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!


  • Here is my specific situation. My company released new versions of a few documents in the fall.  I was hoping that over time the old version would decline and the new version would rise but after 6 months the old version continues to rank #1 and the new version #3. The old version needs to stay on our site but users should really be getting to the most recent version. I think utilizing the canonical tag would solve the issue but i am concerned because the content on the actual pages is not duplicate but it is updated. Below are the two URLs to see the differences in the content. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/06tr008.cfm http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/10tr033.cfm Is this an appropriate situation to use the canonical tag? If not, is there a better solution.

    Technical SEO | | SEI
    0

  • I'm working on a wordpress blog, /www.athleticfoodie.com, and I'd like to change the names of the categories so that I include keywords. If I change the current category name of "Healthy Recipes" to "Recipes for Athletes" will I lose the inbound links associated with the category and/or posts?  Is there a way to prevent this?

    Link Building | | EricVallee34
    0

  • Hi, All! I've spent about an hour working on this with no success, so I thought I would ask the community: How do you tell Facebook which image to put in for the thumbnail on a link you're posting?  And I would like it to be a different image for each post, and I don't want to have to deal with programming PHP (the main solutions I saw). I'm on a Wordpress based site, and I've tried putting images in as the featured image, made sure they weren't huge (under 200x200), made sure they were .jpeg... and the only thing that Facebook offers me as a thumbnail is a generic "green globe" image that I don't believe comes from my site at all. Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

    Social Media | | debi_zyx
    0

  • I have a feed that is parsed on my website. All images do come form another source( and url that differts from my site). However I can change the alt text. I concerns hotel mages worldwide. In order to relate the images with the different language  I want to add a small phrase "airport hotel" translated in the  laguages that are present on my site Example alt text will be alt="airport hotel: Mercure Schiphol Terminal"  or in German alt="Flughafen hotel: Mercure Schiphol Terminal" Will this have a positive effect on my SEO despite the url of the images are not related to my site?

    Image & Video Optimization | | fctexel
    0

  • First let me say I want to improve the text of the site I am working on focusing on the site visitor in the first instance. I run the "On-Page Keyword Optimization" The page fails on "Avoid Keyword Stuffing in Document... ...Occurrences of Keyword 48" well over the limit of 15. The occurrence include those in the site navigation and strapline, but it was my understanding that Google was aware of nav areas/areas common to most other pages on the site and that keywords in these areas weren't viewed as being part of the page content. The keyword is the main keyword for the company, and the page is the home page i.e. "acme widgets" the others are "acme widgets for the home"... well you get the idea: The page breaks down as follows: 5 instances in primary nav 1 instance strapline 3 instances secondary nav Remainder in page body I am told by the tool to reduce to 15 instances, so should I? Have 9 instances in the nav and other areas and 6 or so on the page Have 9 instances in the nav and other areas and 15 or so on the page

    Moz Pro | | GrouchyKids
    0

  • If I go to Google.com I get redirected back to Google.co.uk and search results have a UK bias. I'm trying to research the US market and have a  hazy recolection of Rand demonstrating how you can add a few characters to the google.co.uk url to see US results - just can't remember what video I saw it in. Any ideas? Thanks a lot

    International SEO | | trbaldwin
    0

  • Hello, We are an international company, based mostly in Romania and Hungary, but we also launched some websites in Ukraine. The interesting thing in Ukraine that we are facing heavily, is how they are doing link building. Basically the only link building that they do is buying links through a platform: sape.ru (http://www.mainlinkads.com/ this is English version). Local SEO consultants also advice to buy links. It wasn't so much a problem, but when you have a good site with good content, but have competitors that are buying links and then overcome our good keyword positions, we started to questions whether to start buying links ourselves. What is your opinion on this? Is it possible that Google will penalize a big bunch of sites, now in sape.ru there are: 487 069 sites? Can we adopt the same strategy as our competitors as long as it is working? Thanks, Irina

    International SEO | | InformMedia
    0

  • Hello everyone, I did some linkbuilding in the last few weeks, most of these links are already indexed by Google when i check their Google-cache. But i don't see any improvements in my own positions, despite my backlinks are really good. I'm now wondering, how long does it normally take to see position improvements after your linkbuilding? (Further the on page SEO is good and i'm regulary updating my website) Regards, Yannick

