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'm attending for the first time this year and I am just curious as to what to expect with attendance, etc.  🙂

    Industry Events | | theideapeople
    0

  • I have a friend whose client is giving away something for free if you leave a Google Review for his site.  I recall that being not well liked by Google and could potentially end up in a Penalty.  The site is ranking really poorly in Google but well in Yahoo/Bing so I am wondering if that is what happened. What are you opinions?

    On-Page Optimization | | netviper
    0

  • Need input on a Google Places change to avoid duplicate listing/phone number issue for a name change. Here is a summary: Company A has a Places listing and ranks week for key local terms. Company A has become a franchise and has a completely new name but same address. A New Franchise listing was created. It has same location but a different telephone (tracking) number. Both listings generally appear in Google Places but Company A (older listing) come up first. For branding purposes I would ideally like to eliminate (or edit)  Company A listing and optimize new Franchise listing. We will need to eliminate the tracking phone number and add the old “Company A” phone number to the new Franchise listing. What is the best procedure to delete the Company A listing? I have access to both listings. Do I: -Strip Company A listing of most info…wait and then delete? Do I delete from my account or delete in total? -Just change the name of the “old” Company name to the new franchise name and delete the new franchise listing? An if so, in what order? -or do I just delete the old  listing right away and edit the new franchise listing right away? -When do I add the old (and real phone number) to the new franchise listing? This same scenario has played out in other locations with disastrous results. Appears that Google looks at them as duplicate listings if the old Company name is still active and demotes both listings. Trying to avoid that problem that has been created by other companies. -Would adding Google Boost to the surviving listing help? Any input appreciated.

    Image & Video Optimization | | AgileInt
    0

  • Hi, I have a client who has a word press site that we put together for him. We have noticed that over approximately the last 2 months his sites traffic has plumitied - its gone from a health 200+ per day and sharply decresaed and is not practically zero. Has anyone got any ideas of why this might be? Here is the link to the site - http://wheelworldreviews.co.uk/ Thanks

    Content Development | | Tinderbox
    0

  • How are you supposed to <rel canonical="" tag="">a page with a query string that has already been indexed? It's not like you're serving that page from a CMS where you have an original page with content to add to the head tag.</rel> For example.... Original Page = http://www.example.com/about/products.php Query String Page = http://www.example.com/about/products.php?src=FrontDoorBox Would adding the <rel canonical="" tag="">to the original page, referencing itself, be the solution so that the next time the original page is crawled, the bot will know that the previously indexed URL with query string should actually be the "original"? That's the only solution I can come up with because there's no way to find the query string rendered page to tag with the canonical.....</rel>

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yun
    0

  • Is it better to use the robots meta noindex, follow tag for paging, (page 2, page 3) of Category Pages which lists items within each category or just let Google index these pages Before Panda I was not using noindex because I figured if page 2 is in Google's index then the items on page 2 are more likely to be in Google's index. Also then each item has an internal link So after I got hit by panda, I'm thinking well page 2 has no unique content only a list of links with a short excerpt from each item which can be found on each items page so it's not unique content, maybe that contributed to Panda penalty. So I place the meta tag noindex, follow on every page 2,3 for each category page. Page 1 of each category page has a short introduction so i hope that it is enough to make it "thick" content (is that a word :-))  My visitors don't want long introductions, it hurts bounce rate and time on site. Now I'm wondering if that is common practice and if items on page 2 are less likely to be indexed since they have no internal links from an indexed page Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donthe
    0

  • I'm trying to clarify something about search results which contain local listings. Here is the search string for Google that will give you the same results that I am seeing - http://www.google.co.uk/search?&q=letting agents glasgow&pws=0 Of the results that are returned, some of them have data which seems to be related to their Google Place page but the "title" links directly to their website. What I wanted to know is, "Is it their actual website that has given them those rankings" or "Are they listed where they are because of a well optimized and ranked Places page?

