Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. Latest Questions

Moz Q&A is closed.

After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

Log in to post

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!

  • CWseo


    I have been trying to optimise the following site for both Google SERP's and Google Local - Pixel Primate The URL has been around for around 3 years now but they just updated the website and launched it in December 2012. I did the on-page optimisation early in January 2013 and Google seems to have indexed the changes, for the home page at least. One major keyword I am targeting for the home page is 'Web Design Leicester'. I understand that the DA is fairly low (24) so this is something I need to improve. However, I've experienced positive results fairly quickly from just on-page optimisation for other sites I have worked on. The site just doesn't seem to be ranking at all for any keywords. Maybe the industry type is just extremely competitve but I find it very strange to not be visible anywhere in the SERPs. The site does not seem to have any penalties as it ranks for 'Pixel Primate' and all pages appear when doing a site: search. Also what's strange is that I set up the Google Local listing years ago but it doesn't appear anywhere in the local listing, not even when I search for it manually. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

    Technical SEO | | CWseo
    0
  • joeko


    I was wondering if backlinks from foreign language webistes can help me in ranking? For example: I ve got website in slovak language and I would place article with backlink on the foreign language website.  In which language should be the text surrounding the keyword?

    Link Building | | joeko
    1
  • Martin_S


    Mornin' Anyone have any guests blogging resources to find guest bloggers and blogs to guest post on? I've been using My Guest Blog but it runs dry after a while. Thanks

    Content Development | | Martin_S
    0
  • Hebels


    Last year we bought the videos of presentations on MozCon 2011. They seemed to be disappeared now. Is there a possibility to still watch them?

    Moz Pro | | Hebels
    0
  • Whitespark


    For example, www.storage-mart.com and us.storage-mart.com both show the same DA in OSE. I believe it's the DA of the root domain. How can I compare the DA of the 'www' and 'us' subdomains?

    Moz Pro | | Whitespark
    0
  • EricMoore


    I have been using Google Analytics and SEOMoz tools for a while now. I know which are my top landing pages and some of the keywords which bring me traffic. But I don't know which are the top searched keywords for my website as these are "not provided" by Google Analytics. More importantly, I want to know which keywords are directing traffic to a particular page on my website. Can anyone help ?

    Algorithm Updates | | EricMoore
    0
  • ogdcorp


    Hello, I have currently have a Free listing but Im considering paying the monthly fee. Does it really generate leads? Does it help for link building and SEO?
    If it does, is it wise to link back to the profile page or the home page? Thanks

    Social Media | | ogdcorp
    0
  • cbielich


    I am going to build a fake product and wanted to get some of your awesome ideas 🙂 This is for fun, laughs and mainly viral/back links. Ultimately my goal is to leave the user scratching their head saying to them self "Is this for real?". I want it almost believable 😉 First: My site is based on everything scrabble so I want it related to that since my fans are going to get a kick out of it. I need some great starting points of something fake I can create and post about.

    Link Building | | cbielich
    0
  • Rocket.Fuel


    I need some help figuring out if I should combine multiple domains or if I should let them be separate? I have domain1.com, domain2.com, and domain3.com. Well, domain1.com owns domain2.com and domain3.com. And currently domain1.com points to domain2.com and domain3.com from the homepage. They are going through some changes at their business, and now the option is on the table to combine the domains or still let them be separate as long as they link to each other. What is the best way to handle this and are there more things I should go through before making a decision? None of them have a ton of links to them, and they aren't super robust, but would just to have some advice. Thanks a lot

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rocket.Fuel
    0
  • ILM_Marketing


    Hi All.  I have a client looking to expand their industrial services to southeast Asia (Vietnam and Indonesia specifically right now).  Does anyone know of an SEO/Online Marketing firm local to that region that may be able to help them network with businesses and industries there? I've gone through the SEOmoz member database and reached out to a couple people with agencies in that area but never heard back from them. I personally thought a local firm would be more beneficial to the client but I'm also open to suggestions on ways that we might be able to help them market their services online from the US. Thanks so much! Megan

    International SEO | | ILM_Marketing
    0
  • lbohen


    An SEO report, not by SEOmoz, says my top two competitors have robots.txt files that disallows spidering. I suspect that their robots.txt file doesn't disallow all spidering. How do I find out what is in their robots.txt files?

