Latest Questions

Should You Avoid Links from Sites with Big Difference Between PR and MozRank?

If a site has a Google toolbar PR of 2 and a Mozrank of 5, does that most likely mean that the site is penalized and a link would probably provide little value. I know that Google rarely updates toolbar PR so I suppose the site could have also earned a lot of quality links since the last update. Thanks Mozzers!

Link Building | | SparkplugDigital

0

Starting Fresh with a New PPC Account

I've inherited an Adwords account with a few years' worth of history. The account has changed hands a lot though and there's a lot of clutter and confusing account architecture (confusing and redundant campaigns, thousands of inactive long-long-tail keywords for every match type, etc.). I have a new architecture/strategy in mind but I'm unsure if I should start a new account from scratch, pause 90% of things and start some new campaigns, or delete a bunch of stuff permanently and start some new campaigns. My fear with the pausing option is that I'll have to wade through a bunch of clutter in my daily management and reporting - I like to keep things clean. My fear with deleting is losing data - I'd like to be able to always look back at how things were. And my fear with the new account from scratch method is losing whatever account/campaign quality score or historical value the account has built over time and the logistics of having to stop the old account to create a new account. Can you even have 2 accounts with the same domain or would I have to delete the old account before launching the new? For all my past PPC accounts, I started them more or less from scratch so this is new to me. Any advice/insights would be most appreciated. Thanks! Jeff

Paid Search Marketing | | jeff.gibson

0

Backlink confusion

I've gotten confused when it comes to the Competitive Analysis Report in the Web App. I track in my own spreadsheet how many backlinks I accumulate. However, I had thought that the Competitive Analysis report would do that as well. But each month, the numbers of Total LInks- through Linking c-blocks changes up and down drastically. I clicked HELP to try and understand what each of these means, but could you please explain them to me? I was under the impression that External Followed Links are the ones I was going after, however, shouldn't my records match with the one in the web app? Somehow I went from 786 ext followed links in January, to 867 in Feb, to 804 in March, to 804 in April, then 973 in May, and dropped to 791 2 weeks later...I don't think I'm understanding how the web app calculates these numbers. And how come Domain Authority seems to fluctuate up and down? So what would be the best way to track my progress in accumulating backlinks? Would it be my own spreadsheet or do you have a tool for this? Because I'd like to see how many I've gotten since January, but don't understand how to see this in the webapp. HELP!

Moz Pro | | aircyclemegan

0

Is Creating a Lot of Content A Bad SEO Strategy?

In Danny Dover's book, Search Engine Optimization Secrets, he talks about how every page on your site should be at least a little linkworthy, or it is just sucking link juice from the rest of the site and not contributing any. Does this mean that creating a lot of content, (like a daily news article on your site that summarizes industry news or something similar) is not a good SEO strategy? Should you limit the amount of content pages on your site unless it can attract links or hits on one of your target keywords? Thanks!

Content Development | | SparkplugDigital

0

Rel-canonical tag

Hi, I'm having some confusion with the rel-canonical tag. A few months ago we implemented the rel-canonical tag because we had many errors specifically duplicate page content come upon the SEOmoz web app (mostly because we use tracking code). I had asked what to do about this and was advised by the SEOmoz web app to implement the rel-canonical tag. However, when I'm working on the Keyword Optimizer Tool, it always checks off that I'm using the rel-canonical tag improperly, and then when I go into our sites' CMS for that page and uncheck "Use Canonical URL", the keyword optimizer tool up's my grade for that correction/that I've made an improvement. So my question is if the page I'm working on is the one I want search engines to find, should I not be using the Canonical URL tag? Should the Canonical URL tag only be used on URL's with the tracking code?

Technical SEO | | aircyclemegan

0

Dealing with indexable Ajax

Hello there, My site is basically an Ajax application. We assume lots of people link into deep pages on the site, but bots won't be able to read past the hashmarks, meaning all links appear to go to our home page. So, we have decided to form our Ajax for indexing. And so many questions remain. First, only Google handles indexable Ajax, so we need to keep our static "SEO" pages up for Bing and Yahoo. Bummer, dude, more to manage. 1. How do others deal with the differences here? 2. If we have indexable Ajax and static pages, can these be perceived as duplicate content? Maybe the answer is to disallow google bot from indexing the static pages we made. 3. What does your canonical URL become? Can you tell different search engines to read different canonical URLs? So many more questions, but I'll stop there. Curious if anyone here has thoughts (or experience) on the matter. Erin

Technical SEO | | ErinTM

2

How do you hire an SEOmoz-savvy SEO consultant?

