Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

Latest Questions

Have an SEO question? Search our Q&A forum for an answer; if not found, use your Moz Pro subscription to ask our incredible community of SEOs for help!


  • OK, SO, I am a wedding company in Maui, Hawaii and have an established business on one island with a physical address. http://simplemauiwedding.net We have started a new team in Oahu, Hawaii http://simpleoahuwedding.com and we provide service there and have a full team in place. How can I rank for Local Search on that Island with no physical address? I would love to hear some proven strategies. Thank you 🙂

    Local Listings | | photoseo1
    0

  • I'm stumped: https://reelgood.com/sitemap.xml

    On-Page Optimization | | catbur
    0

  • My company's Ecommerce site has a sale category that is currently out performing some of our normal categories in the SERPs for "[blank] for sale" keywords. For example the sale category landing page is ranking for the keyword "vegetable seeds for sale" rather than the vegetable seed category. Has anyone ever dealt with a similar situation to this? or does anyone have general advice for optimizing (or weakening) sale pages?

    On-Page Optimization | | Scoleman
    1

  • Hi, I have an issue. Our organization shares a church with another organization. Years ago they claimed the address. They have their Google Business category set up as "Religious Organization". About 6 months ago we started sharing the same church with them. We are a total different organization. We now have a verified listing (same address but with STE 100 in it) with the main category being "Church". There are a few issues I am seeing: When doing a search for our address, the icon is the default one, whereas all the other churches in the area show the church icon. Is this because they claimed the original address as "Religious Organization" and because we only have STE 100, even though labeled as Church, Google doesn't see it that way? If you search for the location + church, neither of our organizations show, even after 6 months. They only show if you search for the organization name or address. Could this be because Google doesn't consider this address (therefore both of us) as a church and doesn't show it? Here is our Google local listing and the one we share with. Any help would be greatly appreciated. https://www.google.com/maps/place/1018+Parkway+Dr,+Spring+Hill,+TN+37174/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x8863828b8f17015b:0x59fd9715acc7e144?sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi7h5DCqfbXAhXBc98KHXcyA4gQ8gEIKDAA Thank you!

    Local Listings | | vetofunk
    0

  • Hi all, Our duplicate website which is used for testing new optimisations got indexed and we dropped in rankings. But I am not sure whether this is exact reason as it happened earlier too where I don't find much drop in rankings. Also I got replies in the past that it'll not really impact original website but duplicate website. I think this rule applies to the third party websites. But if our own domain has exact duplicate content; will Google knows that we own the website from any other way we are associated like IP addresses and servers, etc..to find the duplicate website is hosted by us? I wonder how Google treats duplicate content from third party domains and own domains. Thanks

    Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz
    0

  • Example url: http://public.beta.travelyaari.com/vrl-travels-13555-online It's our sites beta URL, We are going to implement it for our site. After implementation, it will be live on travelyaari.com like this - "https://www.travelyaari.com/vrl-travels-13555-online". We have added the keywords etc in the URL "VRL Travels". But the problems is, there are multiple VRL travels available, so we made it unique with a unique id in URL - "13555".  So that we can exactly get to know which VRL Travels and it is also a solution for url duplication. Also from users / SEO point of view, the url has readable texts/keywords - "vrl travels online". Can some Moz experts suggest me whether it will affect SEO performance in any manner? SEO Submissions sites will accept this URL? Meanwhile, I had tried submitting this URL to Reddit etc.  It got accepted.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RobinJA
    0

  • Hi all, We have started link reclamation process as we failed to redirect our old website links to newly created pages. Unfortunately most of the backlinks are pointing to a page which already has lots of backlinks. Just wondering if I can redirect the old pages to the other pages than the actual related page they must be pointing to make sure only one page doesn't take away all the backlinks. And what happens if Google find that backlink is pointing to a different page than the actual page? Thanks

    Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi Moz community If we Google "site:website.com"; it'll list the cached pages from the website. And we used to check them on required date range like how and which pages got indexed. But date range is not working now and the results are missing the pages which got indexed at the selected date range. Any idea why Google does this? Any alternatives to find the recently indexed pages? Thanks

    Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi all This is a good one. I work for a webdev company who has clients in the transport industry. Part of our work on their sites involves pulling in transport-related offers from a feed. This includes both text and images, which our site template turns into viewable pages. The problem is that Moz has flagged that these images don't come with alt text, and there are _hundreds and hundreds of them. _I can't add alt text to them all, there just isn't the time or resources. Besides, the list is updated frequently, and new images are pulled in. So... what do? Would it be prudent to noindex them all by default setting? I'm stuck! Many thanks,
    Tom

    On-Page Optimization | | tomcowles
    0

  • Hello, guys and gals, I am new to SEO and I am vigorously trying to rank my site here in Michigan for my company and respective niche. I have had some luck as I took many days to learn the basic foundation and apply what i have learned, but even after so I have had zero luck with establishing domain authority, page authority or even seeing the slightest SEO rank improvements. could someone please help?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charlesp3
    1

  • Hello,
    my first question is, i started working in August on a website for furniture repair and services that is a local business and who ever setup the website and did the SEO before me implanted the front page content and many other pages in the theme itself, we got Yoast premium and i mostly get bad rank of the page both from Yoast and Moz im guessing because it is simply cant find the links and content that is on the page since it is in the theme code. should i recommend the company to do a makeover and move everything to the actual wordpress page?
    Also many changes has been made to the website, too many to track and i have seen in the past month an continues drop lower and lower of our visibility, but yet in the past week and half huge jump in some rankings. some of them are for hard to rank keywords, a jump of sometime 20/30+ up the ranks.
    since i dont have a track of all the changes has been made, is there a way to know what cause it? Also one last question,
    i have implemented google tag manager and been configuring it for the past month and now i have finally getting close to track all metrics we would like to track, i have removed all google analytics codes that i knew of and managed to find through search through the theme and plugins but yet when i fire up tag assistant it shows two codes the tag manager and analytics, i know it could interfear each other or give false/double readings. is there a way to track it and remove it? i have went through all theme files.. and cant find it.. Thanks!

    Local Website Optimization | | SharonEKG
    0

  • Hi all, We've been working on our site weldingmart.com for a while. 4 weeks ago we got a sudden drop from google rankings even with our own brand name. No clear cause found, and decided to walk through all technicalities of the SEO fundament. thus we did the following
    -> Setup google webmasters tools
    no issues found, a few 404's, few 410's sure thats all ok, 
    -> Setup robots.txt to only index homepages, lister pages, content and product detail pages (disabled all filters and search queries) Also we banned russian and spammy bots for performance-sake. 
    -> Added sitemaps, and around 14k pages seemed to be already indexed. 
    -> When searching for "site:weldingmart.com" i can find 14k pages.
    -> we had a low 33/100 page speed score and improved this to 76/100 So we did a lot of clean up and improved a lot of items. but still 2-weeks in. we still have no ranking improvements. Before we went down we had around 100 clicks a day from google. now 5 avg. by the way i think a main issue is the low link count of course but still googling your own name should return us in top3 right. Is there something we are missing, do we need more time. I just want to verify that we do not mis anything!

    Technical SEO | | jkossel
    1

  • Hi to all, If we delete a post from a blog then rewrite it with more content will google consider it duplicate content or should we add 301 redirect?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WalterHalicki
    2

  • We are a digital marketing agency Our clients are (virtually all) retail automotive dealerships. We compete in various market places coast to coast (USA). Since Google puts retail automotive dealerships under Local SEO umbrella, is it known ( published ) how large is the radius around my client's Google My Business rooftop's address? How wide is their search 'reach' according to Google? Asked another way, in a triangular, three SEO geo area, with one city being at the epicenter of the population dispersion, and my client, versus my client's competitors being different distances from where the majority of the population emanates from, all other SERP factors being equal (assumption) between the two competitors, how far is each clients REACH from a Local Search standpoint. Is this known? Published by Google. ONE example: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/BMW+of+South+Albany,+U.S.+9W,+Glenmont,+NY/42.7662693,-73.8138088/@42.6727121,-73.7993527,12z/data=!4m9!4m8!1m5!1m1!1s0x89dde0fe8829c405:0xd915fb9b3b60bf33!2m2!1d-73.7973301!2d42.589211!1m0!3e0

