Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. Latest Questions
Log in to post

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!

  • scanlin


    By looking in my logs I see dozens of 404 errors each day from different bots trying to load robots.txt. I have a small site (150 pages) with clean navigation that allows the bots to index the whole site (which they are doing). There are no secret areas I don't want the bots to find (the secret areas are behind a Login so the bots won't see them). I have used rel=nofollow for internal links that point to my Login page. Is there any reason to include a generic robots.txt file that contains "user-agent: *"? I have a minor reason: to stop getting 404 errors and clean up my error logs so I can find other issues that may exist. But I'm wondering if not having a robots.txt file is the same as some default blank file (or 1-line file giving all bots all access)?

    Technical SEO | | scanlin
    0
  • greghard


    I'm concerned about this for local SEO and citation purposes. It's not spammy and it flows well, and it sounds like a logical extension of our name, but I'm concerned that it will make it harder for Google to pick up our citations. Any thoughts?

    Image & Video Optimization | | greghard
    0
  • Jeepster


    Hi My site and a rival site are bothl UK based. If I search google.co.uk for a keyword I'm above him, yet if I search the australian results, he's on top. How come? I'd really like to put this right and grind his face into the dirt -- if only as revenge for repeatedly stealing my web content. Thanks

    International SEO | | Jeepster
    0
  • stephenfishman


    In Google places my address shows up in two different ways. I want to establish a consistent way of listing my business, but how do I determine what's best at this point? My listings now show up as the street name: "122 Maple Street" and in other listings as the Route number: "122 Route 44 "   The locals all know this street as Maple Street, but we are a tourist business and tourists probably know the Rt. # better. Is there a systematic way I can determine which is going to be the best way to list this? I have the same question about variations like using Rt. or St. versus Route or Street. Thanks Tio

    Image & Video Optimization | | stephenfishman
    0
  • SEOSHARK


    OK, so I launched a website some time ago and it has always placed real well. the site is www.acrepairdallas.net It is a word press site with a custom theme. I updated the content to the sitemap pages this last week and the site went from #3 on google to GONE! i do a site: search and all pages show up except the home page. everything is DO FOLLOW and DO INDEX.. HELP!!!

    Search Behavior | | SEOSHARK
    0
  • PeterM22


    On my homepage, I currently link to about 40 internal pages. I'm considering altering the internal linking structure to have 50-100 links on the 2nd level pages. If I was to do this, I'd only need 8 homepage links. Do you think the 8 pages linked from the homepage would go up in the SERPs as the pagerank would be less diluted? I've heard so many mixed views on this. Be interested to see what people here think. Thanks, Pete

    Technical SEO | | PeterM22
    0
  • fugu


    Hi, I come across a tough problem. I am working on an online-store website which contains the functionlaity of viewing products details in .PDF format (by the way, the website is built on Joomla CMS), now when I search my site's name in Google, the SERP simply displays my .PDF files in the first couple positions (shown in normal .PDF files format: [PDF]...)and I cannot find the normal pages there on SERP #1 unless I search the full site domain in Google. I really don't want this! Would you please tell me how to figure the problem out and solve it. I can actually remove the corresponding component (Virtuemart) that are in charge of generating the .PDF files. Now I am trying to redirect all the .PDF pages ranking in Google to a 404 page and remove the functionality, I plan to regenerate a sitemap of my site and submit it to Google, will it be working for me? I really appreciate that if you could help solve this problem. Thanks very much. Sincerely SEOmoz Pro Member

    Technical SEO | | fugu
    0
  • David680


    Hi, I have one existing web site, I am building the backlinks by myself and also hire some people to do it for me in blog, forum, bookmarks, articles etc. Questions: 1. what is the max number of backlinks per day which will not trigger google to put my site into the sandbox? I heard some people said 100, some people said 30, and some people said it does not matter if this is not a brand new site. 2. I have 5-6 pages which I want to promote, does the Max number of backlinks apply to the whole site or to the particular page? I am also building a brand new site, is the restriction more tighten for the a brand new site? I heard some people said for the brand new site, the first month, you can only have 10 backlinks per day, now sure it is true or not. Please advise. Thanks -David

    Technical SEO | | David680
    0
  • Storitz


    We have 100 to 150 words of SEO text per page on www.storitz.com.  Our challenge is that we are a storage property aggregator with hundreds of metros.  We have to distinguish each city with relevant and umique text. If we use a modular approach where we mix and match pre-written (by us) content, demographic and location oriented text in an attempt to create relevant and unique text for multiple (hundreds) of pages on our site, will we be devalued by Google?

