Moz Q&A is closed.
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.
Latest Questions
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De-indexing product "quick view" pages
Hi there, The e-commerce website I am working on seems to index all of the "quick view" pages (which normally occur as iframes on the category page) as their own unique pages, creating thousands of duplicate pages / overly-dynamic URLs. Each indexed "quick view" page has the following URL structure: www.mydomain.com/catalog/includes/inc_productquickview.jsp?prodId=89514&catgId=cat140142&KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=475&width=700 where the only thing that changes is the product ID and category number. Would using "disallow" in Robots.txt be the best way to de-indexing all of these URLs? If so, could someone help me identify how to best structure this disallow statement? Would it be: Disallow: /catalog/includes/inc_productquickview.jsp?prodID=* Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Page ranking in .com but not in .co.uk
Hi there, I tried to search the Q&A but couldn't find any answers to my issue. We have a page that is ranking #2 for the term "translation memory" in google.com, but it doesn't show in Google.co.uk. This has been like this for weeks now. We are not targeting any specific country in GWT. Does anyone know a possible explanation for this? Thank you.
Search Behavior | | SDLOnlineChannel0 -
Image Indexing Issue by Google
Hello All,My URL is: www.thesalebox.comI have Submitted my image Sitemap in google webmaster tool on 10th Oct 2013,Still google could not indexing any of my web images,Please refer my sitemap - www.thesalebox.com/AppliancesHomeEntertainment.xml and www.thesalebox.com/Hardware.xmland my webmaster status and image indexing status are below, Can you please help me, why my images are not indexing in google yet? is there any issue? please give me suggestions?Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
New "Static" Site with 302s
Hey all, Came across a bit of an interesting challenge recently, one that I was hoping some of you might have had experience with! We're currently in the process of a website rebuild, for which I'm really excited. The new site is using Markdown to create an entirely static site. Load-times are fantastic, and the code is clean. Life is good, apart from the 302s. One of the weird quirks I've realized is that with oldschool, non-server-generated page content is that every page of the site is an Index.html file in a directory. The resulting in a www.website.com/page-title will 302 to www.website.com/page-title/. My solution off the bat has been to just be super diligent and try to stay on top of the link profile and send lots of helpful emails to the staff reminding them about how to build links, but I know that even the best laid plans often fail. Has anyone had a similar challenge with a static site and found a way to overcome it?
Technical SEO | | danny.wood1 -
Does having a ? on the end of your URL affect your SEO?
I have some redirects that were done with at "?" at the end of the URL to include google coding (i.e. you click on an adwords link and the google coding follows the redirected link). When there is not coding to follow the link just appears as "filename.html?". Will that affect us negatively SEO-wise? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock1 -
Missing campaign after billing update
My campaign is missing after I updated my billing info. Why would that be?
Product Support | | jaspmiller0 -
Spanish equivalent of MOZ? need help with understanding Google.es
I try to keep up to date with everything SEO to ensure my sites rank well.. marblerenovation.com & Trailersafe.co.uk I now have a spanish site that I am having trouble ranking well for clima2000egara.es I have recently found out (by asking our lovely moz community) that googles algorithms are not rolled our world wide. SO I have no idea where I am at with Google.es. Does anyone know how I can find out at what stage google.es is at? and what the last update was? and whether there is an equilalent community like Moz for Spain? I am fluent spanish so the language won't be a problem.. Thanks in advance for all your help
Industry News | | david.smith.segarra0 -
Weird back link showed in moz crawl
Some time ago somebody from this site: http://dianibeach.com created a weird link to our site which had on the end db. Later we have realized that the link was coming from every footer on each page. I believe that the back links from footer does not have realy value and even the more of them the less value. We have asked the guy to remove that links as I thought it might harm our site more then help. Now I I was very surprised to find this link in moz crawl error as second top page on our site in current index??? Can somebody explain how is this possible?? The most ridiculous thing is that when I click on that link it realy opens our site! How is that possible, what is it? This is the link: http://villasdiani.com/?db Thank you very much for any help with this
Moz Bar | | Rebeca10 -
Robots.txt, does it need preceding directory structure?
