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!
-
How to 301 trailing URLs to new domain home page - wildcard?
How would I add a redirect rule so all old domain URLs redirect to a new domain? All the old pages no longer exist on a new website. The domains have been through several CMS platforms, so it would be unnecessary to recreate them. Problem is, they're indexed in search engines from the past 10 years, so it's causing a lot of 404s. Example: search "NARI Tampa Bay" and you'll find 2 old domains: nari-tampabay.com & nari-tampabay.org. The new domain is naritb.org Those 2 old domains are now pointed to the same nameservers as the new and listed as parked domains. Here's the current rules in htaccess: <code>RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^nari-tampabay.org [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.nari-tampabay.org [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.naritb.org/$1 [L,R=301] RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^nari-tampabay.com [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.nari-tampabay.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.naritb.org/$1 [L,R=301]</code>
Technical SEO | | CartoMark0 -
How long does Google/Bing take to index
Hello we have 2-3 new pages being submitted every night to google/bing via our sitemap. Two issues I am noticing. Wondering if anyone else has same issues. a) 22 URL submitted via sitemap but only 1 indexed in two weeks. there are no errors showing b) If i submit manually using "Fetch As Google" and request indexing - the page gets indexed right way but after a day it seems to be unindexed - it will show up when i search (site:domain.com) but then disappear from the results doing the same search a few days later. Is this normal or do i have a problem that needs addressing? thank you
Technical SEO | | sancarlos0 -
Ranking up/down Everyday
hello i have a Domain https://goo.gl/OoigRF, which I am Doing SEO last From 16-18 Months, wordpress platform, Everything 100% as per Yoast , But Then After My rankings position changes Everyday. from 1st-2nd page to 7th-8th & sometimes After 10th page. What can be Reason ?? What are the things i need see, For making My rankings Stable ?? please Suggest Me Some ranking Recovery Steps
Local SEO | | iepl20060 -
Site Crawl 4xx Errors?
Hello! When I check our website's critical crawler issues with Moz Site Crawler, I'm seeing over 1000 pages with a 4xx error. All of the pages that are showing to have a 4xx error appear to be the brand and product pages we have on our website, but with /URL at the end of each permalink. For example, we have a page on our site for a brand called Davinci. The URL is https://kannakart.com/davinci/. In the site crawler, I'm seeing the 4xx for this URL: https://kannakart.com/davinci/URL. Could this be a plugin on our site that is generating these URLs? If they're going to be an issue, I'd like to remove them. However, I'm not sure exactly where to begin. Thanks in advance for the help, -Andrew
Moz Pro | | mostcg0 -
Search volume discrepancies between keyword tools
I'm feeling like I'm basing all my research time on tools that I cannot necessarily trust. Between Google keyword planner, Keywords everywhere chrome extension, and Moz keyword explorer, I'm getting wildly different results on 2 simple keywords related to colleges with baking & pastry arts degrees. "baking college", "baking colleges" So Keyword planner won't give me any search volume for those 2 words, I don't even see them in the results. Instead, it decides I really meant "baker college" which has 33,100 global searches. I tried telling it use only closely related terms, but it keeps giving me "baker college" and refuses to show me the terms I asked for. Stubbornly useless. Keywords everywhere says both of these keywords bring in 33,100 searches. It does not tell me those searches were for "baker college." Totally misleading. Moz keyword explorer says baking college as 0-10 volume, baking colleges has 101-200 volume. So at least it's not trying to give me "baker college" numbers. Perhaps I can trust this, but it's not convenient to upload hundreds of various keywords at a time to pull the volume numbers like I do with the other tools. With Keyword planner making assumptions and grouping unrelated terms together, and Keywords everywhere using those numbers without pointing out the assumptions, I feel like I can't trust anything without taking time to dig into the discrepancies, which is impossible with hundreds of keywords. Do you know of any good search volume tools that don't force or hide assumptions? Thanks.
Moz Bar | | JannetteP1 -
Duplicate content issue
Hi, A client of ours has one URL for the moment (https://aalst.mobilepoint.be/) and wants to create a second one with exactly the same content (https://deinze.mobilepoint.be/). Will that mean Google punishes the second one because of duplicate content? What are the recommendations?
