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'm working on a dentist's website and want some advice on the best way to lay out the navigation. I would like to know which structure will help the site work naturally. I feel the second example would be better as it would focus the 'power' around the type of treatment and get that to rank better. .com/assessment/whitening
    .com/assessment/straightening
    .com/treatment/whitening
    .com/treatment/straightening or .com/whitening/assessment
    .com/straightening/assessment
    .com/whitening/treatment
    .com/straightening/treatment Please advise, thanks.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee159
    0

  • Hi folks, I am working with a group for which I do SEO etc. for one part of the group. Another part of the group hired an SEO agency to carry out their SEO for them (before I joined). In short, they are doing a terrible job by building links in very dodgy directories (ones which get taken offline) and via machine generated 'articles' on horrendously bad 'blogs'. Please take a look at these 'articles' and leave your thoughts below so I can back up the point that these guys are not the kind of SEOs we should be working with. [List of links to articles removed by moderator] Many thanks in advance, Gill.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cannetastic
    0

  • Hi, I've just had my initial report from Moz and it says my pages are missing rel="canonical". I'm using the Yoast SEO plugin on my WordPress site which adds these automatically. I have also checked the source code for my pages and can see rel="canonical". What has gone wrong please?

    Getting Started | | Barn2Plugins
    0

  • Hi, my site has a green padlock and no SSL errors but Moz are reporting an 804 error. I use CloudFlare with fairly complex settings. I've read this thread but it's quite old and I don't understand which parts of it are still valid. I'd love to know whether this can be sorted before I spend hours setting up Moz's features as if they can't crawl my site then I would obviously need to cancel my subscription. Thanks

    Getting Started | | Barn2Plugins
    0

  • Hello All, I am doing A/B testing via google analytic experiment now my query is for my ecommerce site homepage i am trying to add newsletter in 3 different way so it will be variation A, Variation B and Variation C. So my query is what should be then original page? Currently there is no newsletter form on homepage. Do I consider original page as Variation A? i.e. abcd.com?variation-A as original page? Then google will decide winner between original page i.e. variation A and Variation B & C Thanks!

    Reporting & Analytics | | dsouzac
    0

  • Hi All, As we can see the below statement from Google about internal linking: "The number of internal links pointing to a page is a signal to search engines about the relative importance of that page."
    https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/138752?hl=en So if we interlink a page highly than other pages, will it rank on search results instead of homepage? Moreover if the page have "keyword" in URL slug...like www.website.com/keyword. Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz
    0

  • http://www.electricianinperth.com.au is one site that me and my colleagues are constantly struggling with. It has a page rank of 5 which beats a majority of the competitors, but when it comes to Google Australia searches such as Perth Electrician and Electrician Perth etc etc, we just can't seem to get there and the rankings keep fluctuating and dropping. We backlink and update the pages on a regular basis Any ideas? - Could it be the custom Wordpress/CMS system?

    Link Building | | lewisjosep7
    0

  • For many months I have been following this strategy of hiring high domain authority bloggers to review my products and link back to my website. For a month or two my rankings improved but now I suddenly lost rankings. Can Google penalize me for hiring bloggers to review my products? Bloggers do mention in the blog that the product was requested for editorial review. Any tips will be helpful. Regards
    Deb

    Link Building | | DebashishB
    0

  • Hi, Just started working with a site that has the occasional url with a capital, but then the url in the canonical as lower case. Neither, when entered in a browser, resolves to the other. It's a Shopify site. What do you think I should do?

    Technical SEO | | 94501
    0

  • I have some new pages on my site, and Moz gives them a very low PA ranking. I am wondering if these scores are updated monthly or quarterly? I'm not sure how frequently to check back for updated scoring.

    API | | AndrewMicek
    0

  • I'm having some trouble with my titles of a new site, it has been online for around two months now and i'm getting weird titles from most indexed pages. Since my site is focused on finding courses, the course title format is the following: URL: https://www.maseducacion.com/estudios/programacion-curricular--tecnigrap-2982 
    My Title: Course - Institute | Mybrand
    Google Search Title: Course - Institute | Mybrand - Educativa Half of my results have that word at the end, don't know where it comes from, that word is only included in two links. Any idea on how to fix it?

