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!

  • rhysmaster


    I have a website that is a desktop wallpaper script. People can come and upload 100's of wallpapers to share with the community. This is were the problems comes in. Files are normally called 27636dark.jpg or whatever and come with no description. This leads to 2 things. no text content that google can use to know what the page/image is about. Meta descriptions, URL's just look like spam. Example: /car-wallpapers/7636dark.jpg If a text description was added, it would still only be like "Green Trees in the distance". Which as you may guess, with 1,000's of wallpapers... would end up having a lot of descriptions the same. Is there any advice for sites that focus on image driven content?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhysmaster
    0
  • ilyaelbert


    I'm sure we have all been there; filling out yellowbook/yahoo/citysearch/merchant circle citations flawlessly, only to wait months and months for google to decide if they're worth 'attaching' to your places listing. I still believe that the number one factor for getting them to stick is consistensy of information, however my question is what factors affect the speed of 'stickiness'. I've implemented google alerts and rss feed/link pinging services to get citations from hotfrog and BOTW indexed almost the same day, however after examing the google places listing, I'm not showing them as listed as citations; which leads me to my next point; that google places could possibly have their own 'indexing rules and speed?' I've heard several suggestions on how to accelerate indexing, and quite a few of them included building backlinks TO these citations to improve pagerank. Do mozzers have any 'foolproof' ways of getting these citations to 'stick' to google places listings within days, or weeks, instead of months?

    Link Building | | ilyaelbert
    0
  • ilyaelbert


    I have several pages on our website with low pr, that also themselves link to lots and lots of pages that are service/product specific. Since there are so many outbound links, I know that the small amount of PR will be spread thin as it is. My question is, if I were to supply fresh content to the top level pages, and change it often, would that influence whether or not google indexes the underlying pages? Also if I supply fresh content to the underlying pages, once google crawls them, would that guarantee that google considers them 'important' enough to be indexed" I guess my real question is, can freshness of content and frequency of update convince google that the underlying pages are 'worthy of being indexed', and can producing fresh content on those pages 'keep google's interest', so to speak, despite having little if any pagerank.

    On-Page Optimization | | ilyaelbert
    0
  • BraveheartDesign


    Looking to do some paid directory submissions and was wondering if a) they were still worth the money and b) if you have $500-$1,000 what paid directories would you submit too? I am assuming that BOTW is still on the list, but I rarely every see a BOTW link in any backlink report. Are they still relevant or are they more a sign of quality to the engines rather than an actual link? Same with JoeAnt

    Link Building | | BraveheartDesign
    0
  • bodaclick


    Hi there! We have been doing a great effort during the last year but our main competitor is still above us in search rankings. Basically, the main differente remains now in the number of internal links, specially in our homepage. We have more than 200 and they only have around 100, so I think we are wasting too much link power among some irrelevant pages. What could be the effect of this?

    On-Page Optimization | | bodaclick
    0
  • peterkn


    Hi We have a mobile site which is a subfolder within our site. Therefore our desktop site is www.mysite.com and the mobile version is www.mysite.com/m/. All URL's for specific pages are the same with the exception of /m/ in them for the mobile version. The mobile version has the specific user agent detection capabilities. I never saw this as being duplicate content initially as I did some research and found the following links
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY9h3G8Lv4k
    http://searchengineland.com/dont-penalize-yourself-mobile-sites-are-not-duplicate-content-40380
    http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022109.html What I am finding now is that when I look into Google Webmaster Tools, Google shows that there are 2 pages with the same Page title and therefore Im concerned if Google sees this as duplicate content. The reason why the page title and meta description is the same is simply because the content on the 2 verrsions are the exact same. Only layout changes due to handheld specific browsing. Are there any speficific precausions I could take or best practices to ensure that Google does not see the mobile pages as duplicates of the desktop pages Does anyone know solid best practices to achieve maximum results for running an idential mobile version of your main site?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peterkn
    1
  • debi_zyx


    Hi! One of our clients has a site with the store on a subdomain: store.example.com.  When we've set up goals for order confirmation pages, we often see most of the sources attributed to example.com.  Is this because of the subdomain issue? How would we correct it so that we would see as the referring source for the goal the site that sent to the root domain originally, and not the site that sent to the subdomain? Thanks!