    Image & Video Optimization | | XSMedia
    0

  • So the ratio is MozTrust to MozRank, but what is this good for?  What can I deduce from this and what can I use it for?

    Moz Pro | | MarloSchneider
    2

  • A very similar question was asked previously.  (http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-google-did-not-index-our-domain)  We've done everything in that post (and comments) and then some. The domain is http://www.miwaterstewardship.org/ and, so far, we have: put "User-agent: *  Allow: /" in the robots.txt  (We recently removed the "allow" line and included a Sitemap: directive instead.) built a few hundred links from various pages including multiple links from .gov domains properly set up everything in Webmaster Tools submitted site maps (multiple times) checked the "fetch as googlebot" display in Webmaster Tools (everything looks fine) submitted a "request re-consideration" note to Google asking why we're not being indexed Webmaster Tools tells us that it's crawling the site normally and is indexing everything correctly.  Yahoo! and Bing have both indexed the site with no problems and are returning results.  Additionally, many of the pages on the site have PR0 which is unusual for a non-indexed site.  Typically we've seen those sites have no PR at all. If anyone has any ideas about what we could do I'm all ears.  We've been working on this for about a month and cannot figure this thing out. Thanks in advance for your advice.

    Technical SEO | | NetvantageMarketing
    0

  • It only took me a year and a half to get the code Will Critchlow laid out in a blog post last year put on my website. Now I've finally got it but I need more instruction on how to create the custom report I need in GA! Will said he was going to expand on how to set up the custom reports but I'm not sure he ever did. So, can anyone either direct me to Will's follow-up post about setting up custom reports for first click attribution or tell me how to do it? Thanks!

    Reporting & Analytics | | eTundra
    0

  • 3 things : 1. Does Google factor in overall site traffic in rankings?  So for 2 sites, all other things being pretty much equal, the one with higher traffic will be listed higher? 2. Does this logically imply that sites with lower traffic overall face an uphill struggle to be ranked highly??? 3. As an extension to this, would it be true to say that by increasing site traffic, say with Google Adwords or other online or offiline or whatever advertising, that might help get higher SEO rankings??? Thanks so much for your responses.  This forum is great!

    Reporting & Analytics | | inhouseninja
    0

  • On our weekly SEOmoz crawls, we get thousands of warnings about overly dynamic URLs as a result of our product sorting options at the top of our category pages.  It seems like the ability to sort products by price, name, etc., is nice for the customer.  For SEO is this really a problem or can we ignore these warnings?

    On-Page Optimization | | teatable
    0

  • So we know that links from highly ranked websites, pages with high DA, PR etc, matter.  What about the traffic on these links?  Do Google and others look at the traffic on the links and factor that into the algorithm?  What do people think about this? Just wondering about this as don’t see it talked about much….Thanks

    Link Building | | inhouseninja
    0

  • Hello to everybody, We'are thinking about launching a massive amount of satellite websites in order to promote our website. Is it really efficient in terms of link building? Or is the ROI really small due to the amount of time and money needed to create and manage these websites? Thanks a lot!!! Update: Thanks to all of you for all these interesting answers!

    Algorithm Updates | | sarenausa
    1

  • Hey guys, I'm on the free trial for SEOmoz PRO and I'm in love. One question, though. I've been looking all over the internet for a way to check Page Authority in bulk. Is there a way to do this? Would I need the SEOmoz API? And what is the charge? All I really need is a way to check Page Authority in bulk--no extra bells and whistles. Thanks, Brandon

    Moz Pro | | thegreatpursuit
    0

  • I was browsing around other SEO websites and seeing how they charge upwards of $2500 a month... In Australia things are a little different, many potential clients gasp in shock at the prospect of paying just $500 a month... Because of this it seems all the SEOs in Aus have taken to undercutting each other to the point where you can get 'guaranteed' 1st page results for just $200 a month - its become a necessity of doing a guarantee and having a low price just to compete... How do you find clients that actually have decent budgets? Most of the clients I have so far are from referals from web developers or from my participation on business forums etc. I have thought about trying a telemarketing campaign or a direct mail campaign to try and snag some lawyers, and cosmetic surgeons etc Has anyone had experience with these methods or can offer any other suggestions to snag clients with deeper pockets?