    Local Listings | | GaryT_SEO
    1

  • Hi I'm pretty new to all of this so please be gentle! I've been subscribed to Moz Local for a little over a year and my ratings seem to be stuck at an overall score of 82% and an accuracy score of 87% and I just can't seem to get into the Top 3 local searches with competitors from further away outranking me. Moz Local has been consistently showing Factual, Bing, Hotfrog, Thomson Local & Central Index all showing no address entered. I've been in and put this in myself but no change? Right now my score is showing as 59% with a number incomplete and other unable to be contacted. I have found that, even though the address is entered in a consistent way, that it gets interpreted differently, sometimes leaving out the County, sometimes, the village. I've started going through the "Ultimate Local SEO Audit" and have completed Phase 1 on Google My Business. Pretty much everything looks in order there and the only real change was associating a domain email address with the ownership rather than the old gmail one. I've started to go through Phase 2 and haven't seen anything new there yet. What am I missing? Or, are the Moz Local scores fairly respectable? How can I get real consistency in NAP and why does it seem to take so long for Moz Local to make any changes ..... if/ when they do? And, if everything is as you would expect, why am I failing to get in the top 3 when I have more and better review than anyone within 30 - 40 miles?

    Moz Local | | Sassandgrace
    1

  • Hello, Can you explain me what is the difference between co-occurence and synonoyms and how i can find co-occuring words to include in my content as well as synonyms ? Thank you,

    Moz Pro | | seoanalytics
    0

  • Hi All, Our development team needs to do a temporary site name change from www.sitename.com to new.sitename.com and then wants to return to www.sitename.com. They need to do this for the whole site due to how it's built with single sign on (SSO) and how certain post login pages utilize pre login pages and need to keep people logged in. This process is changing with a CMS upgrade and website and post login pages will be independent of the pre login pages moving forward. My question is what is the best way to manage this transition? Right now it seems like the best solution I've been able to work out with development is to reduce the domain shift down to one week and use 302 Redirects, don't index the new.sitename.com site, and for that week and take my lumps as they come from search. Looking for any other suggestion that may help marketing work with dev without casting blame on any teams for drops in organic traffic.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dapacifi
    0

  • ive seen quite a number of errors on my website hipmack.co  a wordpress website and i dont know how to begin clearing the index errors or any others for that matter , can you help me please? ghg-1.jpg

    Moz Pro | | Dogara
    0

  • Hi, I was wondering if in the featured snippets as well as in the regular snippets the words that are bolded are what google considers being part of the knowledge graph for that request. For example if you type "italy tour" see the featured snippet and the bolded words, why are those bolded ?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
    0

  • Hi all, We use robots file and meta robots tags for blocking website or website pages to block bots from crawling. Mostly robots.txt will be used for website and expect all the pages to not getting indexed. But there is a condition here that any page from website can be indexed by Google even the site is blocked from robots.txt; because crawler may find the page link somewhere on internet as stated here at last paragraph. I wonder if this really the case where some webpages have got indexed. And even we use meta tags at page level; do we need to block from robots.txt file? Can we use both techniques at a time? Thanks

    Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz
    0

  • I have a client who has created a number of login pages for their clients (eg. clientA.domain.com, clientB.domain.com). They are all password protected. Just wondering if this has any impact on SEO, good or bad?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz
    1

  • I'm going through all our blog and FAQ pages to see which ones are performing well and which ones are competing with one another. Basically doing an SEO content clean up. Is there any SEO benefit to keeping the page published vs trashing it after you apply a 301 redirect to a better performing page?

    Technical SEO | | LindsayE
    0

  • Please can you tell me why the 'thumbs up' information is incorrect on my personal profile? and When does the URL become personalised? https://moz.com/community/users/10484011 | Thumbs Up: | 7 | Regards Nigel

    Product Support | | Nigel_Carr
    0

  • Hello, Is there a way to know in what state my product is the most "typed" / requested in ? Thank you,

    Search Behavior | | seoanalytics
    0

  • Hello, Over the last few days google released longer snippets. Are website with longer snippets showing deemed to have more relevant content than the others ? Thank you,

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
    0

  • Hi all, This is the scenario: Our website is newwebsite.com. Our old website is oldwebsite.com which has been redirected to newwebsite.com (years back). But one of the old website's sub domain has a lot of back links to our current website like: seo.oldwebsite.com to newwebsite.com. Will this scenario hurts with any wrong linking? Thanks

    Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz
    0

  • I am very new to linkbuilding and SEO as a whole, so please forgive my ignorance. Reaching out to bloggers is a common tactic, but I've found a lot of people tend to blog with the assistance of wordpress or blogspot. I was wondering whether these blogs are still useful for SEO or if it is best to avoid them? Thanks in advance, Lewis