    Technical SEO | | JoaoCJ
    0

  • One of our clients today has sent over a list of keywords which he hopes to be ranked on page one for, please check these out and try not to laugh. All the existing Birmingham xxxx searches Hosted Voice Cloud Communications Cloud Solutions Cloud Services Pure Cloud VoIP Telephony Communications Unified Communications Fixed line SIP & SIP Trunks Broadsoft Yealink Contact Centre & Hosted Contact Centre Cyber Security Ransomware Open DNS Secure device management IoT – Internet of Things CISCO Meraki partner System manager Routers Switches Virtual stacking SOPHOS UTM partner SOPHOS Silver partner General Data Protection Regulation Business Mobile Mobile / Mobility M2M – Mobile 2 Mobile EE Vodafone O2 Managed print Photocopier / Printer Ethernet Leased Line EoFTTC FTTC ADSL2+ Broadband Connectivity WiFi CMX location analytics High capacity 802.11ac Automatic RF optimisation Security radio Identity-based firewall AC Dual Band Cloud managed wifi MDM – mobile device management Critical data Insurance Critical data Storage Collaboration I'm not sure he understood why I wanted to gather this information but he's defiantly not got the right end of the stick!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chrissmithps
    0

  • Hi there, the social visits in the dashboard look like are collected just from facebook social network. In fact if I check the social report in Google Analytics the number of facebook referrals sessions is the same of the number of Social visits from MOZ Dashboard. What's the reason why? How can I resolve this problem including visits from Linkedin, Pinterest and other social network in the Social visits in Moz Dashboard? Thank you

    Getting Started | | vanGoGh-creative
    1

  • My site is about jokes. I wonder what schema markup could I use to be more visible in the search results.

    On-Page Optimization | | MichaelJanik
    0

  • Hi, I'm just looking to get some opinions on resource-page linkbuilding. These are links you would gain from sites when you use the following type of search operators: "keyword" + inurl:links
    "keyword" + inurl:resources
    "keyword" + "helpful links"
    ... and so on... What do you think Google's thoughts on this subject would be when a large portion of the pages returned are long lists of links - usually these will be the title of the page linked to as well as either a bare link or an anchor text link. In some instances a short description of the page linked to would also be there. Are these long-term links that will continue to be relevant and worth spending time on for linkbuilding, or are these going to be see by Google as lower-quality links and potentially unnatural ? For example, Google's page on link schemes states; "Low-quality directory or bookmark site links" may violate their guidelines. Do you think that in some cases, resource pages may be seen as somewhat fitting this description? Thanks! [Edit] I have also found this comment from a Moz post 4 years ago, but cannot find any other reference to John commenting on resource pages: "A while back, someone asked John Mueller in a hangout about the benefits of getting a link on an outdated resource page and the answer was that if it is a link that never gets clicked on then it's probably not passing a lot of value."