    Algorithm Updates | | Storitz
    0
  • Alder


    I have a client who is running a website which just lost a significant amount of rankings and by extension organic traffic in a redesign. Call it newsite.com. The client also has an older site that will no longer be updated, but has good authority that's built up over time. It even out ranks the current site for some queries. This website has no real value to my client. We want to try to pass the authority from oldsite.com to newsite.com as efficiently as possible. Each site has pages a good amount of matching pages, ie. oldsite.com/subject1 and newsite.com/subject1 My question is, would it provide more value to put a contextual link on the old page or simply redirect the entire page to the new site? oldsite.com/subject1 contains a link to newsite.com/subject1 oldsite.com/subject1 301 redirects to newsite.com/subject1 My guess is that the 301 would pass more value, but would like a SEOMoz opinion as well! Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alder
    1
  • Red_Mud_Rookie


    One of my clients is an email subscriber-led business offering deals that are time sensitive and which expire after a limited, but varied, time period. Each deal is published on its own URL and in order to drive subscriptions to the email, an overlay was implemented that would appear over the individual deal page so that the user was forced to subscribe if they wished to view the details of the deal. Needless to say, this led to the threat of a Google penalty which _appears (fingers crossed) _to have been narrowly avoided as a result of a quick response on our part to remove the offending overlay. What I would like to ask you is whether you have any safe and approved methods for capturing email subscribers without revealing the premium content to users before they subscribe? We are considering the following approaches: First Click Free for Web Search - This is an opt in service by Google which is widely used for this sort of approach and which stipulates that you have to let the user see the first item they click on from the listings, but can put up the subscriber only overlay afterwards. No Index, No follow - if we simply no index, no follow the individual deal pages where the overlay is situated, will this remove the "cloaking offense" and therefore the risk of a penalty? Partial View - If we show one or two paragraphs of text from the deal page with the rest being covered up by the subscribe now lock up, will this still be cloaking? I will write up my first SEOMoz post on this once we have decided on the way forward and monitored the effects, but in the meantime, I welcome any input from you guys.

    Technical SEO | | Red_Mud_Rookie
    0
  • aircyclemegan


    I watched a tutorial on lynda.com about keyword research. And they said to use the All In Tittle trick to see how many pages on google are optimized for that keyword - do you reccommend using that method as well? In google, you type allintitle:"key word phrase" and the results show how many page titles are optimized for that phrase. Should I use this technique as well when choosing keywords?

    Keyword Research | | aircyclemegan
    1
  • seozachz


    We have a large content article section on our e-commerce site that receives a lot of visits but also have very high bounce rates.  We are wondering if this is hurting the rest of our site's rankings. **When I say bounce rates I mean what ever metrics Google is using to determine quality content (specifically after the Panda update). ** We are trying to determine if having the content articles on our domain hurts us.  We only have the content articles for link building.

    Algorithm Updates | | seozachz
    0
  • Giggy


    I am working with a client, and when I check on SERP placement, I never see the "www" in the SERP's only nameofcustomer.com not www.nameofcustomer.com. Of course there is a redirect going on...Question is...should this matter at all? I dont understand the relationship between this kind of redirect and SEO. Thank Mozzers

    Technical SEO | | Giggy
    0
  • SCyardman


    My site (http://www.bluedotlandscaping.com) has recently been redone.  Although I have been online for about 9 years, we have never before done SEO.  My Google PR is 0.  With a lot of work the last 3-5 months we have gotten a MozRank of 3.55.  (DA 26 and MozTrust 4.36) What do you think are reasonable expectations? Does Google update often? Is a jump from a PR of 0 to 3 reasonable? If my site does go to a PR of 3, will I see a noticeable change in my keyword rankings? Thanks for your help. Rich

    Industry News | | SCyardman
    0
  • RyanOD


    Is there a better day for link baiting than April 1st? The time has come for everyone to share their April Fool's Day link building campaigns! This is our second attempt at capitalizing on April Fools with the first attempt (2010) falling flat. http://bigfi.sh/aFd2011

    Link Building | | RyanOD
    0
  • davebrown1975


    Hi all, After waiting many months I was happy to see a certain site listed on DMOZ, then months later still haven't seen the dmoz category indexed in google. It makes me wonder if certain categories don't get indexed or blocked or even previously penalized by google. The category in question is a regional one : http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/North_America/United_States/New_Jersey/Localities/G/Garfield/Business_and_Economy/ Anyone come across this before? Dave

