Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. Latest Questions
Log in to post

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!

  • jgomes


    Hello folks, Whenever I go the OnPage link in SeoMoz some of my links show a F ranking note. And when I click in one of them to see the detail of the page rank, it shows me as an A ranking note. Do you have seen the same problem? Which note shall I rely on? Thanks!!

    Moz Pro | | jgomes
    0
  • Benji87


    Hi all, I run a site called Applicable Jobs (http://www.applicablejobs.com) and from analyising my analytics I notice my bounce rate is unusually high at around 85%. I'm keen to get this right down as I've read recently that a high bounce rate is a metric Google uses in determining positioning in the SERPs. I honestly don't think it's the quality of my content because I feel it's genuinely useful to my target audience but I'm wondering if the way my jobs list is generated is causing an issue. At the moment I have my jobs listings generated through javascript so I can have nice effects and use a bit of ajax but if Google crawls it, it obviously won't be able to see the listings. So I'm wondering if when a user comes to the site and they click on one of the job listings, does the Google analytics code recognise that click because that link is generated through javascript? Thanks

    Reporting & Analytics | | Benji87
    0
  • augustos


    Hello Folks, First of all, I want to start by:  this is a "discussion" topic, which theres no right or wrong answer. I would love to hear from everyone your toughts about the GOOGLE +1 BUTTON , for the SEO point-of-view indeed. I assume that I did not add it to my websites yet, theres some reasons why. You guys added it? How is your audience behaviors against the button, they often click on it? It changed anything in your ranks, after they clicked on it? Thanks in advance.

    Search Behavior | | augustos
    0
  • als007


    One of my clients wanted to know whether it's possible for him to rank as one of the related pages on Google for a brand name of a competitor. I honestly don't know whether it's possible so any ideas whether it's possible and if so, ideas on what can be done is greatly welcome. Thank you in advance. 🙂

    Search Behavior | | als007
    0
  • seoug_2005


    Google is showing strange cache for the site -  http://shop.surfcity.co.nz/ . Why is 404 error being displayed ?

    On-Page Optimization | | seoug_2005
    0
  • peteraitken


    I have a business that sells art. There are 2 distinct types of art on offer. In many cases, someone who is interested in Type A may also be interested in Type B. Most search competitors that sell Type B, only sell Type B. As a result, they have a dedicated site for type B art. Would I be better off separating my business into 2 dedicated websites or keeping them combined? The site currently ranks reasonably well due to content, age and has some decent inbound links. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Peter.

    Technical SEO | | peteraitken
    0
  • kennyrowe


    I work on a site selling clothing, and we break up our clothing into categories of types of clothing. Right now in my accessories, I have an other category, which cover the miscellaneous items that there aren't enough to warrant their own categories. I was curious what people thought about further breakdowns of this category. Do I create a category that only has one item in it? Is there a certain threshold of number of items which should signal that these items need their own categories or length of time they're expected to be available to buy? Right now, I'm not targeting the one-off items for SEO purposes because we tend not to carry them from season to season or continue with them long enough to be the best use of my SEO time.

    On-Page Optimization | | kennyrowe
    0
  • stroke


    Hello, Do you recommend using the buttons (facebook, twitter and google +1) on pages with adult content? For adult seo marketing google uses this metric? Thanks, Stroke

    Social Media | | stroke
    2
  • HeadWebChef


    This question is about a new file structure and SEO friendly URL's.  Does a file name make a difference? I have a direct question about file structure.  Our old site was formated with a URL of http://rousechamberlin.com/about_us.aspx  our new site is structured http://rousechamberlin.com/AboutUs/  no file no extension.  As the SEO guy of the company and not the programmer my feeling is this is killing us.  Does anybody have any thoughts on this?

    On-Page Optimization | | HeadWebChef
    0
  • lhc67


    Hi, Mozzers- I'm running a contest for a client of mine via Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/barrettmoving. The prizes are great an iPad2 and an iPod Touch! The contest is pretty cool too. Basically it's a papercraft / travel thing that appeals to a wide range of people. Anyway, here's my question - I've started promoting the contest via social media, the website, online contests...like to get to promoting it on relevant blogs too. I'm in the beginning stages. Any other ideas? Has anyone had luck with PPC or FB ads? Thanks in advance! LHC oVThP5PcRvo

    Social Media | | lhc67
    0
  • SparkplugDigital


    If a blogger is given a product from a company for a giveaway contest on their blog, does Google require the link to the company have a no-follow. This seems like a gray area but I can't find any guidelines put out by Google about this.