I'd like to find an SEO free-lancer to review WikiTree.com and give me ongoing advice. My first instinct would be to go through oDesk, but I know I want someone who is tuned-in to this community and uses SEOmoz's tools. Advice or recommendations? Thanks!

Industry News | | Interesting.com

0

SEOMoz Campaign Tool

I've noticed that when looking at the SEOmoz tool, specifically the On Page analysis tool, it is still looking at an old url. About two months ago I made updates to all of our category page URLs. Previously the old urls were stuffed with keywords, strange characters and were really long. When looking at the on-page tool though it is referencing the old urls for keywords and I'm wondering why? I figure its been long enough to recognize the new urls. Is the paring of a keyword and a url saved and just graded on a weekly basis to produce the report? I had expected to see the new url's by now which are also represented in the sitemap. Around that same time I also added our TellAFriend Page and Review pages to our Robots.txt file as not to be crawled but I still see these pages come up in the errors report. Should this update as well?

Moz Pro | | dgmiles

0

How Does Google connect Owners of Several Sites?

let's say I own 20 sites, all non duplicate content and Google sees that some of them has linked to sites that they consider a "farm" or other violation. So they give penalties to those sites. What happens with the other sites and how can I keep sites the most independent? For ex: These are my questions... Will google follow no follow links to see that they are connected to the good sites and penalize them? If they are all part of google anaylitics with good and bad sites, will google attack them all? Will google look at the owner of all the sites and connect them that way/ I need to know the extent Google connect site owners for penalizing. please only answer with knowledge, and if you can supply specific links, that would be great too, thanks.

Link Building | | joemas99

0

301 finder SEO Tool

Hi there, I´m looking for a tool, which shows all 301 redirect links to a domain. Have some competitors which haven´t many links but have quite good rankings. I suppose they have some 301 redirections... Thanks!

Moz Pro | | TheLastSeo

0

Keyword domains

Hi everyone. Two questions regarding keyword domains (e.g. "widgets.com") If we have to choose a domain with an extra word, does it make a difference to have the added word before or after? E.g. "my-widgets.com" vs "widgets-now.com" Does it make a difference if the extra word is a generic vs a 'real' word? E.g. "my-widgets.com" vs "japanese-widgets.com" Thanks a lot for your feedback!

Technical SEO | | hectorpn

0

Fighting the Brave Battle

Hi All I have been working busily on my Google Places to try and improve my listings and here are some updates (with no visible progress unfortunately). I added reviews - only one of my competitors has more reviews than me and these reviews are genuine. Based on other posts in this forum I looked closely at how my address was formatted as Google Maps does not recognize my street so my address format wise is identical to the top 3 <street ,="" street="" name,="" city="" county=""> this is in Ireland so that is a typical address.</street> I am still below the fold and I have analysed the links of the competition and to be honest I see that they are in business longer and their links from the many websites that they have created over the years. They have more links than me by a factor of 3x and 4x. Am I screwed? As you all appreciate being over the fold is so important and I am currently below the fold and it is not an ultra competitive keyword combination (1600-2000 searches) website design Cork on google.ie. As a websie person even getting 2-3 extra contacts for me per month can mean a HUGE difference. I have read long and hard on this topic for the past 12-18 months. I have not put any serious attention to link building myself - should I get emailing people to try and get those quality links to raise my profile. The problem is getting the time to do this. Does the forum think that if I sent (for example) 20-30 emails per day to a range of related businesses asking rfor links for 'say' 30 days I would get some links without actually having to pay for them Is link building the critical item that I should focus on considering the problems above? All help appreciated and bottle of Jameson for the person with idea that works - (really!) 🙂

Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdaly100

0

Will Google index a 301 redirect for a new site?

