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After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Latest Questions
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Embed video. YouTube or Vimeo ? Whats best for the pagespeed ?
Hello, We want to add video to our website.
Image & Video Optimization | | WayneRooney
We are not sure if to embed it from YouTube or Vimeo. Do you guys know whats best that will not hurt the pagespeed of the site ? Thank you0 -
SEO strategy for UK / US websites
Hi, We currently have a UK-focused site on www.palmatin.com ; We're now targeting the North American market as well, but the contents of the site need to be different from UK. One option was to create another domain for the NA market but I assume it would be easier to rank with palmatin.com though. What would you suggest to do, if a company is targeting two different countries in the same language? thanks, jaan
Web Design | | JaanMSonberg0 -
Should we 301 redirect old events pages on a website?
We have a client that has an events category section that is filled to the brim with past events webpages. Another issue is that these old events webpages all contain duplicate meta description tags, so we are concerned that Google might be penalizing our client's website for this issue. Our client does not want to create specialized meta description tags for these old events pages. Would it be a good idea to 301 redirect these old events landing pages to the main events category page to pass off link equity & remove the duplicate meta description tag issue? This seems drastic (we even noticed that searchmarketingexpo.com is keeping their old events pages). However it seems like these old events webpages offer little value to our website visitors. Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Adding a Canonical Tag to each page referencing itself?
Hey Mozers! I've noticed that on www.Zappos.com they have a Canonical tag on each page referencing it self. I have heard that this is a popular method but I dont see the point in canon tagging a page to its self. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rpaiva0 -
How can I avoid duplicate content when building a review widget?
My website has a profile page for each of the home improvement contractors who signs up. They accumulate reviews on those pages. I want to build a review widget to display our reviews on our contractors' websites. How can I avoid duplicate content issues for the reviews? Example of a profile page with a few reviews: http://www.thehomefixers.com/members/425/waterheaters-plus-llc.php
Reviews and Ratings | | menachemp0 -
Duplicate Title tags even with rel=canonical
Hello, We were having duplicate content in our blog (a replica of each post automatically was done by the CMS), until we recently implemented a rel=canonical tag to all the duplicate posts (some 5 weeks ago). So far, no duplicate content were been found, but we are still getting duplicate title tags, though the rel=canonical is present. Any idea why is this the case and what can we do to solve it? Thanks in advance for your help. Tej Luchmun
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | luxresorts0 -
Privacy Policy: index it/? And where to place it?
Hi Everyone, Two questions, first: should you allow google to index your privacy policy? Second: for a service based site (not e-commerce, not selling anything) should you put the policy in the footer so it's site wide or just on the "contact us" form page? Best, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Schema for a discount
Hi! I'm trying to implement schema for a discount and it doesn't seem to be working. Is this the correct code? NAME OF ORDER HERE are $DISCOUNT HERE What am I missing? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 199580 -
Open Site Explorer and Expired Links?
Hi guys, I've been checking a few domains for SEO purposes and it appears that OSE is indexing a lot of links which no longer exist, this has been the case for over 6 months - does OSE cleanse expired links? As I'm sure they will be contributing to authority in the eyes of Moz?
Link Explorer | | lotterybase0 -
Is it okay to delete old blog posts?
Hi All, I'm doing some SEO work on an entertainment (movies/tv/gaming) blog that started in 2011. Their recent articles have gained some popularity due to improved content and marketing, but there is some old stuff from the early days that was poorly written and gets virtually no traffic. These are mostly old news pieces. Out of approximately 10,000 articles, about 1,000 are receiving the lions share of the traffic. I feel like their good content is getting bogged down in a sea of crap. Would there be any harm in deleting some of those old posts? Is there a best practice for culling content? Thanks!
Content Development | | 74andsunny0 -
Website completely delisted - reasons?