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
Why Moz Update has 48 days this time?
Hi There! We have been Monitoring our DA in Moz.com, from past 6 Months and we have observed that every Moz update happens between 25 to 30 days. Why is the next update has been scheduled for 48 days of time? Is there any specific reason for this? Awaiting your response Thanks Malik Zakaria
Feature Requests | | mzakaria0 -
Question about related topics
Hello, What is the difference between "based on the closely related topics" in the keyword tool and the content suggestions (also called related topics) for the page optimisation score ? Thank you,
Moz Bar | | seoanalytics0 -
301 redirection help needed!
Hi all, So if we used to have a domain (let's say olddomain.com) and we had a new site created at newdomain.com how do we properly setup redirects page to page. Caveat, the urls have changed so for instance the old page oldomain.com/service is now newdomain.com/our-services on the new site. Do we need to have hosting on the old site? Do we need to setup individual 301s for each page corresponding to the new page? Just looking for the easiest way to do this CORRECTLY. Thanks, Ricky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley3 -
Image Size in Alt Text
Hi, On our ecommerce site, when we load an image for an item, it automatically loads different sizes for that image. (i.e. High Res, Large, Small, Thumbnail, etc). We have an option to add the size to the alt text of the image (in addition to the description of the picture... so for example "Blue casual shirt High Res"... is this necessary? One of our clients requested this and I am not sure I see the point of having the image size in the alt text unless it helps the visually impaired in some way?
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
Canonicalize or Block?
Hi Mozers, We have staff profile pages w/ one main URL and then URLs with query parameters and jump links to take you to different parts of the page. The longer URLs with parameters canonicalize to the main pages but should they also be nonidexed? Thanks, Yael
Technical SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Why can't google mobile friendly test access my website?
getting the following error when trying to use google mobile friendly tool: "page cannot be reached. This could be because the page is unavailable or blocked by robots.txt" I don't have anything blocked by robots.txt or robots tag. i also manage to render my pages on google search console's fetch and render....so what can be the reason that the tool can't access my website? Also...the mobile usability report on the search console works but reports very little, and the google speed test also doesnt work... Any ideas to what is the reason and how to fix this? LEARN MOREDetailsUser agentGooglebot smartphone
Technical SEO | | Nadav_W0 -
More content, more backlinks, more appealing design, better SEO than competitor but ranking worse. Why?
Me and my team are working hard to put a good SEO strategy in place and good, useful content for our visitors. We're online for a little more than a year and we got some success but nothing compared to the majority of our competitors. The only thing we noticed so far is that our strongest competitors all seem to have a website based on WordPress... well is it possible to rank better than a site based on WP if we optimize everything well? One of our competitor is a very simple, thin affiliate website based on WP and is called www.comparatif-meilleur.fr ... their content is limited but they do better than us in term of ranking organically... On our side (www.lecomparateur.net) we have backlinks from Wikipedia, Dmoz and a couple of other very good sites, plus a better content, better design and better overall optimization. There must be something we do bad, but we can't find it. Please help 😞 P.S. We update our site quite often too
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benoit_20180 -
We've just completed a company video. Should we post it everywhere at once, or stagger on various channels (YouTube, website, LinkedIn, Facebook...)
Hopefully we'll get a lot of traffic from our new corporate video. If we post it everywhere at once, will we get a spike in our analytics, and if so, will it be seen by Google as an anomaly, or even suspicious. If we spread out the distribution over several channels over a little time, should we get a longer bump. In either instance, we may consider a sharing schedule to promote it over time.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SteveMauldin0 -
Not using alt tags for decorative images?
Hi everyone, My coworker recently stumbled across this article that instructs you to not to alt text for "decorative images" as you might get penalized you for over optimization https://www.shopify.com/blog/7412852-10-must-know-image-optimization-tips Has anyone heard of this or have any thoughts?
