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!


  • We have a domain which performs well within the local search and has got good authority and trust but we are now moving further afield to rank for keywords country wide. Our current domain contains our local area, does this effect your chances of ranking for broader searches? You don't seem to see many general searches bring domains up with the location keywords within their domain.

    Technical SEO | | DragonsDesign
    0

  • Hey everybody, I like to use php redirects for affiliate links so they look better.  I keep them all in the same directory.  I read recently that these may hurt SEO. A couple quick questions: Is this the best way to redirect affiliate links? Should I simply block the directory in robots.txt? Any other suggestions from you SEO guyses and galz? Thanks! Jared

    On-Page Optimization | | JaredB
    0

  • New to this so bear with, I am a TV aerial, satellite, CCTV, Door entry, Access Control, Telephone repair engineer. I have one seperate page for each of the installations I carry out as well as the basic home, about, areas, faqs and so on. My question is do i have one key phrase for each of the services  i cover or do i just relate all the keywords from that service into the keywords tag ie, META name=keywords content="Digial aerials Stockport,digital aerials Manchester,aerials Stockport,aerials Manchester,aerial repairs Stockport,aerial repairs Manchester,digital,aerial,tv,tv aerials Manchester,tv aerials Stockport,arials,arial,aerial installer,aerial installations,aeril installation,Stockport,Manchester ,"> That is what i have fro Tv aerial installation, Should i make landing pages for each phrase for each service or stick to one page? www.redvalecommunications.co.uk is the site if you want to take a look thanks in advance

    Keyword Research | | redvalecomms
    0

  • Term Extractor gives me "realestate" as a result and I'd like to have "realestate CityName" instead. How ca I tell search engine to "skip" single word keyword and that two word keyword is more important on that page?

    On-Page Optimization | | vdjacic
    0

  • There have been changes in the traffic of big websites in Spain, France, Germany and Italy, spread rumors about the Panda Update. Anyone can to support it?

    International SEO | | IEmpresas-92933
    0

  • I am getting a lot of duplicate content  and duplicate page title errors from my crawl analysis. I using volusion and it looks like the photo gallery is causing the duplicate content errors. both are sitting at 231, this shows I have done something wrong... Example URL: Duplicate Page Content http://www.racquetsource.com/PhotoGallery.asp?ProductCode=001.KA601 Duplicate Page Title http://www.racquetsource.com/PhotoGallery.asp?ProductCode=001.KA601 Would anyone know how to properly disallow this? Would this be as simple as a robots.txt entry or something a little more involved within volusion? Any help is appreicated. Cheers Geoff B. (a.k.a) newbie.

    On-Page Optimization | | GeoffBatterham
    0

  • One of my clients that is managing their own server and website recently moved servers. Which then broke their custom 404 page. Instead of fixing this or putting the site back to the old server they redirected the 404 to the home page. I've been working on getting their 404's appropriately redirected, or old urls redirection using a 301 for a month or two. I read the HTTP Status Codes best practices. It just discusses usability. What technical seo back lash can happen?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | triveraseo
    0

  • I know that the url structure is very important for seo preferably using the keyword. But is it okay to have the same url with the product number at the end ?  Each of our products have a name with a product number. Or will this cause to many similar urls? or if the folder is the name of the product that needs to be optimized, can the page just be called the product number? Example: Say you have a 20 different product lines and they are all catagorized in the appropriate folders, and need to be optimized for the actual product name. XXX (folder name ) WWW-PR-123 WWW-PR-1234 WWW-PR-12345 WWW-PR-123456 what would be the best url structure? Can they have the same begining? The product name? something like: www.example.com/xxx/www-pr-123.php www.example.com/xxx/www-pr-1234.php or www.example.com/xxx/pr-123.php www.example.com/xxx/pr-1234.php

    On-Page Optimization | | hfranz
    0

  • In the middle of a nightmare in Google Places. Dealing with a number of Chiropractic franchises. They all had previous practices (and Places listings). In many cases, a duplicate listing was created. Some locations are "under review", others have lost their ranking and a few are ranking for both location in the 7 pack.(usually because they had a different phone number used so I assume Google  sees it as a separate company despite the same location) I am trying to fix all these duplicate or near duplicate listings that were created previously. In one case I edited the existing listing and tried to verify by phone. I got the 5 digit code but Google then said code is not valid. Has anyone been through a similar situation? Should I delete/deactivate old listing and Then optimize the remaining or vice versa? A complete mess. In some cases they may have four listings...old company, new franchise and new name, Doctors names. Any insight appreciated.

