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After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

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  • dancape


    HI Everyone, We have clients for whom we are going to work with in different countries but sometimes with the same  language. For example we might have a client in a competitive niche working in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Swiss German) ie we're going to potentially rewrite our website three times in German, We're thinking of using Google's href lang tags and use pretty much the same content - is this a safe option, has anyone actually tries this successfully or otherwise? All answers appreciated. Cheers, Mel.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dancape
    1
  • b.digi


    Hello community! We are planning to clean up TM and R in the URLs on the website.  Google has indexed these pages but some TM pages are have " " " instead displaying in URL from SERP.    What's your thoughts on a "spring cleaning" effort to remove all TM and R and other unsafe characters in URLs?  Will this impact indexed pages and ranking etc? Thank you! b.dig

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | b.digi
    0
  • TomPryor83


    Hi Has anyone found WordPress Backup Buddy causing a problem with SEO. I understand why it does it, but wondered if anyone experienced issues with this? Only sometimes it adds /?doing_wp_cron=****** on to the end of a URL Thanks Tom

    Technical SEO | | TomPryor83
    1
  • garrettkite


    I've been doing SEO for a little over 4 years. I've never used sites like Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, etc. either personally or on behalf of my clients. This past week I had a discussion with another SEO who asked what I'm doing for my clients with regard to social bookmarking. I responded that I'm really not doing anything and they were shocked. I took a pretty good verbal beating over it. She was borderline offended. I have always been able to deliver solid results for my clients without any type of social bookmarking, so I struggle to see the need, but am surprised at how shocked this other SEO was that I don't do it. How beneficial is it and am I really missing out?

    Social Media | | garrettkite
    0
  • Gordian


    Does anyone have suggestions on places that provide in depth site / analytics reviews for SEO?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian
    0
  • Clickmetrics


    We have numerous versions of what is basically the same site, that targets different countries, such as United States, United Kingdom, South Africa. These websites use Tlds to designate the region, for example, co.uk, co.za I believe this is sufficient (with a little help from Google Webmastertools) to convince the search engines what site is for what region. My question is how do we tell the search engines to send traffic from other regions besides the above to our global site, which would have a .com TLD. For example, we don't have a Brazilian site, how do we drive traffic from Brazil to our global .com site? Many thanks, Jason

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Clickmetrics
    0
  • Taiger


    Hi all I hope that someone can help.... How can I fix multiple 404 errors with Wildcard htaccess redirect The url in question is: How can I fix multiple 404 errors with Wildcard htaccess redirect http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/listing/search/Category/luxury_hotels_venues_uk_wedding_venues/exclusive_use_venues/letter/c http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/listing/location/uk-england/bedfordshire-weddings/franklin-park http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/deal/location/uk-england/chorley-weddings/curtis-bay etc, going to http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com/business the above is just a few examples, google webmaster is showing over  8.000 404 page not found errors. Thanks in advance.

    On-Page Optimization | | Taiger
    0
  • bobjohn1


    I have multiple colors of the same product, but as a result I'm getting duplicate content warnings. I want to keep these all different products with their own pages, so that the color can be easily identified by browsing the category page. Any suggestions?

    Technical SEO | | bobjohn1
    0
  • TheHecksler


    Hi folks, I have a project which is ranking well for specific product-keywords. The problem is, that the ranking pages are PDF files of those products (datasheets). But i do have a normal (html) pages for each product as well. Each of these pages has grade a for the specific keyword and is well crawled, etc. How can I urge Google to "switch" from these PDF files to the specific html pages. I was trying this by testing it robots.txt to disallow to index the PDF file (I tested it with one for first). I would add rel=nofollow to the link to the PDF on the specifi product html page (?) ... Any ideas? Seb

    Image & Video Optimization | | TheHecksler
    0
  • EvansHunt


    Hey Everyone, I have a Google analytics question. I'm looking through a client's site and when I look at the next page path, I get the same URL as the next path. For example, on the homepage, the next page path I get is the homepage again? This happens for all URL's, is this an implementation error? Is there a way to fix this? Thanks!

