Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

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!


  • I have seen this response http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/36353/video-sitemaps-for-youtube-embedded-videos That basically answers this question by saying that Google will give value to the site embedding the video. However I have seen much talk about this whether this really ads any value to the actual site. So By searching videos on Google my site will NOT come up in the results for any embedded video. What would the actual value be?

    Technical SEO | | zachc_coffeeforless.com
    0

  • Hi, I am trying to improve our rankings for pages with photos/images.  For the title is it benificial to include keywords that are almost identical in nature? For example: "Brad Pitt Photos and Images" In Google trends photos and images are both commonly used words so including both seems like it would help.  When I search for each one separately in Google (Brad Pitt Photos vs Brad Pitt Images) different sites are returned (except for the ones that include both image and photos keywords).  I had read that Google knows that Images and Photos mean the same thing, but the search results do vary.  I know stuffing all related combinations isn't good, but selective phrases seem to make a difference. Just want to verify if this makes sense. Thanks

    On-Page Optimization | | NicB1
    0

  • My company is moving forward with creating a subdomain for mobile visitors (m.examplesite.com). I know there is much discussion on subdomain vs one url with different style sheets.  That ship has sailed and the subdomain is the way we are proceeding. Google appears to recommend leaving both sites open to the normal Googlebot and redirecting the mobile bot to the mobile site (as we will be redirecting mobile visitors to the mobile subdomain). Has anyone had experience with this.  Any duplicate content issues? Does anyone feel strongly that the normal Googlebot should be blocked from the mobile site (this seems to go against Google's recommendations)? It seems like another option is to use the canonical tag and let the search engines know the traditional site is the canonical page/version. Any recommendations?  Any other issues that should be considered?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | btdavis
    0

  • I recently wrote a news release on PRweb that was picked up identically by 8 other news websites, with the same anchor-text links as the original. Is the reproduction of duplicate content and links across different websites like this to the benefit or detriment of SEO and ranking power? Some of the links are: http://www.mynewsdesk.com/uk/view/pressrelease/eventa-new-eventa-christmas-parties-website-is-launched-648923?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=Alert&utm_content=pressrelease http://www.prweb.com/releases/christmasparties/neweventasite/prweb8562064.htm Many thanks!!

    Link Building | | RobertHill
    0

  • We have a really large site we're working on who's product pages rank well for the most part but also have multiple products listed in different categories with different URL's. I'm assuming there's no downside to adding canonical tags to these right? Its peak season so I don't want to do anything that could, even temporarily, bring down their rankings. Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com
    0

  • Apologies in advance for the complexity. My client, company A, has purchased company  B in the same industry, with A and B having separate domains. Current hosting arrangement combines registrar and hosting functions in 1 account so as to allow both domains to point to a common folder, with the result that identical content is displayed for  both A & B. The current site is kind of an amalgam of A and B. Company A has decided to rebrand and completely absorb company B. The problem is that link value overwhelmingly favours B over A. The current (only) hosting package is Windows, and I am creating a new site and moving them to Linux with another hosting company. I can use 301's for A , but not for B as it is a separate domain and currently shares a hosting package with A. How can I best preserve the link juice that domain B has? The only conclusion I can come up with is to set up separate Linux hosting for B which will allow for the use of 301's. Does anyone have a better idea?

    Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk
    0

  • I had a few questions regarding nofollow links. It seems like more and more sites, forums, etc.  nofollow their links. Is it still worth trying to get a link from? I've heard only Google takes nofollows into consideration. Do other search engines (Bing specifically) "listen" to nofollows? Finally, when checking for nofollow, does it need to be right by the link(s) or can it be anywhere in the source? Thanks in advance!

    Link Building | | DevonIntl
    0

  • We are a publisher printing a magazine with corresponding news on our website and would like to be included (obviously) into the Bing news area, any tips on getting Bing to notice and include us?

    Link Building | | KenPiech
    0

  • I have 2 sites with duplicate content issues. One is a wordpress blog. The other is a store (Pinnacle Cart). I cannot edit the canonical tag on either site. In this case, should I use robots.txt to eliminate the duplicate content?