    Competitive Research | | lbohen
    0
  • 3vgueni


    Hello, I would like to add reviews on some pages of my website, so it could eventually show up in the google search results with some nice stars. The problem is that the same review will be shown on multiple pages: Example: Reviews about France Reviews about French Riviera Reviews about Monaco (The review is about Monaco but as it's a town on the French riviera and in France i would like to use it to calculate an "Aggregate Rating" for the parent destinations...) Do you think that the use of the same review (with microdata) across multiple pages could be interpreted as a spammy way to get stars in the SERP and eventualy result in lower positions ? Or should I just use the Aggregate Rating without the reviews ? Many thanks for your answers, BR from France Evgueni

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | 3vgueni
    0
  • gheh2013


    I have several pages on one site which have gone down during the past few months. They keyword density on those pages, which is not unnatural, pleased Google for many years. it still pleases Bing. But Google now seems very picky. Based upon your experience, what is the ideal % keyword density for 2 and 3 word phrases, and should they be left out of alt tags even when proper to put them there? While Google dominates, we do not wish to alienate BIng/Yahoo. It is a huge mystery, and experimentation with more non-keyword-related text has so far not born any fruit. Thank you, GH

    Competitive Research | | gheh2013
    0
  • tevag


    Hello all, I am Greek and I have a quite strange question for you. Greek characters are generally recognized as special characters and need to have UTF-8 encoding. The question is about the URLs of Greek websites. According the advice of Google webmasters blog we should never put the raw greek characters into the URL of a link. We always should use the encoded version if we decide to have Greek characters and encode them or just use  latin characters in the URL. Having Greek characters un-encoded could likely cause technical difficulties with some services, e.g. search engines or other url-processing web pages. To give you an example let's look at A) http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%95%CE%BB%CE%B2%CE%B5%CF%84%CE%AF%CE%B1which is the URL with the encoded Greek characters and it shows up in the browser asB) http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ελβετία The problem with A is that everytime we need to copy the URL and paste it somewhere (in an email, in a social bookmark site, social media site etc) the URL appears like the A, plenty of strange characters and %. This link sometimes may cause broken link issues especially when we try to submit it in social networks and social bookmarks. On the other hand, googlebot reads that url but I am wondering if there is an advantage for the websites who keep the encoded URLs or not (in compairison to the sites who use Greeklish in the URLs)! So the question is: For the SEO issues, is it better to use Greek characters (encoded like this one  http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%95%CE%BB%CE%B2%CE%B5%CF%84%CE%AF%CE%B1) in the URLs or would it be better to use just Greeklish (for example http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvetia ? Thank you very much for your help! Regards, Lenia

    Technical SEO | | tevag
    0
  • Ouzan


    Hi, about 20-30 hours ago my own brand name disappeared from google results (We redirected old domain to new one about a month ago) My website is: www.websiteplanet.com If you search for Website Planet in google you will not find our homepage any longer.
    Not only that the brand name disappeared but we also dropped in rankings and lost about %50 of the organic traffic we had. It's important for me to say that we have never done any sort of blackhat or even greyhat SEO, at all. I could probably come up with many ideas of why it happened but maybe one of you mozzers already experienced this and could enlighten me. Will really appreciate any kind of response/help. Thanks.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ouzan
    0
  • proptiger


    I am not able to convincingly decide between using redirects versus using 404 errors. People are giving varied opinions. Here are my cases 1. Coding errors - we put out a bad link a. Some people are saying redirect to home page; the user at least has something to do PLUS more importantly it does NOT hurt your SEO ranking. b. Counter - the page ain't there. Return 404 2. Product removed - link1 to product 1 was out there. We removed product1; so link1 is also gone. It is either lying in people's bookmarks, OR because of coding errors we left it hanging out at some places on our site.

