Latest Questions
Have an SEO question? Search our Q&A forum for an answer; if not found, use your Moz Pro subscription to ask our incredible community of SEOs for help!
-
What to call pages
I reckon I've bagged one of the most interesting SEO projects of the year. My new client is selling vibrators. The site is not even in development yet but they want to make it fun and friendly and take away the stigma and "seediness" of the product. Anyway, the owenr has presented a list of "places" within this site which are places where the products are going to be showcased. These are along the lines of, Royal Rabbits Palace, Clitoral Courtyard, Dungeon Dildos, Magical G-arden etc. (there is a bit shreky/fariy tale thing going on) Clearly, these places add a lot to the look and feel of the site but as URL's and Titles, they are clearly not optimal in an SEO sense. What is for the best...making sure we shift the owner back into SEO best practice or hope that having these weird and wonderful names for the pages is going to add enough to the user experience to make it worthwhile to let through. FYI, did you know you can get vibrators that you can plug an ipod into. Man, I've seen some weird things researching this client!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FDC0 -
Moving to the cloud - dynamic or static IP address?
We're looking at moving our websites to the cloud. Most services seem to default to providing a dynamic IP address, with static IP addresses being offered as paid extras. Is there an SEO disadvantage to having a dynamic IP address?
Technical SEO | | heatherrobinson0 -
New pages do not rank
Hello, Google caching the new pages, but is not appearing in search results. Why? site: www.papajogos.com.br
Content Development | | papajogos0 -
SEO Benefit/Liability of changing URLs of a 2 year old site
I sell RV Parts online. Our organization is called The ROUTE 66 RV Network, so we brand everything around ROUTE 66. When we launched our store 2 years ago, we launched it with the domain: parts66.com We have a PR of 2, and we have been doing an SEO linkbuilding campaign ever since it has been around. Our primary keyword that we are trying to rank for is RV PARTS We also own the domain: rvparts66.com My question is: Is there a significant benefit to switching our URL to RVPARTS66.COM? Does having our primary keyword a part of our URL give us an SEO benefit? If so, what is the best way to keep any credit we have built for our original domain? We are in the process of a complete site overhaul which will launch in a couple weeks, so if there is ever a time to switch domains, the time is now. Thanks! jc
Technical SEO | | steve-2886180 -
Where is the best SEO Glossary of Terms?
Where do you feel the best existing Glossary of SEO / SEM Terms explained currently resides. (and is there a better way to ask this question?) 🙂
Moz Pro | | iansears0 -
My clients website od 100% Flash...Will my SEO efforts be wasted?
My client has a Photography website and has an al carte design. It's in Flash and in 3 years only 3 pages of say 50 are indexed. Are my efforts being wasted?Should I redesign the site in an SEO friendly language? Or, if I build out a huge link building campaign it doesn't matter if I am in Flash or not? Thanks
Technical SEO | | AnthonyGrillo0 -
Help internet archive
Hi can anyone help me. I am trying to track information from sites. I am at the moment got solicitiors involved ref trade mark of a name and we are trying to prove that this name was being used before the trade mark application. A company has gone ahead with a trade mark in full knowledge that this is a common name and we have been told if we can prove that the name was being used before it was registered then we can knock out the trade mark. We have been told there is an internet archive but i cannot find one, can anyone please let me know how i can look at sites from before 2010 and see about if they were using this word to help our case.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Link Juice not passing for root domain to an internal page
Hi Im working in a SEO proyect for the web fagorarrasate.com, it has good root domain ranking, but it seems like the root domain isn't passing any of its link juice to other internal pages of the site although there are links which link to these sub pages For example if I seach in Google for the page http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Stamping+System+and+Presses The firs page appears without any page ranking, so it seems that the root domain is not passing any of its ranking Why could this be happening? Thanks Jordi
On-Page Optimization | | joralles0 -
Cleaning up link profile
I've recently been trying to tidy up my link profile. We have been link building for a number of years and I decided to check it out and see how good our profile looks. I used OSE to give me a report of all external links pointing to pages on my www sub-domain. The results are scary! I have hundreds of links point to my site that originate from URLs such as the following url which attempts to start a download, use caution!!! <colgroup><col width="768"></colgroup>