So here is the problem... We have setup a 301redirect for our clients website. When you search the clients name it comes up with the old .co.uk website. We have made this redirect to the new .com website. However on the SERPs when it shows the .co.uk it shows the old title pages which currently say 'Holding Page'. When you click on that link it takes you to the fully functioning .com website. My question is, will the title tags in the SERPs which show the .co.uk update to the new ones from the .com? I'm thinking it will be just a case of Google catching up on things and it will sort itself out eventually. If anyone could help I would REALLY appreciate it. Thanks Chris

Technical SEO | | Weerdboil

0

Can backlinks negatively influence your ranking, or worse, cause a penalty?

Hello everbody! I am the owner of a price compare website and have been running it succesfully for over two years now. However, since february the news and articles section of our website lost a great deal of it's traffic. We did not completely lose traffic but only for items that were posted after february 2011. We have skilled content writers who do good research on the topics covered in our news section, i can honestly say we write our content for our visitors and not just for the search engines. We have investigated every part of our source code but we did not find anything there that was violating any guidelines. So my next guess was that maybe some incoming links could harm our news section. The most backlinks we receive are directed to our news and article section. These links are generally put on sites which use our RSS feed. There is just one website that we think could be the reason. It had included our RSS feed on each page which resulted in over 2,500,000 backlinks from a single domain which hosts a very poor quality website. We never considered it to be harmfull so we never did anything about it. My question is if this case could be the reason for the drop in traffic? kind regards, Jeroen from the Netherlands

Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeroenpf

0

Login Page Redirection

Hello, I have certain pages on my site which are login only. Am wondering if a user reaches that page, should I send him to a 301 redirect to a new login page? or some other form of redirection? Any suggestions on how to best tackle this situation? Update If I redirect to a login.php page, then what kind of redirection should I use? Thank you for your time, Anant

On-Page Optimization | | anantgarg

0

Google Bombing For A Specific URL

The term "Beruk" which means "Ape or Monkey" in english brings up this page of wikipedia amongst the first page result: URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khairy_Jamaluddin The page does not contain the word "Beruk". External links to the page do not contact the anchor-text "Beruk" Given the above scenario, how is the page still ranking on first page for this keyword?

White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rajeevbala

0

Crawl test. Bot crawled only 200 or so links when it should have crawled thousands

Hi everyone, I just recieved my crawl test report and its only given me 200 or so URL's when my site has thousands, any thoughts?

Moz Pro | | Ev84

0

Google Places - How do we rank

So, google places showing up on search results is great feature . . . But how can we get our results to the top? I mean I can see some terrible websites appearing at the top of the google places with their places page having no activity whatsoever. Is there a trick to this at all? What can we do to increase our ranking on Google Places because our old GOOD rankings are now appearing BELOW the map results Cheers

Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kayweb

0

Why is Open site Explorer showing: No Data Available for this URL

Hi there, Im having a few problems getting my site www.incarmotorfactors.co.uk up and running on SEOMoz and im not sure what im doing wrong.Firstly seomoz shows 2 links for my site... Which is wrong. Google shows alot more. However the most noticable problem so far is Opensite explorer. When i type in the web address it shows "No Data Available for this URL" The site is more then a year old and has a few links, can anybody tell me what the problem may be?

Moz Pro | | Ev84

0

How much javascript does Googlebot read

We have a site where we have certain navigational links solely for the human user. These links help the user experience and lead to pages that we don't need crawled by googlebot. We have these links in javascript so if you disable javascript these links are invisible. Will these links be considered cloaking even though our intention is not to cloak but save our Google crawl for pages we do want indexed?

Technical SEO | | CruiseControl

0

How can i track keywords history

i need to keep a record for all keywords history , is there any way that we can track keywords history so we can compare each week with the previous weeks ?

Keyword Research | | omarfk

0

Traffic down on site on regular intervals

Hi, We are running a sort of large affiliate website, with having 2000 web pages. We are having unique content, metas and related on every page. The problem we are facing is we are not gaining traffic constantly. We have some top rankings for sometimes few days, for few weeks and for few months. But suddenly we went few pages behind on serps, we loose all our ranking. After some time it will come again on serps as natural positions. Due to this after year of hard work on content, meta and many more small small issues, we are on the same no. of visitors. Given below are the my site traffic details with attached image. We used SEOMOZ Pro tools to evaluate all the possibilities and errors we are doing, We found lots of bad things happening our site, We started work them on since early January and which achieved the corrections as per the image of crawl diagnosis summary page shown below : we are not having sitemap on our site and having some soft 404s, but we are working towards it. Is there any thing more specific we can do to this kind of problem.. 5AyHO.png yxkEr.png

Affiliate Marketing | | semshah143

0

301 an old site to a newer site...

