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!


  • Hi all, I was wondering about favicon.ico and it's presence on the website. Is it important to have favicon.ico and there any SEO benefit of it? Thanks in advance!

    On-Page Optimization | | vendrocks
    0

  • I had removed /en from end of each page ( www.mydomain.com/en   become www.mydomain.com) Could it be the reason of losing keyword rankings and sessions?

    Reporting & Analytics | | Jason225
    0

  • Hey guys, just wondering, my client has 3 websites, 2 of 3 will be closed down and the domains will be permanently redirected to the 1 primary domain - however they have some high quality backlinks pointing the domains that will be redirected. How does this effective SEO? Domain One (primary - getting redesign and rebuilt) - not many backlinks
    Domain Two (will redirect to Domain One) - has quality backlinks
    Domain Three (will redirect to Domain One) - has quality backlinks When the new website is launched on Domain One I will contact the backlink providers and request they update their URL - i assume that would be the best.

    Technical SEO | | thinkLukeSEO
    0

  • Hey guys I am the marketing manager for https://www.tadibrothers.com/, i started a year ago when the website was ranked very poorly on most keywords, I got most of our nitch keywords rank well to fist page except the most important ones. backup camera 
    backup camera system
    wireless backup camera system
    rear view camera Our backlinks campaign is doing well 15 backlinks on average every month.
    on-site optimization is also good.
    Our Domain authority is better than all our competitors. Can anyone Please help me to understand why they do not rank well? Hope to hear from someone soon

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TadiBrothers
    1

  • Hi, I'm an SEO intern trying to solve a duplicate content issue on three wine retailer sites. I have read up on the Moz Blog Posts and other helpful articles that were flooded with information on how to fix duplicate content. However, I have tried using canonical tags for duplicates and redirects for expiring pages on these sites and it hasn't fixed the duplicate content problem. My Moz report indicated that we have 1000s of duplicates content pages. I understand that it's a common problem among other e-commerce sites and the way we create landing pages and apply dynamic search results pages kind of conflicts with our SEO progress. Sometimes we'll create landing pages with the same URLs as an older landing page that expired. Unfortunately, I can't go around this problem since this is how customer marketing and recruitment manage their offers and landing pages. Would it be best to nofollow these expired pages or redirect them? Also I tried to use self-referencing canonical tags and canonical tags that point to the higher authority on search results pages and even though it worked for some pages on the site, it didn't work for a lot of the other search result pages. Is there something that we can do to these search result pages that will let google understand that these search results pages on our site are original pages? There are a lot of factors that I can't change and I'm kind of concerned that the three sites won't rank as well and also drive traffic that won't convert on the site. I understand that Google won't penalize your sites with duplicate content unless it's spammy. So If I can't fix these errors -- since the company I work conducts business where we won't ever run out of duplicate content -- Is it worth going on to other priorities in SEO like Keyword research, On/Off page optimization? Or should we really concentrate on fixing these technical issues before doing anything else? I'm curious to know what you think. Thanks!

    Algorithm Updates | | drewstorys
    0

  • I have an ecommerce site. One keyword, which I use to rank #1 for on Google years ago, I'm now completely gone from the SERP's as of a couple weeks ago. I'm scratching my head here, my other keywords don't seem to have changed much recently. Around mid-March of this year, which seems to line up with the Fred update, I noticed I went from page 3 to middle of page 1 for a few days with this keyword. It was a very happy few days. Then it slipped down and down and hovered around page 6. But as of a couple weeks ago, it's now gone. Before the Fred update, I changed a bunch of product pages within the keyword category that had duplicate content because they were kits of items arranged different ways. So instead of repeating the individual item descriptions over and over in the different kits, I changed the descriptions on the kits to links to the individual items within the kits. After the Fred update, at the end of March, I set all these kit item pages that I reduced to very thin content with just links to noindex. My theory is that the Fred update reset algorithmic penalties for a couple days as it was being introduced. So the penalty of duplicate content that I may have had was lifted since I took out the duplicate content, and I made it back to page one. Then as Fred saw I now had a new penalty of thin content, I got hit and slid back down the rankings. Now that I updated the pages that had very thin content to be noindex, do you think I'll see a return of the keyword to a higher position? Or any other theories or suggestions? I remember seeing keywords disappear and come back stronger years ago, but haven't seen anything like this in a long time.