    Image & Video Optimization | | AgileInt
    0

  • i dont mean to be calling any site out im just scratching my head on this one.- I can't see any signal that would make it worthy of ranking on the first page for keyword loose diamonds. page http://www.jewelryexchange.com/DiamondResults.aspx Am i missing something all tools seem to say the site isn't worthy- All help appreciated

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg
    0

  • We use Google Analytics on our ecommerce site and we recently made several changes to an important page.  Due to logistical reasons, we couldn't perform a Google web optimizer test but tracked the page's numbers in analytics from before/after the changes were made. After a week, we noticed that the bounce rate on the page went up by about 10% but the dollar index also doubled.  We're trying to figure out how this could happen, since it seems kind of odd. Any feedback would be appreciated.

    Reporting & Analytics | | airnwater
    0

  • Hey Mozzers, I'm currently faced with a situation that I believe is probably quite common in the SEO industry. I'd like to get the input of the SEOMoz community to see how others have handled this situation and how I can use that to help my company and of course myself in this process 🙂 Here's the dealio. I recently obtained a position at a fairly large company ($500 million annually) with the task of being our Lead SEO, which I am loving, but am finding one thing to be a big hurdle to our success. Essentially no one here has any pre-existing knowledge about what SEO and inbound marketing are. There are a few younger folks who understand some of it, and a few of those who I work with on a daily basis are starting to get it, but I fear that many of the folks on our webteam and even higher up do not understand the value of SEO, the implications of certain things the webteam does to our website, and moreso the value of me being here as the sole SEO expert. I'm wondering if anyone else out there has been in a similar situation and how I might be able to effectively instill a culture of SEO within my company to get people to think about SEO before they do things. My first goal is to ensure people think about SEO before making changes to our site. My second goal is for them to see the power of proper SEO, thus proving how valuable I am to the company. Thoughts anyone?

    Industry News | | CodyWheeler
    0

  • This may be a very basic question... In terms of the overall benefit to the SEO of a website, is it better to have, say, 4 pages about different aspects of the same subject (i.e. wooden lintels, steel lintels, concrete lintels and cavity lintels) or to have one page containing all the information? I have a site with roughly 250 pages, which could probably condense down to almost half that. The vast majority of inbound links point to either the homepage or one of the 20-odd most vistited pages. Of those, 2 or 3 pages count for roughly 70% of entrances. So should I concentrate on adding new pages, or improving/expanding the existing pages?

    On-Page Optimization | | Jingo01
    0

  • I'm currently focusing on link building for one of the websites I work on. In reviewing past customers, I see quite a few that do not have a blog, but do have social media pages like Facebook, for their business. I'm wondering if it's worth the effort to get them to "mention" the website with a link and brief comment from their Facebook page. Thanks for any/all input.

    Link Building | | Technical_Contact
    0

  • Greetings! I have inherited a problem that I am not sure how to fix. The website I am working on had a 302 redirect from its original home url (with all the link juice) to a newly designed page (with no real link juice). When the 302 redirect was removed, a duplicate content problem remained, since the new page had already been indexed by google. What is the best way to handle duplicate content? Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | shedontdiet
    0

  • Hello, I have talked to many SEO companies about their services and rates. I noticed that all of them will buy thousands and thousands of links once you first join. That is why they always want a start-up fee, so they can purchase the links. I know the best method is doing it the ethical hard way of asking sites to link to them, but I dont have time to do that. I mainly want to know where the SEO companies buy their links from. I am figuring that them buying the links are not negatively affecting the sites or they would lose their clients if they got into black hat links. It must be good inorder for them to keep their clients. I was interested in buying links, but do not know who to trust. Does anyone have a recommendation?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | neeper67
    0