Do you need the entire preceding path in robots.txt for it to match? e.g: I know if i add Disallow: /fish to robots.txt it will block /fish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Milian
/fish.html
/fish/salmon.html
/fishheads
/fishheads/yummy.html
/fish.php?id=anything But would it block?: en/fish
en/fish.html
en/fish/salmon.html
en/fishheads
en/fishheads/yummy.html
**en/fish.php?id=anything (taken from Robots.txt Specifications)** I'm hoping it actually wont match, that way writing this particular robots.txt will be much easier! As basically I'm wanting to block many URL that have BTS- in such as: http://www.example.com/BTS-something
http://www.example.com/BTS-somethingelse
http://www.example.com/BTS-thingybob But have other pages that I do not want blocked, in subfolders that also have BTS- in, such as: http://www.example.com/somesubfolder/BTS-thingy
http://www.example.com/anothersubfolder/BTS-otherthingy Thanks for listening0 -
How to find affiliate sites linking to a competitor website?
Hello here, I am trying to understand the best way to find sites that are affiliate of a competitor, through link research. Typically our competitor's affiliates link to our competitor website via any of the following links: http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp?SID=[aff_id]&LID=[link_id] http://click.linksynergy.com/link?id=[aff+id]&offerid=[off_id]&type=2&murl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.musicnotes.com%2Fsheetmusic%2Fmtd.asp%3Fppn%3D[item_id] The first link looks much easier to find, so I have tried to find the first kind of links with Google by using the "link:" clause as follows: link:http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp Or, similarly, by using Open Site Explorer. But I always get 0 results! It is weird because I know there are thousands of affiliates out there with the same tracking code. How's that possible? Why does it look impossible to find the sites I am looking for? Would you suggest any different approach? Any ideas, suggestions and thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance. Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Session IDs and crawlers
Hello here. When we setup our e-commerce website virtualsheetmusic.com to allow session IDs to be assigned to users back in 2001, we decided to not assign them if a bot called the page. We wanted to be sure that bots, which officially can't store cookies, wouldn't have found links containing every time different session IDs . Just to better clarify, the way session IDs are generated on our system, is the standard way: if users have cookies enabled, a cookie called PHPSESSID is created which stores the session cookie. If the cookies are not enabled, session IDs are added automatically by the system to any link URL included on the page which could potentially cause the bots to find every time different link URLs with the session ID appended to them. Now, after 12 years, we are considering if this is still a valuable solution, or can it be detrimental or negative in some way? What are your thoughts about this issue? Thank you in advance for any thoughts. Fab.
Algorithm Updates | | fablau0 -
Best Directories to Get Listed On?
Hello, I'm looking for a list of the best, most trusted, SEO friendly directories to list my company on. Can you guys please provide some directories that you have seen help increase your rankings and also drive targeted traffic? No Black Hat directories, only high quality ones. Thanks!
Branding | | Prime850 -
Using Amazon Product Reviews on my Website
Does anyone know if I can use Amazon Reviews for products that I put on Amazon? I "own" the listing on Amazon because we are the exclusive manufacturers of this product so the review is only referring to products that were sold through our company. Thanks,
Image & Video Optimization | | EcomLkwd0 -
Duplicate page issue
Hi Guys We were recently having trouble with an excessive amount of duplicate page titles. So I asked our web company, at a reasonable expense, to fix the issue which they did. How ever I since note that the issue has returned (please see the attached graph. Could anyone explain to me why this might have happened? I t would be great to have some insight before i go back to them. Thanks again for your help Regards Pete Capture.jpg
Moz Bar | | Hardley1110 -
Will ReDesigning my website negatively affect SEO?