Hi First, to be upfront - these are not my websites, I'm asking because they are trying to compete in my niche. Here's the details, then the questions... There is a website that is a few months old with about 200 indexed pages and about 20 links, call this newsite.com There is a website that is a few years old with over 10,000 indexed pages and over 20,000 links, call this oldsite.com newsite.com acquired oldsite.com and set a 301 redirect so every page of oldsite.com is re-directed to the front page of newsite.com newsite.com & oldsite.com are on the same topic, the 301 occurred in the past week. Now, oldsite.com is out of the SERPs and newsite.com is pretty much ranking in the same spot (top 10) for the main term. Here are my questions; 1. The 10,000 pages on oldsite.com had plenty of internal links - they no longer exists, so I imagine when the dust settles - it will be like oldsite.com is a one page site that re-diretcts to newsite.com ... How long will a ranking boost last for? 2. With the re-direct setup to completely forget about the structure and content of oldsite.com, it's clear to me that it was setup to pass the 'Link Juice' from oldsite.com to newsite.com ... Do the major SE's see this as a form of SPAM (manipulating the rankings), or do they see it as a good way to combine two or more websites? 3. Does this work? Is everybody doing it? Should I be doing it? ... or are there better ways for me to combat this type of competition (eg we could make a lot of great content for the money spent buying oldsite.com - but we certainly wouldn't get such an immediate increase to traffic)?

Technical SEO | | RR500

0

Can you have too many badge links?

If you badge program becomes really successful, can too many badge links hurt your rankings? Since they are image links that are often placed in the sidebar of blogs, could Google mistake badges as do-follow ads and apply a penalty?

Link Building | | SparkplugDigital

0

Special characters in URL

Hello everybody, my question focus on special parameters in URL. I i am working for a website that use a lot of special entities in their URLS. For instance: www.mydomain.com/mykeyword1-mykeyword2%2C-1%2Cpage1.html I am about to make 301 redirect rules for all these urls to clean ones. IE: www.mydomain.com/mykeyword1-mykeyword2%2C-1%2Cpage1
would become:
www.mydomain.com/mykeyword1-mykeyword.html I just wanted to know if anybody has already done this kind of "cleanup" and if i could expect a positive boost or not. Thanks

Technical SEO | | objectif-mars

0

Best local listings submitting service

I'm building several local websites and looking for the fastest, cost effective service out there to list them in all the major local directories like yelp etc.. I've been using UBL but 3 months later i don't see my listing in many of the directories they claim to list at... Thanks!

Technical SEO | | atohad

0

Tags and Keywords

I am trying to improve the SEO for my client's website - http://www.petmedicalcenter.com. I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for improving my h1, h2, etc., tags and keyword usage on the home page? The top 5 search terms are: vet las vegas (most searched) las vegas vets vets las vegas las vegas vet pet hospital las vegas vets in las vegas Any suggestions you have is appreciated. Thanks! -Brant

Keyword Research | | PMC-312087

0

What's the difference between a category page and a content page

Hello, Little confused on this matter. From a website architectural and content stand point, what is the difference between a category page and a content page? So lets say I was going to build a website around tea. My home page would be about tea. My category pages would be: White Tea, Black Tea, Oolong Team and British Tea correct? ( I Would write content for each of these topics on their respective category pages correct?) Then suppose I wrote articles on organic white tea, white tea recipes, how to brew white team etc...( Are these content pages?) Do I think link FROM my category page ( White Tea) to my ( Content pages ie; Organic White Tea, white tea receipes etc) or do I link from my content page to my category page? I hope this makes sense. Thanks, Bill

Technical SEO | | wparlaman

0

URL in signature of discussion forum post

I used to see URL's in the signature part of discussion forum posts covering various topics but it does not seem popular anymore. It seems like a good way to build links and I am wondering why it is not used. Suppose I ask a question about proper tooth brushing technique on the forum at "toothbrushingforum.com" and user "ToothBrushWizard" is nice enough to answer my question. I used to see signatures like this: Good luck,
ToothBrushWizard
www.ToothBrushWizard.com Is this considered poor taste or are these links discounted by the search engines? Is it best to keep an updated profile with your URL and hope that forum users click through to it?