    Industry News | | Netboost
    0

  • I work with a couple of clients in the finance and debt area.  I've been doing loads of work examining the link profiles of the commercial sites at the top of the rankings and 70% of the links I am seeing are low value directories and sites obviously built for links with multiple outgoing links to completely unrelated sources!  When I examine the other links their isn't enough value in them to outweigh what looks to me like very obvious and spammy low quality link building. Why can't Google see what I'm seeing - it's so obvious?  I know there are multiple factors at play but links like these should offer no value or get a site penalised (isn't that what Google tell us) but these sites still seem to be ranking because of them rather than despite them!

    Link Building | | SearchEngineRescue
    0

  • I just have a quick query and I have a feeling about what the answer is so just wanted to see what you guys thought... Basically I am working on a client site. This client has a few other websites that are divisions of their company. However these divisions/websites are no longer used. They are wanting to delete the websites but redirect the domains to their name main website. They believe this will pass on SEO benefits as these old division sites are old and have a good PR and history. I'm unsure for DEFINITE, which way is correct?

    Technical SEO | | Weerdboil
    0

  • We're looking for a recommendation for a very good SEO agency that has experience with link building (white hat only). Any suggestions?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruceMillard
    0

  • My client  nor I received any warning.  We even had a google adwords team optimize the account and my rep does not yet know the reason for the ban.  Not sure if its related but their google organic rankings dropped significantly at the same time. https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164786 Any advice here? Do these Questions get indexed by google?  I will ask my client if I can disclose the domain. Is there any way around a permanent ban? They were spending 50K per month.  Is this enough to have any clout?

    Paid Search Marketing | | webbroi
    0

  • I can't believe I've never done this before, so I'm going to assume that I previously must have figured it out via excel, but I'm hoping there's an easier way. So I want to compare the referring sites between April and May and see which have sent (specifically) less traffic. The problem with doing a comparison in GA is that it only sorts by the highest traffic for May, when actually I want to see the largest negative change (by number, not percentage) between April and May. Is there a way to do this via the dashboard or am I just going to have to play about in excel for 10 minutes?

    Reporting & Analytics | | StalkerB
    0

  • Ok, I have a quick question about these, i keep seeing them. There has been talk of Google showing dual inline sitelinks (the extra links it shows under the number 1 results). It used to show 8 links under many number 1 results. It was reported it was showing 2. Now it’s showing 3 …for example, for comparestore prices, compare the market and pricerunner (for a search on compare). How do I get these, or go about getting started with being able to attain them?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomBarker82
    0

