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!


  • Hello, So i keep getting this message and I went to hurl.it and I get 200 response. But it appears its not my actual homepage bc it says the body is empty and in the title it says "COMING SOON" which is not what my actual homepage says. Does anyone know what this means?? Thank you in advance! Rena

    Getting Started | | Palila-Studio
    0

  • We recently noticed that our primary page was de-indexed in Google. When looking in google search console there are no manual actions taken. We did add a few new banners to the site but I have no idea why this would have negatively affected that site. I did add a new page called https://enleaf.com/company/testimonials/ that had some duplicate testimonials that were also on the home page but have since removed that. Not sure where to go from here.

    Technical SEO | | AChronister
    0

  • Hi, I manage a few clients, but the one that is in reference to this question is a local law firm. They blog on a regular basis and we continue to monitor for and delete any negative backlinks. Their domain authority keeps rising, but they continue to lose rankings for tracked keywords. Has anyone else faced a similar situation? Does anyone one know what is causing this or what I can do to combat it? Thanks,

    On-Page Optimization | | GavinAdv
    0

  • We are managing a website that was previously consistently ranking on P1 or top position on P2 and over the weekend (28th Jan) suddenly dropped to P5. What is the best way of ascertaining whether this was down to an update, a tech issue or a penalty? There are other pages on the site (sub-folders) which are still continuing to rank well on the site for similar kws. Regards,
    V

    Moz Pro | | Varazad
    0

  • Hey Mozzers, long time no post. Just a quick one for you regarding URLS, this is an example of a url on a site https://www.thisismyurl.co.uk/products/spacehoppers/special-spacehopper.html Many of these pages are getting flagged for having a url that is too long. The target of this page is "special spacehoppers". Should i be concerned with the url being to long given my keyword is at the end? Would this be a suitable idea? https://www.thisismyurl.co.uk/p/spacehoppers/special.html Would changing products to p be worthwhile? It would remove length from nearly all urls but would require a site wide re-direct. 2)Would removing the "spacehoppers" bit from the url be worth it? Yes it would shorten the url but would also remove the exact keyword from the url which could be detrimental to rankings.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP
    0

  • Hi Nearly 2 years ago our site was moved from a .co.uk domain to .media. Because this TLD isn't supported for DA, it's hard to measure whether linkbuilding campaigns (for example) are having a positive effect. The old site has a DA of 38 (even after 2 years of inactivity) and the new one is 1, but the new one has better Trust and Citation flow, for example. I'm now investigating whether it's worth moving back to .co.uk and I want to fully understand the risks involved. So far I know of the following potential risks: It's a lot of work so human error is a real risk Could create a redirect loop as the old site has 301 redirects in place to the new one It will take several months for metrics to recover Any thoughts on more risks, how these challenges can be overcome etc will be welcome. Or do I just set fire to the lot and create a new site with yet another 301 redirect from the .media site? What would you do?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AxonnMedia
    0

  • We're busy with adding a German version of our webshop. Right now we're quit successful in The Netherlands with our webshop and SEO. I wonder if Google minds the location of the website (VPS) and IP address concerning SEO for our German webshop. If I Google on this subject I can not find a clear answer. Can somebody help me?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Makelmail
    0

  • How can I tell if a site is high quality or not, so far I have been using Moz's Toolbar to find the Domain Authority and Page authority to determine the quality of the site - is this correct?

    Link Building | | VoodooCreativeLtd
    0

  • Hello Mozzers I don't understand this specific ranking example, maybe somebody can help? For the serach term "elipslife" on Google Switzerland a client's page ranks around position 13. A competitor's page ranks at 9. And I don't get why: the competitor's page has no content and its DA is lower. Its PA is higher so I set a link in the client's homepage navigation a couple of weeks ago to lift the client's page PA above that of the competitor. This is not yet reflected in OSE currently however. Any ideas as to what may be the cause? Thx, Chris

    On-Page Optimization | | ChrisCronimund
    0

  • Hi there, I have a question regarding the canonical tag. The current setup is like so... www.site.com 302 redirects to.. www.site.com/de/ I want to add canonical tags on every page to avoid duplicate content but I'm not sure about the homepage. Should the canonical URL be www.site.com or www.site.com/de/ ? I'm concerned that I could be about to hurt my ranking. Thanks,
    Mitch