Image & Video Optimization | | AliMac260 -
Competitor using our product descriptions
Hi, We have a competitor (with a higher DA) using some content from our product pages word for word on a few of their product pages. It's only a couple paragraphs per product page (including the main product description), not the entirety of the content on the page. It also appears they have scraped some content from another authoritative competitor (and even left their brand name mentioned on it!) I've read mixed thoughts on whether plagiarized content will harm the original site, but am concerned since it is an authoritative site. Should I be concerned since it's only parts of our product page? Thank you all!
Competitive Research | | ATShock0 -
How to optimise for voice search ?
Hello, Let's imagine I do a search for barcelona in the keyword tool. One the the words that comes back with high relevance is barcelona city. I am writing a my content but as a human it sounds more natural to write the city of barcelona. My problem is the the city of barcelona is not given by the keyword explorer, what should I do stick with barcelona city use the city of barcelona even though it is not in the list of keywords ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Where does the small description on a business listing come from in google maps?
Hi All, Simple question, but I'm struggling to find the answer, so I hope someone is able to help. The business I run is Oakdene Forest Park; Google Maps URL: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Oakdene™+Forest+Park/@50.8114372,-1.8598721,18z/data=!4m12!1m6!3m5!1s0x4873980ce90e4ef7:0x755579d631c25b33!2sOakdene™+Forest+Park!8m2!3d50.8114796!4d-1.8582842!3m4!1s0x4873980ce90e4ef7:0x755579d631c25b33!8m2!3d50.8114796!4d-1.8582842?hl=en Under the business name, it has a small description and for the life of me I don't know where Google is getting it from because a part of it is wrong. It looks like this: Oakdene™ Forest Park Rural Resort with Entertainment & a Spa I would like to remove the term 'Rural Resort' but where do I find it?? Thanks in advance for your help.
Local Listings | | Shorefield_Holidays0 -
SEM Rush & Duplicate content
Hi SEMRush is flagging these pages as having duplicate content, but we have rel = next etc implemented: https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott?page=2 Or is it being flagged as they're just really similar pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Mobile ranking changes seem to be faster
I updated a page and the ranking of the page on mobile has already changed whereas on desktop it hasn't. Has anyone noticed that on mobile it takes less time to see changes than on desktop ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
What do we know about Open Site Explorer?
Any clear answer for this result? Google get penalty from Google for it's own website? Please refer to the attached picture below. vsgKw
Link Explorer | | BBT-Digital0 -
API ACCESS to COMPETITOR DATA
Is there access with any of the available API's that I may be able to show my client's keyword competitive data for them vs their competitors (The ones they specify?). Perhaps in JSON format?
API | | Digitlead0 -
Updating 2013 Site Built with Custom Theme, Modify Existing Theme, Create New Custom Theme, Or Use Child Theme?
Our website was designed in 2013 using a custom theme. Some of the plugins are built from scratch. Ranking in our industry is hyper competitive. We are seeking a better interface and also to improve ranking. I have read that custom themes use lighter code and can rank better. Does this apply to a custom theme from 2013? Will we have an SEO advantage using a custom theme? If so, will that advantage be significant? We are using a discontinued plugin called "Firestorm" to display real estate listings. That plugin has been customized. Can we use that plugin on a new "custom" theme? How about on a "child" theme? In terms of the cost of future maintenance, will a "custom" theme require much more intervention (manual installation of updates) moving forward? Which of the following options is best: 1. Adapt our existing custom theme
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
2. Create a new custom theme
3. Create a child theme Thanks,
Alan0 -
Should I have home listings not followed?