  • We have noticed some strange rankings for a while that do not make any type of logical sense from an SEO standpoint. After an SEO review, it is found that these sites rank for top terms in very competitive markets for no clear reason. To demonstrate, here is research for one of the categories where this is taking place. Google for "Phoenix Computer Repair" Rank #1: www.datafast.net/phoenix-computer-repair.html Rank #2: www.mobiletechsupport.com Rank #4: www.mypctechs.com Linkscape Visualization and Comparison Report The first thing we run is a linkscape visualization and comparison report. Compare site #1 to #4 or site #2 to #4. In all instances, site #1 and site #2 are completely dominated by site #4. Visualizer stats, with higher ranking site #1 on the left. Lower ranking site #4 on right: | Overall Score | 29% | 53% |
    | Page mozRank | 3.72 37% | 5.66 57% |
    | Page mozTrust | 5.41 54% | 6.09 61% |
    | External mozRank | 3.38 34% | 5.62 56% |
    | Subdomain mozRank | 3.91 39% | 5.70 57% |
    | Domains Linking | 11 12% | 74 29% |
    | External Links | 10 0% | 17461 60% | ********Linkscape Report Next, running a linkscape report to evaluate inbound links for site #1 shows a collection of cheap profile spam links. There actually appear to be no high quality inbound links: ****http://fastw3b.net/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=3432;sa=summary TARGET: www.datafast.net/phoenix-computer-repair.html TITLE: View the profile of Phoenix12****Anchor Text: Computer Repair Phoenix URL Metrics mozRank: 0.00 mozTrust: 0.00 Passing: 1.59 domain Metrics (fastw3b.net) mozRank: 5.19 mozTrust: 5.05 http://djdriblemouth.com/Simple Machines Forum 1.1.11 blog/index.php?action=profile;u=1897;sa=summary TARGET: www.datafast.net/phoenix-computer-repair.html TITLE: View the profile of Phoenix59****Anchor Text: Computer Repair Phoenix URL Metrics mozRank: 0.00 mozTrust: 0.00 Passing: 1.56 domain Metrics (djdriblemouth.com) mozRank: 2.38 mozTrust: 2.59 http://www.bettingfc.com/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=1990;sa=summary TARGET: www.datafast.net/phoenix-computer-repair.html TITLE: View the profile of Phoenix59 ********Checking Page Text and Content Full evaluation of the top site #1 shows there's not much relevant content on the pages to warrant rank 1. Just a few bare pages with very little text. Site #2 does have a lot of on-page information, but still not enough useful information to justify rank #2 in this market. ********So, what's going on? How is site #1 without any good inbound link and very little page content and site #2 with little inbound links and low trust ranking above sites with tens of thousands more inbound links, sites with more content, and sites that dominate in every way with MOZRank. Is this some kind of black-hat SEO that is exploiting an unpublished weakness in Google? If so, what method is being used? Spammy profile links? The current site ranked #1 has been reported to Google as SPAM 3 times in the past. Every time it disappears from the top ranking for a few weeks, but is back again a short time later.

    Moz Pro | | mypctechs
    0

  • In the keyword difficulty screen how do I recreate your beutiful color coded spreadsheet in the exported excel file based on the advanced reports.

    Competitive Research | | bmcfarlane
    0

  • Most of the pages on our site "Accessible to Engines" test in the SEOmoz reports. We cannot find any problem with the code and it's largely identical to the few pages that come up with an "A" score. One item that may be a reason is that we use meta http-equiv="refresh" content="600; For example in www.weatherzone.com.au/nsw/sydney/sydney We use this to fresh dynamic content on our site. Do search engines penalise pages that use this form of page refresh? Alternatively, is there a known bug in the SEOmoz "Accessible to Engines" report? Many thanks

    Moz Pro | | weatherzone
    0

  • Our site has a lot of non-followed links showing up on the latest SEOMoz Competitive Link Analysis update and I would like to know how to get a list of the sites that aresettin no-follow.

    Moz Pro | | oznappies
    0

  • Of course Google analytics is good. I tried getclicky.com. Are there any other analytics programs that are better that are also affordable? What do you use?

    Reporting & Analytics | | DallasBonsai
    0

  • I have heard of PPC company's that set up a proxy server to replicate your site so that they can use their own tracking methods for their reports. What affect if any does this have on SEO for a site?

    Paid Search Marketing | | prima-253509
    1

  • I came across a nice discovery of about 20 old domain names that each have many root domains and a bit of DA. I want to know the best way to utilize them without any type of penalty. Currently, (as of an hour ago) I am 301 redirecting all of them to the most relative pages on a single domain. Will i get the majority of the link juice from the domains? I'm excited to see what will happen here. Thanks in advance, Daniel

    Link Building | | seoninja20
    0

  • Hello, my company sells used cars though a website. Each vehicle page contains photos and details of the unit, but once the vehicle is sold, all the contents are replaced by a simple text like "this vehicle is not available anymore".
    Title of the page also change to a generic one.
    URL remains the same. I doubt this is the correct way of doing, but I cannot understand what method would be better. The improvement I am considering for pages of no longer available vehicles is this: keep the page  alive but with reduced vehicle details, a text like: this vehicles is not available anymore and automatic recommendations for similar items. What do you think? Is this a good practice or do you suggest anything different? Also, should I put a NOINDEX tag on the expired vehicles pages? Thank you in advance for your help.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Darioz
    0