    Algorithm Updates | | head_dunce
    0

  • We have several subdomains for various markets for our business. We are in the process of moving those subdomains to subfolders on the main site. Example: boston.example.com will become example.com/boston And seattle.example.com will become example.com/seattle and so on. It's not truly a change of address, but should I use the change of address tool in GSC for all of these subdomains moving?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens
    0

  • We have implemented interstitials (pop-ups) on a website (Business Articles Website). The popups are basically used for getting leads from the website (using Signup popups). Before Popup implementation the traffic was steady, After the implementation, the traffic started to decay after a couple of weeks and due to the drop we disabled the popup from the website and initiated a force crawl and within next few weeks, we observed traffic gaining back to its normal trend. Within these timelines drop in desktop traffic was more and mobile traffic remain steady. As per Google guidelines, interstitials are more likely to be affected on mobile than desktop. But in our case, desktop traffic was hit more than mobile. So we carried out this experiment for 3 months. And we observed traffic decay and regain. Is interstitials the only culprit here (as the drop is only in desktop) or Can there be some other reasons as well for the traffic drop? bF7hc

    Algorithm Updates | | iQuanti
    1

  • How do I get an answer box for branded search? If you Google "Sagefrog Marketing group, the ansewr box in the right hand rail no longer appears. Not sure what happened. What kind of markup do I need?

    Local Listings | | Matthew.E
    0

  • Hello Mozzers! If given a list of 25 domains that are all owned by the client, and all relevant to their website, what criteria would you use to choose one? Long story short, the client sold the original domain and now needs a new one. Thanks!
    Frank

    Branding | | FrankSweeney
    0

  • What is the real impact of schema?
    I have been working in a project, a small hostel, and I decided implement structured markup, schemas.org and so on. So my question is, what the real impact/benefits of it.
    My website will perform better?
    does will get better rank ?

    Local Listings | | Roman-Delcarmen
    1

  • Hi, Moz has flagged a whole lot of pages as dupe content, but I cannot see how they qualify as such.
    Not sure if I'm allowed to post actual URLs here....happy to if I can, but I feel certain that the pages are not 90% similar. Has anyone else had this experience? ~Caro

    Moz Pro | | Caro-O
    1

  • I'm building my netlinking strategy, and I know that creation great content on my website is the first step for good linkbuilding. However, as we know, a link does only worth if he can be viewed, shared, and ammended. I'm already including email outreach for my strategy, but I'm thinking of content distribution as a method to reach an even great audience, and to get some backlinks. To be clear, I'm not saying that my backlink strategy will be based on the links received through content distribution (which will be NOFOLLOW); but I think a large audience from the aggregate websites can see my content, and maybe link to it, so I can earn backlinks from the content I'm creating on my website. Based on your experience, what do you think?

    Industry News | | manoman88
    0

  • Hi all, We have a page with "keyword" in slug like "website.com/keyword" where our homepage is "website.com". This "keyword" difficulty is very high, so every minor factor contributing here and we have noticed competitors' pages with "keyword" in URL ranking. Then we also planned to rank this page "website.com/keyword" and interlinked high, so it'll be favoured by Google which didn't happen. So may be we should reduce the interlinking to homepage and optimise this keyword page more to rank for this keyword. Still I doubt the chances of ranking this page is difficult and need much more. How to make this page ranked replacing homepage? If there are no options for this, we are planning to redirect our homepage to this page; so Google will slowly adopt it. Suggestions please. Thank you.