    Technical SEO | | bhsiao
    0

  • I am going to start searching myself, but I have a client on a Windows server needing to do redirects. So besides my usual 'Get a UNIX box', I need to know how to do redirects on IIS. Full site redirect: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^[site].com [NC] RewriteRule (.*) http://www.[site]/$1 [L,R=301] as well as page level redirects redirect 301 /[old-page.php] http://www.[site].com/[new-page] And that leads me to the question of RewiteRules also? RewriteRule ^[requested-page].html [server-fed-page].php [L] Thanks if anyone can [redirect] me to a good URL for these. 🙂 Richard

    Technical SEO | | Getz.pro
    0

  • Afternoon everyone (well, it is for me), We've been tracking the linking root domains to our domain for around 6 months now, alongside tracking these domains we have also been engaging in linking building activities. Our initial activities worked quite well with linking domains rising from around 620 to 720 in 3 months. However, recently we have seen those numbers begin to fall away, in many cases it is because certain domains have stopped linking to us, have become no=follow sites or have been archived. But, in some cases we can see the link is still there, and is being registered by other tools such as yahoo or webmaster tools. My question is really, does anyone have a way of working out why a link, that was in the past being registered by open site explorer, is no longer registering and presumably no longer passing over juice to help with domain authority. What kind of signals should i be looking for to tackle a 'decaying' link? Looking forward to hear your thoughts!

    Moz Pro | | NigelJ
    0

  • Hello, Will use of URL shorteners [bit.ly/tiny.cc or equivalent] in Twitter feeds impact the rankings of a target pages? As I understand it Twiitter links are automatically generated as nofollows so I am assuming the published link is irrelevant. Is this still the case? If we do continue to use URL shortereners should we look at branded URL-shorteners to provide link context? Thanks.

    Social Media | | Urbanfox
    0

  • I am sure everyone around here is aware of Instant Pages that Google introduced at Inside Search Event. How does it affect Analytics? Since the page is pre-loading, does that get recorded as a visitor? If the user doesn’t click on the link, will that impact the bounce rate?

    Technical SEO | | IM_Learner
    1

  • I'm running several community sites with forums (for example http:// www.finalstitch.co.uk). All of those sites have a forum section like http://http://www.finalstitch.co.uk/forum/ So far Google didn't recognize the forum. When I search for the site and click the Discussions filter on the left, no forum topics from my site show up. What should I do to change that? Thank you. 20110616-gu1beph7p673x1jkgahy1q63r.jpg

    Image & Video Optimization | | asmirasro
    0

  • Does anyone have a recommendation for the best xml sitemap plugin for wordpress sites or do you steer clear of plugins and use a sitemap generator then load it up to the root manually?

    Technical SEO | | simoncmason
    0

  • I have a website that it running via SSL, to secure the website, to reassure the customer is browsing (and so will be purchasing) on a secure website, and to show off the green address bar which many of my competitors do not have. However in my campaign I am getting on Links showing, with my rank reporting '1', surely this cannot be! I asked a Help question, and the only response was: "Unfortunately, we don't currently support https for our linkscape crawls. This is definitely something that we plan to implement in the future though! I hope that helps and I apologize for any inconveniences!" This definately does not help.. Is there any way of working around this issue, or will I be forced to cancel my SEOMOZ membership?

    Moz Pro | | jcarter
    0

  • Hi All, I've assembled a collection of 5 closely related articles each about 700 words for publishing by linking to them from on one of my pages and would appreciate some advice on the role out of these articles. Backround: My site is a listings based site and a majority of the content is published on my competitors sites too. This is because advertisers are aiming to spread there adverts wide with the hope of generating more responses. The page I'm targeting ranks 11th but I would like to link it to some new articles and guides to beef it up a bit. My main focus is to rank better for the page that links to these articles and as a result I write up an introduction to the article/guide which serves as my unique content. Question: Is it better to drip feed the new articles onto the site or would it be best to get as much unique content on as quickly as possible to increase the ratio of unique content vs. external duplicate content on the page that links to these articles**?** Thank you in advance.