  • Before answering this, let me explain my goals.  I know that Google made a change a couple years ago that discounts the amount of Page Rank passed to dofollow links when there is a nofollow link present on the page. My goal is to keep the most page rank possible on my home page and pass a specified amount of Page Rank to 7 out of 10 of the pages linked to from my home page.  I realize that creating 3 of the outgoing links as no follow links is not going to increase the Page Rank being sent to the other 7 pages. My question is will my home page be able to retain the Page Rank that would have been used by the three nofollow links or is that Page Rank value just lost when I implement a nofollow?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet
    0

  • I was recently looking at a blog post here or a webinar and it showed a website where you could see all of the local sites (yelp, Google places) where your business has been submitted.  It was an automated tool.  Does anyone remember the name of the site?

    Technical SEO | | beeneeb
    0

  • I'm not sure if it's worth the money, so first I don't want to try with Yahoo dir, but something a bit cheaper. I have a foreign site, but everything is translated ti english as well. I stucked at te second page for my keyword, so I tought I give this method a try. What do You think?

    Link Building | | joo
    1

  • This question was asked before but I didn't see a clear answer to it.  If I've got a site that has as it's home page: http://www.mysite.com/, and there are many references within the site back to the home page that point to /index.php, should I include a canonical tag in the index.php page like this: to avoid a duplicate content issue, and to have all juice from both links combined into one?

    On-Page Optimization | | wcksmith
    0

  • I have an issue with one of my sites where the SEOMoz crawler is following some form action links.  It is my understanding that the crawler will ignore these links.  Why would it not be ignoring them in certain cases.  If you need more detail, please ask.  Thanks.

    Moz Pro | | AmberHanson
    0

  • Hi. My baseball blog (mopupduty.com) shows up as www.mopupduty.com in Google Webmaster tools. This is an issue for me, as my Wordpress plug-in sitemap will only show up on http://mopupduty.com/sitemap.xml , not the www. version Is there any way in changing the www. in webmaster tools without deleting my existing index. The website currently has sitelinks in search results, and I'm not too keen in giving them up via deletion. Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mkoster
    0

  • Hey, I was just thinking that it would be useful to be able to group keywords by page or some other factor in the campaign monitor keyword rank checking tool (I am sure it's called something better than that). Maybe it's just me, but I am struggling a little with this for relatively smaller sites so if I could tag each keyword and filter / group them by the tag it would be another useful tool for my seo utility belt. Fairly painless to implement as well I would imagine. 1. Create tags 2. assign tags to keywords with a drop down (optional) Would be a useful tool when exporting data to group by tag etc. Just a thought. 🙂 Marcus

    Moz Pro | | Marcus_Miller
    1

  • I'm aware that local search is mostly based on citations, and how well your Google places page is optimized, and the landing pages are optimized.  But I was wondering if anyone could tell me if backlinks have any relevance in the local search results?  And if they do, how much would you say the impact the local search results? could you estimate a % of total value? Also if they do, does it help to have backlinks that point at your places page urls? or should the backlinks just point at your places page landing pages?

    Image & Video Optimization | | adriandg
    0

  • I have looked up SERP position in 4 different tools, 3 out of the 4 (Raven, SEO Moz, and Google webmaster tools) are telling me that the site is ranking in the 90s range. When I manually search for the term (when I'm logged out), the site lists on the 1st pages. I also see it listed as the #9 spot when I use SEO Books Rank Checker. Last month, Google webmaster says that the term got us 200 impressions. Has anyone seen this before? Thanks

    Keyword Research | | TheOceanAgency
    0

  • Hello, I am brand new to SEO and I'm learning on the go everyday. I am having issues with Google and getting any sort of ranking or analysis or even just traffic reports. I understand the site has never really been optimized so it might really not have any reports. So basically my real question is what helpful tricks or hints do you guys have that I can implement? Anything and everything helps. So far I have run the crawl diagnostics and I'm working on fixing the errors. Thanks fr your help.

