Latest Questions

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  Multiple You-Tube Channels for Geo-Targeting ??
  

  Hi I have a UK based e-commerce client/project who has authorised a US distributor/dealer to set up their own US site along with US focused Facebook & other socials etc etc Should they also have country specific YouTube channels (even if both target countries English language i.e. UK & US) ? They brand has lots of video content of 2 main types: Product reviews to host on the website (to win serps, snippets and hence conversions from search) Longer more entertaining productions to put on YouTube channel to captivate, entertain and eventually drive YT target traffic to website via 'in video annotations' external link feature etc. Hence it makes sense to me that the US agent should set up their own YT channel along with their other social pages like FB etc, since annotated links go to different sites (US & UK). Does Google allow this (multiple channels) If not and sticking with the one channel is it possible to geo-target in video annotated external links so depending upon viewer location serves up relevant country link ? Any other ideas, help/advice, comments from anyone who has experience in this type of scenario ? Many thanks Dan

  International SEO | | Dan-Lawrence

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  HTTP Status Code 0
  

  Hi, I have over 1200 back-links in an excel 2010 spreadsheet and I have a trial account at Moz Analytics. I am trying to pull the HTTP Status Code of these backlinks from Moz using the SEOGadget for Excel tool [url: seogadget.com/tools/seogadget-for-excel/]. I am able to get the status code as 200 for some links but for most its 0. I am able to get some other info correctly so the problem is mostly with the HTTP Status Code retrieval. Could you please let me know whats causing this and how I can fix this so as to be able to get correct HTTP Status Code for for a list of 1200 back-links automatically. Thanks

  API | | nameen

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  Why is my servers ip address showing up in Webmaster Tools?
  

  In links to my site in Google Webmaster Tools I am showing over 28,000 links from an ip address. The ip address is the address that my server is hosted on. For example it shows 200.100.100.100/help, almost like there are two copies of my site, one under the domain name and one under the ip address. Is this bad? Or is it just showing up there and Google knows that it is the same since the ip and domain are from the same server?

  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite

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  Server down - What will happen to the SERP?
  

  Hi everybody, we have a lot of websites (about 100) on one Server in Italy. This Server crashed 5 days ago and now it should go online (I hope!). What will happen to the SERP? What shall I do to recover the rank of every key? New links, new content, just wait...what? Tnks 😉

  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Sognando

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  Do you think that Content Locking (force to share to unlock content) is manipulative and will eventually be penalised by Google?
  

  There is a tactic called content locking which requires a user to share a post or homepage URL in order to unlock content (either a video, a full post or downloadable ebook). Do you think this is manipulating signals to increase search rankings? Argument Against Using Content Locking Social signals and links from Google Plus shares clearly correlate to increased search engine visibility. Requiring a user to pay for content with social sharing is only used to improve search rankings. According to the webmaster guidelines: "Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, 'Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?'" Argument For Using Content Locker Users tend to value their social profiles and won't share something unless they believe it is valuable. Requiring a share is just a push to motivate them to share something they value. Additionally, it is similar to an email opt-in in that the publisher now has a social media lead they can follow up on. It's not just about SEO, it's about tapping into social network traffic and engagement on social networks.

  Social Media | | designquotes

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  Avoiding the "sorry we have no imagery here" G-maps error
  

  Hi there, we recently did a redesign on a big site and added Gmaps locations to almost every page since we are related to Real State, Listings, Details, search results all have a map embedded. While looking at GWT I found that the top keywords on our site (which is in spanish) are the following. have here imagery sorry After a quick search I found out this is a Gmaps bug, when Google Bot accesses the Pages it throws an error out with this text repeated several times. If you do a search for "sorry we have no imagery here" you will see lots of sites with this issue. My question is, Is this affecting the overall SEO since Bots are actually crawling and indexing this hence its being reported by GWT, Should I cloak this to robots? Has anyone noticed this or has been able to fix it? Thanks in advance!

  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | makote

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  Can I use PO boxes as an actual business Address?
  