Moz Pro | | Entrusteddev
| http://ftp.codeweavers.com/pub/crossover/cxlinux/demo/install-crossover-pro-demo-9.0.1.sh?m=pc&a=bookmarkList.view&target_user_id=1&search_type=tag&keyword=減量 | Another example (this one attampts to start a .jar download!! Be cautious) <colgroup><col width="794"></colgroup>
| http://www.breastreconstructionguide.com/compare.jar?page=1892&username=DXDZSW | All the other metrics reported for the offending URLs seem ok, such as PA and DA. Also, many have meaningful page titles (as opposed to random characters) and nicely formed anchor text. What I'd like to know is; Are these links having a detrimental effect on my SERPs? How does OSE find them since its a URL to a download? Has anyone else had a similar experience? Thanks for your time. Regards Aran <colgroup><col width="794"></colgroup>0 -
Confused about robots.txt
There is a lot of conflicting and/or unclear information about robots.txt out there. Somehow, I can't make out what's the best way to use robots even after visiting the official robots website. For example I have the following format for my robots. User-agent: * Disallow: javascript.js Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /embedconfig Disallow: /playerconfig Disallow: /spotlightmedia Disallow: /EventVideos Disallow: /playEpisode Allow: / Sitemap: http://www.example.tv/sitemapindex.xml Sitemap: http://www.example.tv/sitemapindex-videos.xml Sitemap: http://www.example.tv/news-sitemap.xml Is this correct and/or recommended? If so, then how come I see a list of over 200 or so links blocked by robots when Im checking out Google Webmaster Tools! Help someone, anyone! Can't seem to understand this robotic business! Regards,
Technical SEO | | Netpace0 -
Number of forum posts per topic page
When optimizing a forum topic page for SEO, would it be better to have a higher number of posts per page than seperating the topic up into multiple pages? For example, out of the box a forum may display 15 posts per topic page - would there be any SEO benifit in changing that number to say 30 posts per page? I.e. more content per page and decreasing unnecessary "page 2, page 3, page 4"... etc. Your thoughts and comments are most appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Images on page appear as 404s to Googlebot
When I fetch my website as Googlebot it returns 404s for all the images on the page. This despite the fact that each image is hyperlinked! What could be causing this issue? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Netpace0 -
Frequency of the Campaign reports
Hello there, I would like to know the frequency of the New Rankings and On-page reports for the campaigns that we set up. We received our last campaign report on 3rd September for all the 5 campaigns. We also received 2 reports again on 9th September. Can you please let me know how often do we get these reports and can we manage to receive them every week or fortnight. Best Regards Sandeep
Moz Pro | | CalistonDigital0 -
Newspaper SEO: How to go about link building for news websites
Newspaper SEO is tricky business, primarily because of the way you deal with Keywords. So far, I have been unable to find a comprehensive guide to newspaper SEO via SEOmoz, although I'm a big fan and this website has actually made my career! So, my question is, how do you go about building links for newspaper websites, what keywords should you use and what link building strategies would work?
Social Media | | Netpace0 -
How best to go about creating an application?
Hi there, I work within the travel sector, and I've had an idea of getting an embeddable application built, which would be of use to my company, but also lots of other companies (our competitors) and general websites in our niche. The idea would be that we'd get (and pay for) the application to be built, and then allow other parties to embed it into their site with a snippet of our code so we get the link back from them. There are obviously some technical issues here. The app will be built with Javascript (we can't use PHP on our web server , its a long story!) and I'd want a way to stop other swiping the code and using without the link to us. Is this going to be possible? Also, whats going to be the best way to get the link from them? If a competitor used it, they are less likely to do so with our company name plastered all over it, so it would need to be subtle, or an image link, or something. Not sure. Anyone done this sort of thing before? Thanks
Technical SEO | | neilpagecruise0 -
When creating articles what are the rules of thumb for titles and url links.
For example lets say I'm looking to rank for “Window Glass Replacement”. What kinds of articles should I create for this? Does it matter? Should I create articles such as How to know if your windows need replacement, then have the text in my link say “Window Glass Replacement.” Should I try and vary the link name? Should I vary the titles of my articles, or just make sure the content is different?