Link Building | | superTallDan

0

How do I change my domain?

My domain was updated to use www by default. How do I update it in the profile?

Moz Pro | | dsfsystemsseo

0

Wrong types of questions...

I've noticed something in the forums. Many people are asking the wrong types of questions with regards to SEO and having success with their sites on it. This is understandable since many of the questions being asked are by those who have only just got in to SEO. But it does show that the emphasis of the industry must still be very much focused on getting links and changing META data, etc... with little mention out there in all those resources of what actually matters. Thankfully, the questions are answered with people explaining that the wrong questions are being asked, and that it's not just about random traffic gained through rankings for general keywords. Do you think that in time we'll see an evolution of the questions, as awareness grows, moving from questions of how to rank to questions on how work out the best KPIs to measure, and how to action strategies for improving them?

Industry News | | SteveOllington

5

Page Rank and offline sites

I have a domain with PR6 according to the Historical Pagerank Checker. But that last PR was calculated 2 years ago. I brought the site back online a few days ago and have checked that many/most of the backlinks are still valid. It is now in the Google index but the Historical Pagerank Checker shows PR0. Will it get back its previous rank or something close to it? How long will it take?

Moz Pro | | DomainOptions

0

Duplicate content handling.

Hi all, I have a site that has a great deal of duplicate content because my clients list the same content on a few of my competitors sites. You can see an example of the page here: http://tinyurl.com/62wghs5 As you can see the search results are on the right. A majority of these results will also appear on my competitors sites. My homepage does not seem to want to pass link juice to these pages. Is it because of the high level of Dup Content or is it because of the large amount of links on the page? Would it be better to hide the content from the results in a nofollowed iframe to reduce duplicate contents visibilty while at the same time increasing unique content with articles, guides etc? or can the two exist together on a page and still allow link juice to be passed to the site. My PR is 3 but I can't seem to get any of my internal pages(except a couple of pages that appear in my navigation menu) to budge of the PR0 mark even if they are only one click from the homepage.

Technical SEO | | Mulith

0

Google Directory Listings in multiple countries

I was doing some competitive link research and one of the sites I was looking at has links in multiple Google Directories of other countries. By that I mean a listing in: www.google.pl www.google.hu www.google.pt www.google.co.nz www.google.ie www.google.com.sg www.google.vg and a few others It seemed kind of odd because the site getting these links is a ranch in Oregon. Here is the Open Site Explorer info. I'm a bit of a noob so I've never seen this before. Are these kinds of links worth pursuing? If so, how did they get these multiple listings?

International SEO | | AaronParrish

0

Title Element length too long?

My site automatically builds a title element basic by taking the forum thread title and adding the board description to it. Let's use a fictional site as "Gaggle - Chevy Corvette Lovers forums" in this example. A user makes a post titled "Transmission Problems" then the automatically created title would be: Transmission Problems | Gaggle - Chevy Corvette Lovers forums The process seems to be helpful. Overall thread ranking is good. The added words provide value to users searching for information as "Transmission Problems" is too vague, whereas by adding Chevy Corvette the search can be optimized better. The only issue is a small percent of my pages are being flagged by reporting tools with "Title Element Too Long" So I wish to ask, is there any real harm in this case? Google will simply truncate the title, right?