    Web Design | | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi Guys, We have product pages on our site which have duplicate content, the search volume for people searching for these products is very, very small. Also if we add unique content, we could face keyword cannibalisation issues with category/sub-category pages. Now based on proper SEO best practice we should add rel canonical tags from these product pages to the next relevant page. Pros Can rank for product oriented keywords but search volume is very small. Any link equity to these pages passed due to the rel canonical tag would be very small, as these pages barely get any links. Cons Time and effort involved in adding rel canonical tags. Even if we do add rel canonical tags, if Google doesn't deem them relevant then they might ignore causing duplicate content issues. Time and effort involved in making all the content unique - not really worth it - again very minimal searchers. Plus if we do make it unique, then we face keyword cannibalisation issues. -- What do you think would be the optimal solution to this? I'm thinking just implementing a: Across all these product based pages. Keen to hear thoughts? Cheers.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seowork214
    0

  • We launched a new site and Google Search Console is showing 39 pages have been indexed.  When I perform a Site:myurl.com search I see over 100 pages that appear to be indexed.   Which is correct and why is there a discrepancy? Also, Search Console Page Index count started at 39 pages on 5/21 and has not increased even though we have hundreds of pages to index.  But I do see more results each week from Site:psglearning.com My site is https://wwww.psglearning.com

    Technical SEO | | pdowling
    0

  • Not sure about you all, but I’m loving the new Moz Site Crawler.  However, I was noticing that it is identifying a huge amount of pages as duplicate content. There are about 30,000 pages in this website, with that said we’ve had to make many templates to make the site scalable.  Additionally a url rule was lost which caused a significant amount of duplicate pages to be created.  I am working through using the moz crawl tool to identify duplicate pages but noticing many pages under “Affected Pages,” are actually unique content pages with initial content that is duplicate. I read that Moz flags any pages with 90% or more content overlapping content or code.  My theory for this is that some templates that are too similar, to the point that Moz reads them as duplicative.  Has this happened for anyone else? In addition, if Moz is flagging these similar pages as duplicate content, do we surmise that Google bots are having the same issue? We have seen issues with rankings as it pertains to the actual duplicate pages but hadn't experienced issues across the unique pages, they are hyperlocal pages so we are able to see rankings quite easily.

    Moz Bar | | HZseo
    0

  • Hello, All, In April, two months ago, we caught a hack on a client's website. It created about 40 pages in what looked to be a black hat link tactic. We removed the pages, resubmitted the sitemap.xml (it reprocessed) and ran it through screaming frog to confirm all the pages were gone, but the forty pages still show up in the search results for a site search. We have both the www. and non www. version of sites claimed and set a preference. Nothing is awry with the robots.text. We're not really sure what to do to resolve it. We asked Google to recrawl (fetch) the site. I'm not sure what's going on with it. The website's name is fortisitsolutions.com The site search bringing up the pages from the hack is below. site:www.fortisitsolutions.com Any ideas?

    On-Page Optimization | | Cazarin-Interactive
    0

  • I signed up for the trial, and i dont plan on renewing the service at this time. I cancelled it as soon as i received the email notification for renewal, will i be able to receive a refund? thanks.

    Product Support | | INFINIT_C
    0

  • I noticed that most of the errors would not be occurring if Moz's tool followed the rules implemented in sites robots.txt. Has anyone else seen this problem and do you know if Moz will fix this?

    Moz Bar | | jamestown
    0

  • Hey folks, So I'm aware of the importance of consistent citations, and the mayhem call tracking numbers have been known to cause in regards to that in that past. So just wanted some up to date clarification on these two things: Local SEO isn't strictly speaking a big deal for us as we supply a software and as such are technically global. I'm presuming consistent citations are still worth aiming for though, and will help increase general authority as well? Let me know if I'm totally wrong about that! What's the best practise set up for call tracking, given that your main NAP number you'd obviously want hardcoded somewhere, alongside showing your dynamic numbers to relevant visitors. Apologies for any ignorance, as always any help and advice is muchos appreciato.