    Link Building | | SparkplugDigital
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, Quick question. for the term "NLP" and the site nlpca.com I'm analyzing backlinks of competitors. Is wikipedia a competitor, or are competitors only sites like mine. I'm thinking that if someone links to wikipedia they wouldn't necessarily want to link to nlpca.com Thus, should I still analyze wikipedia? Thank you.

    Link Building | | BobGW
    0
  • JSOC


    All, I operate a Wordpress blog site that focuses on one specific area of the law. Our contributors are attorneys from across the country who write about our niche topic. I've done away with syndicated posts, but we still have numerous articles addressing many of the same issues/topics. In some cases 15 posts might address the same issue. The content isn't duplicate but it is very similar, outlining the same rules of law etc. I've had an SEO I trust tell me I should 301 some of the similar posts to one authoritative post on the subject. Is this a good idea? Would I be better served implementing canonical tags pointing to the "best of breed" on each subject? Or would I be better off being grateful that I receive original content on my niche topic and not doing anything? Would really appreciate some feedback. John

    Technical SEO | | JSOC
    0
  • iAnalyst.com


    Google "halloween costumes", see the yandy listing that shows product data and pricing under their listing? How did they do this? I realize its a rich snippit of some kind but i don't see in the code how or where this is. I've yet to see anyone but Amazon influence the SERPS yet with rich snippits. Pretty interesting

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com
    0
  • mikescotty


    The keyword rankings in one of my campaigns update on Tuesday.  It looks like they updated today but when I downloaded to CSV, some say last Tuesday. Is this because they didn't change or are they still updating?  Today is Tuesday. i.e., do they update at a specific time and if so, what time?

    Moz Pro | | mikescotty
    0
  • leadsprofi


    Hi, on the last Updates of google Panda in Europe, we hAve Lost Ranking. What to do now? where to Start! Which Things First and which Second..? Need help, Tell me how to fix issuess...

    Technical SEO | | leadsprofi
    0
  • Storitz


    We have a specific URL naming convention for 'city landing pages': .com/Burbank-CA .com/Boston-MA etc. We use this naming convention almost exclisively as the URLs for links.  Our website had a code breakdown and all those URLs within that naming convention led to an error message on the website.  Will this impact our links?

    Technical SEO | | Storitz
    0
  • BryanSmith


    We have recently started work with a dealership group that operates ~20 separate dealerships (different locations and brands) and individual websites for each. The group also operates two umbrella websites for the group brand that shows the inventory across All 20 dealerships. All websites are basically using the same template and all product listings are from the same data source (same back-end system). All websites are currently also hosted on the same IP address. Typically we work with clients to rectify duplicate content issues and work towards having just one version of any piece of content. However, this is a unique situation in that each dealership has a legitimate brand and marketing need for having their own website. It also is not realistic to ask the client to create unique content for the same product listing 22x. We understand there are numerous options to consider but I would appreciate hearing any advice/feedback from individuals who have dealt with similar situations. If you know of any good resources on such a scenario, that would also be helpful to verify our thoughts. NOTE: the duplicate content for product inventory is not across all 22 sites but just usually between 3-4 for each product. Often each product listing is shown on 1 or 2 dealerships and the 2 umbrella sites (one is the main group site and the other a product used/clearance site). Currently we can see multiple domains indexed for the same product listings.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BryanSmith
    0
  • SamBuck


    I have done manual link submissions to directors and other places in the past. As a business owner i find it extremely tedious and find no time for it at all. I have outsourced it since and seen moderate results. There are systems like linkvana etc which promise to give high pr links, are they good? is there any other way to get niche relevant links automatically & cost affectively? Thanks

    Link Building | | SamBuck
    0
  • SamBuck


    What are SEO advantages or disadvantages of the following - /%postname%/ - adds a trailing / /%postname% - no trailing / /%postname%.html - creates .html URL Thanks

    On-Page Optimization | | SamBuck
    0
  • hfranz


    To my understanding content has a lot to do with organic rankings if written correctly. My question is, how much content is too much and what pages are best to place content. Our company sells very costly products. Our customers call to purchase, we do not have an eCommerce site. Write now we have on average 350 words per page. We have about 200+ pages. Each page is written for that general category and each product has its own unique content.  It seems to me that the pages with less content, tend to rank a bit better. As we are in the process of redoing our website, is there any recommendations on writing content, or adjusting the amount of text. I am thinking a lot of our text is informative only to a certain extent. Would writing content just for the main category page be better, and then on the actual product page, have only about 250 words as a description? Are there any other recommendations for SEO that are fairly new? Besides the Title, Description, Heading Tags, Image Alts, URLS etc.