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davebrown1975
    0
  • CodyWheeler


    I have searched and searched for the answer to this question and can't find it. We are going to be launching a Wordpress blog on our domain shortly, however we have a much larger site that is mixed with static and dynamic pages full of custom programming tied to databases, etc. that we are running around the blog and can't integrate that into Wordpress due to its complexity. What this means is we have to install Wordpress on our servers somehow separate from the pages of our website. What I am wondering is if we run Wordpress in the /blog directory of our site as a separate installation if it will inherit the domain authority of our domain (currently around 60) or if it will be viewed as a separate site and get no ranking. Also, will our main site inherit the additional link juice from the inbound links that we get from the blog with it being separate from the main site? How does this need to be setup on our webservers to ensure the blog gets authority of the domain, and the blog contributes maximum SEO value to the domain? Any help would be appreciated.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CodyWheeler
    0
  • PeterMurray


    Bit embarrassed to ask this question, but will ask it anyway! I have done some quite reasonable basic SEO for clients in the south of Spain with small sites and had reasonable success. My wife and I came to the Pyrenees in the south of France to take over and run bed and breakfast in a lovely old farm and some self-catering accommodation in one of the pastures (with my continuing to do a bit of work for clients too). We are running and developing the place for friends who are away 3-4 years. They had an abysmal site, so we designed one to together: http:www.loubetaspyrenees.com/ (I have given the French version because it's what I am most concerned with - there is an English version in case I can tempt you to a holiday here!) It's been very well received by users, so that's great. We have the place on about 12 agencies amd almost all link to our site, so it serves as a good showcase. Here's my issue (for the French site): It went online 11th Feb and is already doing well for more "long tail" searches, and for more local and specific searches, but is proving slow on our prime search terms. The prime market is French, and they key terms are "Gîtes" for the self-catering accommodation, and "Chambres d'Hôtes" for the Bed and Breakfast. Our key Geographical term for the French market is "Hautes Pyrenees" - it's a departmental area. In Google.fr We are around result 100 out of 600k results for "Chambres d'hôtes hautes pyrénées" and aren't in the first 200 for "Gîtes Hautes Pyrénées". This is a competitive market and we are competing with optimised and long-established agencies but still hope to do better. I know I am losing from poorly constructed title tags cannibablising the results, but cannot see how to solve this: Home Page Title tag: "Gîtes et Chambres d'Hôtes dans les Hautes Pyrénées | les Baronnies" I have two main pages on the Gîtes: Gîte for 2-3 people Title tag "Gîte dans les Hautes Pyrénées pour 2-3 personnes en les Baronnies"
    Gîte for 3-9 people Title tag "Location Gîte dans les Baronnies Pyrénées pour groupe 3-9 personnes" ("Location" means rental) Google understood the above and put us no 1 out of over 1miillion results for a search for a gite for 9 people in the south west of France ("gite sud ouest 9 personne") And 2 pages for the Bed and Breakfast: B&B in the farm building: "Chambres d'Hôtes dans les Hautes Pyrénées dans une ferme restaurée"
    B&B in gite apartments with sitting rooms: "Chambres d'Hôtes dans les Hautes Pyrénées avec salon et terrasse" I am not sure how to handle the titles for the Home Page and for the 4 subpages - sounds silly, but have you any advice on how I might handle these titles better? I thought of using more general terms on the Home Page ("Holiday accommodation in the ..."), but on such a small site (18 pages in each language version) I feel that would be unwise. It seems I must try to find some way of differentiating the titles on the other 4 pages so that i am not cannibalising but where there are so few alternatives I am not sure how! Oh dear, sorry this was so long!

    On-Page Optimization | | PeterMurray
    0
  • noonzie


    My duplicate page reports shows 376 pages with duplicate content.  After reviewing the pages the report claims have duplicate content, i can't find duplications.  could this be an error, or is there some source code that doesn't display that could be causing this issue?

    Moz Pro | | noonzie
    0
  • bcmull


    To help with DSEO we are consdering setting up a .org and .net of our brand name (the primary site runs off .com obviously). We are thinking that the net/org sites will: Be one page that is optimized as we need (standard stuff like copy, title, alt-tags, meta desc, etc.) Will be hosted on separate C-blocks Will have a google sitemap that is submitted to Google Webmaster Central Provides a link back to .com Any other suggestions? Are separate C-blocks necessary? Thanks, b

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bcmull
    0
  • copykatrecipes


    I am just curious if any of you use the premium themes such as Genesis or Thesis, if so why did you move to those themes?  Also what is the real benefit to one of those themes?  I know both claim to help with SEO, but I can't really understand exactly how other than the code may be more efficient.

