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!


  • Good afternoon, We will be starting our linkbuilding campaign in the next couple of days. Initially we will contact the authors of editorial content where our competitors are mentioned as one tool in a list of tools. We want the author to add us to the list as an additional tool. What success rate shall we expect, in terms of the % of people who include us vs the number of people we contact? Thanks in advance!

    Link Building | | Pennvad
    0

  • Did Google release any seo update in last couple of days? My client is seeing 33% low traffic. The site is hyper-local marketplace website in India.

    Algorithm Updates | | Avin123
    0

  • We've lost a bit of domain authority - has anything been update?

    Moz Pro | | BeckyKey
    0

  • Hi there, We manage a website which generates an overview and detailpages of listings for several real estate agents. When these listings have been sold, they are removed from the overview and pages. These listings appear as not found in the crawl error overview in Google Search Console. These pages appear as 404's, would changing this to 410's solve this problem? And if not, what fix could take care of this problem?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MartijntenCaat
    0

  • Just started a site audit and trying to determine the number of pages on a client site and whether there are more pages being indexed than actually exist. I've used four tools and got four very different answers... Google Search Console: 237 indexed pages Google search using site command: 468 results MOZ site crawl: 1013 unique URLs Screaming Frog: 183 page titles, 187 URIs (note this is a free licence, but should cut off at 500) Can anyone shed any light on why they differ so much? And where lies the truth?

    Technical SEO | | muzzmoz
    1

  • We operate www.metro-manhattan.com, a commercial real estate website. There about 550 pages. About 300 pages are for individual listings. About 150 are for buildings. Most of the listings pages have 180-240 words. Would it be better from an SEO perspective to have multiple listings on a single page, say all Chelsea listings on the Chelsea neighborhood page? Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by having separate URLs for each listing? Are we at risI for a thin cogent Google penalty? Would the same apply to building pages (about 150)? Sample Listing: http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/364-madison-ave-office-lease-1802sf Sample Building: http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/for-a-new-york-office-space-rental-consider-one-worldwide-plaza-825-eighth-avenue My concern is that the existing site architecture may result in some form of Google penalty. If we have to consolidate these pages what would be the best way of doing so? Thanks, 
    Alan

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
    0

  • An SEO provider suggested we add breadcrumbs to the top of each page about 3 years ago, which we did. 3 years later we are going thru the site and find it really busy with lots of redundant and distracting elements. We would like to remove the breadcrumbs from the top of the pages. Is there any real SEO downside to doing so?
    All URLs are listed on our site map so I don't see why Google would not index all pages. Our domain is www.metro-manhattan.com I have uploaded a sample page with a breadcrumb. Thanks,
    Alan kbbpS

    Web Design | | Kingalan1
    0

  • Hi, On a Google SERP, when i activate the MOZ toolbar one of the sites says it has 1,258 links / 667 RDs. But when I open this same site up in OSE I get 3 inbound links (see attch). What's going on? 0Au9H

    Link Explorer | | sanjosepainting
    0

  • Hi all, I'm a bit frustrated because in open site explorer, my site is appearing with the worst possible scores for everything.  (see attch.) However, about 2 months ago I published my site onto a bunch of places using the Yext service. I also manually created 50+ additional links and citations as well as accounts on all the major social media sites. So, how come I get such bad scores and even a big fat zero on inbound links? Thanks! bYCpm

    Link Explorer | | sanjosepainting
    0

  • Hello, We are looking for someone to give us some training for using Moz - someone that really knows what everything is on Moz and how to use all its features. If anyone in interested in doing this, please get in touch to discuss conditions. We're looking forward to getting in touch with you. Thank you!

    Moz Local | | anitawapa
    0

  • I have a Magento website. I am going to add a Wordpress blog under /blog. If I setup each with its own webmaster tools to submit a sitemap does it hurt anything?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj
    0

  • Should an internal link open in a new tab or in the same window? Seems like this is an issue that has never had a definitive answer one way or the other. But I couldn't find any recent articles from reliable sources taking a stance and answering this question. Does anyone know if user engagement metrics (time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit) are impacted if a user clicks a link that opens in a new tab? Thanks!