    Link Building | | Tomwindham
    1

  • OK, so we've lost pagerank and I think it's because of the way our site works (and we operate it). We have a videofolio, which shows on most of our pages, showcasing our work. Over time, we have tended to unpublish these pages and created new videofolio pages to show on our home page and relevant pages. The videofolio is a set of pages, each with a title, body text and a place to insert a link to the video, which is played through a videofolio showcase on our website (www.curveball-media.co.uk). Each is set a category, e.g. film, and when the user clicks the tab for 'film', the thumbnails pop up and the user can play the video. We have to work it this way as it's the only way to remove the videos from showing on our home page and to show new content instead. Simply deselecting a category still allows the videos to be seen when the 'all' category is selected by the user. Last week, I found a way of bringing back these unpublished pages by removing the 'all' tab from the videofolio. Then I turned each one into a blog like structure instead. Essentially, instead of the video link being played through the videofolio, we deselected a category (e.g. animation, film etc) and left the page floating. The only way you can access it without being attached to a videofolio category is through the direct link. By turning off the 'all' category and deselecting the page from any other categories, we were able to properly SEO these pages. NB: If they are created for use with the videofolio, you can have only extremely limited body text and no H2, as this is the text that appears when you hover over the video thumbnail. That's just the nature of the template. What I didn't anticipate is that now the code on the home page shows all these now (un)published pages and their corresponding H2 tags. Without a category selected, there is no way to get to these pages unless I create a direct link. I plan to do this through a blog post. In the home page code, the entire videofolio page shows, including the body text and link to the video. **This text doesn't show on the home page though, i.e. the user never sees this text. ** 1. Is it an issue to have so many similar H2 tags on the homepage? 2. Is it an issue that the code has text which is essentially invisible on the home page? 3. Is it an issue that the content is not linked to through the home page visibly? Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | curveballmedia
    0

  • Hi Guys I am currently working on a website where one of the keyword targets is fluctuating. The keyword is fluctuating between page 2 and page 5. What makes this strange is that we are not experiencing the issue with any other keyword targets. They are all ranking fine.   It is only 1 keyword. The keyword target happens to be the main homepage keyword target - not sure if this makes a difference? The homepage targets 2 keyword e.g. Business Offices & Accessories. The homepage ranks perfectly fine for e.g. Business Accessories but is fluctuating for e.g. Business Offices! Very strange. What makes it even stranger - the keyword variations of the fluctuating keyword e.g. office for business  - these variations are all fine and not fluctuating. Its only 1 keyword. If anyone has any ideas  or feedback that would be great! Thanks, Duncan

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed89
    0

  • Hi Moz commnity, Our website ranking was good and dropped for couple of recent months. We have around 10 sub-domains. I doubt them if they are hurting us. Being said all over in SEO industry like the sub-domains are completely different websites; will they hurt if they are not well optimised? And we have many links from our sub-domains to website top pages, is this wrong for Google? How to well maintain the sub-domains? Do I need to worry about them? Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi guys, Has anyone seen cases where a site has been impacted negatively from internal linking from blog content to commercial based pages (e.g. category pages). Anchor text is natural and the links improve user experience (i.e it makes sense to add them, they're not forced). Cheers.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright
    0

  • I know that duplicate H1 and H2 tags are a red flag for Google, but does the same apply for H3, H4 and H5 tags? A lot of my products have the same H5 tags and I'm wondering whether or not that is pulling down my keyword rank.

    On-Page Optimization | | moon-boots
    0

  • Years ago the rank would be the same across Australia. If we ranked 3rd in one city, it would be the same in every other city. Right now, we are ranking 3rd in Sydney and Melbourne, however we ranking a low 7th in Brisbane for keyword "Trampolines". Why is this? How can we fix it in Brisbane. Interestingly, we are a Brisbane based business. The keyword is "Trampolines" and the website is http://www.vulyplay.com 

    Local Listings | | Vuly
    0

  • Hi all, there seems to have been an algorithm update on February 7. One of my big sites www.poussette.com, lost about 25 % of its organic traffic afterwards and has not revovered yet.  What are the best steps to take right now? It is 7 years old we continuously did conservative SEO (technical, link building, adding content). Thanks in advance. Dieter

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco
    0

  • I write short blog post between 80-100 words and I link out to other websites. However, How many external links should I have in each blog post to rank better in search?

    Link Building | | WilCross
    0

  • I'm thinking about adding a sidebar on the right side of my blog post with links to other pages. Is have a sidebar with links to other pages good or bad for SEO.

    Link Building | | WilCross
    0

  • I am trying to understand why a website would use # instead of a ? for its parameters? I have put an example of the URL below: http://www.warehousestationery.co.nz/office-supplies/adhesives-tapes-and-fastenings#prefn1=brand&prefn2=colour&prefv1=Command&prefv2=Clear Any help would be much appreciated.