Technical SEO | | marker-3115280 -
Is this directory good or spamy?
I was using open site explorer and one of our local competitors and in the top 5 of the SERP has a link in http://directory.askbee.net/submit-site-to-directory.html They want either a $1, $5 or a 3 way link to get your link in the directory. Do any of these help or would this directory be a waste of time. Thanks
Link Building | | mmaes0 -
Brackets in a URL String
Was talking with a friend about this the other day. Do Brackets and or Braces in a URL string impact SEO? (I know short human readable etc... but for the sake of conversation has anyone relaised any impacts of these particular Characters in a URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AU-SEO0 -
Canonical Tag
I've been helping someone out with their website, and I noticed the person who built the site made the canonical tags like this:
Web Design | | StandUpCubicles
href="http://www.example.com/" rel="canonical" /> I'm use to seeing it how seomoz does it: Does this matter? Is it ok to have it inverted? They also have another canonical tag in there like this:
var hs_canonical_url = "http\x3A\x2F\x2Fwww.example.com\x2Fhome" Any idea what that is? Could it be hurting the site?0 -
Buying links
I have 2 websites to pay monthly to gain links from, number 1 is on the homepage of a directory, it has a PA of 90 and DA of 88.
Link Building | | myloseo
the link will be on the right hand side along with 55 other featured sites.
these links are there throughout the whole site. number 2 is from a website with 20 max sponsored links on a page and will be one of the sub pages on the site with a PA of 74. How valuable if any would these links be? My current pa on the site i wish to send the links to is 26 Can i expect my PA to go up by much? Also i currently have 317 links from 7 root domains on my site will this effect the rank of the paid links? Thanks in advance0 -
Help! Need advice for a new HTTPS URL!
Hi. We have just launched a new website that is fully secure with the HTTPS url. You can still access the home page with an ordinary HTTP address. That is what we want to change. Should we forward the HTTP url to the HTTPS? Redirect? It is the same URL for both. http://www.parrotmoon.com Thank you for all ideas! Jay
Technical SEO | | theideapeople0 -
Dynamic URLs via Refinements
What is the best way to handle large product pages with many different refinement possibilities. Ex. hard drive - 40 gigs - black case etc. All of these refinements add to the length of the url and potentially create crawling issues as the url is to dynamic. I have seen people canonical all refinements and pages to the main cat page, I have seen others no follow certain refinements. Also in the SEOmoz crawling report it tells me that over two parameters is bad. What is the best way to handle this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Gordian0 -
How many small businesses use SEO?
I'm looking for data (not opinions) on how many small businesses use SEO, that is, either do it in-house, hire a firm, or hire a freelancer. I've poked around on SEMPO and eConsultancy but can't find what I'm looking for.
Industry News | | jsteimle0 -
Can anyone tell me where my site can be improved
My website is www.theradiatorgallery.com I have been trying to get on 1st page for designer radiators. I am currently ranked 21st just dropped to the 3rd page within the past hour, i was 20th before this. There are some sites that i would think i would rank better than due do i have better on page optimization, higher PA, DA and PR based on seo moz reports. Is there something wrong with my site that i am missing? the sites i feel i should rank better than are; radsnrails.co.uk, warmrooms.co.uk and a couple others Any help would be great! Thanks Guys
Technical SEO | | myloseo0 -
Reciprocal links
Hi SEOmoz Pros, We have vendors from whom I was hoping to get links. To make it more enticing to them I was planning to select a small number of vendors (with good site metrics-PA, DA, PR) and create a "Featured Vendor" module on some pages that would link back to the vendor's site as well--thereby created reciprocal links. I was planning to only have one vendor to a page and only for the pages that we are targeting locally. My hope is to help boost the ranking of those pages. Is it okay to offer our vendors to link back to their site or should I ask for a one-way link back to our page and pitch it as exposure for their brand?? Lastly, does Google penalize for these types of links? Thanks!