    Link Building | | iwebdevnl
    0

  • Hi All, I would like to know what would achieve the best inbound link ranking from google. I have to run an inbound link campaign and have to choose between two options: Option 1, get people to link directly to the home page or Option 2, get people to link to a custom url (for example, www.domain.com/index.aspx?dealer1455) the custom url has a function to hide certain menu items on the home page. Also The custom url ID number will also change for each person that links to us. So in effect each link is directed to an individual custom URL. My preference is option 1. But a number of the people linking to us would prefer to link to a custom home page that has their competitors details hidden. At the end of the day the decision needs to be made on what will provide our  site with the best rankings in the serps What option is best to improve search engine rankings ? Many Thanks in advance

    Link Building | | SaimanRhino
    0

  • I have just discovered a client site that is serving content from a single database into two separate domains and has created xml sitemaps which contain references to both domains in an attempt to avoid being tagged for duplicate content. I always thought that a sitemap was intended to show the files inside a single domain and the idea of multiple domains in the sitemap had never occurred to me... The sites are both very large storefronts and one of them (the larger of the two) has recently seen a 50% drop in search traffic and loss of some 600 search terms from top 50 positions in Google. My first instinct is that the sitemaps should be altered to only show files within each domain, but am worried about causing further loss of traffic. Is it possible that the inclusion URLs for the second domain in the sitemap may in fact be signalling duplicate content to Search Engines? Does anyone have a definitive view of whether these sitemaps are good, bad or irrelevant?

    Technical SEO | | ShaMenz
    0

  • mrswitch.com.au is one site that we are consistantly struggling with . . . It has a page rank of 3 which beats most of the competitors, but when it comes to Google AU searches such as Sydney Electrician and Electrician Sydney etc, we just can't seem to get there and the rankings keep dropping. We backlink and update the pages on a regular basis Any ideas? - Could it be the custom CMS system?

    Technical SEO | | kayweb
    0

  • I am creating a new site which has a directory component.  Based on what I have ready I am inclined to keep the site architecture as flat as possible.  However, the natural layout that I have come up with in my head has the directory listings 5 or 6 pages deep in the site structure. I saw in another post that someone in a similar situation was suggesting that going deep like this is fine so long as there are many internal links to the deeper pages to indicate that they are important. Should I make a conscious effort to make the site architecture as flat as possible? Are there any specific guides/resources that address this particular issue that I should be aware of? Thanks!

    On-Page Optimization | | fastestmanalive
    0

  • In Google Wemnaster tools, I have the option to set it to either have as default the "www" or without it. What are the pros and cons of one way or the other . . . or is this a way more complicated question/can of worms I have opened?

    Technical SEO | | damon1212
    0

  • Just noticed that lots of SEO sites were blasted by Panda... http://trends.google.com/websites?q=webmasterworld.com&geo=all&date=2011&sort=0 http://trends.google.com/websites?q=seomoz.org&geo=all&date=2011&sort=0 http://trends.google.com/websites?q=digitalpoint.com&geo=all&date=2011&sort=0 http://trends.google.com/websites?q=forums.seochat.com&geo=all&date=2011&sort=0

    Industry News | | EGOL
    3

  • What is the best way to get comments indexed that are hidden in a slider using display: none? For example: http://www.coupondudes.com/stores/kmart.com Click on "Add comment" Is there a way to do this without changing the design? If not, should we create a page per coupon with the comments shown. Will that pose duplicate content issues? 20110512-qg1ra18k9khdsqi6j3rkq4dfgb.jpg

    Technical SEO | | 58phases
    0

  • I heard Google is not providing all of a competitor's site's external links, speculated as protecting their privacy. But that Yaho still provides the complete list of their recognized links. (I assume they mean when using the term 'link:url') Has anyone else heard this claim? Is there a way around this check?What sources do you use at SEOMoz for your Pro reports?  thanks, geo

    Link Building | | rhawk
    0

  • What is the ideal length for an item's URL. Theirs a few different options. A) www.mydomain.com/item-name B) www.mydomain.com/category-name/product-name C) www.mydomain.com/category-name/sub-category-name/product-name Please choose A, B, or C and explain why you made that decision. Looking forward to the responses.

