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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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Latest Questions

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  • JohnHuynh


    Hi, I have a primary website and beside that I also have some secondary websites with have same contents with primary website. This lead to duplicate content errors. Because of having many URL duplicate contents, so I want to use the robots.txt file to prevent google index the secondary websites to fix the duplicate content issue. Is it ok? Thank for any help!

    On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh
    0
  • MannixSEO


    Are the MozCon Slides available yet?

    Industry Events | | MannixSEO
    0
  • Charlessipe


    I was wondering if the authority of individual pages is diluted when you add new pages (in Google's view). Suppose your site had 100 pages and you added 100 new pages (without getting any new links). Would the average authority of the original pages significantly decrease and result in a drop in search traffic to the original pages? Do you worry that adding more pages will hurt pages that were previously published?

    Technical SEO | | Charlessipe
    0
  • RCF


    Since June 13, 2013, the number of organic search queries containing a plus sign (+) has gone up over 1,000% compared to the previous period on my site in Google Analytics. These plus signs appear to be taking the place of spaces in these search queries (i.e. "word1+word2+word3"). This appears to be almost (or completely) Google organic traffic, not other search engines. Since I highly doubt searcher behavior would change so suddenly, I'm trying to figure out why Google is replacing spaces with plus signs. Is anyone else seeing this? Any ideas?

    Reporting & Analytics | | RCF
    0
  • JohnHuynh


    Hello, I have use the http://copyscape.com to check the duplicate content and found that my website have some errors duplicate contents with other competitors website. But a problem is, I could not define the reason of this (my website copied the competitors website or they copied of mine) To solve this issues, should I modify a unique my contents (this is difficult) or anyone have a good solution for this problem? Please give me advice? Thank you!

    Link Building | | JohnHuynh
    0
  • AC_Pro


    Hey fellow Mozzers, Just got back from Mozcon and enjoyed getting to know a handful of you. I do in house SEO for a B2B wholesaler. We have a B2C website directory for homeowners to locate contractors to work on their home. On the site we have a products section which includes tech specs but not pricing. Our contractors have been asking us to add the ability to purchase their items online, so we are wanting to add a B2B sub-domain (store.domain.com) to our website for the contractors to purchase products online. We do not want consumers to be able to purchase the items and will have pricing behind a log in. I have a few questions that I'm hoping you might be able to answer: 1. What would be the best practice to not have duplicate content errors with products that are listed on both sites? Should we rel-canonical items shown on both domains or do something else?
    2. We are not against having the new site be crawled, but will Google be upset/ding rankings because pricing is behind a log-in? Are there certain best-practices for B2B ecommerce sites?
    3. Do you know of any other sites that have done this/do you have any recommendations on how to best implement this?

    Web Design | | AC_Pro
    0
  • Gordian


    I have read that loading images from a subdomain of your site instead of the main domain will give you speed benefits on load time. Has anyone actually seen that to be the case? Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | Gordian
    0
  • LeverSEO


    Still waiting to look at the analytics for the timeframe, but we do know that the top keyword dropped on or about April 23, 2012 from the #1 ranking in Google - something they had held for years, and traffic dropped over 15% that month and further slips since. Just looked at Google Webmaster Tools and see over 2.3MM backlinks from "sister" compainies from their footers.  One has over 700,000, the rest about 50,000 on average and all going to the home page, and all using the same anchor text, which is both a branded keyword, as well as a generic keyword, the same one they ranked #1 for. They are all "nofollows" but we are trying to confirm if the nofollow was before or after they got hit, but regardless, Google has found them. To also add, most of sites are from their international sites, so .de, .pl, .es, .nl and other Eurpean country extensions. Of course based on this, I would assume the footer links and timing, was result of the Penguin update and spam. The one issue, is that the other US "sister" companies listed in the same footer, did not see a drop, in fact some had increase traffic.  And one of them has the same issue with the brand name, where it is both a brand name and a generic keyword.  The only note that I will make about any of the other domains is that they do not drive the traffic this one used to. There is at least a 100,000+ visitor difference among the main site, and this additional sister sites also listed in the footer. I think I'm on the right track with the footer links, even though the other sites that have the same footer links do not seem to be suffering as much, but wanted to see if anyone else had a different opinion or theory. Thanks!
    Jen Davis

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LeverSEO
    0
  • ZAG


    Do special characters, such as the "&" symbol or a "," in title tags and meta descriptions negatively affect your ranking in search engines? Any feedback is much appreciated. Thank you!