    Technical SEO | | Future13
    0

  • I think it's extremely important to be aware of any change in ranking ASAP is there any way to have SEOMOZ Pro update more often than once a week?

    Moz Pro | | montage
    0

  • I'm trying to find the best tool to check for broken links on our site. We have over 11k pages and I'm looking for something fast and thorough! I've tried Xenu and LinkChecker. Any other ideas?

    Technical SEO | | CIEEwebTeam
    0

  • Please review my request here: http://www.screencast.com/t/4IBtbBFC and let me know I think it would make the program even more robust and beneficial to many members. Please advise: Thanks Sean

    Moz Pro | | montage
    0

  • I am just wondering if anyone has had a full SERP Report in the keyword difficulty tool finish for them or if they know how long these take to populate?

    Moz Pro | | MarloSchneider
    0

  • I carry a line of products that come in 4 sizes and 15 colors.  Is it better to have separate products for each combination (Red Large, Blue Small, etc), or a product for each size with attributes for the color, or something else? Also, should I put the brand name in each product name, or only put it in the category that contains that brand?  Thanks.

    On-Page Optimization | | teatable
    0

  • Primarily questions I want to know definitive answers to: Do incoming links to a YouTube video affect Google's decision to show a YouTube video thumbnail in the results? If so, does YouTube rank the video higher due to incoming links? Does YouTube take any off-page factors into consideration when ranking a video? Does anyone else have any other helpful tips/thoughts/suggestions? Please don't answer this just to get points and give me fluff information. I'd really like to get some concrete data/info 🙂 Cheers!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alhallinan
    0

  • Hi, Im currently working on www.kupwakacje.pl which is something like travel agency. People can search for holidays and buy/reserve them. I do know plenty of problems on my website, and thx to seomoz hopefully I will be able to fix them but one is crucial and it's kind of hard to fix I think. The search engine is provided by external party in form of simple API which is in the end responding with formatted HTML - which is completly stupid and pointless, but that's not the main problem. Let's dive in: So for example the visitor goes to homepage, selects Egypt and hit search button. He will be redirected to www.kupwakacje.pl/wczasy-egipt/?ep3[]=%3Fsp%3D3%26a%3D2%26kt%3D%26sd%3D10.06.2011%26drt%3D30%26drf%3D0%26px and this is not a joke 😉 'wczasy-egipt' is my invention obviously and it means 'holidays-egypt'. I've tried to at least have 'something' in the url that makes google think it's related to Egypt indeed. Rest which is the complicated ep3[] thingy is a bunch of encoded parameters. This thing renders in first step a list of hotels, in next one hotel specific offer and in next one the reservation page. Problem is that all those links generated by this so-called API are only changing subparameters in ep3[] parameter so for example clicking on a single hotel changes to url to: www.kupwakacje.p/wczasy-egipt/?url=wczasy-egipt/&ep3[]=%3Fsid%3Db5onrj4hdnspb5eku4s2iqm1g3lomq91%26l ang%3Dpl%26drt%3D30%26sd%3D10.06.2011%26ed%3D30.12.1999%26px%3D99999 %26dsr%3D11%253A%26ds%3D11%253A%26sp%3D which is obviously looking not very different to the first one. what I would like to know is shall i make all pages starting with 'wczasy-egipt' a rel-canonical to the first one (www.kupwakacje.pl/wczasy-egipt) or shoudn't I? google recognizes the webpage according to webmasters central, and recognizes the url but responses with mass duplicate content. What about positioning my website for the hotel names - so long tail optimalization? I know it's a long and complicated post, thx for reading and I would be very happy with any tip or response.

    Technical SEO | | macic
    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.