Hi, I got a request from a potential client as he do not understand why his website cannot be found on Google. I've checked that and found out that the complete website is not listed (complete delist) at all - expect just one pdf file.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheHecksler
I've checked his robots.txt - but this is ok. I've checked the META Robots - but they are on index,follow ... ok so far. I've checked his backlinks but could not found any massive linking from bad pages - just 6 backlinks and only four of them from designdomains.com which looks like a linklist or so. I've requested access to their GWT account if available in hope to find more infos, but does anyone of you may have a quick idea what els it could be? What could be the issue? I think that they got delisted due to any bad reason ... Let me know your Ideas 🙂 THANX 🙂 Sebi0 -
What Constitutes Keyword Stuffing?
Greeting MOZ Community: I have been attempting to add certain keywords phrases to the home page text of our real estate web site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). When I check the keyword density and look at the keyword cloud, the frequency of certain terms appear substantially higher than they should be (see attached keyword cloud and keyword density chart. Certain terms like "office space" have a 5 or 6% frequency which seems high. Last thing we need is a Panda penalty. When I viewed the code for the home page (see enclosed), I noticed HREF tags, SRE tags and ALT tags repeating certain keyword phrases, driving up their density. I have attached a keyword cloud for the home page of a competitor and the use of language seems more diverse. Does Google take the text in these various tags into account? I know the ALT tag is important for SEO, but how about the others? Does the use of text in the tags for this page make the overall page look spammy? Also, there are text and tags for the carousel in the home page that appear in the code for the home page. If this code were somehow concealed, would we be better off from an SEO perspective? Thanks, Alan pkM7CZG 1DFFMZ0
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Direct Traffic has Dropped 48% to Last Year
Since February of 2013 our organic traffic at http://www.weddingshoppeinc.com had been declining. We were able to get traffic back up to par with numbers from the previous year by December of 2013. In March of 2014 our direct traffic took a major hit and hasn’t improved. We know our mobile traffic is part of the problem, but the issue has affected traffic from desktop and mobile devices. Is this an organic traffic problem, or is our decrease in direct traffic coming from somewhere else? Has anyone else seen this issue, or does anyone have advice? Here is what we’ve already looked into and updates to note: Before this issue, when we compared organic and direct traffic, direct was usually half of what organic was (i.e., if organic was at 10 visitors, direct was at 5). However organic traffic has followed normal trends and direct has dropped. In August we updated our .net code to MVC to drop our first byte from 1,700 to 300 milliseconds. However, if you look at our m. site, it’s around 1,000 milliseconds. We changed our SEO strategy in May to follow best practices. We’ve been rewriting old content. We haven’t ever done any black hat SEO, just have some old blogs from 2010-2012 that have too many keywords. These are getting edited. In March we moved our images to a CDN for our images. We’re currently working on server errors and broken links, but nothing significant changed around March to affect our traffic. Very recently, our web developers said that they believed our direct traffic had been getting tracked wrong in Google Analytics prior to March 2014. However they think they fixed the issue in a March push. We've taken this theory into account, but we also see a drop in revenue at the time of their push that correlates with the drop in traffic, so we know there’s a bigger issue. Any input you can provide would be greatly appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JimmyFritz1 -
How to turn on persistent urls in WordPress?
I'm using an appointment form on my website and I have the option to add a referral url to form submissions so that i know which pages the form submission came from. I need to be able to distinguish between organically generated form submissions and those that come in via AdWords. If referral url shows the AdWords tracking code i know the form submission came in from AdWords. My problem is that when a visitor comes in after clicking an ad and then visits another page on my website that AdWords tracking code disappears from the url. I was told that there was a way to turn on persistent urls in WordPress but I can't figure out how to do it. I'm assuming that if i turn persistent urls on the AdWords tracking code will remain on every subsequent url that they visit on my website. Is this true? Any help with this will be greatly appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | SpaMedica0 -
Atom, RSS Feed or XML Sitemap which is better?
Hey Mozers! I'm reaching out to you today because I'm trying to find out more information about Atom & RSS Feed. I'm not sure which my Retail company should use for the sitemap. Atom? RSS? XML?. Why would you choose one more so than the other what are the benifits?