    Technical SEO | | ZAG
    1
  • OMGPyrmont


    I manage a directory site with hundreds of thousands of indexed pages. I want to remove a significant number of these pages from the index using NOINDEX and have 2 questions about this: 1. Is NOINDEX the most effective way to remove large numbers of pages from Google's index? 2. The IA of our site means that we will have thousands of internal links pointing to these noindexed pages if we make this change. Is it a problem to link to pages with a noindex directive on them? Thanks in advance for all responses.

    Technical SEO | | OMGPyrmont
    0
  • irvingw


    https://www.moz.com/  has an invalid cert guys This Connection is Untrusted You have asked Firefox to connect
    securely to www.moz.com, but we can't confirm that your connection is secure.
              Normally, when you try to connect securely,
    sites will present trusted identification to prove that you are
    going to the right place. However, this site's identity can't be verified. What Should I Do? If you usually connect to
    this site without problems, this error could mean that someone is
    trying to impersonate the site, and you shouldn't continue. www.moz.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is only valid for moz.com (Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain) If you understand what's going on, you
    can tell Firefox to start trusting this site's identification.
    Even if you trust the site, this error could mean that someone is
    tampering with your connection.
              Don't add an exception unless
    you know there's a good reason why this site doesn't use trusted identification.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw
    1
  • AmberHanson


    I thought all Mozcon attendees were going to get access to Moz Analytics even after the convention was over. I can't seem to find were to access it from my campaigns manager dashboard and the Analytics landing page says im on queue to get access.

    Moz Bar | | AmberHanson
    0
  • Robertnweil1


    Hello guys, One of our clients is planning to have a new landing page for any users hitting the site for the first time. (returning users will still see the current homepage based on cookies ... in other words, the site would technically have 2 home pages). According to this client, they are planning to do something like this: https://www.websitename.com/ (for returning visitors) https://www.websitename.com/newuser (for first time visitors) Our instinct is that is not great to have 2 home pages (that would affect the SEO campaign we are managing for this company) and we are not sure how to handle this. That's why we would appreciate your opinion regarding this topic: From an SEO perspective, do you think this is a good idea? If not, what would you guys do differentiate first-time visitors vs returning visitors without affecting SEO? Maybe just a pop-up? Thanks in advance for your help !

    Web Design | | Robertnweil1
    0
  • Anthony1982


    Hi I'm tidying up my site and had a few questions ref: use of headings. 1. My previous SEO company use to reduce the font size for headings, this seems a bit black hat to me ? Is this okay? For example heading text as font 6 and paragraph text as font 12. 2. If my key search term is 'driving lessons in London' and my second key search term is 'Driving Schools London', Is it better to have my H1 as: Driving Lessons London & H2 as: Driving Schools London OR H1: Quality Driving Lessons in London by driveJohnson's H2: How our driving school in London can help you: In my opinion the 2nd one reads better and i notice other companies doing it the second way, the first way i mentioned seems a bit old school and doesn't read well ? 3. Is it worth using H3 & H4 ? Can you use H2 more than once ? 4. Lastly could i have two key search terms within one heading, as long as the paragraph underneath is about the heading. For example: H1: Our driving school in London offers cheap driving lessons The two keywords search phrases here for me would be driving schools London and driving lessons london. If someone could get back to me, i would be very grateful.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anthony1982
    0
  • Bio-RadAbs


    I just ran the wordtracker tool and noticed something interesting. The tool didn't pick up our meta description. It's strange as our meta descriptions appear in organic search results and Moz never reported missing meta descriptions.After reviewing other pages,  I noticed our meta description tag is written as the following: name="Description" content=" I never thought about this, but are meta tags case sensitive? Should it be written as: name="description" content=" Thoughts?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs
    0
  • NikitaG