  • We'd like to track conversions using Google's Website Optimiser, but the conversion page is hosted on a different sub domain so Google won't allow us to use this as the conversion page. The plan was then to add a blank page on the original domain that contains Google tracking code and a meta refresh to the page on the sub domain. We would then block this page in the robots file so Google doesn't try to index the page with the meta refresh. Does anyone see any harm that may come of this? Or any other way around the issue? Thanks in advance

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | heatherrobinson
    0

  • What is the best (hopefully seomoz) tool to create a list of the keywords bringing the most traffic into a competitor's website?  Goal is to build a list of keywords that bring the competitor the most traffic, stack ranked by volume of traffic coming into the competitor.

    Moz Pro | | sftravel
    1

  • Hello... i just started with a new client this week, before working with us his last domain-hosting-webdev provider cancel their account and took off the entire site and left them with a nice "under construction page" (NOT) and added the noindex, nofollow tags. 4 weeks after that, we come into the scene and of course our client it's expecting us to reinsert at least for branded terms the site, and he wants it done on a matter of hours... I tried my best to explain that it's not possible and we are doing everything we can't.... now i ask you guys.. I already created de GWT account, Created a well structured Sitemap and submitted it to google and bing, did the onpage optimizitation at least the basics... there is a way to speed up the process? kind of like "hey you! google bot, forget about the noindex nonsense a come crawl again?" Any help would be great Daniel

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez
    0

  • Hi The designer of the company I work for is re-designing Pop Up browsers as well as inline Pop up and Drop down menus. He needs SEO requirements - how can they be SEO friendly? Thanks a lot for your help! SL. Please see below the detail: Browser Pop Ups all include:
    • a browser title,
    • a logo and title in the title bar,
    • a close window button and
    • a call to action (that closes pop-up when clicked). Usage:
    Use when you'd like to offer additional information to the
    user but, not take the user away from the main page. Inline Pop up and Drop down menus. The inline pop-up & drop down is used to display additional menu options, functionality
    or content on the page without dedicating real estate in the page layout. It's a part of the page HTML to retain SEO value and thus does not trigger pop-up blockers. A title bar displays when content of the pop-up or drop down is not in context of
    the trigger. When used as a drop down, it is attached to the the bottom of it's trigger and left-aligned (unless it would exceed beyond the browser chrome, then it's right-aligned). When used as a pop-up, it is centered vertically/horizontally in the users browser window.
    The inline pop-up/drop down can be triggered differently per instance (e.g. onclick, onhover with delay). It can be closed by: clicking on link/location that triggered the pop-up/drop down (a.k.a. close icon) clicking anywhere outside the pop-up/drop down There are 5 widths to choose from, based on the needs of the content: 196px (3 columns) 266px (4 columns) 406px (6 columns) 546px (8 columns) 658px (10 columns)

    Technical SEO | | charsimona
    0

  • We recently modified the whole URL structure on our website, which resulted in huge amount of 404 pages changing them to nice human readable urls. We did this in the middle of March - about 10 weeks ago... We used to have around 5000 404 pages in the beginning, but this number is decreasing slowly. (We have around 3000 now). On some parts of the website we have also set up a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new ones, to avoid showing a 404 page thus making the “indexing transmission”, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. We've lost a significant amount of traffic, because of the URL changes, as Google removed the old URLs, but hasn’t indexed our new URLs yet. Is there anything else we can do to get our website indexed with the new URL structure quicker? It might also be useful to know that we are a page rank 4 and have over 30,000 unique users a month so I am sure Google often comes to the site quite often and pages we have made since then that only have the new url structure are indexed within hours sometimes they appear in search the next day!

