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  • Hi In November, we have switched our website (https://www.insidermonkey.com) from HTTP to HTTPS. Initially, we noticed slight search traffic loss but later discovered it might be due to HTTPS switch. A month later we added the https version at search console, and then saw an immediate huge drop (about 25-30%). We discovered the problem might be due to poor redirection and noticed our redirects were 302s instead of 301s. To fix the problem, we implemented the 301 redirects and submitted the sitemap containing links to the old site at the new search console property (https). We've gone through points listed on the page below: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543 We fixed the redirects to 301 Double-checked the sitemaps Made sure we had a properly installed SSL certificate (Now, we get A+ from https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.insidermonkey.com) Made sure we have no mixed-content errors (we don't have any issues at search console.) We only avoided implementing HSTS, in case we might want to switch back to HTTP.
    We had a small improvement in the following month, but our traffic did not fully recover. We wanted to test for the possibility to switch back HTTP by switching only 2 articles in our CMS to HTTP. Our traffic got worse, not only for those but for the whole site. Then we switched back those 2 articles to HTTPS again and implemented HSTS. It seems our search traffic getting worse day by day with no sign of improving. In the link below you can find the screenshot of our weekly search traffic between 1 October - 1 March. We are down from 500K weekly visitors to mere 167K last week. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Y1TQbj_YtGG4NhLORbEWbvITUkGKUa0G Any ideas or suggestions? We are willing to get professional help as well. What is the way to find a proper consultant for such problem with relevant experience?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | etakgoz
    0

  • Hi everyone, I have another (very basic) question! It's about the use of keywords throughout articles - is it worthwhile putting keywords and associated phrases in bold and italic and also underlining them at various points throughout my website articles? I have read that this helps google to know what the article is about. Any comments would be much appreciated!

    Branding | | ClareO
    0

  • My local dental practice has some pretty awesome number 1-3 rankings locally and nationally for all the keywords and topics we're interested in (thanks Moz) I was searching on my mobile locally for a keyword and notice that each time I search on my smartphone the first thing I see is a competitors ad for that keyword or phrase.  Then you scroll through four ads and the map pack (which we're in) and you find us at the number one position. I want to completely dominate the serp and was reading this: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/37161.pdf but if I' honest I don't really understand it. Should I run ads on the mobile to get that number one position on the ads so that everyone who searches locally for our keywords sees us on their smartphone before they even start to scroll and then see us again in the map and again in the 1-3 position? Is this a good idea or a waste of money?  PPC had never delivered decent ROI for us and will typically break even so we are just busy fools chasing leads for not much gain.  But I was thinking a more 'branding' related number one position ad might increase the conversion rate, CTR or help in some way.  Would it cost a fortune to keep it at the top of the mobile results for maybe 10-20 keywords just on the mobile? I know this is what google want me to be doing and i also want to choke my competition and completely dominate the SERPS because we provide the best service by miles and often the ads are shoddy and poorly executed.  What's the consensus amongst you wonderful PPC / SEO experts.  Obviously there's lots of SEO's saying it's a great idea because they just want to sell SEO services.  And google is in this camp.  So I don't know who to trust for the right answer.

    Local SEO | | Smileworks_Liverpool
    0

  • Hi Moz community, I have this different scenario of using canonicals to solve the duplicate content issue in our site. Our subdomain and main domain have similar landing pages of same topics with content relevancy about 50% to 70%. Both pages will be in SERP and confusing users; possibly search engine too. We would like solve this by using canonicals on subdomain pointing to main domain pages. Even our intention is to only to show main domain pages in SERP. I wonder how Google handles it? Will the canonicals will be respected with this content relevancy? What happens if they don't respect? Just ignore or penalise for trying to do this? Thanks

    Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz
    0

  • What is the best way to configure a website that targets a number of countries and languages around the world? For example, Apple has websites optimized for just about every country and language in the world (see: https://www.apple.com/choose-country-region/). When you choose the UK it takes you to: https://www.apple.com/uk/ When you choose China it take you to: https://www.apple.com/cn/ Etc. When you go to apple.co.uk it forwards you to the UK version of the website. The same is true for apple.cn. Is this the ideal way to set it up? I have also seen websites that have each version of the website on its own TLD such as exampleBrand.co.uk and exampleBrand.cn - in this example they don't forward to the .com. My concern with Apple's solution is SEO and hosting. Do consumers favor seeing their country's TLD in search results over exampleBrand.com/uk? For hosting, shouldn't the mainland China version of the website be hosted in China? Is it possible to just host a folder of a website in a certain country such as the cn folder for China? Any suggestions would be appreciated. I was unable to find much info on this.

    Web Design | | rx300
    0

  • A website that I was working on did not have meta descriptions, had poorly optimized meta titles, and URL structure. I created optimized descriptions and titles for each page. I also updated the URL structure of select pages and created 301 redirects. Since I did this I noticed that my clicks, impressions, CTR, and position all decreased on Google Search Console (I just setup Search Console so I only have 1-week of data). Traffic on Google Analytics is about the same. Is this normal?

    Reporting & Analytics | | rx300
    0

  • If you compare your scores with others sites when tracking a keyword and you or someone else has implemented AMP the score is a 1. It would be better to get the PA from the canonical reference. See screen shot for an example. Does anyone else agree? Can this be developed? cJp9J

    Feature Requests | | dmcubed
    0

  • Hello there! I'd like to get some advice/tips about link building for charities. I am doing an internship on SEO in a charity in London and I have Moz Pro to work with. So, I have to work on the links building but I don't know how to start, what value I can offer, etc . Thanks! 🙂

    Link Building | | Ignacio.Puglisi
    3

  • Hello,
    since August i am working on a customers website on WordPress who has a costume made theme, back in October  after updating some plugins we had a massive breakdown and the website went up and down and had technical issues for over a month and traffic was completely gone for a while, since we have dropped to about 40% of the monthly traffic the website was getting prior, i was waiting to see if the website will recover since we were getting some traffic and are ranking but that did not happen, is there a way to tell if there are any code issues or anything that can cause that drop? moz crawler only indicates normal meta description errors but nothing in the code, changing the theme would probably be best solution as a popular premade theme would give a definite answer but that is not possible.

    Reporting & Analytics | | SharonEKG
    0

  • We've all used the Google Adwords Keywords Tool, and if you're like me you use it to analyze data for a particular region.  Does anyone know how accurate this data is?  For example, I'd like to know how often people in Savannah, Georgia search for the word "forklift".  I figure that Google can give me two kinds of data when I ask for how many people in Savannah search for "forklift". They might actually give me rough data for how many people in the region actually searched for the term "forklift" over the last 12 months, then divide by 12 to give me a monthly average. Or they might use data on a much broader region and then adjust for Savannah's population size.  In other words, they might say, in the US people searched for "forklift" and average of 1,000,000 times a month.  The US has a population of 300,000,000.  Savannah has a population of about 250,000.  250,000 / 300,000,000 is 0.00083.  1,000,000 times 0.00083 is 208.  So, "forklift" is searched in Savannah an average of 208 times. 1. is obviously much more accurate.  I suspect that 2. is the model that Google is actually using. Does anyone know with reasonable certainty which it is? Thanks,
    Adam

    Local Website Optimization | | aj613
    0

  • Hi, I'm currently undertaking a project to manage better my images and to rank for image searches. My site uses mod_pagespeed to optimises images, therefore image urls are changed to a pretty seo unfriendly url or even sometimes inlined within my page. On top of that I generally resize all my images by passing the desired file dimension within the image url in order to optimise the loading time of my site. Is there a way to provide a hint to google that I have a much better quality image with higher dimensions and better name? Can i specify within my image sitemap an image that actually does have different dimensions and a different within the page it serves? Are there better tricks to achieve that? Thanks in advance

    Technical SEO | | mattam
    0

  • Our site keeps getting duplicated content flagged as an issue... however, the pages being grouped together have very little in common on-page. One area which does seem to recur across them is the ViewState. There's a minimum of 150 lines across the ones we've investigated. Could this be causing the reports?