    Reporting & Analytics | | debi_zyx
    0
  • tgraham


    Hi all, Our business has aquired a new domain name because there are several organisations closely related to ours that use similar domain names to target a niche group of users.  We would like to use this new domain name to link to an existing website with content targeted at this user group as we feel that they will be more comfortable getting to the content via this new URL. After a useful search in these forums the majority of SEOMOZ gurus suggest that the new URL should be redirected to our current site using a 301 and we are happy to do this.  However do we have to link the URL to our homepage or is it acceptable to link to a subfolder within the domain and then targeting content on this page to the user niche? Thanks for any input. Kind regards. Edit 11:38 The old url is oldcommunity.charity.com (we know having a subdomain is bad) this is where we manage all community engagement. The new url is www.newparticularcommunity.com and we would redirect this to oldcommunity.charity.com.  The reason we have bought www.oldparticularcommunity.com is because the url is used by other charities for community engagement and is recognised by the community we are targeting.  We are redirecting to our old site because we do not want to engage with them on this new url as our old site oldcommunity.charity.com already does this and can cater for the new community and perhaps they haven't realised that we can.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tgraham
    0
  • petrakraft


    The website of the travel platform is well designed and looks serious - without any adsense or suspicious links on it. So does the email newsletter of them. But I checked the domain in OSE and saw not less links which came from more or less linkfarms with very often the same anchor text. Would you suggest your customer to submit on the platform?

    Link Building | | petrakraft
    0
  • tgraham


    We are a large charitable organisation which has not paid too much attention to SEO guidelines in the past and as such have a number of websites that have been built by external development agencies. The question that we would like to ask is how this is affecting our SEO. The sites that have been built previously have been created on subdomains and we know that this is an issue. Subdomains are considered separate sites by the Search Engines and not all equity is passed from the subdomains to our main sites, especially as our internal link structure is poorly constructed. However if we had put the sites under our main website URL in subfolders would we still be reducing our page rank and link equity as the pages are hosted by the companies that built them often in a different programming language (Open Source rather than Enterprise) and sometimes in a different country. One company that we asked to build pages for us recently said that it was no problem with SEO because they would put the content in an iFrame to one of our main domain URL in a subfolder but I know that iFrames pass all link equity to the company where the site is actually located/hosted. What are the brilliant SEOMOZs communities thoughts on this? Thanks very much. EDIT - 1100hrs. Thanks to all the responses so far, but we've not quite got to the root of the issue - sorry it's probably the way I've phrased the question.  Essentially we host our own website but our internal team does not have the resource to build all the functionality required by the business.  So if we need a platform that manages our events or a platform that manages our community it has to be built externally then integrated into our existing structure as it would cost too much / take too long / potentially don' t have the expertise to do internally.  External companies tend to have the best functionality but then we are directing our visitors to their sites.  So we are asking them to integrate their sites into ours for an extra fee but what we are trying to find out is whether or not this is worth it in terms of search equity for our site if we only lose visitors once they have arrived at our site and are then directed off...?