Hi, I currently am doing digital marketing for a home builder. Here is one of our challenges: we build homes, create the page to sell them, details on the house are put up, Google crawls them, and then the house sells and I need to take it off the site. This is just creating a constant redirect process that I'm OK with but I'm just thinking I'd rather have Google not know they exist and delete them. I have community pages and floor plan pages with evergreen content and a blog that's doing well. I'm OK with Google not seeing these pages, but I'd really like to know what others in the industry do and what Moz thinks is best. I have a working theory of creating 10-15 pages where I rotate the houses: house 1 is posted and once it sells replace site content with house 16 (assuming 15 pages already exist with 15 houses). Reason - none of my listing pages have any page authority and it overall just makes the site un-authoritative. I know the domain authority is a different ranking factor, but I need the pages to be stronger or just not there. I'd love confirmation that that shouldn't be a concern for me as it seems to be one that I've inherited through years of SEO marketing paranoia.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AvexHomes2 -
Moving content to a new domain
I need to move a lot of content with podcasts and show notes to a new domain. Instead of doing redirects, we want to keep some content on the current domain to retain the link value. There are business reason to keep content on both websites but the new website will primarily be used for SEO moving forward.If we keep the audio portion of the podcast on the old website and move the show notes and the audio portion of the podcast to the new website, is there any issues with duplicate content?Long-term, I presume Google will re-index the old and the new pages, thus no duplicate content, but I want to make sure I'm not missing anything. I was planning to fetch pages in Search Console as we migrate content.Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | JimmyFritz0 -
Posting same content to different high authority websites
Let's say 1 article piece is highly relevant to multiple states and we pitch this article across the different domains in those states. Each article piece will be tweaked to localize the content. I understand that Google devalues links coming from low quality, websites that are spun up, but what about links that are basically the same content (but localized), across different high authority domains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imjonny1230 -
Massive Amount of Pages Deindexed
On or about 12/1/17 a massive amount of my site's pages were deindexed. I have done the following: Ensured all pages are "index,follow" Ensured there are no manual penalites Ensured the sitemap correlates to all the pages Resubmitted to Google ALL pages are gone from Bing as well In the new SC interface, there are 661 pages that are Excluded with 252 being "Crawled - currently not indexed: The page was crawled by Google, but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling." What in the world does this mean and how the heck do I fix this. This is CRITICAL. Please help! The url is https://www.hkqpc.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | D.J.Hanchett0 -
Google Search console says 'sitemap is blocked by robots?
Google Search console is telling me "Sitemap contains URLs which are blocked by robots.txt." I don't understand why my sitemap is being blocked? My robots.txt look like this: User-Agent: *
Technical SEO | | Extima-Christian
Disallow: Sitemap: http://www.website.com/sitemap_index.xml It's a WordPress site, with Yoast SEO installed. Is anyone else having this issue with Google Search console? Does anyone know how I can fix this issue?1 -
My site links to my clients not showing in Moz
I've got a web design business with a site that's been out there for 17 years - www.biztoolsone.com. I've got links to my clients' sites in my portfolio page. The backlinks list for my clients, when I check them in Moz, don't show the links from this site. They always showed in the list until a few months ago. The site has a DA of 59 & PA (for home page) of 50. The spam score is 0/17. I'm having a tough time telling my clients that the Moz backlinks list is accurate when that site doesn't show in the list. The same is true for www.fayettevillenc.biz - this is one I created years ago to generate backlinks. It's got a spam score of 4/17, so I'm a little more understanding of that one. Thanks for any guidance!
Link Explorer | | wcksmith10 -
Hyphens in Keyword
Hi everyone, I was wondering if anyone had any experience of whether Google treats keywords with hyphens differently. One of my websites main keywords is 'buy to let', however all across our website it is referred to as 'buy-to-let'. People always search without the hyphens. I recently heard that Google may only treat us as a highly relevant match and not an exact match for this keyword. I was wondering if anyone had any experience of this, and what is the best course of action to take. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brian-madden0 -
Why do new issues occur when there have been no updates to the website?
I am unsure on how new issues are created when crawling the site from one crawl to the next. I had assumed the number of issues would remain static if nothing was done from one crawl to the next. Can someone explain how new/additional issues are added from each crawl, even without updates being made? Thanks in advance, Christopher
Moz Bar | | debb0 -
Two Tracking for Banners - Internal Promotion & Event Tracking -Any Impact on Analytic Figure or Bounce Rate?
Hi All, I have implemented Internal Promotion - https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/enhanced-ecommerce#promo-clicks for my ecommerce site on homepage banners. Along with this I did event tracking for Banner click. So any negative impact of bounce rate or other reports? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Arnold30 -
Hotel SEO, 3-pack & Search Console: How to get the right data and how to improve CTR?
Hey guys, I've been working with some hotels and I feel like there are some specific issues which need special solutions.