    Technical SEO | | Romancing
    0

  • I've only ever submitted my sites to tons of free directories, not the paid ones. I'm thinking of getting into a few paid directories now, but just wondering, anyone had experience with a paid directory link being treated like a paid links an penalized or anything? Has it helped you? My competitors has a lot of backlinks from paid directories, so I"m thinking of doing the same thing. But if Google thinks of paid directories as paid links, I would be better off just turning him in 🙂

    Link Building | | DanDeceuster
    1

  • Hi Everyone, My seomoz crawl diagnostics is indicating that I have duplicate content issues in the wordpress blog section of my site located at:   http://www.cleversplash.com/blog/ What is the best strategy to deal with this? Is there a plugin that can resolve this? I really appreciate your help guys. Martin

    Technical SEO | | RogersSEO
    0

  • I tend to focus on two or three main keywords to target from the homepage. In fact come to think of it from all pages. Do you target up to 10 keywords of more from one page. Taking longer tail keywords into consideration. Granted the limits to any phrase or keyword group.

    Keyword Research | | onlinemediadirect
    0

  • I tend to work on the on page changes first of all following keyword research. Then take a look at some internal linking, Setup a wordpress blog on /blog or sub domain and get my copywriter to start adding regular content . Next stage is link building Old fashioned emails requests, blog comments taking a look through existing sites we own for relevant places. On going analysis once positions change.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect
    0

  • I am reviewing a website that has different activities, and there are many ways to sort them. The issue is that the website is essentially displaying the same information, but in different sorts. Take a look at this search page: http://www.kijubi.com/AC-Fishing You are looking for fishing trips here, but you can sort it by city, region, and category. I have decided to "no index" some of these sorts, but I am afraid they might be picking up some long tail traffic on the city and region sorts. For example, "newport beach fishing trips", something like that. Any suggestions on how to deal with removing all of these duplicate sorts, while still maintaining the traffic that may be received by sorting with some long tail terms?

    On-Page Optimization | | CindyAlbright
    0

  • Specifically, I just redesigned my site.  I'm reading Danny Dovers book, and learned about checking the cache version of the site to see what google is REALLY seeing . . . . . . which evidently is my old site. Obviously, my sites not going to make any real progress with SEO as long as the site is out of date.  It says it last checked the site on 5/5 and I launched the site on 5/9. Obviously, it does not do these things immediately, but anyone have any ideas on how long it should take before google starts to show me some love?

    Web Design | | damon1212
    0

  • When looking to improve a sites ranking . I am working on a site that has script errors and needs fixing have you had any experience ?

    On-Page Optimization | | onlinemediadirect
    0

  • To take a site from no where to the top of google in some of the top industries such as Gambling and Finance. I am a never say never type entrepreneur and say yes the logic is there as with all SEO to break into it. How do you feel the internet will shape up in say 10 years time will we see less of the smaller guys take on the world with the larger keywords.

    Search Behavior | | onlinemediadirect
    0

  • I wanna buy dofollow comments, can be there any negative effects? I understand that is a kind of a black hat seo, but i saw many sites who used this type of service and get boosted in the search engine ranking.

    Link Building | | Alexsmenaru
    0

  • One of the branded channels I run has been offered to be apart of YouTube's Partnership program. Trick is - I don't necessarily want to see ads pop up for my videos, as I imagine the revenue is fairly small. I would be wiling to join the program if there is evidence that joining the program helps our rankings on YouTube. I imagine it may - as YouTube likely would give preference for partnered channels, partly due to ad/revenue opportunities for them, and partly because partners have obviously proven to have better content. What do you guys recommend?

    Social Media | | iinuser
    0

  • If you only had 8 hours to work on an SEO project... How would you spend your time to get the fastest results? On-page optimization, or link-building? Context: On-Page Optimization: "A" grade (SEOMOZ On-Page Report Card) Keywords: "moderately competitive" (SEOMOZ Keyword Difficulty Tool) Domain Authority: 33 (SEOMOZ Competitive Link Analysis)

    Link Building | | JessicaCox
    0

  • Hello, Keyword: TV Stands. I have been researching competitors for a client and we seem to be unable to understand why certains pages are ranking on page 1 of Google UK for keyword TV Stands. eg: http://www.furnitureinfashion.net/plasma-TV-stand.html (Google UK 8 - TV Stands) http://direct.tesco.com/q/N.1999542/Nr.99.aspx (Google UK 9 - TV Stands) The furniture in fashion has links from sites like: http://www.ummah.com/forum/ and http://www.muslimco.com/ which is totaly irrelevant to the site. Any ideas on other things as the tesco.com site does not have direct links to it. Cheers