    International SEO | | tgraham
    1
  • randfish


    See the attached image, showing a comparison of SEOmoz.org's search traffic from Google over the past 6 days and the prior week. farmer-3x.gif

    Industry News | | randfish
    2
  • GeoffKenyon


    Hey SEOmoz Community, I have a couple questions about social media campaigns. Which KPIs do you use for social media campaigns? How do you determine realistic campaign goals? I am looking at projecting the number of followers/fans and the amount of traffic a site can expect to see as a result of this growth. Any suggestions. Thanks! Geoff

    Social Media | | GeoffKenyon
    0
  • Francisco_Meza


    I need to pay for some directories, but I don't know if BOTW, Business.com, Joe Ant and others are still worth it.  Anybody know if this is still viable? http://www.seomoz.org/directories All Mozzers, can you please give me a 'thumbs up' so I can get more MozPoints? 🙂

    Link Building | | Francisco_Meza
    19
  • WillyF


    I woke up on Friday morning to see that my traffic from Google on Thursday was down 30% on one of my sites. Traffic hasn't bounced back, and I'm wondering why I've been lumped in with the content farms. My site only has original, high quality content. It has a great link profile with tons of links from .edu page, and I've always played by Google's rules. I can't understand why my site has been negatively affected, which makes it hard to do something about it. Right now, the only thing that I can come up with is to work really hard at building more links. Were you affected? What are you doing about it?

    Algorithm Updates | | WillyF
    0
  • debi_zyx


    Many websites - especially those done in foreign countries by non-native English speakers - have many grammatical and idiomatic errors in the English copy. How important is that to conversions (actually convincing the customer to buy, etc.)  Is the poor English a turn-off, a cause for distrust or discomfort - or do people not care? I'd be interested to hear people's personal opinions (the more the merrier) and if anyone has a more global perspective backed by research, testing, etc - that would be great, Thanks in advance!

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | debi_zyx
    0
  • RishadShaikh59


    Our newspaper website has an extensive readership in the US, UK, Australia and UAE. Should we go for a mobile web app? Is that worth the investment considering the fact that you have to design different apps for different devices. Or does a mobile version of the website work fine? Also, are there any specific guidelines that you shoudl follow when designing web apps with regards to SEO? Also, if you could point out some good resources for getting web apps designed, that would be great! Thanks, Rishad.

    Branding | | RishadShaikh59
    0
  • turnon


    A few pages get a lot of external links and rank well (when site:domain.com) but i do not want that those pages rank well (these are blog pages and we are in E-commerce) Can i redirect these pages to other pages which are more important to me and customers because google see only the link or is google so smart that they see a realtion between the page from which i get the links and to the page in my webste In that case i rename the old pages.

    Link Building | | turnon
    0
  • ThomasHgenhaven


    Has anyone noticed any changes since the Farm Update from Google allegedly affected 11.8% of all US queries? Seems like we got some extra long tail traffic from the US - but its too early to tell if that is a coincidence or a more permanent change. I guess its one of those days where its good not to be a content farm 🙂

    Algorithm Updates | | ThomasHgenhaven
    0
  • RishadShaikh59


    Is Wordpress good enough to be used as a full fledge CMS for a large website. In particular, I'm talking about a news website. We have been online since 2002 but pretty soon we will have digitized our print newspaper archives of about 60 years. So, my question is, is it OK to use Wordpress for the entire website and if so what are some of the important things that need to be kept in mind. Cheers!

    Web Design | | RishadShaikh59
    0
  • JimSkychief


    Our site fell from grace last July and landed on page five of the Google search results for our primary keyword. For 6 months I tried a number of strategies with no results, including reconfiguring our site based on the SOEmoz on-page grading tool. More recently, after receiving your advice in a Q&A, I took down all of my paid links and submitted a reconsideration request to Google. Interestingly, 3 days later we popped up 20 spots. This left us on the top of page three. Better than page 5, but still not prime time! A few days ago (two weeks after our reconsideration request was submitted) I got a message back in my Webmaster Tools, that they had completed a review of our site - but oddly enough they provided no info on the outcome, positive or negative. And there has been no additional movement in the rankings since I received the message. Was the original 20 point jump the result of the reconsideration request, or just a coincidence? Or, is it possible that they did a review and the results will only occur later during some organic re-indexing process? What do you think?