Algorithm Updates | | rpaiva0 -
Google My Business Locations Query- Do I need unqiue Picture File Names for every location
Hello All, I am just in the process of updating all my google business locations for each of my depots. I have been uploading photos but I am wondering if the file names of the photo's need to be unique for every location ? I know I need to describe the picture in the filename so it's good use of keywords but I am wondering if google will see it as spaming if I upload the same product pictures etc to ever google business location ? thanks Pete
Local SEO | | PeteC120 -
Does a text URL (without hyperlink) provide any SEO value?
Our clients use the link shortener of our service software to share their job offers. Sometime the job baords they post to do not allow hyperlink and thus post the url as text only. Do these url texts offer any benfits in terms of SEO?
Link Building | | rflores0 -
Are .clinic domains effective?
We acquired a .clinic domain for a client, they are right now running under a .ca and I was just wondering if there were any cons to making the switch. On the flip side are there any pros? I've tried to search for the answer but couldn't seem to come across anything, thank you if you have any knowledge or could point me to a resource.
Technical SEO | | webignite0 -
Duplicate anchor text vs poor relevance in internal links
We're writing a number of blog posts, all based around a particular head-term (call it "women's widgets"). Each post will be centered around a different long-tail keyword (e.g. "women's brandA widgets", "women's brandB widgets", "women's type1 widgets", etc.). We want to link from the blog posts back to the main "women's widgets" category-level page on our site. Should we: a) Use the words "women's widgets" in each blog post and link that to the "women's widgets" page? This would be the most relevant, but it also seems like using the same anchor text on all of the posts, and linking to the main page, is not good since Google doesn't like seeing the same exact anchor text all the time, right? b) Link the long-tail keyword ("women's brandA widgets") to the main "women's widgets" page? That would solve the anchor text duplication issue, but then the anchor text doesn't seem relevant to the page being linked to (it might never mention "brandA" on that main page at all), and I think it would also hurt the blog post's chances of ranking for the long-tail keyword since we're basically saying that there's a more relevant page for that keyword somewhere else (i.e. you shouldn't link out from a page using the phrase you're trying to optimize that page for). c) Link a nearby word/phrase instead? For example, we could say "Trust Companyname.com for your women's widget needs", and link "Companyname.com" to the "women's widget" page. By proximity to the keyword phrase, that may help a bit, but again the relevancy of the anchor text to the page being linked to is fairly low. I'd hate to have a bunch of "click here", "read this" or "company name" anchor texts being used, just in the name of not overusing the head-term in the anchor text. Are we just missing something, or misunderstanding Google's preferences? What do you do when you don't want to overuse a keyword in anchor text, but you still want to link to a main category-level page using the head-term in order to tell Google that that is the most relevant, best page for that keyword? Is anchor text duplication more of a problem for external backlinks, and less of an issue for internal interlinking? Do you have a different suggestion, other than what I outlined above? Thanks for the help!
On-Page Optimization | | BandLeader
John0 -
Address Format for Local SEO
Hi, Ive been reading how important it is to get the address of a business consistent and written in the right format to help with Local Search Engine Rankings. Is this correct? If this is the case, are there any online generators to help create this html in the right format to put into a webpage. Thank you.