Web Design | | RyanKent

0

Crawl questions

My first website crawl indicating many issues. I corrected the issues, requested another crawl and received the results. After viewing the excel file I have some questions. 1. There are many pages with missing Titles and Meta Descriptions in the Excel file. An example is http://www.terapvp.com/threads/help-us-decide-on-terapvp-com-logo.25/page-2 That page clearly has a meta description and title. It is a forum thread. My forum software does a solid job of always providing those tags. Why would my crawl report not show this information? This occurs on numerous pages. 2. I believe all my canonical URLs are properly set. My crawl report has 3k+ records, largely due to there being 10 records for many pages. These extra records are various sort orders and style differences for the same page i.e. ?direction=asc. My need for a crawl report is to provide actionable data so I can easily make SEO improvements to my site where necessary. These extra records don't provide any benefit. IF the crawl report determined there was not a clear canonical URL, then I could understand. But that is not the case. An example is http://www.terapvp.com/forums/news/ If you look at the source you will clearly see Where is the benefit to including the 10 other records in the Crawl report which show this same page in various sort orders? Am I missing anything? 3. My robots.txt appropriately blocks many pages that I do not wish to be crawled. What is the benefit to including these many pages in the crawl report? Perhaps I am over analyzing this report. I have read many articles on SEO, but now that I have found SEOmoz, I can see I will need to "unlearn what I have learned". Many things such as setting meta keyword tags are clearly not helpful. I wish to focus my energy and I was looking to the crawl report as my starting point. Either I am missing something, or the report design needs improvement.

Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKent

0

Got loads of pages, but none indexing?

I have a WordPress site with loads of pages on a url like this http://mysite.com.au However, Google has indexed http://www.mysite.com.au and as a result only indexing 2 pages. How do I fix this? Many thanks Dan

On-Page Optimization | | Pokodot

0

Question relates to mobile site & duplicate content.

We are working on the mobile version of a large site (migraine.com) and will be using a separate theme for it (directing visitors to m.migraine.com)- what are the necessary code or other important step we should take so that we do get penalized for having duplicate content? Thank you in advance for your responses

Algorithm Updates | | OlivierChateau

0

Campaign for pages that I want to optimize?

Go easy on my guys and gals. I'm brand new to the world of SEO and I'm a Realtor by trade, so this is all new to me, but exciting and fascinating at the same time. You might ask why I don't hire a company to do the SEO for me for my website at: www.DiscountRealEstateFees.com since I'm one of those Realtors who makes a ton of money every year. Unfortunately, that's not the case and some day when I've built my business to a point that I can relax and breathe easy, I will hire that company. Besides, by then, I'll be an SEO expert and be able to ride herd on them if they're not doing a good job! My question is: Should I create a campaign on SEOMoz.org for each page on my website that I want to optimize or are the campaigns supposed to be for individual websites only? Thanks for your help!

On-Page Optimization | | Assist-2-Sell

0

Mozpoints not updating

Added 2 comments on 2 questions and my points are still at the same level. Anyone knows why? I don't.

Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mosaicpro

0

Duplicate Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, is it a problem?

Hi, If i use same terms of use and privacy policy content across my websites, does it amounts to duplicate content issues? Does it affect my websites in any manner? Regards

Content Development | | IM_Learner

0

Answers do not have more points. Why?

Every day when I get home from work, a web marketing firm in Rio de Janeiro, spent 2-3 hours trying to help other students of SEO, like me. I do not know why when I post an answer they do not have more points on my profile. I always try to answer questions on issues that i dominate, or exemplifying experiences I ever had. When I am not aware, I never answer, try searching at most. I really like to to know why my score has stopped.

Moz Pro | | j0a0vargas

2

Redirecting multiple websites to a single website

I've been trying to run several truck accessory affiliate websites for a quite a while now. I've recently decided to combine all of my affiliate websites into a single community website. This way I'll be able to focus all my energy and link building into a single place and build up a single brand. My question is, how many websites do I try to redirect to the new website at a time? Do I need to spread this out? Or is it ok if I move all of my content and websites at a single time? I have around 30 websites that I could move to this new domain. Thanks! Andy

Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daenterpri

0

Continued Lack of Google Indexing

I run a baseball site (http://www.mopupduty.com) that is in a very good link neighbourhood. ESPN, The Score, USA Today, MSG Network, The Toronto Star, Baseball Prospectucs, etc etc. New content has not been getting indexed on Google ever since the last update. Site has no dup content, 100% original. I can't think of any spammy links, we get organic links day after day. In the past Google has indexed the site in minutes. It currently has expanded site links within Google search. Bing & Yahoo index the site in minutes. Are there any quick fixes I can make to increase my chance to get indexed by Google. Or just keep pumping out content and hope to see a change in the upcoming future?

Technical SEO | | mkoster

1

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