Link Building | | AC_Pro1 -
Good organic rankings but no shopping rankings
My site www.hair1direct.co.uk comes up well in the organic rankings but when I select shopping in Google it does appear. Why would this be? Thanks James
Technical SEO | | avecsys0 -
Google keyword tool [exact match]
Hey there, I'm trying to work out what my next big course to run will be. I want to know if my technique is a good gauge of popularity. I'm using Google's keyword tool specifically for New Zealand. I'm typing in a course topic e.g Photoshop Courses and looking at the exact match results to see if there might be a market for that course. Broad match seems to offer up a lot more numbers but seem a bit vague. Am i right to think 'After Effects Training' wouldn't be a popular course as it returns a (<10) local monthly result while 'Photoshop Courses' might be ok as it has a (46)? **I'd appreciate any insight. ** Dan
Keyword Research | | danielfromnz
- the Adobe Trainer0 -
Link Building: No linked to content in industry
Hello, I'm doing link buidling for a small ecommerce niche. There's no resource content in the niche (looking at OSE Top Content) that has attracted backlinks (on any sites) How should this effect what resource content I should create. Thanks!
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
Will Bing/Google's engine index a page that has only been on social media?
Will Bing's engine index and rank a page that has only been seen on social media and has no inbound links? Will Google's? Are inbound links absolutely required to get a page indexed and ranking and getting traffic? If unknown, how would you go about testing this?
Reporting & Analytics | | SarahGoliger0 -
Duplicate Content | eBay
My client is generating templates for his eBay template based on content he has on his eCommerce platform. I'm 100% sure this will cause duplicate content issues. My question is this.. and I'm not sure where eBay policy stands with this but adding the canonical tag to the template.. will this work if it's coming from a different page i.e. eBay? Update: I'm not finding any information regarding this on the eBay policy's: http://ocs.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CustomerSupport&action=0&searchstring=canonical So it does look like I can have rel="canonical" tag in custom eBay templates but I'm concern this can be considered: "cheating" since rel="canonical is actually a 301 but as this says: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html it's legitimately duplicate content. The question is now: should I add it or not? UPDATE seems eBay templates are embedded in a iframe but the snap shot on google actually shows the template. This makes me wonder how they are handling iframes now. looking at http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml does shows the content inside the iframe. Interesting. Anyone else have feedback?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joseph.chambers1 -
Bad on page optimization grade, still displays high in SERP
I'm looking at the keyword on page optimization report for my site and I have keywords where my landing page is showing up first on the SERP, but my SEOmoz on-page optimization grade for them is an F. Am I ranking high for these terms because no one is optimized for the terms? They are almost all directed at my home page, does domain authority play a role in me ranking high for them? Thanks for any insight.
Moz Pro | | ClaytonKendall0 -
CNAME instead of A-record: seo problem?
Our supplier of a hosted CMS is hosting a few hundred website on his server. For every domainname pointing to a website we need to use the same IP-adres in the DNS A-record. They are now asking us to delete de A-record for all the websites and add a CNAME record. So they can send the traffic via a company like Versign in case of a DDOS attack. A lot of the websites rank well. Will there be a SEO problem when we start using the CNAME's instead of the A-records? Thanks, Olaf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Olaf1 -
Do keywords in a URL that's linkified provide anchor text benefits?
I'm curious about links that are just URLs (e.g. http://www.google.com/reader) or in a URL-like format (e.g. Google.com/Reader) vs links with plain-word anchor text (e.g. Google Reader). If a link that is just a URL (or a partial URL) has keywords in it, do those keywords provide anchor text relevance benefits? I'm particularly thinking about URL shorteners that provide customized links, and social media. Many web tools (twitter, blog comment systems) don't render HTML but will automatically link URLs. If http://boston.craigslist.org/jjj/ gets linked to through custom shortened URLs like http://bit.ly/Boston-Jobs, is it more likely to rank for the term "Boston Jobs" than if it received the same number of links using a non-custom shortened URL like http://bit.ly/ejq5uX9?