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JohnW-UK
    0

  • I am working on a project that is basically a site to list apartment for rent (similar to apartments.com or rent.com). We want to add a bunch of amenity pages, price pages, etc. Basically increasing the page count on the site and helping users be able to have more pages relevant to their searches and long tail phrases. So an example page would be Denver apartments with a pool would be one page and Seattle apartments under 900 would be another page etc. By doing this we will take the site from about 14,000 pages or so to over 2 million by the time we add a list of amenities to every city in the US. My question is should I worry about time release on them? Meaning do you think we would get penalized for launching that many pages overnight or over the course of a week? How fast is too fast to increase the content on your site? The site about a year old and we are not trying to scam anything just looking to site functionality and page volume. Any advice?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioV
    0

  • What's the oldest active domain on the Internet? What was the first registered domain? What's the oldest active link? What other old web stuff can you think of?

    Industry News | | Gyi
    0

  • I would like to get peoples thoughts on putting 80% of your anchor text links in just 2 keywords vs a nice spread of branded and longtail keywords.. like I am. recently fell off the first page for a key SERP.. and the site in P10 has gone nuts on just that two keyword's.. I know we have a good site onpage/ conversion / low bounce rate page views etc.. Pretty sure we get more traffic than them. Seems that this obvious bloated anchor text profiling has worked for them though.. What do you guys think/know?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | robertrRSwalters
    0

  • What is the best way to manage 404 errors for pages that are no longer on the server. For example, client deletes old site from server and replaces it with new site. Webmaster tools is reporting 100 +  404 errors form the old site.  I've blocked the 404 pages with robot.text. Requested removal in google webmaster tools. And created a custom 404 page - http://www.tvsphoto.com/missingurlexample Is there anything else I can do?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOProPhoto
    0

  • Hayneedle is an e-commerce company that operates 200 niche sites selling indoor and outdoor home products. They were ranking at the top of the first page for most terms related to their sites (fire pits, fountains, benches, etc.), but all of a sudden at the end of April they lost their rankings, getting dropped to page 4 or lower for tons of their sites (barstools.com, patiofurnitureusa.com, adirondackchairs.com, benches.com, etc.). Does anybody know what caused this? Other than one thread on an SEO forum, we haven't been able to find any discussion about it online. It seems like cross-linking between the sites could have been a problem here, but we'd love to hear thoughts from the experts here on this. Our company is using the same business model of one brand with niche sites and we want to avoid anything like this happening to us.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | outdoorliving
    0

  • I started managing a fairly small site that consists of a home page, flash portfolio, and a wordpress blog. The home page ( main index ) is canonicalized as:  The wordpress blog is canonicalized as Does canonicalization need to be consistent across the site? Could the difference in canonicalization cause any ranking problems, and or indexing problems for the blog / entire site? Any thoughts are appreciated!

    Technical SEO | | SEOProPhoto
    0

  • When you contact a blogger or website owner about guest posting, who do you say is contacting them? For example, do you say that you are an SEO for the company or do you simply sign off as the company you are doing work for. I tend to introduce myself as 'a PR/SEO representative for company X'. What about you?

    Link Building | | SebastianDyer
    0

  • I'd like to optimize my blog better for search.  The first reccomendation I got from my SEOMoz Pro Campaign Crawl was that I needed to reduce the number of links per page on my site. I have lots of links from navigational items in the sidebar that people do click on. I'd really like to keep some or all of the tags and categories I list. Comments are another issue.  Most of our posts get about 10 comments.  However, our best posts get 50-100 comments.  Those comments create a lot of links. I was planning on attempting to reduce the number of links using javascript but I guess Google understands javascript now.  I may still do this b/c our pages are huge and some progressive rendering would likely help the user experience. Can you use javascript (ajax or otherwise) to limit the number of links on your page in a way that helps your SEO efforts?  Any specific suggestions for reducing links that come from comments and navigational items? How much will reducing the number of links on a given page help with SEO?  Any simple way to estimate or quantify this without diving in? Thanks in advance!

    On-Page Optimization | | TaitLarson
    0

  • I came across this question on why the poster's rankings in Bing/Yahoo were so much lower than his rankings in Google. One of the links responded with was a presentation Rand gave about the difference in ranking elements of Google and Bing. My purpose for looking into this is to boost rankings in Bing to be more in line with my Google rankings. My takeaways from Rand's presentation were that Bing likes shorter URLs than Google and it's better to have more links from more root domains with more precise anchor text. Unfortunately this presentation was given at last year's SMX Advanced and is almost a year old. Since then Microsoft has been accused of basically scraping the Google SERPs and Google unleashed at least two maybe three rabid Pandas. Needless to say the environment has changed. So my question is for those people who are happy with how they rank in Bing: What SEO factors are you seeing make a bigger impact in Bing vs. how they impact your Google rankings?