I currently have a one page website which lists all the company information on one page [domain name is www. bwd . co . za]. It uses javascript for navigation. My challenge is that the layout is outdated and I would like to update it with a high quality WordPress theme which will not be a one-pager. Currently on Open Site Explorer the website has a domain authority of 30/100 and page authority of 41/100. I've worked hard to push the numbers to get to where they are hence I'm a bit concerned. Will re-designing my website negatively affect SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | bonganig0 -
Multiple stores for the same niche
I started developing a new niche of products in my country about 3 years ago. That's when I opened my first store. Everything went fine, until a year ago, when someone I thought was a friend secretly stole my idea and made his own competing store. I was pretty upset when I caught him and decided to make it as difficult as possible for him, so I made another 4 stores, trying to get him as low as possible in the search results. The new sites have similar products (although not 100% identical), slightly different titles, images and prices. They look different and are built on different e-commerce platforms. They are all hosted on the same server, have roughly the same backlinks, use the same Google account for Analytics, have the same support phone numbers etc etc. I wasn't thinking that I'm doing something fishy, so I didn't try to hide anything. Trouble is that those sites, after doing fine for a few months, dropped like bricks in the search results, almost to the point that they can't be found at all. At the moment, the only site that ranks relatively well is the original one and a couple of secondary pages with no importance from one of the other sites. How did this happen? Does Google have something against this practice? Did they take action by themselves when they realized that I was trying to monopolize this niche, or did my competitor report me for some kind of webspam? And more importantly, what do I do now? Do I shutdown all but my original site and 301 redirect users to it from the others? Can I report my competitor for engaging in the same practice? (He fought back and now he has 3-4 sites, some of which still rank kind of OKish, also he has no idea about web development, SEO or marketing, he just crudely copies what I do and is slowly but surely starting to do better than me).
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pandronic0 -
Why is redirecting all broken pages to the homepage is a bad idea?
I have a site where all broken pages are redirected to the homepage. I've been told that it's a bad idea in terms of SEO. I just can't figure out why 🙂
Content Development | | VinceWicks0 -
Does Google's algorithm work the same in every country?
I can't help but feel this is a silly question! but does Google algorithm work exactly the same throughout all countries? I run a few sites in the UK and a couple in Spain but can't help but feel that my Spanish sites are harder to rank for. The sites that rank the best are business directories in Spain... whereas here in the UK you'd be lucky to find one on page one..
International SEO | | david.smith.segarra0 -
Should I watermark my product images
I am in the process of creating new images for my products to use on my website. Are there any advantages or disadvantages of watermarking each image? Is there an SEO impact good or bad? I am aware that filename and Alt tags are important, but am unsure if google dislikes watermarked images.
On-Page Optimization | | BipSum1 -
Redirecting non www site
Hello Ladies and Gentlemen. I 100% agree with the redirecting of the non www domain name. After all we see so many times, especially in MOZ how the two different domains contain different links, different DA and of course different PA. So I have posed the question to our IT company, "How would we go about redirecting our non www domain to the www version?", "Where would we do that?", " we cant do the redirect on our webserver because the website is listed as an IP address, not a domain name, so would we do the redirect somewhere at GoDaddy?" who is currently maintain our DNS record So here is the response from IT: " I would setup a CNAME record in DNS (GoDaddy), such that no matter if you go to the bare domain, or the www, you end up in the same place. As for SEO, having a 301 redirect for your bare domain isn't necessary, because both the bare domain and the www are the same domain. 301 is a redirect for "permanently moved" and is common when you change domain names. Using the bare domain or the www are NOT DIFFERENT DOMAINS, so the 301 would not be accurate, and you'd be telling engines you've moved, when you haven't - which may negatively impact your rank. It sounds to me that IT is NOT recommending the redirect. How can this be? Or are we talking about two different things? Will the redirect cause the melt down as the IT company suggests? Or do they nut understand SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davenport-Tractor0 -
How to setup google analytics snapshot
Hello all! I get these awesome emails from google about a specific site. But I am not sure how, and why. But I like the data it generates. I am uploading a screen shot. They are called Analytics' Snapshot. My question is basically: How to setup google analytics snapshot to report on a specific website in my account? Because I have several I track - Over 40 domains, but I am mostly concered with like 4 -5 of them, I would like to report on. Thanks Mozers!! GJF3iQX
Search Behavior | | smstv0
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