  Hi mozzers, A potential future client(electrician) covers 40+ locations in one region(local SEO) but only has 1 address. He wants to rank for at least 5 to 7 main locations which he has PO boxes for. Can I use these as addresses on his website or will it be seen as violating the google guideline? If it is no good what should I do? Thanks

  Image & Video Optimization | | Ideas-Money-Art

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  Exclude status codes in Screaming Frog
  

  I have a very large ecommerce site I'm trying to spider using screaming frog. Problem is I keep hanging even though I have turned off the high memory safeguard under configuration. The site has approximately 190,000 pages according to the results of a Google site: command. The site architecture is almost completely flat. Limiting the search by depth is a possiblity, but it will take quite a bit of manual labor as there are literally hundreds of directories one level below the root. There are many, many duplicate pages. I've been able to exclude some of them from being crawled using the exclude configuration parameters. There are thousands of redirects. I haven't been able to exclude those from the spider b/c they don't have a distinguishing character string in their URLs. Does anyone know how to exclude files using status codes? I know that would help. If it helps, the site is kodylighting.com. Thanks in advance for any guidance you can provide.

  Technical SEO | | DonnaDuncan

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  If I redirect based on IP will Google still crawl my international sites if I implement Hreflang
  

  We are setting up several international sites. Ideally, we wouldn't set up any redirects, but if we have to (for merchandising reasons etc) I'd like to assess what the next best option would be. A secondary option could be that we implement the redirects based on IP. However, Google then wouldn't be able to access the content for all the international sites (we're setting up 6 in total) and would only index the .com site. I'm wondering whether the Hreflang annotations would still allow Google to find the International sites? If not, that's a lot of content we are not fully benefiting from. Another option could be that we treat the Googlebot user agent differently, but this would probably be considered as cloaking by the G-Man. If there are any other options, please let me know.

  International SEO | | Ben.JD

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  Is it cloaking/hiding text if textual content is no longer accessible for mobile visitors on responsive webpages?
  

  My company is implementing a responsive design for our website to better serve our mobile customers. However, when I reviewed the wireframes of the work our development company is doing, it became clear to me that, for many of our pages, large parts of the textual content on the page, and most of our sidebar links, would no longer be accessible to a visitor using a mobile device. The content will still be indexable, but hidden from users using media queries. There would be no access point for a user to view much of the content on the page that's making it rank. This is not my understanding of best practices around responsive design. My interpretation of Google's guidelines on responsive design is that all of the content is served to both users and search engines, but displayed in a more accessible way to a user depending on their mobile device. For example, Wikipedia pages have introductory content, but hide most of the detailed info in tabs. All of the information is still there and accessible to a user...but you don't have to scroll through as much to get to what you want. To me, what our development company is proposing fits the definition of cloaking and/or hiding text and links - we'd be making available different content to search engines than users, and it seems to me that there's considerable risk to their interpretation of responsive design. I'm wondering what other people in the Moz community think about this - and whether anyone out there has any experience to share about inaccessable content on responsive webpages, and the SEO impact of this. Thank you!

  Web Design | | mmewdell

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  Learning Center on Subdomain or New Domain
  

  Hello, With so much emphasis for SEO to develop unique, information content I am working to build out a "Learning Center' for one of my clients in the finance industry. As you can guess, this is quite a competitive space and their rankings have become somewhat stagnant so we are looking for new ways to develop original, share-worthy content for the site. So my question is, in order for them to retain the most SEO value should we develop this on a subdomain such as learning.website.com or a new domain altogether. Note: We do not want to develop this under the current site domain as it we want o only post informational content & courses and keep these pieces outside of the "sales" side of their website. Therefore, I thought the subdomain would be the best bet so that we would retain the most value for SEO... however, some of my colleagues disagree. Some vote it should be within a directory under website.com. Some say a new site & domain altogether. My vote is to place this under a subdomain such as http://learning.website.com with the idea that the site's authority will influence the root http://website.com. The argument I was provided against the subdomain was: "essentially adding a subdomain would mean you're sort of starting over again in terms of building authority.  adding a folder will ride the coattails off the already established authority." Lastly, for clarification, the current domain is set up as http://website.com so the subdomain would be http://learning.website.com, the directory would be set up as http://website.com/learning/ and a whole new domain would be http://newwebsite.com. This is for a Wordpress site. Thoughts?  All feedback is much appreciated!

  Web Design | | TinaMumm

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  My wistia videos are not being index by Google. Does anyone know what can be happening?
  

  I have the wistia site map on my robots.txt file and I also manually submit the site map to google. It shows that my videos were submitted successfully but they are not being indexed.  Thanks

  Image & Video Optimization | | bedbugsupply

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  Ecommerce or E-commerce as a Keyword?
  