    Web Design | | proptiger
    0
  • douglasapuc


    So here comes the hard part of working with SEO.... I've been doing SEO for a quite long time now and as far as I concern, it has been working and that's why I can tell people I'm a SEO Manager! It was all good until 3/4 months ago when I got this client that wanted me to do SEO for his Escort Agency. I've analysed his website and came across some structure error, poor linking and so on... I've started by reformulating his website, re-structuring his urls, keeping good pages and throwing alway the poor content ones, requested some website owners to remove links to that website and so on.... All good and sorted, but when it came to do the off-page optimisation it  became a nightmare! It's pretty easy to get links for a clothing website or any other (not "obscure") kind of websites, but no serious and authority websites would link to an escort agency; It's also very easy to create something funny and nice and post it on a page of your website to get people sharing and liking on facebook, but again very hard to get people to share and like things posted by an escort agency... You can't really advertise on escorts directories and use keywords on the ad because godfather google would penalize you.... I really don't know what to do anymore, so I will list some questions and if guys SEO experts could help me out, I would be so grateful!!! How can I get people linking to the website without paying for it? How can I get good authority links to this kind of website? How can I advertise on paid directories without being penalised by google? How can i get shares and likes on social network websites? The website has about 3000 pages, been online since 2010, have at least 3 lengthy articles posted a day! Please guys help me out with this case that is making me loose my nights of sleep... If you guys need the website address and the targeted keyword I can PM you (I dont know if the forum allows me to post it here) Thank You so much for the help in advance....

    Social Media | | douglasapuc
    6
  • ocelot


    Hi I am planning on setting up a lead generation website in a sector I know well and have a domain registered although its only a few weeks old. I am looking for some insight and advice please to see it its worth doing.  For example there are lots of payday loan (not my niche btw) lead gen sites in the UK at the moment but what do all of these sites do with all the leads they generate - who buys them and for what cost per lead? I have done affiliate marketing in the past, but how does the lead gen process work. Do you sign up with a lead gen affiliate style network that buys the leads generated off your website. Or do you have to sell these leads on yourself?  If so where do you sell them.  I plan tobe operating in the UK

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | ocelot
    0
  • faisalnlm


    I want to calculate that how many backlinks i need, in order to get in higher SERPs? is there a way to calculate? One is obvious that check number of backlinks of websites that are ranking in top 5 positions. But i guess it is not true any more... So please help

    Link Building | | faisalnlm
    0
  • ufmedia


    I successfully enabled rel=publisher on our WordPress blog, and as a test I also enabled rel=authorship for a set of blog posts.  (Tested both in Google's Rich Snippets Tester.)  However, on the individual blog posts the publisher credit disappears.  Is there a way to enable both to appear on blog posts?

    Technical SEO | | ufmedia
    0
  • LockCity


    Hi everyone, I am a SEOMOZ newbie and I have been learning about SEO for a while now whilst working on my site - lockcity.co.uk - I already understood the importance of anchor text but was amazed to learn how google only count the anchor text used in the first link (http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/anchor-text). My questions are - does this rule still apply? and if so do the menus really count as the first link? If I went on this approach, this would make my menus too long for e.g. on my 'Auto Locksmith' page, my targetted keywords are 'Auto Locksmith' but also the town keywords need to be included. I really thought I had this covered on the home page by making sure the anchor text and alt text were keyword relevant to the link, but looks like Ive been missing out on an opportunity. Our business is slightly complicated in that the 25 mile radius we cover includes 4 different regions - therefore I feel like I always have to get these keywords in as well to make sure we get traffic from our area. Thanks for any advice you can give!

    On-Page Optimization | | LockCity
    0
  • HasanPK


    Hey, I'm a brand's person with no SEO experience, yet I'm in a position where I have to carry out an SEO audit of our telecom company's website. Though our website is up and running for some years now, nobody bothered to undertake keyword research. From the little I've read over months on SEOmoz, I've just done the following: took out keywords bringing organic traffic on to our website and checked our rankings for those keywords on major search engines. My observation is that most of these words are long-tail keywords. Since we only have product/service information related to our offerings, most of the head terms we've used for packages/offers/services pages are branded keywords. My understanding is that we need to rank top for our branded keywords (a must) and try to rank as high as possible for long tail. In addition, we can use those keywords in our copy so that the right page ranks top for the respective keyword. Am I missing anything here? What else do I need to do?

    Keyword Research | | HasanPK
    0
  • Clicksjim


    Hi, could someone please let me know the correct html code to get an anchor text link in a blog comment please? Thanks!