Local Listings | | Ampweb0 -
Redirecting old Sitemaps to a new XML
I've discovered a ton of 404s from Google's WMT crawler looking for mydomain.com/sitemap_archive_MONTH_YEAR. There are tons of these monthly archive xmls. I've used a plugin that for some reason created individual monthly archive xml sitemaps and now I get 404s. Creating rules for each archive seems a bad solution. My current sitemap plugin creates a single clean one mydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml. How can I create a redirect rule in the Redirection WP plugin that will redirect any URL that has the 'sitemap' and 'xml' string in it to my current xml sitemap? I've tried using a wildcard like so: mysite.com/sitemap*.*, mysite.com/sitemap ., mysite.com/sitemap(.), mysite.com/sitemap (.) but none of the wildcard uses got the general redirect to work. Is there a way to make this happen with the WP Redirection plugin? If not, is there a htaccess rule, and what would the code be for it? Im not very fluent with using general redirects in htaccess unfortunately. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | IgorMateski0 -
Setting Up a Keyword Matrix
Greetings MOZ community!! My real estate web site contains about 500 pages with perhaps 70 pages targeting low volume, somewhat valuable but not very competitive keywords. Three to four URLs target very competitive terms. The following terms are among the most valuable: New York City office space,
Keyword Research | | Kingalan1
New York office space,
Manhattan office space,
NYC office space Such variants as: Office space in New York City,
Office space in New York,
Office space in Manhattan,
Office space in NYC
ETCETERA convert really well How would I match different terms to different URLs? For example I have just re-written the following two critical URLs: www.nyc-officespace-leader.com (home page)
http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/commercial-space/office-space (product page) Would it make sense to use "Manhattan office space" and variants on the home page while excluding "New York City office space" variants? At the same time I would use "New York City office space" variants on the "office-space" product page while excluding all mention of "Manhattan office space". Is this logical and does it conform to SEO best practices? For the "NYC office space" terms I would add them to http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings. This URL has almost no text but a strong potential to rent because of a high number of incoming internal links. Is this approach sensible? In general what measures should I take to prevent URLs from competing for the same keywords? Also, is there a software package or tools that I can use to come up with keyword variants? As a non SEO professional, can I create my own keyword matrix or is this really in the realm of a professional SEO consultant? Thanks, Alan0 -
PPC for Luxury Goods Website
Hi Mozzers, I am starting a PPC campaign for a website that sells high-end products. The search volume for the generics is very high but I think the conversion rate on those will be quite low given the price of the products. Does anyone have any experience in doing PPC for high-end retailers and what type of keyword I should be bidding on? Thanks!
Paid Search Marketing | | KarlBantleman0 -
Should I disavow links from pages that don't exist any more
Hi. Im doing a backlinks audit to two sites, one with 48k and the other with 2M backlinks. Both are very old sites and both have tons of backlinks from old pages and websites that don't exist any more, but these backlinks still exist in the Majestic Historic index. I cleaned up the obvious useless links and passed the rest through Screaming Frog to check if those old pages/sites even exist. There are tons of link sending pages that return a 0, 301, 302, 307, 404 etc errors. Should I consider all of these pages as being bad backlinks and add them to the disavow file? Just a clarification, Im not talking about l301-ing a backlink to a new target page. Im talking about the origin page generating an error at ping eg: originpage.com/page-gone sends me a link to mysite.com/product1. Screamingfrog pings originpage.com/page-gone, and returns a Status error. Do I add the originpage.com/page-gone in the disavow file or not? Hope Im making sense 🙂
Technical SEO | | IgorMateski0 -
Blocking Reviews by Blocking Words?
A client sent me an email this week, stating that you could block bad reviews on social media sites by "blocking" certain words from comments such as "I", "you", "them", "they"......she heard it at a conference from some other CEO's that had some problems with bad reviews. Essentially these CEO's blocked these words making the pages read only pages so no one could leave a review on social media sites. Now, I have never heard this tactic, nor think this is a good idea in any way shape or form. And I know that you can't block bad reviews from happening (without looking at the bigger picture and encouraging some look at internal processes and customer service). Has any one heard of this tactic? Or better, know of anywhere online that documents this idea of blocking words? I have to get back to her, but I have beaten the drum about how to acquire good reviews so much, I feel I am not getting through! Help! Thanks
Reviews and Ratings | | cschwartzel0 -
I am ranking for local broad terms, but I am not ranking when geo-modifier is included.
I have noticed that my rankings for broad terms have dramatically improved in the area I service. But, when I put the broad term in my search query with a geo-modifier I notice I am still not ranking even though my domain authority and page authority is higher than the competitor who is ranking. Why might this be? I am not penalized, or have a manual action. I am also featured in more hyperlocal niche directories.
Local SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0
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