    On-Page Optimization | | Mulith
    0

  • Ok, like 1 year ago my site was doing good in google search engine. But I decided to change CMS and design of the site. Did some mistakes like, changed site links structure (when I notice it later I changed it back), then some of the pages were lost because I simply didn't need them on the new cms and there were no feature of keeping them. Site has a  lot of backlinks and was strong in rankings. It's been almost a year or maybe already a year and I can't get even to top100 for those keywords... But I was in (top10-20) Site is still getting links, ranking well on yahoo and baidu, but google, just won't let my main keywords to come back. I rank for some that doesn't make sense to me and I even wasn't working on them.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onmaso
    0

  • Hey guys, been a longtime SEOmoz user, only just getting heavily into SEO now and this is my first query, apologies if it's simple to answer but I have been doing my research! My website is http://www.lyricstatus.com - basically it's a lyrics website. Rightly or wrongly, I'm using Google Custom Search Engine on my website for search, as well as jQuery auto-suggest - please ignore the latter for now. My problem is that when I launched the site I had a complex AJAX Browse page, so Google couldn't see static links to all my pages, thus it only indexed certain pages that did have static links. This led to my searches on my site using the Google CSE being useless as very few pages were indexed. I've since dropped the complex AJAX links and replaced it with easy static links. However, this was a few weeks ago now and still Google won't fully index my site. Try doing a search for "Justin Timberlake" (don't use the auto-suggest, just click the "Search" button) and it's clear that the site still hasn't been fully indexed! I'm really not too sure what else to do, other than wait and hope, which doesn't seem like a very proactive thing to do! My only other suspicion is that Google sees my site as more duplicate content, but surely it must be ok with indexing multiple lyrics sites since there are plenty of different ones ranking in Google. Any help or advice greatly appreciated guys!

    Technical SEO | | SEOed
    0

  • Hi guys, I'm loving the SEOMoz PRO dashboard and have learnt so much from the campaigns I've been running. I was wondering if I could personalise the reports to have my logo on them instead of SEO MOz's? At the moment, I export them and try recreate them offline, but it wouold be way easier if I could just send them the reports PDF'ed up straight from the dashboard.

    Moz Pro | | Lindsay_D
    0

  • Hello Guys, First of all, I wanna say that I just have some 1-2 years experience in SEO, I´m not a GURU or expert ok? So, take it easy... I have one costumer which wanna develop a E-COMMERCE focusing SEO and best pratices of web development. What care should I have? I mean the most important issues... From the coice of domain name to very specific point. What is the main mistakes SEO made at develop a E-COMMERCE? Thanks so much 😃

    On-Page Optimization | | augustos
    0

  • Our client needs a content disclaimer on their site.  This is a simple "If you agree to these rules then click YES if not click NO" and you're pushed back to the home page. I have this gut feeling that this may cause an upset with the search robots. Any advice? R/ John

    On-Page Optimization | | TheNorthernOffice79
    0

  • Sorry for the lame title, i couldn't think of a better one. I want to know if google treats this: http://www.domain.com/products/some-product-name the same as it would treat: http://www.domain.com/?products=some-product-name if not, could you tell me the differences?

    On-Page Optimization | | adriandg
    0

  • Hi all, When you set up campaign tracking in Google Analytics you get something like this "?variable=value parameters" in the URL. If you place such a link on your site as an internal link, will it be considered as a different URL and will have its own link value? The question I have is, since Google knows it's a Google link and knows the original URL (by stripping the tags), does it pass link value to the original URL? If not, what can be done to pass link value? Thanks in advance. Henry

    Reporting & Analytics | | hnydnn
    0

  • Hey guys, everyone know that to get better PR you need quality one way links.. my question is should I put nofollow to the links to the websites on my portfolio? since those website have the link to my page? ideas?