    Technical SEO | | jack86
    0

  • I am new to seo and seomoz.  Any thoughts on how to get started with the below site: http://www.allianceconcretepumps.com

    On-Page Optimization | | APICDA
    0

  • I have a wordpress blog with settings currently set so that Google does not index tag pages. Is this a best practice that avoids duplicate content or am I hurting the site by taking eligible pages out of the index?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC
    0

  • I logged into my Adsense account yesterday and saw a notification that I could have code to add the plus one button to my site. I currently have addthis on most pages, so I set it up so that the +1 button is floated next to my Addthis FB, Twitter and Share buttons. I'd love to hear your personal thoughts on +1. Do you think it will have a great effect on rankings? Are you likely to +1 interesting sites as you surf the web? Are you adding it to all of your pages?

    Social Media | | MarieHaynes
    1

  • Hi, All! We were trying to advise a client about local SEO, and we ran into the issue of - their Google Places pages (yes, they have several, that's a separate issue) are "unclaimable."  Meaning - up at the top of the page there is neither a "Edit this page - Business Owner?" heading or a "Edit this listing - Owner-verified listing" heading.  When you try to claim it independently using the phone number (all pages have the same phone number, but different addresses), Google gives you "No address found for this phone number" and the option to now add a new page, which is not quite what we're looking for.  This is an Israeli location, and this appears to be an issue with a few other random Israeli pages I checked (I saw pages with neither heading option).  But a number of the Israeli pages have "Owner-verified listing."  How did they get it? Any help would be much appreciated.  Thanks! Regards, Aviva

    Image & Video Optimization | | debi_zyx
    0

  • We're currently working on an SEO project for http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/. After a crawl of their site, tons of duplicate content issues came up. We think this is largely down to the use of their brand filtering system, which works like this: By clicking on a brand, the site generates a url with the brand keywords in, for example: http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-cid77.html filtered by the brand Mammut becomes: http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-Mammut-cid77.html?filter_brand=48 This was done by a previous SEO agency in order to prevent duplicate content. We suspect that this has made the issue worse though, as by removing the dynamic string from the end of the URL, the same content is displayed as the unfiltered page. For example http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-Mammut-cid77.html shows the same content as: http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-cid77.html Now, if we're right in thinking that Google is unlikely to the crawl the dynamic filter, this would seem to be the root of the duplicate issue. If this is the case, would rewriting the dynamic URLs to static on the server side be the best fix? It's a Windows Server/asp site. I hope that's clear! It's a pretty tricky issue and it would be good to know your thoughts. Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic
    0

  • We recently took the decision to consolidate 3 domains for .com.au, .eu and .us. This decision was made before I arrived here and I'm not sure it's the right call. The proposal is to use a brand new .co (not .com isn't available) domain. The main reason is in terms of trying to build domain strength towards one domain instead or trying to grow 3 domains.  We re-sell stock simlar to hotel rooms (different industry) and our site is heavily search based. So duplicate content is an issue that we hope improve on with this approach. One driver was we found for example that our Autralian site was outranking out european site in european searches. We don't want to only hold certain inventory on certain sites either because this doesn't work with our business rules. Anyway if we are to go about this, what would be the best practise in terms of going about this. Should we suddenly just close one of the domain and to a * 301 redirect or should we redirect each page individually? Someone has proposed using robots text to use a phased approach, but to my knowledge this isn't possible with robots.txt, thought a phased individual page 301 using htaccess may be possible? In terms of SEO is 1 domain generally better that 3? Is this a good strategy? What's the best 301 approach? Any other advice? Thanks J

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Solas
    0

  • Does the search engines have a preference for pages with long or short copy? (Assuming our short copy fulfill the basic keyword requirements) While a long copy, enable us to include more long tail keywords, i find that most people prefer to read a short copy. We currently try to keep each page short and give the reader an option to explorer further with links to more detailed pages.

    Content Development | | petersen
    0

  • My domain's homepage has been ranking 1st position for an specific term for about 8 months. Our domain got hacked and it took just one day to make the website right again. A week after our homepage didn't appear anymore in Google results, it isn't even indexed. However the rest of our internal pages keep being indexed and ranking as usual. How can I make my homepage appear again in the results? Is there a way to speed up this process? Will it be in the same position as before, or will it have some sort of penalization for the hacking?