    Web Design | | hfranz
    0
  • SL_SEM


    I was recently checking out our analytics keywords stats and I am seeing traffic noted as google organic traffic coming from India. When I do a search on http://www.google.co.in/ for those terms using a "incognito" browser with no cookies, and not logged in I don't see our site in the first 100 results. The same thing happens on google.com if I try to set the account in india. I am trying to see if this might be an issue with an adwords campaign not getting auto-tagged (auto-tagging is turned on in adwords), or if there is something else going on. The keyword campaign gets many more clicks than analytics shows for this organic option so perhaps it is an odd rare occurrence. I am glad to have the traffic, but I want to be sure it is actually tracking correctly as organic, or if PPC is not tagging for some reason 😉 Any suggestions or thoughts?

    International SEO | | SL_SEM
    0
  • MikeQ-BACC


    Hi there, One big reason my non profit hired me to tackle SEO for our site is that there is currently a lot of negative stuff out there right now about us. There was a lot of stuff that went down in the past, and currently Googling different names of our org's members, or typing in variations of our name, brings up several sites that are negative and inflammatory. They have been up since the early 2000's, so they have that advantage over us. It's interesting because I'm sort of in a position where I'm doing SEO for the sake of doing SEO, which is sort of cool because I get to learn a lot. We don't really have conversion KPIs or anything, but I'm sure that will come in time. I suppose my question is, what is the best way to tackle this? I mean I know that overall doing great SEO will help, but I'm wondering if there's a specific practice I should be focusing on to defeat a ton of negative stuff that has age over us. I'm also concerned that even if we get our site listed #1 for various searches, there will still be the negative stuff on page 1, just lower ranked. Any thoughts? Thanks for your time!

    Moz Pro | | MikeQ-BACC
    0
  • reeljerc


    I have multiple domains with the same registrar.  Is there an SEO benefit to create complimentary blogs on blogspot, wordpress.com or other "free" blog sites and forward these domains with the purpose of backlinking to the main site?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | reeljerc
    0
  • mickey11


    I made 18 websites, and have used a analytics web app called piwik. You can google it, but basically it is like google analytics. I have done nothing for the websites no links, no updates. I did do the onpage optimization extremely well. At first I had daily traffic over all the websites at about 200, then like a month went by and it was at 100, then another month has gone by it is hovering around 30 visits -- This is total traffic across all the websites. In addition my websites were ranking much better and alot of them were coming up together in the results in a single google query, now this is no longer true, only one or maybe two come for the same google query and they come up lower in the serp ranking ie. before it was 1st place now 3rd for example, so traffic has decreased respectively. Anybody can tell me what I can do, to regain the positions and traffic I had before.

    Reporting & Analytics | | mickey11
    0
  • MRCSearch


    I'm getting to start work with a new client, and I've run across something I've never had to deal with before, off-site images. The site I'll be working on is for an appliance retailer, both online and physical. The way they've had their site built (not something I was part of) a third party company maintains the product inventory side of things. They're sourcing from about 35 different manufacturers, and this third party has direct access to the product information streams. They push the weekly updated information to my clients site. What this means, though, is that the product images don't live on the client's site. They're hotlinked from the third party's inventory doohickey. I've never seen something quite like this before. Has anyone else? Any ideas as to what problems I may face when it comes to on-site SEO?

    Web Design | | MRCSearch
    0
  • AkshayaPatra


    I have generated more than 1000 quality keywords For my Foundation, now i am very much  worried how would some on separate the  keywords in to conversion keywords, Targeted Keywords, High priority Keywords. how would you justify that the keyword which are short listed will be the best keywords for website promotions??

    Keyword Research | | AkshayaPatra
    0
  • 1200wd


    We run an online store with the majority of our customers coming from 4 different European countries. The site is accessible through TLD's of all of these countries. However our .com domain currently has the most links pointing to it and the highest domain authority. Unfortunately, we are unable to tell through which TLD visitors reach our site. The niche is rather competetive, and therefore I am unsure whether it would be worth it to solely use our .com domain for the English language, and try to rank for each of the seperate languages with its own country-specific domain. **Question/discussion: **Will it be worth the costs and time to spent to build links for the country specific domains in these countries, or should we focus on making our .com domain stronger and use it for all countries? I'm aware of the benefits of ranking with a domain in the country the user is in. Note: We have major duplicate content issues at this moment, due the content being available in different languages, on a handful of domains. On each domain, users can view the site in different languages. In addition, the language indication in the url is not very clear (?lang=x) so I believe this should be improved to make it easier for search engines to tell which language is presented. If I choose to use a different language for each TLD, then the language flag in the navigation on the site will point to a different domain, so each language is hosted on 1 domain and there is no more duplicate content. However, I'm afraid this will lead to lower rankings, as the (strong) .com domain will no longer host the content in different languages.