    On-Page Optimization | | NicheSocial
    0

  • Hey guys, I have spent a little time searching for a suitable solution, but I feel like maybe directly asking my specific question is the best way to go about this: We have a site www.mywebsite.com and it serves all UK customers (right now, the site is useless for US customers). We would like to move those customers to www.mywebsite.co.uk and carry all the google points we have accrued with it but unfortunately, I feel like a 301 redirect would cause a big issue because in January, we want to launch a new site which will have very similar if not the same urls but the content will target our new US customers. I don't want to end up in a position where our customers end up with redirect loops or where we end up confusing customers. For now, our solution is this: make our site available on both .com and .co.uk canonical tags on both sites will be set to the UK version of the site. if the user enters the homepage on .com, we show a page saying: "hey, we are launching a US site soon, click here to read more and sign up, or click here to go to the UK site." - this page will not have a UK canonical tag because it has no equivalent on the UK site. If the user clicks on the "goto uk site" button, they have acknowledged that we have 2 sites now and we can 302 redirect them to the equivalent .co.uk page every time they go to .com until we get .com live (powered by a cookie). -- we hope that bots won't be affected by this. It would be good to know if it will affect bots or have any negative SEO side effects. at this point, we have 2 types of users, informed and uninformed users. Informed if they clicked the button described above. if the user enters any other page on .com, we don't redirect uninformed users, we just let them use the site as normal because we don't know if 302 redirects will cause issues for our ranking. if the user enters any other page on .com, we redirect informed users to the .co.uk site... this includes the .com homepage If the user goes to .co.uk, the site is normal. No special landing pages, no redirects, no extra cookies. We want to start changing external .com links to .co.uk and new content we write about our site will start going to .co.uk When .com goes live, we will remove the redirects and people using .com will start seeing US content instead of UK content. People using co.uk will be unaffected. Hopefully, google is directing most of our customers to .co.uk by now. Ideally, we want to transfer our google ranking from .com to .co.uk since it is technically a move, but I need to be sure there will be no side effects from using 301 redirects when we put the US site live... Both SEO wise and UX wise. Anyways, does anyone see any potential problems with our current plan? are 302's problematic for our SEO goals (moving .com points to .co.uk)? will changing canonical from .com to .co.uk have positive or negative effects? Can we safely apply 301's and is it necessary... esp. considering the short timeline (releasing US in Janurary). Are there any extra steps we can take to maximise our efforts and/or speed up the site transfer. Is it a bad idea to allow .com to serve the same content as .co.uk except the homepage? Any gotchas you can think of? Thanks in advance, Dipun

    Branding | | dipunm
    0

  • Hi We are looking to offer same day delivery if you're in a 20 mile radius to us. I'm trying to do some research on how to optimise this for Google organic listings. Would this be the same as optimising for a local business listing? I'm not sure where to start. Thanks! Becky

    Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey
    0

  • Dear Moz & Forum, I've been on a bit of a merry-go-round with one of my clients.  He knows enough about SEO to ask questions, and one thing he likes is to see the links that we are building inside Open Site Explorer. Now, of course we know that it takes a while for links to show, but that was ok, because we could just plug the links that we've built into a bit.ly link and then they'd show under Just Discovered Links in Open Site Explorer, and then boom, we're happy. It stopped working some time ago, and after the support team were a little unstuck I sent a hopeful tweet to @randfish.  Here is the response: https://twitter.com/randfish/status/788412272129347584 The advice to use Bit.Ly was removed swiftly after this!  Oops! The current Guidance is here: https://moz.com/help/guides/research-tools/open-site-explorer/justdiscovered It says: Want to see your new link in the Just-Discovered Links tab? An easy way to start seeing your link in the Just-Discovered section is to have it shared on Twitter and available on Feedly link. Feedly stopped supporting their own link shortner a few years ago.  Also, when you share a link from Feedly on twitter it is just the same as sharing a normal tweet, because it shares the standard URL for the site not a link to view on Feedly. Or, maybe these two statements are independant of one another and they should both be done separately?  I've done that too! I've also added the feed to recommended feeds inside fresh web explorer and that didn't work either! So, Moz and Help team please help me! How can I get links I've built for clients into Just Discovered Links? Thank you!