    Technical SEO | | HerbalTechnologies
    0

  • Hi Guys, I recently posted a question on the Google Webmasters Forum http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=683e71557db7fd54&hl=en&fid=683e71557db7fd540004a4b4add8cbb6 and didn't get a satisfactory feedback so I thought I will put this to the SEO gurus on here. Perhaps one of you guys might good buddies with Matt and might be able to ask him directly. I actually posted on Matt's blog but he hasn't got back to me. Basically we did a URL restructure for client and set up 301 redirects and saw a huge drop in rankings over time. The 301 redirects seem to work fine and have been tested by many many people. We suspected that google might be ignoring the 301 redirects or devaluing them and so I reviewed the server log to see what is happening when the googlebot crawls the site and it showed that on many occasions the googlebot did not reload the page after hitting a 301 redirect. Sure.. you might say it probably queues it or Google might just be checking that the 301 redirect is still in place but why check so often (with a few hours to a day on the same URL) it even skips a 301 redirect on the robots.txt file i.e. from http://clientsite.com/robots.txt to http://www.clientsite.com/robots.txt.  from non-www to www version. I don't think it is easy to dismiss the skipping of the robots.txt file - this 301 redirect should be loaded immediately to use the instructions the gooblebot requires to crawl the page. Any help will be appreciated. I can sent the server log to anyone personally but I am reluctant to post it on here. Regards, Zan

    Link Building | | FRL
    0

  • Our website seems to be well optimized. However I need to find more quality backlinks. I am having a hard time with this. Do backlinks have to related to the company? The reason I ask is because I can receive some links, but they do not relate to our company.  BUT sometimes we have customers come to our facility and we book them a local hotel room and send them to near by restaurants.  Is it ok to have local restaurants and local hotels links on our website and have them link to ours, on a page for customer visits. OR any other tips on receiving quality backlinks?

    On-Page Optimization | | hfranz
    0

  • Hello semoz, I having problem adding my site http://климатмонтаж.рф to Campaign Manager. I got this error: "We have detected that the root domain климатмонтаж.рф does not respond to web requests. Using this domain, we will be unable to crawl your site or present accurate SERP information." Is it possible anyhow to add my cyrillic domain? Thank You, Dmitri

    Moz Pro | | zhuk
    0

  • There has been a lot of talk lately around social profiles potentially improving your brand as well as search. What I'd like to know is the best practices for getting those social profiles crawled and indexed so they actually provide a good link to my site. I'm also wondering what the difference between what Linkscape sees and what Google sees and when I'm looking at Open Site Explorer's rankings on one of those social profiles how can I be sure that Google sees it the same way. I ask this because a lot of these profiles are not well internally linked to. An example is about.me, it's a potentially great link, but it's essentially an island, and even after dropping a couple Twitter links to my profile, Open Site Explorer shows and Page Authority of 1, and it's not even indexed with Google. What I did last night was put a link to my about.me, flickr and wedding wire in my Connect menu drop down on my site to get that crawled hopefully soon. Are there other methods of getting those crawled and indexed so it starts passing some juice?
    What do you guys do?

    Moz Pro | | WilliamBay
    0

  • what are the 10 commandments to follow when designing a website?

    Web Design | | sarenausa
    0

  • So I have a client who uses a program called test and target by Adobe to test different pages of content for the best layout, design, etc. They use javascript redirects and css hide and show to hide content with div tags. I'm wondering if anyone has experience with test and target or knows about how these hidden div tags and javascript redirects will affect my indexing and SEO. I'm hoping for some guidance fairly quickly as well 🙂

    Web Design | | CoolSEOnStuff
    0

  • I'm working with a site that finds standard linking to spread authority to interior pages ugly. Here's what they don't like: footers tag clouds sidebar lists of links text heavy paragraphs with links a gallery of images with alt text/links So, I'm looking for other ways to link from their homepage to these less prominent pages inside the site. Here are my two questions: 1. Would something like this work, with the links under the "Specs" tab (p.s., this is just a random example and not my client): http://www.goincase.com/products/detail/CL57925/ 2. Any other ideas for spreading the authority via links from their homepage and other pages on the site to less powerful pages? Thanks! Best...Mike