Social Media | | Jay.Neely0 -
Blackhat SEO firm had more success than whitehat me
I’ve been link building for a small online store. Before I took over their SEO, they hired a company who got them lots of spammy links over a 12 month contract. The spammy links didn't seem to improve or hurt rankings on their main keywords but general search traffic has almost doubled. Now I’m doing whitehat SEO for them and getting links through emailing bloggers and giving them reasons to link to us. Over 2 months (amongst over things) I’ve obtained links from around 35 websites, mostly PR 3 – 4 with a few up to PR 7. On my own website, a couple of links like this would produce a noticeable effect in the rankings, but I can’t seem to budge the ranks for this website. I’m concerned that they might just want to go back to their old SEO firm for more spam links. Am I doing the right thing? Am I getting links quick enough and how can I argue the case for whitehat if they’re getting more noticeable results from blackhat?
Link Building | | davidtube0 -
Fixing Google Places once Banned
I have a lot of clients who have somehow botched up their Google Places listing, and now are not showing up in local search results. In one particular case, they were using 2 different Gmail accounts and submitted their listing twice by accident. It appears Google has banned them from local search results. How does one undo steps like this and start fresh? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ocsearch0 -
SEOmoz Pro dashboard report question
Hi there, SEOMoz dashbard report shows 'URLs Receiving Entrances Via Search' - Is it counting only organic searches or all searches including PPC? Thanks, Gemma
Moz Pro | | RBA0 -
Does anyone know of a crawler similar to SEOmoz's RogerBot?
As you probably know SEOmoz had some hosting and server issues recently, and this came at a terrible time for me... We are in the middle of battling some duplicate content and crawl errors and need to get a fresh crawl of some sites to test things out before we are hit with the big one? Before I get a million thumbs downs- I love and will continue to use SEOmoz, just need something to get me through this week ( or until Roger is back! )!
Moz Pro | | AaronSchinke1 -
Siloing and navigation menu linking
Still trying to understand siloing and how it relates to displaying links in the navigation menu. I'm working on optimizing a site for a lawyer friend. His site consists of 4 top level pages - index, attorney profile, practice areas, and contact. Then, there are 2 folders that contain all the 2nd-level pages for his 2 practice areas - personal injury and business litigation. The website in question is www(dot)comitzlaw(dot)com. From what I read about siloing before taking the 30-day SEOMoz trial (which I really like so far, by the way), I set the main (left hand) menu up as follows: The 4 top level pages only display the "collapsed" navigation menu, which only links to the index pages for personal injury and business litigation. Go anywhere in personal injury, and all pages link to the "expanded" personal injury navigation (links to auto accidents page, wrongful death, motorcycle accidents, etc.) but the "collapsed" business litigation section and vice versa for business litigation's links to personal injury. I did this because, as I understand, it keeps the practice area links on topic (like in a car sales example where you want a Ford section linking to Ford pages and Chevy pages linking to Chevy pages). Just wondering if anyone thinks I have this set up right. Wondering if the home page should display the "expanded" navigation menu instead or if all top level pages should show the expanded? Appreciate any thoughts on this. Thanks.
Web Design | | c2g0 -
Best way to consolidate link juice
I've got a conundrum I would appreciate your thoughts on. I have a main container page listing a group of products, linking out to individual product pages. The problem I have is the all the product pages target exactly the same keywords as the main product page listing all the products. Initially all my product pages were ranking much higher then the container page, as there was little individual text on the container page, and it was being hit with a duplicate content penality I believe. To get round this, on the container page, I have incorporated a chunk of text from each product listed on the page. However, that now means "most" of the content on an individual product page is also now on the container page - therefore I am worried that i will get a duplicate content penality on the product pages, as the same content (or most of it) is on the container page. Effectively I want to consolidate the link juice of the product pages back to the container page, but i am not sure how best to do this. Would it be wise to rel=canonical all the product pages back to the container page? Rel=nofollow all the links to the product pages? - or possibly some other method? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
How would you optimise a news website?
I have been asked for advice on how to optimise a news website whose keywords, almost by definition, change every day according to the articles being written. How would you, for example, do SEO for the NYtimes.com? Great content and subsequent links I'm sure take care of themselves. Just onsite then? If so.... what?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seomasters0 -
What is the practical influence of priority in a sitemap?
I have a directory site with 1000s of entries. Will there be benefit to be gained from playing with various entries priorities in the sitemap? I was thinking I might give more priority to entries that have upgraded their directory entry. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | flow_seo0
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.