    On-Page Optimization | | JimSkychief
    0
  • JimSkychief


    I write and publish artcles. Typically I publish them on a few top article sites like EZineArticles. The articles then get picked up by other sites, often numbering in the hundreds. All of the articles are published with a link back to our website using a keyword. Are there any SEO risks in this type of link proliferation?

    Link Building | | JimSkychief
    0
  • RishadShaikh59


    Now, there are a number of do's and dont's when it comes to internal linking, but do those rules apply to news websites that have to interlink relevant news stories, primarily based on their relevancy to the user and the value that they have to provide rather than keeping the idea of page rank sculpting in mind? What's your take on this?

    Link Building | | RishadShaikh59
    0
  • Jurnii


    I have just recently spoken to an SEO consultant who is pushing the opinion that more internal links would be better for me. They are particularly focused oin aligning a large number of content articles that I have developed over the years, and getting more keyword focus, and more links (inpage within site) onto these pages.  I have to agree on a certain level that maybe this large base of unique content is unedr utilised. What is the general opinon, more internal links are better?

    On-Page Optimization | | Jurnii
    0
  • goodnewscowboy


    Recently on Q&A, Petra weighed in with a link tool site that had completely missed my radar. My problem is lack of time. I don't have enough of it to readthe2 dozen+ SEO blogscurrently in my RSS feed I would like to tobe able to read to  stay current. So I end up only reading at the moz. I'm hoping the collective wisdom of the SEOmoz crowd will shine forthand set me on the road of pursuit of new knowledge with the best of the best blogs

    SEO Learn Center | | goodnewscowboy
    0
  • Yozzer


    This may sound a little basic, but i'm going to ask anyway. On Googles keyword tool Ive always used broad match, knowing that they are never 100% accurate, and obviously inflated by other SEO's searching for their keywords, but used it all the same to get an idea of global monthly searches and potential targeted traffic. I have seen recently, on SEOmoz, and a post fromJill Whalen not long back, that unless you change the match to "Exact" your data is useless? Could somebody explain why this is the case? My initial thoughts were,  a search for SEO on broad shows 6,120,000 per month Yet a search for the same keyword in exact match shows 673,000 per month. I had presumed that the broad match would include "learn SEO"  "What is SEO" etc etc, where as 673,000 just search exactly for SEO. Is this correct? 3 points go to Richard Q&A answering animal dude Getz if he gets this first! Thanks in advance

    Keyword Research | | Yozzer
    2
  • Yozzer


    This is just a quickie: On one of my campaigns in SEOmoz I have 151 duplicate page content issues! Ouch! On analysis the site in question has duplicated every URL with "en" e.g http://www.domainname.com/en/Fashion/Mulberry/SpringSummer-2010/ http://www.domainname.com/Fashion/Mulberry/SpringSummer-2010/ Personally my thoughts are that are rel = canonical will sort this issue, but before I ask our dev team to add this, and get various excuses why they can't I wanted to double check i am correct in my thinking? Thanks in advance for your time

    Technical SEO | | Yozzer
    0
  • debi_zyx


    Hi, All! I would like to create a custom report that will enable me to see which of my pages are contributing to goal completion on my site (so I can then optimize the pages that are contributing the most, with maximal ROI for the optimization investment). If I make the dimension "page/page title" and the metric "goal X completions" - which would make sense - what exactly are the numbers that I am seeing telling me? Is it how many times a person started the goal funnel from that pages (meaning every goal would appear only once and there be no overlap)? That doesn't appear to be the case with the numbers, because the headline in the main "Goals" section tells me I have 30 goal completions for that goal, for example, but the headline in the custom report (which is adding up all the numbers) is, say, 100. Or does it mean the number of times that this page was ever in the navigation path of someone who ended up completing a goal? Then the same goal would be counted multiple times, for each page in the path. Additionally, I see this strange thing on some of my reports where the actual funnel pages appear as contributing towards goals, which I guess makes sense, but again the numbers don't match up. If the goal was to get to page B, and the funnel was A->B, and there were supposedly 30 goal completions, my custom report says that A gave 28 goal completions and B gave 25. Anyone know for sure - or through testing - what the case is with all these things? Any explanations will be much appreciated!