    Technical SEO | | RobLev
    0

  • Hi, In the page I'm working on, I encountered an tag in an image, rather than in a text form. Do you think it's an issue when it comes to SEO?
    What do you suggest I should do if there is an issue? Keen to hear from you!

    Technical SEO | | nerdieb
    0

  • Hi Guys, Is having a single h1 tag still best practice for SEO? Guessing multiple h1 tags dilute the value of the tag and keywords within the tag. Thoughts? Cheers.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kayl87
    0

  • We continue to get hundreds of spam links per month, and just found a link from here. I do not believe this is owned by moz. https://www.wapz.net/ Maybe I'm wrong? Thanks.

    Moz Pro | | plahpoy
    0

  • Hi, I'm running a website since one year and a half, and I'm periodically watching with Moz OSE tools the number of backlinks it has. It still shows only 11 backlinks from 8 domains, even if my actual backlinks are much more and come from about 40 domains. I've already searched the forum and read that Moz scraper updates once per month, but all these backlinks are like 6 months old, and still no trace. Many other competitor tools, including the simple google search console can see all the backlinks, only Moz can't retrieve them. Do you have any idea? Somebody else in the same situation? Or is there a way to submit to Moz links to pages containing that backlinks?
    Thanks
    Regards

    Link Explorer | | fabio_m
    0

  • Ok, you guys probably think this is a new website and i should just wait, but this is not the case.
    We have 2 websites (old) websites with a DA of 34 and a DA of 19 and high PA values on the mainpage. Our problem: All the other pages stay at a page authority of 1. One website is build in Magento and one in Wordpress. Both websites have deeplinks, footerlinks en in-contentlinks. The other pages don't get any linkjuice according to Moz. We don't use any robot noindex,nofollow or nofollow links and the menu structure isn't the problem. Is anyone familiare with the problem? I know is shouldn't be concerned about PA/DA, but i just can't explain what's going on.

    API | | Forresult
    0

  • hi there, Google has Suspended By Google Business Listing Google has suspended your page due to quality issues. there is No spam Things in My Business, i have Requested Google, But It has not made active Since 10 Days, Is there any way to make My listing Publish on Google please Guide me to which steps Need take Thnx

    Local Listings | | innovative.rohit
    0

  • My seo strategy is based around uk county geo and genre pages I want to optimise for cities and towns too and wanted to know your thoughts on tags v a nice little short code plug in that will punt out a random band order from that area and a genre. Then thinking of unique geo and genre target. What do you think? [loop type=bands-to-hire taxonomy=Genres term=blues-band count=3 orderby=random]
    [field thumbnail]
    [field genres]
    [field title-link]
    [field excerpt] [/loop]

    Technical SEO | | agentmorris1
    0

  • http://www.themorrisagency.co.uk/wedding-band redirects to http://www.themorrisagency.co.uk/wedding-band-cost-much-hire/ NO canonical in place. Nothing in Htaccess. I cant think where else to look to find it. If I amend it to http://www.themorrisagency.co.uk/we it still redirects. Any ideas? I have spent way too long on it now

    On-Page Optimization | | agentmorris1
    0

  • does google see the keyword "e cig" and "e-cig" as the same word? on MOZ it shows that they have a totally different amount of search quarries.