    Link Building | | Samstore
    0

  • Hi How important are anchor text links within your own site vs. buttons for SEO? We've redesigned some of our pages from anchor text links to buttons which are just clickable images.I know historically this isn't the best way, but is it still as important as it used to be?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey
    0

  • Hi all, If we redirect an old page to some new page, we know that content relevancy between source page and this new page matters at Google. I just wonder if Google is looking at the content relevancy of old page (from cache) and new page too. Thanks

    Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz
    0

  • What is SEO best practice to implement a site logo as an SVG?
    Since it is possible to implement a description for SVGs it seems that it would be possible to use that for the site name. <desc>sitename</desc>
        {{ STUFF }} There is also a title tag for SVGs. I’ve read in a thread from 2015 that sometimes it gets confused with the title tag in the header (at least by Moz crawler) which might cause trouble. What is state of the art here? Any experiences and/or case studies with using either method? <title>sitename</title>
        {{ STUFF }} However, to me it seems either way that best practice in terms of search engines being able to crawl is to load the SVG and implement a proper alt tag: What is your opinion about this? Thanks in advance.

    Technical SEO | | twisme
    1

  • We launched a new website (www.gelderlandgroep.com). The site contains 500 pages, but some pages (like https://www.gelderlandgroep.com/collectie/) contains filters (so there are a lot possible url parameters). Last week we mentioned a tremendous amount of traffic (25 GB!!) and CPU usage on the server. 2017-12-04 16:11:57 W3SVC66 IIS14 83.219.93.171 GET /collectie model=6511,6901,7780,7830,2105-illusion&ontwerper=henk-vos,foklab 443 - 66.249.76.153 HTTP/1.1 Mozilla/5.0+(Linux;+Android+6.0.1;+Nexus+5X+Build/MMB29P)+AppleWebKit/537.36+(KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Chrome/41.0.2272.96+Mobile+Safari/537.36+(compatible;+Googlebot/2.1;++http://www.google.com/bot.html) - - www.gelderlandgroep.com 200 0 0 9445 501 312 We find out that "Googlebot" was firing many, many requests.  At first we did a nslookup for the IPadres where it actually seems to be googlebot. Second we visited Google Searchconsole and I was really surprised... Googlebot on steroids? Googlebot requested 922.565 different url's and made combinations for every filter/ parameter combination on the site. Why? The sitemap.xml contains 500 url's... The authority of the site isn't very high, no other signal that this is a special website... Why so much "Google resources"? Of course we will exclude the parameters in SearchConsole, but I never saw a Googlebot activity for a small website like this before! Does anybody have any clue? Regards Olaf searchconsole.png nslookup.png

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Olaf
    0

  • Hi Moz community, We have our backlinks mostly pointed to our homepage. We are trying to rank better and not having minimum number of backlinks to our internal pages is one of the things I worry about. Backlinks to homepage alone help in ranking internal pages or backlinks to internal pages help in ranking homepage? Or both required? Thanks

    Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi, My client has an ecommerce website. He is ranking on top for many strong keywords. However with two prime keywords he is unstable. My client's business is in UK. Hence we are checking in Google UK. We are noticing that from 4rth Dec that our single keyword is unstable and home page at times ranks in top 10 and at times out of the picture. Please help.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Devtechexpert
    0

  • Hi all, We failed to redirect the links of our old website versions to new website pages for years and we are planning to now redirect all those old links to new in the process of link reclamation. This activity may increase the back links suddenly or steadily. If there is sudden increase in backlinks, will it hurts us? What's Google's stand? Thanks

    Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz
    1

  • Hi guys, We currently have a site which uses WordPress & attached to it is a Woocommerce for its store. We want to just move the store to shopify, but keep the blog on wordpress. We also want to keep the same URL structure for the store the same e.g. www.website.com/store (woocommerce) to www.website.com/store (shopify) Is this even possible? Can you point a domain to two separate servers (servers – one for wordpress, one on shopify) at the same time? This is SEO related as we want to preserve the authority as a sub-folder. See this: https://inbound.org/blog/the-sub-domain-vs-sub-directory-seo-debate-explained-in-one-flow-chart Cheers.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cerednicenko
    0

  • My firm has a credit union client whose bounce rates skyrocketed after implementing an online banking portal. Logging in to the online banking portal takes you to a 3rd party site. Would arriving at the site and immediately logging in be considered a bounce? And if so, would a high bounce rate actually correlate with a warm reception to their online banking tool?