    Reporting & Analytics | | debi_zyx
    0
  • MarloSchneider


    Not an unusual situation, I have a blog on blog.domain.com it has quite a few blog postings.  The platform is old and will be scrapped, but the blog content itself is going to be moved to domain.com/blog. The current process is we are manually listing all linked to/content pages and we are going to 301 redirect them to their counterparts on the new blog.  This is going to be a tedious process. A) Is there any way to automate the moving of the blog? B) What is the best way to do the massive 301 redirect, php headers, .htaccess?  Should we move the individual pages with redirects, or redirect the domain in the .htaccess (this will be very difficult to match all the titles and file structure)?

    Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider
    0
  • andresgmontero


    Hi, we received an email about a guy who wants to copy and paste our content on his website, he says he will keep all the links we put there and give us full credit for it, so besides keeping all the links on the page, which is the best way for him to give us the credit? a link to the original article? an special meta tag? what? Thank you PS.Our site its much more authorative than his and we get indexed within 10min from the moment we publish a page, so I don't worry about him out raking us with our own content.

    Technical SEO | | andresgmontero
    0
  • endlesspools


    We're in the process of rolling out a new domestic (US) website design.  If we copy the same theme/content to our International subsidiaries, would the duplicate content penalty still apply?  All International sites would carry the Country specific domain, .co.uk, .eu, etc.  This question is for English only content, I'm assuming translated content would not carry a penalty.

    Technical SEO | | endlesspools
    0
  • Yozzer


    We have a fairly large client for which I look after the analytics, and just recently the SEO also. This celebrity client already recieves near a million visitors per month, 96% of the time for her name. I'm using Googles keyword tool and search trends for insights as to what people are searching for As I get further and further into optimising different pages, I'm running out of ideas for Unique page titles to drive additinal traffic as they have all been covered. {high volume exact searches that is} I'm not sure if I'm over using her name also: for example most of the clients pages start with: "First name last name Keyphrase"  should I be using her first name last name on every title? Thanks in advance for what seems like a simple task, however when your up against it for the first time, it's a "Do I Don't I situation!" Kind Regards Sean

    Keyword Research | | Yozzer
    1
  • GrouchyKids


    Has anyone got any knowlege about software that I can use to submit PAD files? Would also love to hear about any techniques, for instance I imagine that the PAD detail should not be changed from one submission to the next, any thoughts? Thanks in advance, Justin

    Link Building | | GrouchyKids
    0
  • debi_zyx


    Hi, All! This is for any foreign language SEOs where articles or prepostitions such as "the" "to" "in" or anything else are actually part of the word they are modifying and not a separate word, as in English: How does Google understand those words on-page and in anchor text?  If you want to optimize for the word "house", and your content/anchor text says "the house" or "in the house" (again, all one word) - what does Google count that as?  Does it count toward "house"?  Does it count toward "in the house" only?  Does it count toward "house" but not as much as if you had just put "house"? I end up sometimes writing slightly grammatically-off content because I want to optimize for the keyphrase - but is that necessary? Obviously different languages might be different, but you can probably project a little from one to the others. Thanks in advance!

    Link Building | | debi_zyx
    0
  • RodneyRiley


    I'm trying to get to the bottom of something. If you are trying to optimise for a phrase e.g. "Keyword 1 Keyword 2" And your anchor text is something like "Keyword 1 keyword 2 Another word" Does this still provide as much weight for "keyword 1 keyword 2" or does the additional word come into play and dilute the effect? If it does come into play does it have much of an effect?