    Moz Pro | | smokingllc
    0

  • Hi Everyone, I hope that someone will be able to help us with this one as we have trawled the internet looking for a solution! We have multiple domains (.com/.co.uk/.net versions) which all point to the one website, however, some of these domains have a high spam score - 9-11. Our first initial reaction would be to remove the auto redirects, but, the other domains have been a source of conversion in previous months (or so analytics tells us). So what I'm wondering, is do we remove the 'spammy' links from redirecting to our site, or do we leave them there? We certainly don't want to risk a penalty. Thanks for reading!

    Link Building | | hydra_creative
    0

  • New to WordPress and SEO. Built and launched my website last week. The URL was originally domain/about. However, I installed Yoast plugin and it told me "about" was a stop word. So, without too much thought (my first problem), I changed the url (before Google crawled me) to clearwingcommunications.com/storytelling. Since then, I've noticed that sites I know are optimized have their URL with the word "about." So, is this considered a bad practice? My site HAS been crawled at this point. If I change it back to About and do a 301 redirect, does that hurt reporting? Thanks for your help! Christy

    On-Page Optimization | | christyr
    0

  • Hello, What's an inexpensive, easy-to-use email outreach program for link building? Thanks

    Link Building | | BobGW
    0

  • We have affiliate links applied to our index URL - https://playon.co - which are not picked up as a duplicate URLs by Google. We've applied a canonical URL, but our homepage is a 301 redirect to a page with a language parameter. So what happens is: https://playon.co/ goes to https://playon.co/en Affiliate links such as https://playon.co/#/?affiliate_token=1390448caccb7d go to https://playon.co/en#/?affiliate_token=1390448caccb7d This gets picked up as rel="canonical" href="https://playon.co/en" which I assumed marked it as a non-canonical page. Nonetheless, we keep seeing this affiliate "page" ranking - even above our own homepage for some terms. Worse, the affiliate URL also contains old cached information of the page. I don't even see how these SERP results should exist, because the affiliate link just ends up at the homepage (https://playon.co/en) My questions: What can we do to remove these affiliate URL versions of our homepage from being ranked? Google doesn't see anything after the hash in the indexed affiliate URLs. If we were to no-index our index URL (https://playon.co/) to completely remove the affiliates links, would our canonical version (https://playon.co/en) assume the top listing, or will we have effectively nuked our entire site? Appreciate any help.

    Affiliate Marketing | | jmoreland
    0

  • Hi, So I have started using the new Search Console and for one of my clients, there are a few 'Index Coverage Errors'. In the old version you could simply, analyse, test and then mark any URLs as fixed - does anyone know if that is possible in the new version? There are options to validate errors but no 'mark as fixed' options. Do you need to validate the errors before you can fix them?

    On-Page Optimization | | daniel-brooks
    0

  • Hi! First question: I am wondering if it's possible to track two buttons with the same code in Google Tag Manager without changing the code? There are different page URL's.. Second one: My tags are displayed in Google Analytics as 'events'. When I put the events in 'goals', the number of times it fired differs from my events. Someone who can help me with this issue?

    Reporting & Analytics | | conversal
    0

  • Hi, In moz pro you get content suggestions. I was wondering if you can still rank  if the topics you cover for a specific keyword on your page are not listed there ? I guess the key is that all the topics covered are related to each other, correct ?  Thank you,

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
    0

  • Hi all, We used a have a banner with link from all pages our subdomain. The link is JS link and it's linking to our website homepage from our sub domain. Recently we have added similar HTML link from all pages of sub domain presuming that Google might not be considering JS links. So, now we have 2 links (JS and HTML) from every page of sub domain pointing to the website. If Google considers 2 links, will there be any risk for employing same link twice from every page? Thanks

    Web Design | | vtmoz
    0

  • I've just overhauled a website, leaving lots of former posts in the dust. I've set up a 404 redirect to the home page so that if anyone goes to one of those old pages they land on the home page instead of a dead 404. But, there's a couple urls from the old site I'd prefer to redirect to similar pages. These urls have forward slashes and I don't know how to get the slashes in when I copy it over to the new site.  This is probably something easy, but I'm baffled. This www.lawbarron.com/personal-injury/whip-its-nitrous-oxide/ becomes this when I copy it www.lawbarron.com/personal-injury-whip-its-nitrous-oxide Can someone help me out?