    Algorithm Updates | | rball1
    1

  • I'm a little new to SEO, so maybe this is obvious to some . . . I'm attempting to build backlinks by submitting articles, posting on forums etc.  I just wrote my forst article for ezine and submitted it. I was feeling pretty good about myself until I mentioned it to someone trying to sell me their SEO services and he said that ezine articles are considered "nofollow" on all their links. Well, that was pretty frustrating to hear!  It got me wondering, how many of these other sites have all their posts and blogs listed as "nofollow"?  Is there a way for me to figure it out ahead of time?  Obviously, there are only so many hours in the day and I would rather focus on posting on sites that will actually help me build backlinks! Thanks for your help in advance!

    Link Building | | damon1212
    0

  • We have a DNN site that we recently rebranded. The old site was almost ten years old and now that we have a brand new site, a lot of random urls are coming up as errors. While we went through and created 301's for our top sites, we still have site popping up from Google's cache. What is the general recommendation? There are way too many sites to 301, mostly because of how DNN writes the urls. Should I let them be and wait for the SE's clear them out? Or is there a way to have Google clear the cache of this domain and start fresh?

    Industry News | | KJ-Rodgers
    0

  • Many times now we have pushed certain keywords for homepage listings but we have found the traffic levels to be very poor and many cases first page listings turn out to be vanity. The frustrating thing is that sometimes we have to tell some of our SEO customers that in order to get a good market share for there industry they will always have to do google adwords. What are your thoughts on this . Thanks

    Link Building | | onlinemediadirect
    0

  • Are there any articles or tutorials here about how to build links? The only two methods I've been able to uncover are using OSE to analyze competitors backlinks and directory listings. I'm thinking there must be other ways.

    Link Building | | waynekolenchuk
    0

  • A couple of weeks ago I was having problems with my real estate local listing.  I made some changes (like removing anything remotely like keyword stuffing and a few other things).  Then, we re-emerged.  But now, instead of having 4 citations we have 221.  It looks like Google has merged our listing with all of the other agents in our office. So, now if you type in to Google: ABC Realty in OurCity the very first listing is a 1-box that has our listing: Jane and John Doe, Sales Representatives, ABC Realty and our phone number.  We actually rank higher than the ABC Realty office's own web page.  We are getting phone calls from people who think they are calling the main office but instead call us.  (This is not at all bad for business...but perhaps there is an ethical issue?) My problem is that if you click on our places listing, there is one photo on there of a realtor who is not us.  Additionally, we lost our two reviews that we had, but we have one review for another realtor who is not us.  The rest of the listing is totally ours - our photos, our description, our website, our phone number.  If I go to edit the listing, the option to remove that photo is not there. So, now we have a conundrum.  One one hand, it's great to have this boost.  We are appearing #1 for searches for our office and this brings us business.  But, I want to be ethical.  Realtors can be nasty and I don't want other realtors thinking that I have done bad manipulative stuff to steal other peoples' business. Can anything be done?  What would you do?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes
    0

  • Does anyone know if we can expect keyword rank tracking in Google mobile? It would be a cool feature for SEOmoz Pro. Does anybody know of any reliable software that does this at the moment?

    Moz Pro | | A_Q
    0

  • Hi Guys, Question,
    Lets say I have a page oldfile.php at position #2  then set-up a redirection in the following way 100 incoming external links--> oldfile.php [301 to] newfile.php Google comes along and updates its index to newfile.php and ranking of newfile.php remains at position #2. Everything is good. Lets say in 5months, I come along and delete oldfile.php so we have
    100 incoming external links--> deleted(oldfile.php) or 100 incoming external links-->404 error.       |||| newfile.php Do I then loose the rankings on newfile.php. My thinking is that now that all the external links now point to a page not found, newfile.php should loose rankings Am I correct in my assumption?

    Technical SEO | | VividLime
    0

  • I'm working on a Chinese website: www.aijiatu.com. If I use Term Extractor, I only see words in English. How does it work? is Chinese (utf8) not supported and it only finds the non-Chinese characters? or are the chinese words extracted automatically translated? or do I use Term Extractor badly (I'm a newbie)

    On-Page Optimization | | Travel-Stone
    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.