    Technical SEO | | CaitlinDW
    1

  • Can we have organization markup schema for subdomain ? For example if my main domain is xyz.com and subdomain is sub.xyz.com If i plan to have organization markup schema for subdomain how should it look like ? Should the markup schema must have main domain url or sub domain url in markup schema ? Should it be like this ?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NortonSupportSEO
    0

  • Is there a way to run a report through Moz's Open Site Explorer to produce an MS Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheet showing Page Authority (PA) for all the individual pages on my site?

    Link Explorer | | micromano
    0

  • Hi All, I've been working for a website/publisher that produces good content and has been around for a long time but has recently been burdened by a high level of repetitious production, and a high volume in general with pages that don't gather as much traffic as desired. One such fear of mine is that every piece published doesn't have any links pointing to when it is published outside of the homepage or syndicated referrals. They do however have a lot (perhaps too many) outbound internal links away from it. Would it be a good practice, especially for new content that has a longer shelf life, to go back to older content and place links pointing to the new one? I would hope this would boost traffic via internal recircultion and Page Authority, with the added benefits of anchor text boosts.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ajranzato9
    1

  • Hi there, My client has a site website.com and a booking engine, booking.website.com They are currently tracking the main site and the booking subdomain as two separate properties in the same GA account. The issue is we can't see where users are originating on the subdomain property; it's all being counted as referral. My understanding is we need to set up subdomain tracking using Google Tag Manager in order for GA to pass the user data between the two subdomains. This is fine, except for this one line I am reading on Google's guide to cross-domain tracking: Subdomains If you have updated your tracking code to analytics.js, then no additional configuration is required to track subdomains. You can use cross domain tracking to collect data from a primary domain, like www.example.com, and a subdomain, like www.subdomain.example.com, in a single Analytics account property. That last line makes it sound like we should be using cross-domain tracking for this purpose. Are we correct in setting up subdomain tracking and NOT cross-domain tracking to be able to track users across subdomains on the same domain?

    Reporting & Analytics | | FPD_NYC
    0

  • Hi, There is a lot of debate going on on whether to use a single keyword per page or multiple keywords per page. What I know for sure is that it is not advisable to repeat the same exact keyword in different pages. I need to optimize product pages, categories and pages for an online store and still do not know if it is better to: 1-work with one main keyword per page plus latent semantic keywords, 2-to optimize a page for multiple different keywords (2 to 4 keywords) which are strongly related to the main topic or to the product sold in a particular product page 3- use single keyword for each page (and no more than one keyword per page). Some seo gurus argue this is the best way to get higher ranking for that particular page in the serps. My personal opinion would be 1 or 2, but I would like to hear what you suggest and think about it. Any suggestion or opinion is welcome and appreciated. Thanks in advance

    On-Page Optimization | | cinzia09
    0

  • Hi,I have some questions related to duplicate content on e-commerce websites. 1)If a single product goes to multiple categories (eg. A black elegant dress could be listed in two categories like "black dresses" and "elegant dresses") is it considered duplicate content even if the product url is unique? e.g www.website.com/black-dresses/black-elegant-dress duplicated> same content from two different paths www.website.com/elegant-dresses/black-elegant-dress duplicated> same content from two different paths www.website.com/black-elegant-dress unique url > this is the way my products urls look like Does google perceive this as duplicated content? The path to the content is only one, so it shouldn't be seen as duplicated content, though the product is repeated in different categories.This is the most important concern I actually have. It is a small thing but if I set this wrong all website would be affected and thus penalised, so I need to know how I can handle it. 2- I am using wordpress + woocommerce. The website is built with categories and subcategories. When I create a product in the product page backend is it advisable to select  just the lowest subcategory or is it better to select both main category and subcategory in which the product belongs? I usually select the subcategory alone.  Looking forward to your reply and suggestions. thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cinzia09
    1

  • Hello, you know when you search for your brand on google for example nike.com . It shows usually the pages that are importan. Our brand however shows totally random URLs under the brand. There should be however our category pages. How can i add those? Some html code i presume?