    Link Building | | Clicksjim
    1
  • eventurerob


    I do not think I have a problem here, but a second opinion would be welcomed... I have a site which has a the rel=canonical tag with the trailing slash displayed. ie www.example.com/ The sitemap has it without the trailing slash. www.example.com Google has it's cached copy with the trailing slash but the browser displays it without. I want to say it's perfectly fine (for the home page) as I tend to think they are treated (with/without trailing slashes) as the same canonical URL.

    Technical SEO | | eventurerob
    0
  • BipSum


    My website is e-commerce and used to rank for all industry related keywords like buy widgets, cheap widgets, online widgets in top10. And suddenly my website was hacked and to resolve this hacking issue i have re-write all my dynamic urls into static pages after that new pages are indexed and ranking well. But after few months i have notice few changes in keywords ranking going down. But suddenly after Google Algo (EMD/Panda) update on Sept 27 i lost all my positions. And then according to Google guidelines i have worked on over optimization and low quality pages. I have removed all tones of low quality pages from SERP and simultaneously worked on url re-write. But i have notice small percent of changes in keyword positions like when Google Algo (EMD/Panda) is rolled out i lost my keyword positions from 1st page to 200 page and after working on over optimization and low quality pages the keywords are came back to 100 pages. Recently i have notice that my web pages ranking for irrelevant keywords. For example, let's say i used to rank for home page for these keywords; buy widgets, cheap widgets, online widgets but now am ranking for different inner pages say (guide pages). Can any one suggest me whats wrong..

    On-Page Optimization | | BipSum
    0
  • MattBarker


    We noticed recently a huge amount of referral traffic coming to a client's site from various hard cord porn sites. One of the sites has become the 4th largest referrer and there are maybe 20 other sites sending traffic. I did a Whois look up on some of the sites and they're all registered to various people & companies, most of them are pretty shady looking. I don't know if the sites have been hacked or are deliberately sending traffic to my client's site, but it's obviously a concern.   The client's site was compromised a few months ago and had a bunch of spam links inserted into the homepage code. Has anyone else seen this before?  Any ideas why someone would do this, what the risks are and how we fix it? All help & suggestions greatly appreciated, many thanks in advance. MB.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MattBarker
    0
  • PeterRota


    So, I have searched around the internet but, I still can't find the answer.What is Keyword Rich Anchor Text? Is it basically just exact matching to the page. For example if my page was www.randonmpage.com would a keyword rich anchor text be randompage? Thanks. Peter

    Link Building | | PeterRota
    0
  • Beekhuizen


    Hi, I was wondering: we work in an extremely competitive market. There are 6 companies, offering the same service in my country: price comparison in a niche market. The competitors have hundreds of different websites, using iframe-techniques. Would it be helpful for me to link to those 6 competitors, in a piece of content about our company strategies, USP's and overview of the market? From a transparency point of view, i would prefer telling my visitors there are other competitors, which are undoubtedly performing very well, but we perform better on several aspects of the price comparison. On the other hand, my competitors benefit from the backlinks as well. Is my gain bigger than the gain of my competitors do you think? Has anyone tested this once?

    Algorithm Updates | | Beekhuizen
    1
  • shags38


    I inadvertently created a mini link farm some time back by linking all of my parked domains (2000 plus) to some of my live websites (I was green and didn't think linking between the same owner sites / domains was an issue). These websites were doing well until Penguin and although I did not get any 'bad link' advices from Google I figure I was hit by Penguin. So about 3 or 4 months ago I painstakingly deleted ALL links from all of those domains that I still own (only 500 or so - the others were allowed to lapse). None of those domains have any links linking out at all but old links from those domains are still showing up in WMT and in SEOmoz and every other link tracking report I have run. So why would these links still be reported? How long do old links stay in the internet archives? This may sound like a strange question but do links 'remain with a domain for a given period of time regardless'? Are links archived before being 'thrown out' of the web. I know Google keeps archives of data that has expired, been deleted, website closed etc, etc for about 3 years or so (?). In an effort to correct a situation I have spent countless hours manually deleting thousands of links but they won't go away. Looking for some insight here please. cheers, Mike

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | shags38
    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


Browse Questions

Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.