    Local Website Optimization | | Zoope
    1

  • Good morning all, Does anyone have the recording for Friday, June 9th's webinar? I was at an off-site event that day and couldn't listen in. The recording isn't listed in the moz.com/webinars section. Any help is appreciated, thank you!

    SEO Learn Center | | Corporate_Synergies
    1

  • We are using Canonical tags at almost all the pages of our eCommerce website. We have various sorting options like "High to Low", "Best Sellers", etc., due to this page URLs get change with some dynamic URL parameters. To avoid duplicity, we are using canonical tag on each page which point to the original url. Also, we are using IBM Coremetrics to track traffic and conversions, but to measure referral traffic in Coremetrics, we have to add tracking parameters in the URL. So, while link building we need to share URLs with Coremetrics tracking parameters in the URL, but the canonical of this page is pointing to the original URL. Suppose we have a Page that needs to be shared with Coremetrics tag: domain.com/category-name/?cm_mmc=Referral_-xyz--izUPF8VmRng--3 This Page has the canonical tag pointing to the original url: domain.com/category-name/ My question is if the URL: domain.com/category-name?cm_mmc=Referral_-xyz--izUPF8VmRng--3 got shared on other websites, will it pass link juice to the original URL: domain.com/category-name.

    Affiliate Marketing | | Ramendra.Singh
    0

  • Hi, We've ramped up our PR since 2-3 weeks and have been mentioned in a lot of publications including a big name like Forbes. But the OSE moz tool still shows zero backlinks to our domain. 
    How much time does it take for it to get updated? Do I have to do something manually to make it happen? 
    Please let me know

    Link Explorer | | ImranZafar7
    0

  • As a recent Moz subscriber, I'm trying to up my game in terms of inbound marketing.  One of the most pressing tasks is to add json-ld across all of my WordPress sites. What is the best way to do this? Should I use the technique set out here: https://moz.com/blog/using-google-tag-manager-to-dynamically-generate-schema-org-json-ld-tags Or should I use one of these plugins? https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/schema/ https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-structuring-markup/ I want to get this right so any guidance would be gratefully received.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | treb0r
    0

  • Hi everyone, we noticed while doing last month's reports that even the best performing campaigns have a few keywords that slipped - some up to 10 positions down. We know keywords fluctuate every month, but May was just a weird month for rankings. While looking at possible issues that caused this, we noticed that these campaigns' clicks have gone up. So while keywords have gone down, their visitors seemed to be on the rise. Is there a correlation? Maybe Google saw an increase in visitors and decided something's up and lowered the rankings (this sounds ridiculous - sorry! May just be pure luck, but thought I'd ask anyway). Has anyone seen a drop in their rankings for May also? I checked everywhere, and I don't think there has been a major update going on. Thanks!

    Algorithm Updates | | nhhernandez
    2

  • What is a reasonable length of time to expect 404s to be resolved in Search Console?  There was a mass of 404s that were built up from directory changes and filtering URLs that have been fixed.  These have all been fixed but of course there are some that slipped the net.  How long is it reasonable to expect the old 404s that don't have any links to drop away from Search Console?  New 404s are still being reported over 4 months later.  'First detected' is always showing as a date later than the fixed 404's date. Is this reasonable, i've never seen this being so resilient and not clean up like this?  We manually fix these 404s and like popcorn more turn up. Just to add the bulk of 404s came into existence around a year ago and left for around 8 months.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards
    0

  • So I came across this idea on YouTube: Indexing your backlinks. I understand its not enough to just have google crawl your pages - you want them indexed. So, if you create backlinks on say a blog or social profile, will it benefit you to have them submitted to other popular blogs, news / pr sites, video channels - of which may be unrelated - for the sole purpose of getting them not just crawled but indexed? There are SEO companies that I have seen that claim they do exactly that (publish your backlinks all over the web - making backlinks for backlinks) but in reality is this a good thing or a bad thing? Could this help rankings or hurt them?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | momentum_technology_services
    0