    Web Design | | julie-getonthemap
    0

  • So this is my situation. I want to redirect : example.com/post1/ to example.com/post1/?m=yes

    Technical SEO | | CarlLSweet
    0

  • I'm doing some overdue spring cleaning on our WP blog. Some big visual updates are in the works, but currently I'm working on pruning and updating some poopy and outdated content. Many of the older posts weren't written with SEO in mind and were posted to the blog merely as an extension of our monthly enewsletter. Here's an example: http://pq.systems/2FkQyVG This post needs a lot of work to meet our new standards. The content is thin, readability is weak, kw targetting is non-existant, the visuals suck, zero links, and the charting software mentioned has since been replaced with another solution that we are currently promoting. There are quite a few other posts with similar issues... Any thoughts on the best way to handle these posts? From poking around similar Q&A threads, it seems my options are: Create new updated post, remove old post, 301 redirect from old to new Create new updated post, add blurb & link pointing to new post at the top of old post Edit/update old post, add "This post was updated....etc" blurb to top of old post Any other options or opinions on which solution I should go with would be much appreciated!

    On-Page Optimization | | SamKlep
    0

  • Is there a way to host my website.com/BLOG URL PATH from a different host than my main website.com host? Is it accomplish-able with DNS settings or are there other considerations that might lead to complications doing this? Specifically, we are investigating install WordPress on a dedicated host, JUST to power the blog for our main website, but our main website is on an internal proprietary hosting and CMS. So basically we're trying to host: website.com --> OFF OF CURRENT INTERNAL HOSTING website.com/blog/ --> OFF OF THIRD PARTY HOSTING (USING WORDPRESS) I know this is a technical question beyond the scope of SEO, but I'm figuring there are members of the community that may have tried this already so I'm floating it here. Many thanks! Cheers.

    Web Design | | AlexVelazquez
    0

  • Hi, I'm working with a new client that works with a lot of suppliers and they want to have their titles built in a specific way. If I generate a template (so to speak) will generating dynamic meta titles have a negative effect on their SEO and is this even possible? If so, what would be the best way to handle this? There is approximately 100 suppliers. Any feedback/advice is appreciated!

    On-Page Optimization | | daniel-brooks
    0

  • Hi all, We've recently re-launched one of our sites with a substantial redesign, refreshed content, meta data, descriptions and functionality. We noticed in SERPs that some of the page titles are showing the old name for the site, which hasn't been used for a few years and the site's been through a few updates and a URL change since then. All the meta titles showing up as they should in crawls through Search Console and Moz and it's my understanding that if Google were pulling a cached version of a title it would have gone for a more recently cached one? Any thoughts on why Google's turned back the clock on our site's name would be greatly appreciated! -Jamie

    Technical SEO | | JamieCMF
    0

  • OK - bear with me... We have a .co.uk website. However, we only want it indexing in the US Google and NOT the UK Google. Is there a way of configuring this in Search Console /Webmaster tools?

    Technical SEO | | AbsoluteDesign
    0

  • Hi everyone! While performing keyword research using both Google's old and new Keyword Planner, I've noticed a disparity between the two tools. In many cases, the old tool gives a much larger monthly search volume than the new tool. There are a few cases where both tools provide the same monthly search volume for a term, but those are few and far between. Has anyone else experienced this? Thanks in advance!