    International SEO | | 1200wd
    0
  • MiroAsh


    Is there any reason why a link within an <area> tag would not be counted as correct backlink? In this example there is no <a> tag, so will this still be considered a link?</a>

    Link Building | | MiroAsh
    0
  • sunilmuse


    Hi Team, I've started my first campaign and would like some advice on building backlinks. I have got the no. 1 competitor's backlinks through OSE. Here is the first backlink URL as mentioned in OSE. for them: www.uofaemergency.org/ (DA: 45  PA:44) However the backlink appears on another page of that domain, not on the homepage as it says in OSE. That backlinking page as a PA of just 1. Do I go for the homepage or the page on which the competitor's backlink appears? It is an unrelated site to the niche and the content in which the link appears is nonsensical. Does this matter as far as link juice is concerned? Is this a good site or page to get a link from? How do I go about getting an in content anchor text link from this site? What's the required process? I would like to start buidling good links asap and start to get rankings for my site. Thanks. Sunil.

    Link Building | | sunilmuse
    0
  • flaca


    I have an ecommerce website that offers retail and wholesale products which are identical, of course with the exception of pricing. My concern is duplicate content. If the same product is offered under both the retail and wholesale category, and described identically, with the exception of price, metadata and a few words, is that considered duplicate content and would both pages be disregarded by the robots? Is it best to avoid the same description for that one product under the two separate categories? Thanks for all your help!

    Algorithm Updates | | flaca
    0
  • AlanMosley


    google has rejected a few listing i have for certain businesses, i have read the guidlines and I am well inside them. It does say that if business name is changed you need to re-verify, but does not allow you to do so. I think google have lost their way, they should stop building operating systems and electric cars and get their web site sorted out.

    Industry News | | AlanMosley
    0
  • ukss1984


    Hello, In January, we started a new blog to supplement our core ecommerce website. The URL of the website is www.footballshirtblog.co.uk and the idea behind it was that we would write articles related to our industry to build a community which would ultimately boost our sales. We would add several posts per day, a mix between shorter news stories of around 150 words and more detailed content pages of around 500 words. Everything was going well, we were making slow but sure progress on the main generic keywords but were receiving several thousand visitors a day, mostly finding the posts themselves on Google. The surge on traffic meant we needed to move server, which we did around 6 weeks ago. When we did this, we had a few teething problems with file permissions, etc, which meant we were tempoarily able to add new posts. As our developers were tied up with other issues, this continued for a 7-10 day period, with no new content being added. In this period, the site completely dropped from Google, losing all it's rankings and traffic, to the extent it now doesn't even rank for it's own name. This is very frustrating as we have put a huge amount of work and content into developing this site. We have added a few posts since, but not a huge amount as it is frustrating to do it with no return and the concern that the site has been banned forever. I cannot think of any logical reason why this penalty has occured as we haven't been link spamming, etc. Does anyone have any feedback or suggestions as to how we can get back on track? Regards,
    David

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss1984
    0
  • Mulith


    I recently added about 20 paid links from directories but have since seen a 10% drop in traffic. I did also delete about 1000 pages of content that had no inbound links and were duplicated on other sites on the web and replaced the content with new content supplied by a client but still duplicated on other sites on the web, old URLs no longer valid or linked to, new content on new URLs. Assuming the drop in traffic had nothing to do with the content change mentioned above, should I remove the paid links in an attempt to recover? I don't think the old content was bringing in much traffic as it appeared elsewhere on more authoritive sites than mine.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith
    0
  • danlae


    Hi Ive had a couple of good blog entries of major blogs in niche that my ecommerce site is working. Ive seen rankings on 2 major keywords go from 25-->14 and 30ish to 11 most likely because of these to entries. What happens when these 2 2 articles go of the main page of the blog an into 'archives' of blog ? Will ratings decrease again ? Thanks for help

    Link Building | | danlae
    0
  • augustos


    Hello folks, How is google dealing with those clever peoples who decide to buy a famous place on internet( domain ), to be their domain name. For example if someone buy a very well ranked domain name for some keywords in their niche, is there any punishment? Whats the bad things about buy a domain? Thanks.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | augustos
    0
  • seoug_2005


    Most of our  traffic is from Referring sites, and in referring sites, job sites are sending most of the traffic. How can we segment traffic from job sites. There are about 40 such sites. We would like to receive a report which shows traffic excluding from these job sites.