    Reporting & Analytics | | TheKatzMeow
    0

  • When moving the content after a while to a subdirectory of my core website I would copy the full content and later further improve it. Would the external links that I redirect via 301 be counting similar to links I had earned in the first place? I understand that 301 redirect normally just implies minimal loss of link power. Topic of the site I consider to acquire is loosely related to my core site.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
    0

  • Hi Moz Community, We're looking to replace some URLs on our Wordpress site and I want to make sure we won't hurt our SEO with the changes. The site is lushpalm.com When we originally launched our site we created pages (which are linked to in our main menu) to essentially display our categories. We did this as a workaround because we didn’t like the URL to have the word “category” in it. Now we would like to make some changes and we want to make sure we’re not going to hurt our SEO in any way by accidentally duplicating content or otherwise. We want to fix our structure and now link to our category pages from our main menu, BUT we want to change the URL of the category page so that it doesn’t have “category” in it, essentially renaming it the name of the page currently linked to in our main menu. So basically, the category lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips, would be renamed with the URL lushpalm.com/surf-trips and the current page that is at lushpalm.com/surf-trips would be therefore replaced. My questions are: If we did this, would that mean that the previous “lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips” would cease to exist? Or is there some imprint of that out on the web? And if it is then would it re-direct to the new page? Would replacing the current page URL with a category hurt our current SEO in any way? Would this change cause any duplicate pages somehow? Thanks so much for your help!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TaraLP
    1

  • Hi Mozzers, A website deals with some javascript redirects. After some research, It came clear a normal 301 is the best option, but javascript redirects can be useful if you don't have access to a website' server. Does anyone have experience with javascript redirects? Can they be harmful in any point of SEO? I would love to hear your thoughts!

    Technical SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE
    0

  • Our website's images are not indexed. Will anyone help me? How will all images in my website be indexed? This is my website address: https://www.expertclipping.com/

    On-Page Optimization | | jacky_risham
    0

  • Hi Moz community, Backlinks being a major ranking factor, do they must be very recent or fresh to make a ranking difference compared to the backlinks which are years old? We know usually fresh content ranks well, but I wonder how much the fresh/recent backlinks impact in rankings. Do the years old backlinks from related and reputed website have same impact on rankings? Thanks

    Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz
    0

  • Hello, I am currently designing the webpages of my website and I am wondering if I should link externally or if it going to hurt me ? I am in the travel industry and for example in the France in the Loire valley, I want to list hotels that people can stay at in pre and pods trip. Is it ok to link to maybe 10 of those hotels websites or can it hurt me ? Thank you,

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
    0

  • Hi all, The suggestion to use meta robots tag rather than robots.txt file is to make sure the pages do not get indexed if their hyperlinks are available anywhere on the internet. I don't understand how the pages will be indexed if the entire site is blocked? Even though there are page links are available, will Google really index those pages? One of our site got blocked from robots file but internal links are available on internet for years which are not been indexed. So technically robots.txt file is quite enough right? Please clarify and guide me if I'm wrong. Thanks

    Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi all, We can see very old links or anonymous links of website suddenly listing under soft 404 or 404 in GSW. As per Google, some of them are some script generated ignorable links. Other are actually the ones which were deleted but not redirected. I wonder how Google get these years old links even though there are no source links available for these. These must be fixed even though they are not linked anywhere from our internal or external pages? Thanks

    Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi there: As part of a site redesign project, we've been doing a lot of 301 redirects, as we retire old URLs or rename them. My question is: is it necessary to redirect ALL old URLS? What about URLs with no links and low authority? Are these really necessary to redirect, since they're not referenced on the web and there's obviously a global redirect happening at the level of the root domain? Just curious; I'm not sure I've ever really understood this...

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey
    0

  • When I grade my page it says I have more than one h1 tag. I view the source page and it shows there are two h1 headings with the same wording. If I delete the one h1 heading I can find, the page source shows I have deleted both of them. I don't know how to get to the other heading to delete it. And I'm off page one of google! Can anybody help? Clay Stephens

    Moz Pro | | Coot
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


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