    Technical SEO | | advertisingcloud
    0

  • HI, Is there any tool to check how a website's internal linking structure has been linked. Some times few important pages may not linked very well and some links will be over linked. This will surge rankings...like if more links are pointing to one page? Is there any tool to check this?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz
    0

  • Mozzers, I wrote the following blog post about Microsoft’s current offer to receive $100 free in bing ads. http://www.cildermansolutions.com/blog/free-bing-ads-coupon-for-2017-get-100-in-free-advertising-credits I noticed that the bounce rate on the post is higher than i was expecting; I am wondering if this is because I put the eligibility rules for collecting the ads coupon in the 2nd paragraph...and people are just seeing that right away and bouncing. I obviously don’t want to lie or trick readers, but i am wondering if the community has any idea/suggestions. Thanks, Matt

    Search Behavior | | matt.nails
    0

  • Hi all, I've been looking around at some of our competitors websites and I've been noticing huge amounts of keyword stuffing throughout the pages and also grouped within the bottom of the page. From what I've been taught it's not a good thing to do and you can be penalized for it. What's anyone else's take on keyword stuffing and how it's looked upon in 2017? Is there a max amount of keywords you should have on your page? Here are a few URL's to the websites I'm talking about and their webpage. https://www.walmart.com/cp/personalized-gifts/133224 - Keyword stuffing in the bottom group text  for the word "personalized" http://www.personalcreations.com/unique-groomsmen-gifts-pgrmsmn - Keyword stuffing in bottom group text for "groomsmen" http://www.groovygroomsmengifts.com/ - keyword stuffing throughout page for "groomsmen"

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | znotes
    1

  • In an interesting article from January on content cannibalisation: https://ninjaoutreach.com/content-cannibalization-avoid/ there is the following paragraph: "When the same keyword is used across a number of pages of a single website, Google’s spiders automatically get directed to a page with low-grade quality which in turn results in the low ranking of all the pages on the website." Is this true? The suggestion here is that they automatically get directed there as a form of penalty. This seems like quite an extraordinary claim! Can anyone verify?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ad-Rank
    0

  • Hi everyone, Here's a duplicate content challenge I'm facing: Let's assume that we sell brown, blue, white and black 'Nike Shoes model 2017'. Because of technical reasons, we really need four urls to properly show these variations on our website. We find substantial search volume on 'Nike Shoes model 2017', but none on any of the color variants. Would it be theoretically possible to show page A, B, C and D on the website and: Give each page a canonical to page X, which is the 'default' page that we want to rank in Google (a product page that has a color selector) but is not directly linked from the site Mention page X in the sitemap.xml. (And not A, B, C or D). So the 'clean' urls get indexed and the color variations do not? In other words: Is it possible to rank a page that is only discovered via sitemap and canonicals?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adriaan.Multiply
    0

  • Question. I've noticed in the past and more recently that if you search a business (example: Adidas) in Google, you'll see their activity on Twitter being displayed organically. How can you get your business to show? I also did some research and found that some business that have their tweets displaying are not Twitter verified. I though that may have something to do with it...I guess it doesn't. Does anyone know what "triggers" a business to have their tweets show up organically. When you search Adidas, you'll see their business info, then the twitter carousel (displays 3 tweets and a arrow to view more). Thanks for your help. 102GB

    Social Media | | Kdruckenbrod
    0

  • Hi All, Hypothetically, let’s say a brand established in the UK created the following URL for the Italian market, www.example.com/it/ticket-watch (Ticket watch the made up brand) In this scenario, Ticket Watch is used across multiple services and domains in the UK such as: www.example.com/ticket-watch www.ticketwatch.com/ Essentially, could you point multiple ticket watch pages that live on different domains so that www.example.com/it/ticket-watch could potentially have 4 or 5 tags from the same country (UK), but the self-referencing pages will only have one hreflang tag: canonical and hreflang meta information to be included on www.example.com/it/ticket-watch But the hreflang meta information to be included on www.ticketwatch.com/ will only have one tag I’ve only in included 2 hreflang tags for the for the first example but let’s say there were an additional 2 or 3 GB based ticket watch hreflang tags. Will these tags still be validated? Thanks,