    Technical SEO | | zuriwolf
    0

  • I found page duplicate content when using Moz crawl tool, see below. http://www.example.com
    Page Authority 40
    Linking Root Domains 31
    External Link Count 138
    Internal Link Count 18
    Status Code 200
    1 duplicate http://www.example.com/index.htm
    Page Authority 19
    Linking Root Domains 1
    External Link Count 0
    Internal Link Count 15
    Status Code 200
    1 duplicate I have recently transfered my old html site to wordpress.
    To keep the urls the same I am using a plugin which appends .htm at the end of each page. My old site home page was index.htm. I have created index.htm in wordpress as well but now there is a conflict of duplicate content. I am using latest post as my home page which is index.php Question 1.
    Should I also use redirect 301 im htaccess file to transfer index.htm page authority (19) to www.example.com If yes, do I use
    Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com/index.php
    or
    Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.example.com Question 2
    Should I change my "Home" menu link to http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/index.htm that would fix the duplicate content, as indx.htm does not exist anymore. Is there a better option? Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gozmoz
    0

  • I'm doing some competitor analysis for a client. I'm looking at the client's title tags and meta descriptions for specific search results, in comparison to their main competitor. I'm trying to establish if the client is ranking higher due to better relevance, or just because they have higher PA and DA. It appears to be the latter. Observations: For both the client and their competitor, their home pages appear in the results much more frequently than specific landing pages The meta description Google chooses to display in the search results for the home page does not always match the ACTUAL meta description for the page and appears to vary depending on the specific search query Questions: Does Google create meta descriptions on the fly? Is this an example of Google using semantic search? And if so, why are we bothering to type customised meta descriptions for specific pages, if Google is just going to recreate them anyway? Is Google displaying results of the home pages simply because they cannot find pages more relevant (ie. if we produced landing pages more relevant to these specific search queries, would Google rank them higher)?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz
    0

  • Hello, I started to doubt myself. We have a classified advertisements website. On the main www.website.com page, almost all the advertisements are shown. Now we take those advertisements and also split them into categorys Category 1 / category 2 / category 3 / category 4 Now all those categories almost always have the same content as www.website.com except a bit less (because X amount of content is now divided also to 4-5 groups) For raking should i actually tell google that those categories are a copy of www.website.com or they should still be as they are?

    Technical SEO | | advertisingcloud
    0

  • I have a client who has just seen his average page rank creep up from around 39 to 34 over about two months, then it appears to have dropped back to position 40+ in the space of a week. I believe he's made a lot of changes to targeted keywords, so I'd like to think it's simply because his old targeted keywords are dropping and new keywords still have to build their rankings. But I'm also worried in case he has over-optimised and might get getting penalised. Any advice on where to start digging?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz
    0

  • I own the site http://www.artofwar.cc/  I have a 301 redirect rule in place to direct all non-www traffic to www.  The site is about 10 years old.  We're ranked in the top 20 in Google for around 20-40 search terms that I know of. Google Webmasters lists us as having in excess of 10000 backlinks (though many are subdomained duplicates). Majestic reports 1269 external backlinks, with the best trust/citation flows being around 40/100.  Majestic also reports 39 referring domains. I'm working through crawl errors at the moment.  The main high priority ones are 4xx errors, due to the fact that I changed some URL redirect rules a month back and am slowly getting round to changing internal backlinks in the forums.  There are no 5xx server errors, which I would think is the most likely reason Rogerbot might fall over crawling the site.  Rogerbot has no issues crawling, I've set it up in the phpBB section of the site as a registered bot, and it logs in and crawls for long periods when I manually trigger a crawl. Can anyone explain why the site might still be at DA 1?

    Link Explorer | | e_i_pi
    0

  • Dear moz community I have been analyzing the websites that rank in top 20 for our target keywords. All of the top 20 sites except us have their websites re directing to websites.com/target keyword. This is due to probably because they have multiple city's and one of the target keywords term is cityname + word. My question is and idea -  make a 301 to our www.website.com to /city-keyword and start linking to that page with new links. Would that bring any benefit? Seems that it's a very strong ranking signal. Any threats that I must take into account? We currently rank as #9

    Technical SEO | | advertisingcloud
    0

  • Hi, I run a psychology blog for millennials and I recently started using MOZ trial. I'm looking for a general blueprint or questions I should be answering as I try to boost my search engine traffic to match up with psychologytoday.com Aside from link building and writing quality content, what are some other strategies that I can implement?