    Reporting & Analytics | | EvansHunt
    0
  • Philip-DiPatrizio


    I'm wondering how Moz Local will handle a business that doesn't want to publicly display an address.  A handyman, landscaper, or locksmith might want to do something like this.  Is it easily handled or do you have to manually try to "work around" to hide the address on sites that let you? Thanks!

    Moz Local | | Philip-DiPatrizio
    0
  • KempRugeLawGroup


    Is there any sort of guideline on this? Right now, we have very few google reviews. However, I've cross referenced a list of our happiest clients with people who have g+ accounts. There are at least 12 clients, I feel strongly would write us g+ reviews if I asked them to. I want to just get the word out today, but I'm worried if 8-12 reviews in a week would red flag us. I've heard that getting too many reviews to quickly can be a problem, but I'm thinking that more like 100 than 10, but I have no idea. Most of my competitors don't have any reviews, and the most any of them have is 10. I don't know if that matters at all either in terms of triggering a red flag. I'd appreciate whatever insight you all could give. Thanks, Ruben

    Reviews and Ratings | | KempRugeLawGroup
    0
  • InvoqMarketing


    I have a client who has a website for their U.S. based customers. They are currently adding a Canadian dealer and would like a second website with much of the same info as their current website, but with Canadian contact info etc. What is the best way to do this without creating duplicate content that will get us penalized? If we create a website at ABCcompany.com and ABCCompany.ca or something like that, will that get us around the duplicate content penalty?

    Web Design | | InvoqMarketing
    0
  • RobSchofield


    Does anybody know of a website that can let you know when an external link was created to a site? Or any other way of finding this info out. Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobSchofield
    0
  • blackrino


    I know there have been several people who have asked this but a lot of them were back in 2012 before many of the google changes. My question is the same though. With all the changes with Google's algorithm. Is it okay to put your link on the bottom of your clients website. Like Web Design by, etc. Part of the reason is to drive traffic but also if someone is actually interested who designed the website, they will click it. But now reading about how bad links can hurt you tremendously, it makes me second guess if this is ok. My gut feeling says, no.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blackrino
    0
  • themegroup


    Hey Mozzers! Something occurred to me the other day was that, while we can write title tags and meta descriptions to be within the character count and therefore appear nice and neatly in the SERPs, when Google et al decide to pull subpages out as further site links, it seems to still pull the normal meta description but with a far lower character count. As this looks untidy and could potentially impact CTR, is there a way I can amend the preferred text for the shortened version, via Webmaster Tools, for example? Thanks in advance for your help! Nick.

    On-Page Optimization | | themegroup
    0
  • Branden_S


    We are building several sites for several clients which will be using images from the manufacturer.  Our dev team wants to insert the manufacturer's url for the images, instead of actually downloading the image and hosting on our server.  There are thousands of images, so downloading images to our server will be time consuming, so we are looking for a shortcut.... however I'm concerned this will cause other issues. Is using manufactueresdomain.com/12345.jpg going to cause SEO issues?  will this generate Google penalties?  Since we are not able to control the image file name, we cannot optimize it.  We will add Alt text and Title tag for each image, but the file name is random characters.  How important is the file name for SEO?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Branden_S
    0
  • MickEdwards


    Does anyone know of a tool to check open graph data, especially og:url and og:image? I use the og object debugger in FB, but wanted to know if there is a tool to load all URLs or crawl the site in one go?

    Social Media | | MickEdwards
    0
  • CommT


    Hi Mozzers, We have recently rebranded with a new company name, and of course this necessitated us to relaunch our entire website onto a new domain. I watched the Moz video on how they changed domain, copying what they did pretty much to the letter. (Thank you, Moz for sharing this with the community!) It has gone incredibly smoothly. I told all my bosses that we may see a 40% reduction in traffic / conversions in the short term. In the event (and its still very early days) we have in fact seen a 15% increase in traffic and our new website is converting better than before so an all-round success! I was just wondering if you thought I should redirect my XML sitemap as well? So far I haven't, but despite us doing the change of address thing in webmaster tools, I can see Google processed the old sitemap xml after we did the change of address etc. What do you think? I know we've been very lucky with the outcome of this rebrand but I don't want to rest on my laurels or get tripped up later down the line. Thanks everyone! Amelia