    Web Design | | 94501
    0

  • I have a client who wants to forward their website traffic to a campaign on Facebook for two week. I think it's a horrible idea on so many levels, but need a solid reason why. My gut says that their Google rankings will suffer, but I can't find any research/articles that state such. Help?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Axis41
    0

  • I have repeatedly tried to use Open Site Explorer on a site. I always get the same response: No Data Available for this URL The site is 4 months old. It is listed by Alexa in 1.3 million page category. The site ranks well on numerous key terms for the industry it covers. OSE offers 4 reasons for not having data: 1. Recency of page creation. In the explanation offered 45-60 days is the longest estimate it should take. The site has been live close to 120 days. 2. Deep down in the web. The tool doesn't even have any data for the site's home page. 3. Blocked pages. The site is listed in Google and these pages are not blocked. 4. No links. There are plenty of links. Site url is www.terapvp.com What can I do to fix this issue and get data?

    Reporting & Analytics | | RyanKent
    0

  • Hey guys, We're in the middle of designing our core navigation for our new site, which will feature a blog. I want to make sure the blog is linked to from the main navigation to pass all of the link juice to it, but since it isn't the core feature of the site we want people to view, I don't want it to take attention away from other things. Due to this I am thinking about giving it a main navigation link that opens in a new window. It would still be reachable from every page on the site, but it would allow users to view the blog in a new window rather than leaving the main site. The blog will still be on the same domain in a domain.com/blog subfolder. My question is... is this good practice? Will this pass the necessary link juice from our root domain to our blog, or will opening it in a new window detract from the value of the link? Any other comments / issues with designing the navigation like this that I'm not thinking of would be appreciated! Thanks

    Web Design | | CodyWheeler
    0

  • I put my plan to change web hosts on abeyance when an SEO friend of mine told me that it would negatively impact the sites SEO. I am not changing the url or anathing, just the host.

    Technical SEO | | ambisuite
    0

  • HOLA! I need some questions answered by all the GREAT people here: 1. suggestions for 3rd party facebook analytics tracking (currently utilizing a custom API and raven tools) 2. who is using the open graph protocol  and how are you doing so?

    Social Media | | Gaveltek-173238
    0

  • Hi All. I've noticed some issues between the thesis themes and Yoast's plugin, namely, thesis doesn't recognise Yoast's plugin in for title tag and meta description. Is there a way to overide this?

    Technical SEO | | PerchDigital
    0

  • I've noticed that Google News has withdrawn the necessity for there to be a minimum of 3 numerical digits in the URL if you submit the content via a new sitemap. Is this 100% correct? I'm working on a site rebuild for a client that is where submission to Google News will be instrumental in their strategy. Are there are difference between UK and US submission as this is UK based?

    Content Development | | PerchDigital
    0

  • What is the latest opinion on whether to have a blog hosting on your primary domain or on an outside domain (either Wordpress or just another URL). In the past we have done the former and it's been a great source of fresh content and organic traffic. Wonder if there is good argument now for not having it on the domain. With this new site we're working on it logistically would be more challenging given their tech resources, plus they already have thousands of pages.

    Content Development | | BMGSEO
    0

  • Can someone recommend an excellent SEO who can perform a full site audit of my fairly large Wordpress site? The site receives about 14,000 visits per month but traffic is waining one month after a recent change. Need analysis of some funky stuff in my Webmaster tools and overall site review.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC
    0

  • I would like to transform  our 400 page website to a CMS system. We rank failrly well for most of our keywords and not so much for others. Our website is currently optimized with lots of unique content, but we need to transform to a  more professional website with lots of options. Will doing this transformation affect our rankings if Redirects are correct ? Any recommedations for a Easy CMS that is very SEO Friendly?

    Web Design | | hfranz
    0

  • Are article submissions still relevant after the panda update? Many of these sites (ezinearticles) are still hit from the panda update.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | qlkasdjfw
    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.