    Content Development | | Psych2Go
    0

  • Hello, we found recently quite a big error  our index.php file had no canonical tag nor was a 301 redirect. So we put a canonical tag to it that it's the main www.examle.com duplicate . Now is there any difference in regards to link juice or Google 301 vs canonical tag ? I read that moz did a 301 from their index php.  I understand one difference is that user then can Type in the URL if no 301, but I'm interested about ranking effect of it.

    Technical SEO | | advertisingcloud
    0

  • Hi, we are moving our site from http to https and would like to know what should one look out for. What are the things that can go wrong, and what is the best way to go about it. Regards Tai

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger
    0

  • Hi there I currently have a client that has a service that offers to a wide metropolitan geographic region. Currently we offer location detection when they hit the site. I'm curious what the best method going forward would be. This client is coming from a PPC initially but I've sold them on a longer term goal with organic SEO (local) . So my question is what is the best method for ground up web creation when offering a service that services multiple areas within the same metropolitan region? Bonus questions anyone using Flat CMS's?

    Local Listings | | swagseo
    1

  • Hi Mozzers, I have a client that is rebuilding their eCommerce store. We are deliberating how to map the URL structure. My advice is and has always been to have language as the structure so the UK and US markets in English but separate pages with href=lang tags so the engines rank the correct page, the French page in French and tagged correct, German in German etc etc This way we have a clear page to optimise and build links into and the users select the currency ($ / £ / € or Ruble) They may want to have it by Currency, so rather than /UK or /US it would be /dollar, /sterling etc etc Have you any experience with both structures and what are the pros and cons as it seems clear to me language should be the way foreward They are using Magento 2 as well if that influences anything. Thanks Gareth This presents are tougher landscape to optimise for I feel and less clear for users

    International SEO | | Bush_JSM
    0

  • Aloha Moz community! I've been chipping away on my site and have been happy to see progress on getting to the first page for some searches I'd like to rank for. That being said and during my time doing this I noticed a fellow photographer jump to the first page out of what seems like nowhere! http://emilyhelen.com/ It left me scratching my head trying to figure out where and how they're site jumped up to the front so fast and has been holding strong since then. Do you guys have any ideas or ways I could replicate that? Much appreciated as always guys! Warmest aloha, Jon Gibb

    Local SEO | | Trey3
    0

  • Hey there -- The Acxiom listing that is showing up for a client in Moz Local isn't the clients business. It's showing a different law office. The only overlapping data is the city, state and zip code. For reference, the client has claimed their Acxiom business listing. Anything I can do to fix this? I can't even click on the listing from Moz.

    Moz Local | | ApogeeResults
    0

  • Hi Moz ! We're having quite a discussion here and I'd like to have some inputs. Let me explain the situation and what we plan to do so far. One of our client has two separate markets : World and Europe. Both pages versions will be mostly the same, except for the fact that they will have their own products. So basically, we'd want to show only the European EN version to Europe and the standard EN version to the rest of the world, same goes for FR and ES. As far as IT, DE, CS and SK, they will only be present within the european version. Since we cannot target all Europe with a single hreflang tag, we might have to do it for every single european countries. Regarding this subject, SMX Munich recently had quite an interesting session about this topic with a confirmation coming from John Mueller saying that we can target a single URL more than once with different hreflang tags. You can read more here : http://www.rebelytics.com/multiple-hreflang-tags-one-url/ So having all this in mind, here's the implementation we plan to do : www.example.com/en/ Self canonical www.example.com/fr/ - hreflang = fr www.example.com/es/ - hreflang = es www.example.eu/it/ - hreflang = it www.example.eu/de/ - hreflang = de www.example.eu/cs/ - hreflang = cs www.example.eu/sk/ - hreflang = sk www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = be-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = ch-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = cz-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = de-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = es-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = fr-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = uk-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = gr-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = hr-fr etc… . This will be done for all european countries (FR, EN and ES). www.example.com/en/ - x-default Let me know what you guys think. Thanks!