    Keyword Research | | Brandon.H
    0

  • Our business is in 10 cities.  We offer identical services in each city, there's absolutely nothing different about the services we offer based on location.  We have a contact page for each city with a bit of unique content (phone, address, photo of city, list of counties we service).  It really would be a grey area to create subsites for each city and try to rewrite the service description content 10 times.  However, we want to improve organic results.  We of course have Google Places listings for each city. From an on-page SEO perspective, wouldn't it only have the possibility of benefiting, not hurting local SEO but add the city name linked to that city's contact page in the footer?  I've seen arguments against it, and could see maybe if you were in like 50 cities instead of 10, but is there really any observed downside to doing that in the footer for every page?  We can't title the difference service pages with the city name in the headings or page title, so at least we'd have anchor text in the footer.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wizkids964
    0

  • When I do a Google search on site:www.domainname.com, my clients homepage does not appear. Other inner pages do. The same thing happend a while ago and I did 'fetch by google' in Search Console. After that the homepage was indexed again when I did a site:www.domainname.com search. But now (2 weeks later), it's gone again. When I search on the brand name of the website in Google it does find the homepage. I don't know why it doesn't find the homepage when I do a site: search. Any ideas? [see images where you can see the problem] XTrDn 2doHF

    Technical SEO | | robk123
    0

  • My company has been around for several years now and hasn't really paid much mind to SEO or search engine rankings, so now I'm an in-house marketer with moderate SEO knowledge. We're setting up an article site with our help pages and blog under a subdomain so our writers can easily post articles without having to go through developers every time, as our root domain was set up with a custom in-house CMS. Is it possible for me to run a successful SEO campaign for our article site subdomain? I get that the root domain wouldn't benefit from any SEO authority the new site obtains, but my hands are tied.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teachbanzai
    0

  • I'm looking for some left-field and interesting ways you guys have attacked link building

    Link Building | | Tug-Agency
    0

  • I have recently taken over the maintenance/redesign of our website and after setting up Moz I see many errors:
    Duplicate content
    Missing descriptions
    Duplicate titles
    etc. All are related to blog categories and tags. My questions are: are these errors hurting us? Should I simply remove tags/categories from the sitemaps or bite the bullet and create content for every single category page? Our site is https://financiallysimple.com/ and we are using Yoast plugin in Wordpress  (if that helps)

    On-Page Optimization | | jgoethert
    2

  • Hello everyone, We run a Magento store, and I have a general question about SEO-eCommerce. We recently launched a new site where we've modified the menu navigation for product categories. So let's say in the past we had a main category called 'Jackets' in the top navigation bar, and once you were on the jackets page you had a few subcategories to choose from. On the new site, we reworked the navigation bar in order to get our customers there in fewer clicks. So right away in the top bar, the customer can click 'Casual Jackets', 'Leather Jackets' and 'Winter Jackets'. We no longer have an internal link to the parent category 'Jackets'. Now here's the question:
    -Do I 301 redirect 'jackets' to one of the sub-categories of my choosing?
    or
    -Do I keep the main category 'jackets' even though we don't actually link to it internally? I see pros and cons for both, and I'd like to proceed in the way that will be most beneficial from a rnakings point of view for all jackets categories. Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yacpro13
    0

  • Hi all, This is my first post at this forum 🙂 I'am running a Opencart shop with a SEO extension installed. This extension has a redirect module which works like this. When visiting the site on 404 url (and if there is setup a redirect for that url). It serves the correct content but on the 404 url with the correct url set in rel canonical. For example: Try visit this url: 
    https://makitech.no/ventilasjon/ventilasjons-pakketilbud
    Here i have setup a redirect to the correct content, which is actually this url https://makitech.no/pakketilbud I am used to use a 301 header redirect so the user get redirected to the correct url. So my question is this. Is it a okay practice to serve the content on the 404 url (it responds 200) when the correct url is set in canonical? Any thoughts?

    On-Page Optimization | | mrmagnecom
    0

  • Hi all, I am currently doing keywords research and matching it to our sales data. With an input of resources, do you know if there is a good way to create a growth forecast as a result of SEO investment? How do I work out a strategy and align it to a compelling financial forecast? Your experience on this will be super helpful! Many thanks, Eric

    Local SEO | | Eric_S
    1

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