Algorithm Updates | | Maggiathor
Maybe some of you also work for hotels and face similar problems. Question 1: Google "forces" 3-packs impressions to OTAs like booking.com via Hotel Ads. You basically have a big blue "book now" button and a small little website button. This ends up basically leading to CTRs below 1% despite a 1-3 Position. Is there any way to improve the organic CTR? Of course we use hotel ads, but they offer bad analytics AND we basically pay for our SEO-Performance. Question 2: Search console doesn't specify wether or not a impression comes from 3-Pack or the rest of the organic results, which basically leads to a average position which says nothing. It's hard to evaluate the performance of meta-titles and texts, because the ctr is also mixed. What would be a better way to get this data or do you think google will change this in some time (new search console doesn't offer this). Question 3: Hotel Rankings are dominated by OTAs, Meta-Searchers and BIg Chains. Has anyone experience in SEO for smaller, family owned Hotels? Any tricks how to get a steady traffic source outside of brand results? Hope there are some travel experts in here 🙂0 -
Using h2 for category on ecommerce website
Hi, I am working on an ecommerce site and the main category - lets call them car widgets - is using a h1 at the top of the page which is great. There are 4 sub categories on the page - lets call one of them red widget. The only content on the page is the sub category name and an image. Should the sub category red widget use a h2? Thanks S
On-Page Optimization | | bedynamic0 -
Query on Not Set In Product List Performance in Google Analytics
Hi All, I have query for given below screenshot-1. What is Not Set here? For column no. 2 only purchase and revenue showing other column blank why? I have properly implemented enhance ecommerce via tag manager. And my product list impression, clicks all working fine for all categories now I don't know from where I am getting Not set - Please check screenshot-2. So what is Not set here? Thanks! QcBGT OCrEp
Reporting & Analytics | | Arnold30 -
Trailing Slashes on URLs
Hi we currently have a site on Wordpress which has two version of each URL trailing slash on URLs and one without it. Example: www.domain.com/page (preferred version - based on link data) www.domain.com/page**/** The non-slash version of the URL has most of the external links pointing to them, so we are going to pick that as the preferred version. However, currently, each version of every URL has rel canonical tag pointing to the non-preferred version. E.g. www.domain.com/page the rel canonical tag is: www.domain.com/page/ What would be the best way to clean up this setup? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cathywix0 -
Is CTR that important? SERP Questions (ADVICES for a case study)
My website is gabseo.ca Lately I have been following keywords my town in Canada from Mexico and I have the impression that the Google updates the SERP almost every hours for my target keyword. It is possible that the CTR on the SERP can be that powerful? Sometimes I am number 1 for "SEO Gatineau" for example and overnight I am #9 or #10, the next day I am #3... Is there another way that I can test the search result? Whn you try this query, what do you see? It started happening this week and coincidentally I didn't publish any blog articles this week... is it related? I am stressing out right now because my agency is a startup. So how can I beat the other agencies if I don't have a good CTR? I know that I will do a casestudy about this! Any comments, ideas?
Local SEO | | Gab-SEO0 -
Time to rank is faster is some countries than others
Hello, I have noticed that pages rank much faster in some countries than other. For example it seems that in the usa it takes much longer than in France for example. For the same keyword in English. Have anyone noticed that also and why is that ? I have also noticed that the more monthly searches the keyword has the longer it will take to rank. Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Related searches volume
Hello, The related searches we see at the bottom of google search results. Is this what people also search for ? If it is why does the keyword so no volume for those related searches ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Best Practices to Design Site Mock Up Using Wordpress Rather than Wireframes?
We are in the process of redesigning our real estate website. Our designer/developer is very quick and confident on Wordpress. He suggests designing directly on Wordpress and bypassing wireframes and a mock ups. He is very confident in his Wordpress abilities. Is it a mistake to take this approach? He has also asked that we select a real estate theme at this point. I would think that the theme would be selected after the wireframes and mock ups get done. But there are certainly different approaches. Are there best practices for redesigning a webiste; any suggestions? Are there significant risks/disadvantages to bypassing wireframes/mock ups? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan Rosinsky0
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.