    Link Explorer | | stevestretton1
    1

  • Hi,I have a website www.contractor-accounts.co.uk that has an .htaccess file that strips .php and forces a closing brace /. The site is now over 6 months old and still has a very low ranking with MOZ also rating the site as DA/PA = 1 which seems to indicate some sort of issue with the website.  Can anyone offer any suggestions as to why this site is ranking poorly as much of the onpage SEO has been completed to a level of 90%+ for specific keyterms so I'm probably either looking at routing of the framework of so other technical SEO issues possibly? Any help much apreciated... <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c=""><ifmodule mod_negotiation.c="">Options -MultiViews</ifmodule> RewriteEngine On # Redirect Trailing Slashes...
        # RewriteRule ^(.)/$ /$1 [L,R=301]
         RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /+[^.]+$
         RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ %{REQUEST_URI}/ [R=301,L]
       
        # Redirect non-WWW to WWW...
         RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^contractor-accounts.co.uk [NC]
         RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.contractor-accounts.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301] # Handle Front Controller...
         RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
         RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
         RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]</ifmodule>

    Technical SEO | | ecrmeuro
    0

  • Should I delete them? Simply give them a different address like "City, State, Zip"? I see the benefit of having key buildings on campus in Google Maps, but I don't want those to affect my accuracy score and, thus, my local rankings for SEO.

    Local Listings | | GabeGibitz
    1

  • At the moment my site suffers from a flat product category structure where over 600 items fall into one category alone. This category is then filtered using a faceted search which appends query strings to the category URL and changes the products displayed on the page. At the moment our product category URL is as follows, www.domain.com/category/greeting-cards and this holds all cards including occasions such as anniversary, birthdays etc and also themes such as animal cards, contemporary cards etc I have proposed changes to my developer to change this structure to include subcategories. I can now go two subcategories deep. For example, "greeting cards > occasions > birthday cards" or "greeting cards > themes > animals". This is reflected in the new URL structure, which has been proposed, www.domain.com/greeting-cards/occasions/birthday-cards. In this URL do I need "occasions" in the URL as I don't think it adds much value to the user? Would I be better of having www.domain.com/greeting-cards/birthday-cards. If a user searches for "birthday cards" then I think this would be more relevant?

    On-Page Optimization | | joe-ainswoth
    0

  • Hi, Im unable to change my url in moz local, each time it says location needed, but i can't change the location?

    Moz Local | | Matthewca
    0

  • I want to find the complete internal redirects on website. Just internally linked. How to find such?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz
    0

  • We have a site of about 100.000 pages that is getting several million of visitors per year via organic search. We plan to add about 50.000 new pages gradually in the next couple of months and would like to add affiliate links to the new pages. All these 50.000 new pages will have unique quality data that a team has been researching for a while. I would like to add in the area under the fold or towards the end of the pages in an unobstrusive way affiliate links to about 5 different affiliate programs with affiliate links customized to page content and of real value to visitors. Since affiliate links are one of the factors that may trigger panda I am a bit nervous whether we should add the affiliate links and if there is any way of implementing the affiliate links in a way that they may be less likely to trigger panda. E.g. would you consider hiding affiliate links from google by linking to intermediate URL (which I would mark as noindex nofolllow) on our domain which then redirects to the final affiliate landing page (but google may notice via chrome or android data) ? Any other idea?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
    0

  • Does anyone know definitively if the format of the canonical tag matters? Silly question I know. vs

    Technical SEO | | Healio
    0

  • Hello, One of our clinics is moving a couple of miles away from it's current location. Does anyone know the proper steps to take to make the change in Google My Business. I know I can go in and edit all the details, but what becomes of the former listing? If someone were to search by our name and the former street address, is Google going to be smart enough to deliver our new location as the search result? Also, I know there's a Mark Permanently Closed feature, but that's not exactly true. That location didn't "close," it relocated so I'm assuming I should stay away from that feature. Thanks in advance for any insight. Erik

    Local Listings | | SmileMoreSEO
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, Has anybody ever experienced event tracking significantly impacting session data? Here's a summary of what I'm finding: When I measure sessions to a particular hostname (a subdomain) in my Google Analytics report, sessions dropped by over 100% when I removed some event tracking on that subdomain (an event was triggered when a user clicked on a particular button). When I reinstate that event tracking, sessions go back up to around where they used to be. Can anybody understand why this might be happening? Thanks!