  • Hello everyone, I was wondering if I can get some different opinion about having a blog feed on the homepage. Image, title, excerpt I have several feeds on mine which I do not believe it hurts and has helped my rankings but I wanted some superior SEO brains to weigh in. https://www.brightvessel.com Is it good for SEO? When would it be bad? How many posts would be considered too much? On my blog, have the most recent posts which have some of the same feeds. Which is making me question the duplicated content. https://www.brightvessel.com/blog/ Thanks! Judd

    On-Page Optimization | | brightvessel
    0

  • I was wondering feedback and input on creating long tail keywords associated with a question.  With addition a  landing page that addresses that problem with a few products. Using PPC to bid on long tail keywords,  I would set a campaign for long tail keywords and have multiple ad groups with a close knit and similar sentences like "Top 10 highest rated summer dresses" and "Popular dresses for the summer weather." My landing page would address the question with a list of products like a buzz feed article format. 1. As it is on a subdomain blog with an add to cart feature, would interlink building be helpful in exchanging link juice. 2. Bidding on a long tail keyword is cheaper, but will they result in higher conversions since its hyper-specific question?  And since it is a long tail keyword sentence. 2-3 smaller keywords between the sentence would also pick up on to Google search?

    Paid Search Marketing | | petmkt
    0

  • Good Morning Moz peeps, I am new to this but intending on starting off right! I have heard a wealth of advice that the "post name" permalink structure is the best one to go with however... i am wondering about a "custom structure" combing the "post name" following the below example structure: Www.professionalwarrior.com/bodybuilding/%postname/ Where "professional" and "bodybuilding" is my focus/theme/keywords of my blog that i want ranked. Thanks a mill, RO

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RawkingOut
    0

  • hello there, While Adding My website in Google Analytics,It is not Showing India Country in list. What i can do to add My account in it?? Have requested Google, But Got No response.any body can help please . Thanx in advance,
    Falguni

    Reporting & Analytics | | iepl5
    0

  • Hi, I work for a gifting company, and so Christmas is hot on the agenda right now. I was wondering what you would recommend when it comes to gifting categories for keywords such as 'Christmas gifts for Mum'? I have a 'gifts for mum' category for all year round, but to rank for Christmas related keywords I will have to include these keywords on this page as soon as possible and this would make the content on the page seem slightly irrelevant. I do not really want to have separate pages, but is this the only way to rank for this?

    Keyword Research | | Lisaangel
    0

  • I'm looking for articles/evidence that if you have a high ranking organic listing that it will improve your chances of being in the local pack.  I came across this about a year ago, but I have had trouble finding articles to support this. Does anybody know of any recent articles and/or studies that show a correlation of high organic listings and local pack visibility? Thanks!

    Local Listings | | BigChad2
    0

  • I was doing some KW research for a client and noticed something interesting with regard to Yelp and Justia. For a search on DWI Attorneys, they each had over 300 character meta descriptions showing on the SERP without truncating. Everyone else was either truncated or within limit of roughly 160 characters. Obviously if there is a way to get something other than a list to show that way you can own some real estate. Would love to hear from some of you Mozzers on this. Here are two images that should assist. Best Edit: I found one that was not a directory site and it appears it is Google doing it. The site has no meta description for the home page and this is what is being pulled by Google. There are 327 characters here! The truncation marks are showing it being pulled from different parts of the page. Image is Killeen DWI Attorney. NOTE None of these are clients, etc. I also changed the cities so this is a general search. zAQpA qZ9KI 06p7U

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertFisher
    1

  • Hello,  recently came across a company that has been paying people directly for reviews. I of course do not recommend this and realized the ethical implications and even the lawsuits that can come from this, but does Google have a manual penalty for fake reviews or do they just algorithmically discount ones that raise red flags? I have never really had to worry about this in the past.  I know you can flag fake reviews to them on an individual basis, but does anyone have history of knowing specific situations where a company was manually punished for doing this?  Just curious and I kind of wanted to give them strong documentation to knock it off.  Thanks in advance.