    Link Building | | onyx808
    0

  • So, our developer just created a player at the bottom of this site I work for.  It's not really important what it is.  The thing is, when you go to our home page now, the javascript changes the url from www.site.com to www.site.com/home It's not actually redirected or anything (no 301, it's just the javascript doing this), but I'm worried that if someone links back to our site they're going to surely pull that URL to point back to, which is wrong. Also, when you go to a category, the URL changes from www.site.com/category to www.site.com/home#category.  Again, it's not a redirect but I'm still worried people will link back to this since it's on the entire site now... I'm suggesting that we turn off this new feature until we find a workaround.  I just wanted to confirm with you guys that this is best. Thanks

    Web Design | | poolguy
    0

  • Does the order of the robots.txt syntax matter in SEO? For example (are there potential problems with this format): User-agent: * Sitemap: Disallow: /form.htm Allow: / Disallow: /cgnet_directory

    Technical SEO | | RodrigoStockebrand
    0

  • Curious to see if this is a positive or negative thing for SEO...or even perhaps, neutral. h9SZz

    Technical SEO | | RodrigoStockebrand
    0

  • Hi, Has anyone tried making links to a deep links to a page on an external site (like dmoz or the bbb) which has a link to your website? Of course, you might wonder "it depends on the type of link" you make to this larger site. Let's say it's a link (without no-follow) on a forum or blog comment - low-quality but on a decent site. Anyone think this may have some benefit to increase the chance / rate that your own link from another site will be indexed more and provide more benefit? A dmoz link is great, but it's on the backpages because it's a huge site, opensiteexplorer hardly indexes dmoz links. Regards,
    Valters

    Link Building | | qlkasdjfw
    0

  • I ran some of my pages through the 'on-page report card' and one thing that kept popping up was to Avoid Keyword Self-Cannibalization. I thought the best SEO practice was to have anchor text at the end of your article that matched your target keywords. Is this not accurate? Please let me know the best practice so I can make sure my pages are all optimized correctly. Thanks. Here is an example: http://www.youdrivethesuccess.com/culture/real-estate-commission-split/

    Moz Pro | | brentmitchell
    0

  • I've been moved to a busines development part of the business but I'm still in charge of all of our SEO and SEM. I was only an advanced beginner to begin with but our needs have grown. I'm not sure whether to contract with one or two people. Can someone be extremely well versed in all things SEO and SEM or is it better to get two people on board that might serve as a better sounding board? While they certainly work together, both are a constant moving target and it requires us to stay on top of trends and white hat policies of all the major players. My worst nightmare is to get someone that tries to game the system and screws up our rankings long term.

    Industry News | | thenorrisgroup
    0

  • Does anyone know of a tool that will allow you to track links to an email address hyperlink like mailto:user@domain.com

    Technical SEO | | dsonenberg
    0

  • If you have acquired a link on a home or other page; just how can you value the contribution of that link. If a home page has a DA=50 and 100 obls (outbound links) should the DA be discounted significantly and is there an equation which can be applied to help quantify eg 50/100 *10 therefore link from this page is same value as link from DA=5 with only one link? Just how diluted does juice become if number of obls is high?

    Link Building | | seanmccauley
    0

  • I just recently learned that changing your page title earns you a google penalty.  Unfortunately i learned this after playing around with my page titles a bit to get the most optimal page titles.  Does anybody know how long this google penalty lasts? is it forever? or just temporary?

    On-Page Optimization | | adriandg
    0

  • I am accessing these tools from the "Rankings Report" page and looking at competitors pages. I click on the dropdown next to the keyword and select either "extract terms" or "explore links". In both cases I get a message that says SEOmoz has no data for the page in question. This happens consistently for many keywords and pages. What gives?

    Keyword Research | | GPN
    0

  • I am trying setup product reviews on an Ecommerce site and was wondering if there were some good websites to create a model around that is SEO friendly. Right now my reviews are in a separate directory off the review (http://www.example.com/review/product/etc) and I would like my reviews to be attributed to the product page to add in free, fresh, unique content that contains valuable information for both the user and SEO (new keyword derivatives). Also any suggestions on getting users to leave reviews? Whether it is a monetary incentive/coupon or a free method (of course this is preferred :)) Thanks in advance!

    Content Development | | ResponseMine
    0

  • Hello, We have 3 web directories, and I wonder if it is legal for search engines to ask people who want to be in the directory to link to a particular website in order to be in our directory. I mean, it is free adding the url in the directory but if they lwant to be in the directory they have to ink to a website we have decided.
    Is this correct, or is punishable? Thanks!

    Link Building | | teconsite.com
    0

  • When using keywords in url's for internal pages, isn't it a good idea to use dashes or underscores in the url between the keywords?