    Reporting & Analytics | | A_Q
    0

  • When doing competitor analyse i can see that they are getting domain links form youtube and pinterest yet when i analyse my own links i do not have these. My Google analytics shows me that iam getting traffic from these sources so why is it not showing up for me? and is this affecting my moz rank?

    Link Explorer | | RobAdair1
    0

  • The scenario is this, we have a website eg: ABC.com where the content is in two language folders (en-us and en-gb). We have created a new brand with website XYZ.com for the USA market. Of course, this domain will take a while to rank because it is completely fresh. My question is how best to deactivate the en-us content on the old site to: a) prevent it showing up on Google US
    and
    b) pass the US traffic to the new website to boost its rankings I was thinking of removing the en-us pages from ABC.com and using a 410 error page containing a link to XYZ.com
    Would it be better to replace the content on en-us instead (with a link)? I'm not keen to use a straight 301 redirect as sometimes we get traffic from other countries to the en-us content. Thanks in advance Mozzers 🙂

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esseljay
    0

  • I can't figure the answer to this issue, on my blog I have a number of pages which each show snippets and an image for each blog entry,  these are called /recent-weddings/page/1 /2 /3 and so on. I'm getting duplicate page titles for these but can't find anywhere on Wordpress to set a unique title for them. So http://www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/recent-weddings/…/2/ has the same title as http://www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/recent-weddings/…/3/

    Technical SEO | | simonatkinsphoto
    0

  • I set up a Moz Campaign to track my blog domain (made a separate one for our website) and added in keywords I've optimized our blog posts for. I've spent about 2 months optimizing pages and there's been no change in the numbers I see in the dashboard (specifically Search Visibility and Top National Keywords) and Rankings module. It all basically says either 0 or '--'. I think I've set this campaign up right because the website campaign has been changing and showing different results in the same amount of time. I'm going to ask the stupid question -- is this because I've set up the blog campaign wrong, my site is blocking Moz from accessing blog data or my SEO efforts simply aren't working? Please help. I need a sanity check here. Thank so much in advance!

    Moz Bar | | Visier
    0

  • My site has been visited by unusual users with one second session times. This leaves my analytics data confused.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CompraBit
    0

  • Hello, everyone. This is Brad. I am new to Moz. I have a question. When I check my rankings in Moz Pro I get lots of high-ranking keyword phrases that are listed as "since removed".  What does this mean? I am attaching a screen shot.

    Moz Pro | | b3bailey
    0

  • Hi guys, We have a glossary on our website. All terms are accessible via a 'view all' URL, however we also have each letter on their own URL, e.g /a. Currently the rel=canonical tag for all the individual letter pages points to the view all URL. I'm just wondering whether that is best practice or not, as currently not all the individual letter pages are being indexed. Thanks 🙂

    Technical SEO | | brian-madden
    0

  • I've just done a local business listing check and it's come back with an inconsistency on the address.  I can't understand where the inconsistency it as Google haven't verified the address yet.  I've tried to rectify it but can't seem to correct it.  Any suggestions please?