  I have done a good bit of research but am not sure which word to focus on.  I feel that the trend is moving towards no hyphen but I do not have any data to justify that other than google trends.  Here is the research I found: Google Trends says ecommerce is more popular
  http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=e-commerce%2C%20ecommerce&cmpt=q Ngram says e-commerce
  https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=ecommerce%2Ce-commerce&year_start=1990&year_end=2013&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cecommerce%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ce%20-%20commerce%3B%2Cc0 Google Adwords Keyword tool says e-commerce:
  e-commerce has 33,100 monthly search volume
  ecommerce has 14,800 monthly search volume What do you think,  will ecommerce overtake e-commerce in the future monthly search volumes? Ecommerce or E-commerce?

  Algorithm Updates | | Manseo

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  How many words per page?
  

  I know this has been answered before, but I don't think it has been in about a year (and we all know how quickly the SEO landscape can change).  We're having a little debate on it right now and I'd be curious to get some feedback from the community. What is the minimum number of words you would use on a page?  Does it matter to you if it's a second tier (website.com/x) or third tier (website.com/x/y) page? It's always a tough sell on design between trying to keep it clean and trying to provide a lot of useful information.  I'd be curious what your thoughts are.   Thanks! -Adam

  Content Development | | AdamWormann

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  Break in H1 tag - big, small or no problem?
  

  Hi, I've just taken on a new ski client who offers ski instructor courses. The landing page for the keyword [ski instructor courses] was created by the web agency but with no heading tags... http://www.snowrehab.com/ski-instructor-courses Subsequently they've put them in but I've noticed the H1 tag has a break in it where 'ski' is on a separate line to 'instructor courses' Is this an issue that need to be addressed? Also I can't look up the page in the Moz on-page grader - any ideas why? Many thanks! Richard

  On-Page Optimization | | richardpatey

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  Using href lang tag for multi-regional targeting on the same page
  

  Hi, I have the site au.example.com and I ranked on google AustraliaI would like to be ranked also in Google New Zeland for the same page (au.example.com) Because they are geographically & culturally close Can I place href lang tag for both countries and present the same page The code should look like: OR should i have create a different page for New Zealand (for eample: http://au.example.com/EN-NZ) And the code will look like: What will work better or there is other solution? Hope I’m clear.. Thanks!

  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kung_fu_Panda

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  Google trends quota's limit?
  

  Hi Mozers, I've a problem with Google trends tool : after 5 searches, I reach the "quota limit". Have you the same issue? Do you use other tools "similar" to Google trends? SEMrush,...? Thank you for answers Regards, Jonathan

  Keyword Research | | JonathanLeplang

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  Keyword research tools
  

  So I went to a panel a while back that said Wordtracker is basically useless. I'm not using it as an end-all, be-all, but more for insights and context. Do you agree with that statement? The hosting company provides a keyword research tool, so I wasn't sure how seriously to take it. Have you guys been using Bing for the search data previously provided by Google's Keyword Research Tool? Do you find that to be a viable resource? Thanks.

  Keyword Research | | SSFCU

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  Best SEO agency
  

  What are peoples thoughts and ratings on SEO agencies in London. There are so many of them it is hard to understand which are the best.

  Industry News | | S_Curtis

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  Noindex xml RSS feed
  

  Hey, How can I tell search engines not to index my xml RSS feed? The RSS feed is created by Yoast on WordPress. Thanks, Luke.

  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoisyLittleMonkey

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  Bold & Italics Best Practice?
  

  Hi All, Does anyone know the official best practice use of bold and italic fonts? If I have a long page of text- 800 words + I usually bold a few sentences to allow the user to be able to read only the bold on the page, and still make sense of the article. By reading all the bold it will kind of make sense and the user gets the point of the article. This wasn't really done for SEO purposes, but so the reader gets to the bottom of the page in a reasonable amount of time, and gets all the key points and facts of the article. I was advised not to do this and to just bold/italic the keyword/phrases the article was written to rank for. I would like to know anyone else's opinion/strategy on using bold/italics effectively and within best practices. What's the official word? Thank you for your help. Ian

  On-Page Optimization | | cookie777

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  Measuring the lead that come from Organic Search
  

  Hello, One of my clients wants to know how many leads he gets from the organic search, he has Affiliate ID's for the Social media and for his affiliate websites, but now he wants to know how many leads he gets from the organic search. According to his affiliate program there are some leads without affiliate ID's but not all of them from the organic search big part of those leads are from "refer a friend program" and leads that were entered the system manually. Is there anyway in Google Analytics or any other program that can track the leads who come to my client website from searching for the brand name or concepts/long tails and registered/opened a new account ?

  Affiliate Marketing | | JonsonSwartz

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