    Reviews and Ratings | | jeremyskillings
    0

  • I work for a company that makes an important product in a category. The company has a website (www.company.org); the product is at www.company.org/product. We recently (early May) redesigned and rearchitected the product site for SEO purposes. The company site talks about the category a bit (imagine the Colgate site; it talks about "toothpaste" a bit). The blog (blog.company.org/product) also talks about the category quite a bit (and links to the company site of course). The product is a major product in the category, among the top 3. The site and blog have been around for 15+ years. The site has appx. a billion backlinks, most branded links to the product. It's in the top 50 highest ranked sites among all sites on the internet in the ahrefs rank index. Imagine you are searching for our product category, "category". If you search for "category" in Bing today, my company's site is the 3rd result, and it's the 1st result from a company that makes a product in this category. If you search for "category" in Google today, our site is not in the top 150 results. In fact, the site keeps dropping out of Google's index. (See attached for what that looks like in the search console.) What might cause a site to jump from "ranked in top 10" to "not ranked" in Google -- back and forth every couple of days? Penalties? Our recent (early May) site rearchitecture? We're not making giant, index-shifting changes every day. wE0Bn

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno
    0

  • Hey everyone! Had a quick question for ya'. Does anyone know if there are currently SEO tactics that are in place to help a company's Facebook page rank in their search bar? For example: When I search "Idaho Auctions" into the facebook search bar, there's a multitude of results - ranging from groups, to events, to businesses. How do these get ranked above each other?

    Branding | | TaylorRHawkins
    1

  • Recently a client of mine had a new site developed and had changed their domain, so the old URL is now redirecting to the new URL. They want to be able to track referral traffic in the analytics so we can decipher how much direct traffic is coming in from people typing in the old URL. Is this possible and if so, can I have a guide in doing so? Thanks!

    Reporting & Analytics | | DigMS
    0

  • As someone that recently moved from an agency to a position in-house, I am appalled at the lack of support and resources for users of Moz Local that are NOT connected to an agency partner. Without a public phone number, a support rep, and nobody manning the chat... how are we supposed to get answers for the service that we paid good money for? I would like to know how to add an alternate address to the duplicate are of our listing account. We have an old address that appears everywhere but is not showing in the duplicate listing report and I'm not sure how to add it. Any help would be appreciated. A public phone number and/or tech support rep would be even better! Bryan Mull
    Isolator Fitness

    Moz Local | | Isolatorfitness
    0

  • Hey Moz, So we are trying to figure out weather it is the same if we have Hreflang for "US-ES" vs "US-PR", IF we do "US-PR" for Puerto Rico for its own links we then have to create 3 parts to our site, PR Spanish PR English US Spanish We looked at Apple as an example and they had a "Latin America" for their Hreflang and labeled everything has either "es-419" is that the same concept as having just "us-es" for Puerto Rico? ( see attached screenshot ) We are trying to figure out what would be more effective and weather or not "US-ES" search results will appear for Puerto Rico also. PZVwg16

    Technical SEO | | uBreakiFix
    0

  • Yoast keeps pestering me about Cornerstone Content. Is it really a ranking factor? Ryan

    Content Development | | drdougweiss
    0

  • Hey guys, Just saying hello!

    Link Building | | digital-trends
    0

  • When making content pages to a specific page; should you index it straight away in GSC or let Google crawl it naturally?

    On-Page Optimization | | Jacksons_Fencing
    0

  • Hi all, Today I have gone through this "Silo" concept where we need to build 2nd hierarchy level pages and then lower hierarchy pages further to rank good for related terms of "keyword(s)". But I wonder, is it real? the so called Silo structure? Google may consider that we are trying trick if we create multiple pages (doorway pages) targeting same keyword. And one of my competitors is having too many 2nd hierarchy level pages against this Silo structure and even the homepage rank may dilute by contributing to the so many pages. But their web pages rank good for the keywords they chosen by creating multiple landing pages. These are contrary to each other. How it works in real? Thanks

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz
    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.