    International SEO | | Netleaf.ca
    0

  • We are using Moz Local and have a client who's salespeople create individual Facebook Pages for themselves and use the storefront's address. They are noted as duplicates. How much does this really hurt local SEO?

    Moz Local | | 9CloudsInc
    0

  • Hi, I notice today strange update on the DA of our website and competitors website as well. caminhoslanguages.com (our website) : drop from 26 to 19 bridgebrazil.com : drop from 29 to 26 rioandlearn.com : drop from 19 to 14 carioca-languages.com : drop from 22 to 15 DA drop affect all website, but bridgebrazil.com less than the other. bridgebrazil is close now. the website is rank first, but it is a business that no longer exist. thay rank first, only because it belong to an international company that have other languages schools in different countries, providing them a huge based of links high DA. Sorry to tell you, with this new update you totally miss the point. In which sense does the DA represent the quality of the websites ?? Is it not fair for small school, trying hard to get excelent website to get penalized like this, because it is really hard for them to get link from very high PA pages you know ? Could somebody give explication? If you would like to improve your algorithms, I would suggest to reduce the values of the links from companies internal linking. Because it provide unfair advantage for small business.

    Competitive Research | | Bartbijen
    0

  • I am working for a motor homes company that works with a network of dealers. Having just analysed the site I notice that dealers are sending links to the site - lots of them. They are all follow links and are freely given. ADDED: There are upwards of a million new affiliate backlinks and then a load of pretty normal freely given backlinks with dealers who have commission arrangements, etc., with the company on motorhome sales. Now this doesn't feel right to me because even if it isn't purposefully manipulative, it may appear so because of clear commercial relationships between my client company and the dealer businesses. So I will recommend nofollow althought the site will lose a huge number of backlinks as a result. What are your thoughts on this?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart
    0

  • I wonder whether this has been taken into account yet or there are any plans to in future.

    Moz Bar | | mybuilder
    1

  • Hello folks, I'm looking at hosting options. In your opinion, what's the best provider out there and why? Cheers, Gill.

    Web Design | | Cannetastic
    0

  • Hi all, I was wondering what happend at the last MOZ-update. The MOZ-health page has no current errors and i've checked a lot of websites probably about 50 a 60 from our customers and from our competitiors and everybody seems to have a decrease in DA's / PA's. Not just a couple went up and down like normally would happen, but all seems to have dropped.... Is anyone seeing the same in their campaigns? Greetings,
    Niels

    API | | NielsVos
    3

  • We have had a steady rise over the past year and as the DA results came out i was extremely disappointed to see a 10 point drop. Competitors have also dropped but not by this figure. We have been continuing with the work we have been doing all year. Not the best news to have to share with the client. Would you use DA as a KPI or is it a little unreliable?

    API | | Astute-Media
    0

  • Hi Has anyone had experience of updating their text to code ratio if its too high & whether this has much impact on SEO performance? I am trying to prioritise tasks & wondered if this is something which should be higher on my list. Thank you 🙂

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey
    0

  • Let's say there is a website(domain) and couple of sub-domains (around 6). If we optimise all sub-domains with "keyword" we want our website to rank for.....like giving "keyword" across all page titles of sub-domains and possible places which looks natural as brand mentions. Will this scenario helps website to rank better for same "keyword"? How can these sub-domains do really influence website in rankings? Like if the sub-domains have broken links, will this affect website SEO efforts?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz
    0

  • How is the best way to handle all the different variations of a website in terms of www | non www | http | https? In Google Search Console, I have all 4 versions and I have selected a preference. In Open Site Explorer I can see that the www and non www versions are treated differently with one group of links pointing to each version of the same page. This gives a different PA score. eg. http://mydomain.com DA 25 PA 35 http://www.mydomain.com DA 19 PA 21 Each version of the home page having it's only set of links and scores. Should I try and "consolidate" all the scores into one page? Should I set up redirects to my preferred version of the website? Thanks in advance

    Technical SEO | | I.AM.Strategist
    0

  • Hi to all, If you can share your ideas on how to do a proper setup, it would be great. Cheers