    Hello I have a website that I am trying to SEO optimise.
    The current structure of the site is that all pages are linked directly after the domain:
    example:   www.domain.com**/page01**  www.domain.com**/page02** The website is however logically organised in the following form:
    www.domain.com**/page01/page02** Sometimes the parenting goes to 3 levels: (please help me with the right term here) Domain
    ↳ Page001
         ↳ Page002
              ↳Page003 My question is: should keep the current structure, or is it worth the effort to re-link the website in a parented way. Are there any benefites to one or the other, and could you point to some video tutorials or documentation to read. BqoDAsx.jpg DMMIC5o.jpg

    Technical SEO | | NikitaG
    0
  • lisarein


    I have read through other postings about this issue, but since I have over 400 of these errors I am interested in seeing how to fix this issue quickly. Does anyone have a ideas or suggetions? Thanks, Lisa

    Technical SEO | | lisarein
    0
  • RandyEpp


    A company I am working with has been posting pictures and links to their website in the comments section of Houzz articles. I notice many companies have been doing this in general. While it generates decent amounts of traffic, I am wondering if google sees 30 links coming from article comments that it will deem that as spam? My gut tells me to send these comment links to the Houzz member profile, then direct them to your own website. Thoughts? ***Anyone in home design, decor, etc. should really get involved there. Fantastic source of business for professional in that field.

    Link Building | | RandyEpp
    0
  • Viewpoints


    I have multiple pages that I do not want to be indexed (and they are currently not indexed, so that's great). They don't have meta descriptions on them and I'm wondering if it's worth my time to go in and insert them, since they should hypothetically never be shown. Does anyone have any experience with this? Thanks! The reason this is a question is because one member of our team was linking to this page through Facebook to send people to it and noticed random text on the page being pulled in as the description.

    Technical SEO | | Viewpoints
    0
  • KempRugeLawGroup


    My client is a Law Firm just outside of Tampa, and I am trying to get her keyword phrase: "Tampa Car Accident Attorney" in the top 3. One of the strategies I want to use is to create a scholarship for "Tampa Area Students and how a car accident impacted their life" or "Tampa Area Students and how they think they can decrease car accidents." (that's still be worked on).  Once the scholarship is created, I want to put it on our Tampa Car Accident Attorney page, and get other companies to link to that page. My question is what links should we go after? Because that will tailor it to who we give the scholarship to. We could give it to a University of South Florida student, and get one .edu link. We could do the same thing for the University of Tampa, or Stetson Law School, but we'd only be getting one link from each of them. If we set it up for high schoolers, we can get more links from the community and schools, but I'm not sure high school .edu links matter all that much. Is 10 high school .edu links as important as 1 college .edu link? I don't know. If anyone has had an experience with this or any insights, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

    Link Building | | KempRugeLawGroup
    1
  • GregB123


    Setting up canonical tags for an old site. I really need advice on that darn backslash / at the end of the homepage URL. We have incoming links to the homepage as http://www.mysite.com (without the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/ (with the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/index.html I know that there should be 301 redirects to just one version, but I need to know more about the canonical tags... Which should the canonical tag be??? (without the backslash) or (with the backslash) Thanks for your help! 🙂

    Technical SEO | | GregB123
    0
  • apartmentGin


    I am working on an e-commerce website, and our CEO is sure that having target="_blank" in internal search result is boosting the conversion (not sure, but it's not an issue at the moment). The problem is that Google Analytics sees all URLs visited from search results as entrances/direct visits, hence the Booking Funnel Tracking does not work as it was supposed to. Is there any way to recover the tracking? Or we shall get the rid of target="_blank" attribute?

    Reporting & Analytics | | apartmentGin
    0
  • lcourse


    we have a couple of pages displaying a dot in the URL path like domain.com/mr.smith/widget-mr.smith It displays fine in chrome, firefox and IE and for the user it may actually look better than replacing it by _ or -. Did this ever cause problems to anybody?
    Any statement from google about it?
    Should I change existing URLs? If so, which other characters can I use in the URL instead of underscore and dash, since in our system dash and underscore are already used for rewriting other characters. Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
    0

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