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEONOW123
    0

  • Have just migrated current and active site to Magento 1.9 and a new hosting package (dedicated and reasonably powerful for what we need). But we seem to have had a drop in conversion rate.  I don't really know whether it's anything to be concerned about the moment. I've set up extensive server level 301 redirects for old pages. Would be glad of any thoughts? Thanks you

    Web Design | | seoman10
    0

  • I have a website that Im currently working on that has been fairly dormant for a while and has just been given a face lift and brought back to life. I have some questions below about dealing with 404 pages. In Google WMT/search console there are reports of thousands of 404 pages going back some years. It says there are over 5k in total but I am only able to download 1k or so from WMT it seems. I ran a crawl test with Moz and the report it sent back only had a few hundred 404s in, why is that? Im not sure what to do with all the 404 pages also, I know that both Google and Moz recommend a mixture of leaving some as 404s and redirect others and Id like to know what the community here suggests. The 404s are a mix of the following: Blog posts and articles that have disappeared (some of these have good back-links too) Urls that look like they used to belong to users (the site used to have a forum) which where deleted when the forum was removed, some of them look like they were removed for spam reasons too eg /user/buy-cheap-meds-online and others like that Other urls like this /node/4455 (or some other random number) Im thinking I should permanently redirect the blog posts to the homepage or the blog but Im not sure what to do about all the others? Surely having so many 404s like this is hurting my crawl rate?

    Technical SEO | | linklander
    0

  • I have a lot of backlinks ending with .xyz, around 20%, and they look very suspicious. Should I disavow these? Here are a few: yourrelicsbargains.xyz fantasticsiteinfo.xyz yourvintagelifestyle.xyz usefuldiscount4u.xyz bestdealsaction.xyz bestmemorabilialifestyle.xyz 59177.net lovecollectorsbargains.xyz

    Link Building | | moon-boots
    0

  • Hi Moz community, As for now we have two different versions of a client's homepage that’s dividing our traffic. One of the urls is the index.html version of the other url. We are using Adobe Business Catalyst for one of our clients and they told us they can’t 301 redirect. Adobe Business Catalyst does 301 redirects, but not to itself like an .htaccess rewrite. Doing a 301 redirect using BC from index.html to / creates an infinite loop and break the page. Are there alternatives to a 301 or any suggestions how to solve this? Thanks for all your answers and thoughts in advance,
    Anna

    Technical SEO | | Anna_Hoesl
    0

  • We have a gallery here with our main categories of patches. https://www.stadriemblems.com/gallery/ If you click on one, say Fire Patches, you'll be taken to a page of just fire patches. https://www.stadriemblems.com/fire-patches/ But here's the kicker: If you notice of the fire patch page, there are also sub-categories to that. So if you click on say, Fire Rescue, you get taken one level deeper. https://www.stadriemblems.com/fire-patches/fire-rescue-patches/ I'm redoing this entire site (a project over five years overdue), and I'm wondering if it's really worth it to keep these three-level deep sub pages. I originally created them with long tail SEO in mind, making us be the only ones who come up when people search for very specific patches. But it's a big undertaking to redo all of them, and are they really adding any value?

    On-Page Optimization | | UnderRugSwept
    0

  • If someone leaves a review of your business on your Google My Business listing, and you respond to that review, will they receive an email notification of your response to their review? We are working with a client who has unanswered reviews from several years ago, and though it's best practice to respond to all reviews, we didn't want to respond to reviews from 2013 if the person (who has likely forgot about their experience with the business in question) is going to get an email notifying them of our late response to their review. Thank you!

    Reviews and Ratings | | BlueCorona
    1

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.