    On-Page Optimization | | BradBorst
    0

  • Hi, I have a WordPress-based site and overall everything is working well. However, I can't seem to figure out how to get apostrophes and other characters to display normally. Now, the problem isn't that they are displaying as code to normal visitors or up in the title bar, they are displaying as code to Google's bots as well as to SEOMOZ. Example: Normal visitor sees: About **** | **** - Metro Vancouver's IT & Web Experts Google and SEOMOZ see: About **** | **** - Metro Vancouver's IT & Web Experts I've played around with different ways of typing the title (not using character codes vs. using character codes) and nothing seems to work. Any help or explanation would be appreciated.

    Technical SEO | | Function5
    0

  • A site has category pages as such:  www.domain.com/category.html, www.domain.com/category-page2.html, etc... This is producing duplicate meta descriptions (page titles have page numbers in them so they are not duplicate).  Below are the options that we've been thinking about: a.  Keep meta descriptions the same except for adding a page number (this would keep internal juice flowing to products that are listed on subsequent pages).  All pages have unique product listings. b.  Use canonical tags on subsequent pages and point them back to the main category page. c.  Robots.txt on subsequent pages. d. ? Options b and c will orphan or french fry some of our product pages. Any help on this would be much appreciated.  Thank you.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Troyville
    0

  • Should I park a domain or Redirect? And what is the best way? I need to switch our domain name. I currently have all of our domains redirecting to our main website. I have set up there own hosting in our cpanel account so I could redirect them to our main domain. Was this too many steps? I tried putting all of our domains in our main domains, .htaccess file, and redirected them to our main website, but they did not work. So that is why I set up there own cpanel accounts. Now they work fine. However, my hosting company told me that I could just park the domain on our current domains account.  If I can redirect all of these domain in one place, that would be great. I thought that a parked domain is considered duplicate websites, as both urls work, displaying the entire website with both urls. So Would I have to re upload our entire website to the account that I want as our main domain? Or is there another way of going about doing this?

    Web Design | | hfranz
    0

  • My wordpress site's robots.txt used to be this: User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: http://www.domainame.com/sitemap.xml.gz I also have all in one SEO installed and other than posts, tags are also index,follow on my site. My new posts used to appear on google in seconds after publishing. I changed the robots.txt to following and now post indexing takes hours. Is there something wrong with this robots.txt? User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /wp-admin Disallow: /wp-includes Disallow: /wp-content/plugins Disallow: /wp-content/cache Disallow: /wp-content/themes Disallow: /wp-login.php Disallow: /wp-login.php Disallow: /trackback Disallow: /feed Disallow: /comments Disallow: /author Disallow: /category Disallow: */trackback Disallow: */feed Disallow: */comments Disallow: /login/ Disallow: /wget/ Disallow: /httpd/ Disallow: /*.php$ Disallow: /? Disallow: /*.js$ Disallow: /*.inc$ Disallow: /*.css$ Disallow: /*.gz$ Disallow: /*.wmv$ Disallow: /*.cgi$ Disallow: /*.xhtml$ Disallow: /? Disallow: /*?Allow: /wp-content/uploads User-agent: TechnoratiBot/8.1 Disallow: ia_archiverUser-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: / disable duggmirror User-agent: duggmirror Disallow: / allow google image bot to search all imagesUser-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /wp-includes/ Allow: /* # allow adsense bot on entire siteUser-agent: Mediapartners-Google* Disallow: Allow: /* Sitemap: http://www.domainname.com/sitemap.xml.gz

    Technical SEO | | ideas123
    0

  • Hi, I'm trying to figure out the best way to host my own videos on my website in addition to uploading them to YouTube. My site is Wordpress-based, and I use Pages for the main landing pages, Posts to create the different products I offer.  Is there a good way to upload my videos of each product into those Posts for SEO purposes? Maybe there's a specific plugin that I should be using? Thanks in advance, Shawn

    Image & Video Optimization | | darkgreenguy
    0

  • Because I noticed a couple conflicting information they recommends me to do, but it conflicts some SEOmoz recommendations.

    Moz Pro | | smstv
    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


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