    Moz Local | | shogajen
    0

  • Hi all, Weeks ago, I implemented the advised social profile markup (below, but with my own details, of course) but I continue to have no success with getting my social profiles onto my knowledge panel. Any ideas? Cheers, Rhys

    Local Listings | | SwanseaMedicine
    0

  • Hi We have a team in France who deal with the backend of the site, only problem is it's not always SEO friendly. I have lots of 404's showing in webmaster tools and I know some of them have previously had redirects. If we update a URL on the site, any links pointing to it on the website are updated straight away to point to the most up to date URL - so the user doesn't have to go through a redirect. However, the team would see this as the redirect not being 'used' after about 30 days and remove it from the database - so this URL no longer has any redirects pointing to it. My question is, surely this is bad for SEO? However I'm a little unsure as they aren't actually going through the redirect. But somewhere in cyber space the authority of this page must drop? Any advice is welcome 🙂

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey
    0

  • We are planning to experiment redirecting our homepage to one of the 2nd tier page. I mean....example.com to example.com/page. We need this page to rank well, but it doesn't have much internal links or external back-links, so we opt for this redirect. Advantage with this page is, it has "keyword" we want to rank for in URL. "page" in example.com/page. Will this help or hurt us in SEO? I think we are missing keyword in our root domain, so interested to highlight this page. Thanks, Satish

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz
    0

  • Hoping that someone may be able to advise if they've come across a hosting plan that offers multiple server locations within 1 plan? ie. One in Australia and another one in UK for example?

    Local Listings | | IsaCleanse
    0

  • Opencart allows the use of product tags (please note, these are NOT meta tags) which I believe are used for when customers want to search for a product using the search function. So one of my tags could be ''star wars socks'', and when a customer types this into the search it brings up every product containing the tag for socks. This is all good and well, however, these tags appear on the product page itself, right below the Manufacturer/Brand, and above the price (they created pages but I have canonical links in them so that is a non-issue). Will Google look kindly on this or could it be considered as keyword stuffing? Or will Google know they're for search and ignore them? I just need to know whether or not removing them entirely will be a good or bad idea.

    Technical SEO | | moon-boots
    0

  • Hello. I am thinking of changing the hyphens to underscores. The problem is that i have a magento extension for improved navigation and if you choose to use hyphens for special characters it will not let you choose this also for separating attributes. It will allow you only bouble hyphen. So when i go to sub-category  https://www.shoponline.gr/peripoihsh/somatos/kremes-somatos/ and filter two brands (victoria's secret and frais monde) it returns the url https://www.ishoponline.gr/peripoihsh/somatos/kremes-somatos/victoria-s-secret--frais-monde instead of the iniital url with undescore which was https://www.ishoponline.gr/peripoihsh/somatos/kremes-somatos/victoria_s_secret-frais_monde. So it is "victoria-s-secret--frais-monde" vs "victoria_s_secret-frais_monde". Any suggestions? Thank you in advance.

    Technical SEO | | iShopOnline
    0

  • Hi. My website, dailytekk.com, has been steadily losing viewers since April. In recent weeks, though, the drop has been much more significant — scarily so. Almost all our traffic comes from Google, organically. In the last 30 days I've lost 135k page views. I'm not sure if we just have content that is getting old, if Google changed something in the algorithm, if we are being penalized, if AMP pages are having a negative effect, etc. I would love to find a great consultant to help us figure this out and get back on the right track. We seem to be losing traffic despite our best efforts at this point. Thanks, Chris

    Reporting & Analytics | | dailytekk
    0

  • Hi Mozzers! So we're finally ready to move from http to https.  Penguin is finally showing us some love due to the recent algorithm updates.  I just added the https to Google search console and before 301 redirecting the whole site to a secure environment.....do i upload the same disavow file to the https version? Moreover, is it best to have both the http and https versions on Google Search console?  Or should I add the disavow file to the https version and delete the http version in a month? And what about Bing? Help.

    Reporting & Analytics | | Shawn124
    0

  • How does Hubspot compare with MOZ? Doe it provide similar features or is the functionality very different? Is Hubspot complementary to MOZ or could it be used as a substitute? If we stopped our MOZ subscription and subscribed to Hubspot would we lose anything? Thanks, Alan

    Moz Pro | | Kingalan1
    0

  • Hi all, Google is indexing a URL on my site that doesn't exist, and never existed in the past. The URL is completely made up. Anyone know why this is happening and more importantly how to get rid of it. Thanks 🙂

    Technical SEO | | brian-madden
    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.