    Keyword Research | | joel.cortez
    0

  • Our company has a paid subscription-based site that only allows us to add HTML in the WYSIWYG section, not in the backend of each individual page. Because we are an e-commerce site, we have many duplicate page issues. Is there a way for us to add or hide the canonical code in the WYSIWYG section instead of us having to make all of our pages significantly different?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | expobranders
    0

  • Hi guys - we have noticed a site we work one has taken a hit on its rankings over the past week. We have been through all the usual reason - hacking, duplicate content, back links, other sites copying text etc - but can not find any reason why its rankings have been affected. Has any one else noticed unexplained changes in rankings with sites about a week ago? Thanks in advance! Phil

    Algorithm Updates | | Globalgraphics
    1

  • We have a set of branded and unbranded keywords that we want our product site to rank very high for. Right now, our support site owns the first page of rankings for most of the keywords we care about. What is the most efficient way to give the rank currently enjoyed by our support site to our product site? Both have very high domain authority and tons of backlinks. Here are some factors that might apply: Support site has lots of copy including these keywords, while product site doesn't (yet) Support site doesn't currently include a lot of links to the product site (and vice versa) They're on the same domain -- support is at support.domain.com, product is on www.domain.com Support site has many more pages and their URLs are more semantically related to keywords I know there are lots of structural improvements implied by the above -- on the product site, increase the amount of copy (and landing pages) focused on keywords and significantly improve internal links, etc. But I'm wondering if the fact we control both sites gives us any options we wouldn't have in a competitive situation?

    On-Page Optimization | | hoosteeno
    0

  • Website: www.wheelchairparts.com
    Keyword: wheelchair parts My website is #1 or #2 on almost every search engine besides Google. Google has us bouncing between the bottom of page 2 and top of 3. However we are on page one for "wheelchairparts". I need to get a link building campaign going for this site. I feel it's more difficult for ecommerce websites and nothing seems to fit in with Rand's Mozcon 2016 Link Building talk except hacks. I need to find a flywheel. Either way, my question is what can I do other than link building to get on page 1 of Google for the term "wheelchair parts"? Thanks in advance! - Mike Bean

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mike.Bean
    1

  • I have a page which is ranking already pretty well for a relative competitive keyword. 
    Google also ranks us on first page for synonym of keyword we optimize the page for (even though synonym does not appear on our page). I am now considering to replace some occurences of the keyword in the page by different synonyms, in the hope that our ranking may further improve for these synonyms. 
    However I am concerned that google may penalize me for keyword stuffing if I am using a wide range of synonyms of one keyword on our page. My plan is only to replace some occurences of keyword with synonyms. I am a bit nerveous here since page is already ranking quite well in a competitive niche. Any thoughts?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
    0

  • Having a keyword in a top domain extension like .com could benefit your SEO. Well I think it was like that. 
    So if you would sell cars and you had cars.com it could benefit. But is there something to say about the new extensions like .shoes.
    Do they have the same impact or are they just not old enough? A domain like cars.com is probably registered since the beginning of the Internet so it carries more weight. I'm curious to hear your opinion on the matter. Thank you in advance,
    kind regards, Eelco

    Local SEO | | KnowHowww
    0

  • I have a site in English hosted under .com with English info, and then different versions of the site under subdirectories (/de/, /es/, etc.) Due to budget constraints we have only managed to translate the most important info of our product pages for the local domains. We feel however that displaying (on a clearly identified tab) the detailed product info in English may be of use for many users that can actually understand English, and may help us get more conversions to have that info. The problem is that this detailed product info is already used on the equivalent English page as well. This basically means 2 things: We are mixing languages on pages We have around 50% of duplicate content of these pages What do you think that the SEO implications of this are? By the way, proper Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions as well as implementation of href lang tag are in place.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauraseo
    0

  • As of this morning, the Domain Authority section on our campaign still reads: "Next scheduled update: Jan 25, 2017 PST" and nothing has changed - it is still showing our old DA and how much it went up since last time. Is this a problem on our end, or is Moz experiencing difficulties with DA updates? Thanks in advance!

    Product Support | | whiteonlySEO
    0

  • Would anyone know why after adding schema.org markup to a websites products, reviews and ratings why it still isn't showing up in Google SERPs? Does Google pick and choose who's rich snippets get displayed on a random basis or some other criteria?

    Reviews and Ratings | | znotes
    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.