    Content Development | | copykatrecipes
    0
  • GroupM


    I have the following problem - one of my clients (a Danish home improvement company) decided to block all the international traffic (leaving only Scandiavian one), because they were getting a lot of spammers using their mail form to send e-mails. As you can guess this lead to blocking Google also since the servers of Google Denmark are located in the US. This lead to drop in their rankings. So my question is - What Shall I do now - wait or contact Google? Any help will be appreciated, because to be honest I had never see such thing in action until now 😄 Best Regards

    Technical SEO | | GroupM
    0
  • DigitalLeaf


    Hi, From a few years ago I know 'double listings' were considered prime real estate. These days I can see triple listing, google places, PDFs all from the same domain. Im confused as the what the standard is now. I have been asked for some reverse SEOing to push down some bad press (keyword is the brand name) and am curious to know whether I still can get some high results by making a sub domain, optmising some more internal pages etc. Thanks.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DigitalLeaf
    0
  • 5225Marketing


    Hi, I'm working to optimize a site that currently has about 5K pages listed in the sitemap.  There are not in face this many pages.  Part of the problem is that one of the pages is a tool where each sort and filter button produces a query string URL. It seems to me inefficient to have so many items listed that are all really the same page.  Not to mention wanting to avoid any duplicate content or low quality issues. How have you found it best to handle this?  Should I just noindex each of the links?  Canonical links? Should I manually remove the pages from the sitemap?  Should I continue as is? Thanks a ton for any input you have!

    Technical SEO | | 5225Marketing
    0
  • adriandg


    I have probably set them for each of my storage locations over 20 times now.  They stick for a week, only to find them have all been deleted once again. Also, why are my competitors able to choose custom categories, where as I am not?

    Image & Video Optimization | | adriandg
    0
  • spytunes


    I've used the on page grade and now have all my pages at a grade A for relevant keywords. Most of them are cool, achieveing first page rankings apart from a few massive keywords. So the question is, what's next? What do i do now that I'm at grade A, but perhaps not #1 yet... Cheers -dan

    Moz Pro | | spytunes
    0
  • martinLachapelle


    http://www.actuallyrank.com/85.php i am working on french site and i don't have a tone of budjet. would you truste this link building buissness ?

    Link Building | | martinLachapelle
    0
  • stevenmusumeche


    At the linklove conference, many of the speakers emphasized the importance of not having too high a percentage of anchor text for your incoming links, because it looks unnatural.  I was wondering whether this applies to your keyword being in the anchor text along with other things, or just exact anchor text matches? For example, if my keyword is widgets, is it bad to have too many of these: Please buy widgets from Acme Corp. or Please buy Acme Corp widgets.

    Link Building | | stevenmusumeche
    0
  • craven22


    When I started SEO - I didn't really know what I was doing (still don't!) Just wondering if anyone can help me with this small problem. I now understand that I basically have 4 URLs www.ablemagazine.com (Page Authority: 38/100) www.ablemagazine.co.uk (Page Authority: 47/100) ablemagazine.com (Page Authority: 3/100) ablemagazine.co.uk (Page Authority: 51/100) What should be configuration be to ensure I'm not loosing masses amounts of linkjuice? At the moment I have ablemagazine.co.uk set as my default domain in webmaster tools. www.ablemagazine.com www.ablemagazine.co.uk and ablemagazine.com all 301 redirect here (I think)

    Technical SEO | | craven22
    0
  • EricVallee34


    I'm in the process of building a website and am experimenting with some new pages.  I don't want search engines to  begin crawling the site yet.  I would like to add the Robot.txt on my pages that I don't want them to crawl.  If I do this, can I remove it later and get them to crawl those pages?

    Web Design | | EricVallee34
    0
  • fabioricotta-84038


    Hi folks, I have a website (www.mysite.com) where I can't host a 404 page inside the subdomain www because a CMS issue. In order to provide a 404 page, I can create a subdomain like “404.mysite.com” that returns 404 and then if I find that a page does not exist I can redirect it to 404.mysite.com. My question is: should I redirect as 301 or 302? Does it have any difference?

    Technical SEO | | fabioricotta-84038
    0
  • inhouseninja


    Notice more sites have an "in the News" section on the home page, or something similar like press releases... Apart from providing users fresh content, is there an SEO value to this?  What is the explanation for this? Have a feeling the answer is obvious but just not too sure Thanks a lot.