    Reporting & Analytics | | seoug_2005
    0
  • DELETE_b


    Hi, we are planning to make major changes in our site (SEO optimalization) and recently I read post in some kind of blog speaking about problems with FB Likes, Tweet etc when we change URLs. So the question is: Is it true that we lose social rankings when we change URLs structure( e.g. from http://domain.com/aaa/213/aa to http://domain.com/category/text/text), even with proper 301 redirects?

    Social Media | | DELETE_b
    1
  • RetailClicks


    Hello, Small question about the Open Site Explorer. on August 24th I've been trying to create several CSV reports which I knew would take a few days. But now, almost a week later when I check Open Site Explorer > Recent CVS reports it tells me it's still saving data. It's been saving data for 4 days now. Am I missing something, is this a bug, do I have to do something or should I wait a little longer? Thanks in advance, Dennis Tappij Gielen Retail&Clicks JFwMt.jpg

    Moz Pro | | RetailClicks
    0
  • NRMA


    Hi, I have a super spiffy (not) CMS that tends to create some pages at the root level of the site (not where I want it) i.e. www.site.com/page.htm as well as the desired location i.e. www.site.com/category/keyword/page.htm . Now obviously a canonical tag inserted into the URL at the undesired location would be the best option, however the source code is exactly the same for both pages (can’t change this) i.e. if I put the canonical tag that reads www.site.com/category/keyword/page.htm"/> it will appear in the head section of both pages, the desired URL and the non desired URL. Will a canonical tag inserted into the head section of a the preferred URL directing the search engine spiders pretty much to itself cause more grieft than the solution it offers re duplicate content ? Marc

    Technical SEO | | NRMA
    0
  • dunklea


    Hey Moz Community, I'm looking for some URL structure advice for a new directory of a website. We're trying to rank for the term 'internships abroad in <country>'</country> We have roughly 100 pages targeting specific countries. Right now the URL structure is www.gooverseas.com/internships-abroad/china, but some of my colleagues believe this structure would be better: www.gooverseas.com/internships-abroad/intern-in-china. I personally prefer the shorter structure, but we couldn't come to any agreement so we thought we'd pose the question to the community. Any thoughts? Thanks!

    On-Page Optimization | | dunklea
    0
  • dennis.globalsign


    Hi, I just got a message from Google Webmaster Tools telling that there are "artificial or unnatural links" pointing to one of my subdomains, and that I should investigate and submit my site for reconsideration. The subdomain in question has inbound links from 4K linking root domains. We are a certificate authority (we provide SSL certificates) so the majority of those links come from the site seal that customers place on their secure pages. We sell certificates to a full spectrum site types, from all sizes of ecommerce sites to .edu, .gov, and even adult.  That said, our linking root domains have always been a mixed bunch, which tells me that these offending links were recently added. Here are my questions: Is it possible to slice my link reports with some sort of time element, so that I can narrow the search to only the newest inbound links? How else might I use OSE to find these "artificial or unnatural links"? Are there any particular attributes I should be looking for in a linking root domain that might suggest it's seen by Google as "artificial or unnatural". Any help with any aspect of this issue would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Dennis p.s. I should probably state that I've never bought links or participated in link schemes.

    Technical SEO | | dennis.globalsign
    0
  • Tektronix


    Hey all, We recently ran a video content contest on a micro site and we generated some links for the URL. In December we are planning on doing a redirect of the domain to our YouTube channel where all of the videos hosted.  My question is how much SEO benefit will there be by redirecting to our YouTube channel vs redirecting to a single video from the contest. Does the strength of the channel as whole affect the videos in that channels ability to rank on YouTube and in SERPs? The other option is to just redirect the URL to our product page on our main website, but to me that doesn't seem like it would provide the best user experience 🙂 If anyone has experience with this kind of an issue I'd appreciate your feedback. Thanks!

    Image & Video Optimization | | Tektronix
    0
  • Scratch_MM


    Currently, my client's blog makes a duplicate page every time someone comments on a post. The previous SEO consultant told the developer to not put a canonical link directing it to the main blog post. Did taking out the canonical link result in these duplicate pages? My question is why would she recommend this action? Is it best to now add in the canonical link in or should we implement a 301 redirect or insert a index: no follow? Would adding a canonical link keep duplicate pages from happening in the future?

    Technical SEO | | Scratch_MM
    0
  • 1step2heaven12


    unable to dispaly anchor text error  Doh! Roger is still working out the kinks with the new index and is having issues untangling anchor text data. We're currently showing anchor text data from the previous index, but we will update as soon as we can.

    Moz Pro | | 1step2heaven12
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Browse Questions

Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.