    Link Building | | RodneyRiley
    0
  • ThomasHgenhaven


    Hi mozzers, I am currently working on a phd, and one of the professors asked me for help. He would like to know how many Danish school websites (n=1500) links to a certain section of a government website (the relevant section has around 1600 pages). The problem is, that the government website is coded very poorly from an seo perspective with lots of strange URL variables, entailing OSE can't give valid data. So, what would be the best way to check how many of the school websites link? Throw all 1500 website through Xenu, or is there a smarter solution? Maybe the link out feature on Bing? Any suggestions will be greatly appreciate. Thanks!

    Algorithm Updates | | ThomasHgenhaven
    0
  • vibelingo


    Is it worth the effort using your own domain for a Google blog? After adding my own domain to a blog I see a boost in ranking, maybe the url has more value without the blogspot extension, or that  Google might treat the (max.10) pages you produce under your own domain as "independent"  thus giving you the chance of building your own domain trust...?

    Content Development | | vibelingo
    0
  • JoeQuery


    In PHP, I'm wanting to store a session variable based upon a link that's clicked. I'm wanting to avoid query strings on pages that have content. My current workaround is to have a link with query strings to a php file that does nothing but snags the variables via $_GET, stores them into $_SESSION, and then redirects. For example, consider this script, that I have set up to force to a mobile version. Accessed via something like a href="forcemobile.php?url=(the current filename)" session_start(); //Location of vertstudios file on your localhost. Include trailing slash $loc = "http://localhost/web/vertstudios/"; //If GET variable not defined, this page is being accessed directly. //In that case, force to 404 page. Same case for if mobile session variable //not defined. if(!(isset($_GET["url"]) && isset($_SESSION["mobile"]))){ header("Location: http://www.vertstudios.com/404.php"); exit(); } //Snag the URL $url = $_GET["url"]; //Set the mobile session to true, and redirect to specified URL $_SESSION["mobile"] = true;header("Location: " . $loc . $url); ?> Will this circumvent the issue caused by using query strings?

    Technical SEO | | JoeQuery
    0
  • Firestarter-SEO


    I have no clue how to set this up in the Bigcommerce store platform

    Technical SEO | | Firestarter-SEO
    0
  • Ken_Jansen


    I have been adding backlinks, about 110 since the last crawl, but only 14 new linking domains showed in my campaign profile. Can someone explain? Is it that the linking domains were not crawled and thus not seen. Is it that the crawl posting is from data that was crawled a long time ago (4-6 weeks ago) and it took a while for it to show up is it that the domains i got links on were, possibly, not so hot and just get filtered out?

    Link Building | | Ken_Jansen
    0
  • Jvalops


    Hi There, Where would you install the blog? mydomain.com/blog/ blog.mydomain.com mydomainblog.com regards

    Content Development | | Jvalops
    0
  • NeilInFrance


    (can we ask questions in a language other than English?) Pour le SEO est ce qu'il faut mieux un domain avec les tirets ou sans ? Les américains aurait tendance a faire les domaines sans tirets 
    Par exemple goodseoconsultants.com Et bcp disent qu'utiliser les tirets fait "spammy" ; En France il y a plus tendance à mettre les tirets mais est ce qu'il y a une risque négatif pour le sites qui le font ? Par contre il y a plus de chances que les moteurs et les humaines comprennes les mots avec ; good-seo-consultants.com Qui a raison ? Neil

    International SEO | | NeilInFrance
    0
  • NeilInFrance


    Hi Interested in your views on this and any references to research on the subject Using Google Books recently I have discovered multiple citations of a web site I produced years ago in a whole load of publication. Really quite touching to find these 10 years afterwards I imagine that this must have a positive effect on search engine listings for this site. The site has really good listings still. Has any research or any announcement been made by Google about this. Pushing this a bit further ; An advertising hoarding has a web site address http:// ... would Google StreetView pick this up and could it be used as a signal too ? Neil PS No I don't sell adversing hoardings 😉

    Image & Video Optimization | | NeilInFrance
    0
  • Jvalops


    What is the best procedure for link building? Does blogposts help?

    Link Building | | Jvalops
    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.