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT
    0
  • juris_l


    Hello, I've question regarding affiliate partner generated links.Company www.example.com has a affiliate program. Partner www.example2.com links to the company site with affiliate link www.example.com/?affid=xxxx in banner, article etc. As I understand these type of links could hurt our Company site, so I asked partners to use rel="nofollow" in all links where they link to us usign ?affid=xxxx in url. To be 100% sure that I did the right thing I decided to post here my question. Could these type of links hurt our Company site? Regards,
    Juris

    Affiliate Marketing | | juris_l
    0
  • cheaptubes


    when moz crawls my site they say I have 2x the pages that I really have & they say I am being penalized for duplicate content.  I know years ago I had my old domain resolve over to my new domain. Its the only thing that makes sense as to the duplicate content but would search engines really penalize me for that? It is technically only on 1 site.  My business took a significant sales hit starting early July 2013, I know google did and algorithm update that did have SEO aspects.  I need to resolve the problem so I can stay in business

    On-Page Optimization | | cheaptubes
    0
  • WSIDW


    For a long time my website has appeared in both desktop and mobile search in Google. Yet recently it has stopped appearing in mobile yet still on desktop. Any ideas why this is happening and how to rectify it please? Many Thanks.

    Algorithm Updates | | WSIDW
    0
  • Blink-SEO


    Hi all! I'm currently working on a migration for a large e-commerce site. The old one has around 2.5k urls, the new one 7.5k. I now need to sort out the redirects from one to the other. This is proving pretty tricky, as the URL structure has changed site wide. There doesn't seem to be any consistent rules either so using regex doesn't really work. By and large, the copy appears to be the same though. Does anybody know of a tool I can crawl the sites with that will export the crawled url and related copy into a spreadsheet? That way I can crawl both sites and compare the copy to match them up. Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO
    0
  • EasyLounge


    Hello, We currently have a lot of color variations on multiple products with almost the same content. Even with our canonicals being set, Moz's crawling tool seems to flag them as duplicate content. What we have done so far: Choosing the best-selling color variation (our "master product") Adding a rel="canonical" to every variation (with our "master product" as the canonical URL) In my opinion, it should be enough to address this issue. However, being given the fact that it's flagged as duplicate by Moz, I was wondering if there is something else we should do? Should we add a "noindex,follow" to our child products and "index,follow" to our master product? (sounds to me like such a heavy change) Thank you in advance

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyLounge
    0
  • abnovak


    Hi Everyone, I've been looking into this situation for quite a while, but most posts/information on this topic seem to be from at least 1-2 years ago. I'm currently working with a dentist who just moved into the same suite as another dentist who has been working there for years. They each have the same address and same suite number, the same phone number, but each own their own respective practice and have their own patients. To make things even more complicated, the dentist that has been working there for years uses his name as a business name, while the new dentist has a business name differing from her actual name. I'm not exactly sure how to go about optimizing the new dentist's local presence, but the only thing I can think of doing is try to recommend having the suite split into Suite #-A and Suite #-B and seeing if it's possible to add a second phone number for the new dentist. Please let me know your thoughts, and if you've seen this topic come up in the past, I would love to get pointed in the right direction. Thanks for all your help!

    Technical SEO | | abnovak
    1
  • SwanJob


    I run a small seo company. We work uber white hat. We are small with only 4 of us but we have a good client base with great results. My question is related to my own websites because they are the only sites in which I practice this technique. I just watched the white board Friday about good vs bad link building. In the bad link building it mentioned never to externally link in the footer. Is this an all around statement? For instance, every new site we make we always put links in the footer of our clients. Usually says something like "Developed by Stodzy Internet marketing Almost all the web design companies I work with do the same thing. Is this going to help me or hurt me?

    Link Building | | SwanJob
    2

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