    On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja
    0
  • JohnW-UK


    I came across www.soundandvision.com and did a Link Analysis on them.... http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.soundandvision.com/a!links I noticed that the top links they have are from Google directories or Google IP's. How has this happened? I am listed in Dmoz in the UK does this mean I have automatically appeared around the world. Dmoz is pretty strict about rejecting links how can a company be listed so much? Is this a good practise? Cheers

    Competitive Research | | JohnW-UK
    1
  • C-Style


    Post Farmer update.........where is the best place to syndicate articles now? I'm in the insurance industry so it helps if it's an insurance-related site. Any help would be appreciated.

    Algorithm Updates | | C-Style
    0
  • beeneeb


    Hi everyone, According to my account, the crawl diagnostics were completed yesterday.  However, the duplicate page titles that it mentions aren't correct.  The changes that I implemented several days ago are not being shown in the report. When I click the duplicate page title links, the latest date in the graph is 3/26.  However, it says the crawl was completed on 3/30. Does it take a few days for the reports to match what the crawl actually discovered?

    Moz Pro | | beeneeb
    0
  • vdms


    Hey all, I accidentally posted this as a private question and now want to post it publicly due to some updates (for the worse.) I'm a photographer and the site I'm talking about is my portfolio site. It is very image heavy and had basically no text. Those who have consistently beat me (positions 1,2, etc.) in SERPs for my key search phrases have a modest amount of text on their pages. I'd been doing OK in SERPs (top 3-5 for my key search phrases) over the past couple years and my site has decent age and domain authority (a good number of relevant inbound links from extremely reputable sources over the years, etc. etc.) [In case it matters, my root domain has a PageRank of 4 and I have a couple internal pages with PR5.] For years I resisted adding any text because I was trying to obey Google's rule to design "for people, not search engines." Over the past couple of months, though, I got some advice on the SEOMoz webinar about adding (relevant) alt text and body text, and also read Google's Webmaster Central article about giving images good titles and alt tags, so I decided to take the plunge about ten days ago. I went through the site and added modest amounts of relevant text to pages where it was appropriate and where it didn't detract (too much) from the design. I made sure my images had sensible human-readable alt tags that were descriptive and made sure not to do any keyword stuffing. Finally, I edited some of my page titles so that they were a little more descriptive. Again, nothing extreme or radical or spammy.  (But overall, esp. from Google's perspective, there were some fairly significant changes in a short period of time.) Well.. you're all already guessing what's next. As soon as Google saw these changes, I tanked pretty badly. I went from position 3-5 on my key phrases to positions like 16-25 and spent a few days in those positions. Now I'm just gone & buried somewhere in Google's boneyard. My latest ranking report for today shows me "not in top 50" for any of my key phrases on Google. I'm #1 for many of those same terms/phrases on Bing and Yahoo. (Always have fared very well with them.) Google's webmaster tools says my sitemap is OK and most of the URLs submitted are in the index. Please tell me this is temporary, while Google deals with my changes? (Actually don't, just tell me what you really think.) 🙂 Thank you all...

    On-Page Optimization | | vdms
    0
  • Highland


    I have an odd situation. I have a CMS that has a global robots.txt which has the generic User-Agent: *
    Allow: / I also have one CMS site that needs to not be indexed ever. I've read in various pages (like http://www.jesterwebster.com/robots-txt-vs-meta-tag-which-has-precedence/22 ) that robots.txt always wins over meta, but I have also read that robots.txt indicates spiderability whereas meta can control indexation. I just want the site to not be indexed. Can I leave the robots.txt as is and still put NOINDEX in the robots meta?

    Technical SEO | | Highland
    0
  • bjalc2011


    One of my clients has a template page they have used repeatedly each time they have a new news item. The template includes a two-paragraph customer quote/testimonial for the company. So, they now have 100+ pages with the same customer quote. The rest of the page content / body copy is unique. Is there any likelihood of this being considered duplicate content?

    Technical SEO | | bjalc2011
    0
  • scanlin


    We have external links pointing to both mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com. I read this: http://www.stepforth.com/resources/web-marketing-knowledgebase/non-www-redirect/ and wondered if I should add this to my .htaccess file: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com
    RewriteRule (.*) http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] so that the link juice all flows to the www version of the site? Any reason not to do it?

    Technical SEO | | scanlin
    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


Browse Questions

Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.