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 - We launched a schema plugin for our WordPress site to make our blog seen as articles and main page as an organization. The day after, we saw a dramatic decrease in Keyword rankings but our website health improved with Google. Any thoughts on what could be causing this?

    Technical SEO | | Erin_IAN
    0

  • We'll be optimizing file names moving forward, but it hasn't been done in the past. I have probably 1,500 that would need to be changed, so want to make sure it's a valuable use of time/worth the effort. 🙂 Also, has anyone used Media File Renamer for wordpress? Seems this would be a good way to rename files without needing to reupload everything. Thanks!

    Image & Video Optimization | | jennafrye
    0

  • One of my client's websites was recently hacked and I've been dealing with the after effects of it. The website is now clean of malware and I already appealed to Google about the malware issue. The current issue I have is dealing with the 20, 000+ crawl errors which are garbage links that were created from the hacking. How does one go about dealing with all the 301 redirects I need to create for all the 404 crawl errors? I'm already noticing an increased load time on the website due to having a rather large .htaccess file with a couple thousand 301 redirects done already which I fear will result in my client's website performance and SEO performance taking a hit as well.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPK
    0

  • Hello, A client of mine has an online store with a pre-made cart. In this cart the name below the product in the category pages and the H1 tag on the product pages themselves are the same textbox entry (they have to be the same thing) We want to add two product features to the product name, but this will make the H1 longer and diluted. Let me give you a fictional example, A category page for cross-trainer shoes would have products in it. Below each product it says things like "Nike Sports One Shoes" and "Adidas Action Series Shoes". We want to make it "Nike Sports Shoes size 7 through 12 for running and walking" and "Adidas Action Series Shoes size 5 through 10 for running, walking, and hiking". The reason for the change is that we want users to know about size and one more important feature before they visit the product page in our case to save them time. But this changes the H1 on the product page (a pre-made cart problem) from "Adidas Action Series Shoes" which is the direct search term to "Adidas Action Series Shoes size 5 through 10 for running, walking, and hiking" which is not a direct search term. This dilutes the keyword in the H1 but will save users time. We will put a tag inside the H1 just so you know, so that we can bold the name of the product to still be seen clearly, I hope that's not an HTML SEO problem. **What do you think, for users with diluted SEO or better SEO in this case? Our product pages are our most important pages in this industry. Thanks**

    Web Design | | BobGW
    0

  • Hey folks Looking to get some input from what other people are seeing with Penguin 4.0 and historically penalised sites. We have three sites we are looking at currently - all had historically brutal penguin penalties. All have done extensive clean up and are respectable businesses and have seen some manor of recovery or improvement. However, we are seeing issues at a homepage level with these three sites in that the homepage currently does not rank for the main terms but an inner page does in it's place (but not as well as we would expect given everything else). This applies to a single keyword on all three of these sites - add a modifier to that keyword and they rank top of first page (often 1st place). Example of modifiers being 'installer', 'uk', 'supplier' etc. That main keyword though only ranks top of 3rd page in this instance and it is an inner page and not the homepage which is the best fit for the targeted term. Question Is anyone else seeing this? Sites that have gone from no visibility in top 50 for a previously abused term that are now seeing some visibility page 2 / page 3 for the big terms and top of page 1 visibility for those terms + modifiers. Thoughts This seems a bit odd to me and hard to understand in light of the Penguin 4.0 announcement if there is no demotion and only devaluation of bad links then why would a single page still be seemingly so heavily effected how can an algorithm that focuses on devaluation of bad links still be granular as this seems to be a penalty of sorts that effects a specific page for a specific keyword (the one most abused historically in terms of link building). two of these are big companies, biggest in their industry in the real world with lots of high visibility clients like TV shows, IKEA etc. Lots of natural highly authoritative links, good content etc - we are digging in further but certainly looks like they have their house largely in order. Note We have one other client that I believe is seeing something similar on an internal page and that page was the main link target for spammy links of old that are now removed. However, it appears Google has a memory regarding even these removed links. I mention this primarily as I don't believe this is homepage specific but rather that is the case as the homepage was the main link target historically. Summary These sites are seeing movement - huge movement. Not exactly what we would expect though given the extensive clean up and talk around how this release of the algorithm works. Be interested to see what you are seeing out there folks and if anyone has seen anything similar. Cheers
    Marcus

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marcus_Miller
    0

  • This has been bugging me for a while now and I'd like to know what you guys think. I often find what I can only described as 'oddities' in our rankings for certain search terms.  For example, we might rank top 5 for 'A5 week view diary' and then second page for 'Week view diaries A5'.  (Not an actual example, I just find stuff like this all the time across our various pages) They are basically the same query, so I don't understand why so often there is such a discrepancy.  I can only put this down to exact match keyword phrase still being an important ranking factor. What do you guys think? Are exact match phrases still an important part of the SERP results? Thank you. Isaac.

    Keyword Research | | isaac663
    0

  • Hi We had a new site design at the end of April and at the same time changed to https. Over the last 6 months, according to our analytics account the traffic has dramatically dropped especially from mobile. We were at 3607 new visitors from mobile in April and now 32! in September. Technically (other than page speed and some meta issues that I'm aware of) there doesn't initially appear to be anything wrong. I have just been into search console and notice that the old http site still has the GA code on it, could it be that this is why the data is showing such a massive drop? Should we have taken that off when we migrated the site? The same analytics account is also on the new site. Thanks in advance Janine

    Reporting & Analytics | | Janine1
    0

  • One of my clients' run a hyperlocal marketplace (have different pages for each city) to hire music teachers. Should the title be "Hire Violin Teachers, Tutors from Boston"? or "Top 10 Violin Teachers of Boston". I prefer former title as it has 2 keywords - "violin teachers", "violin tutors" than latter. But my client argues that "Top 10" has a strong affinity to attract users that would increase CTR. Am I right? or Is he right? and Why?

    On-Page Optimization | | Avin123
    0

  • One of my clients' run a hyperlocal marketplace (have different pages for each city) to hire music teachers. When I am doing link building, should I use anchor text as "violin teachers" or "violin teachers in boston". I suggested to use "violin teachers" as this is the primary keyword with high search volume and if we rank for this keyword, we will automatically rank for locality keywords like violin teachers in boston, violin teachers in new york, violin teachers in los angels etc. But, he argues that we are hyper local services, which means we should have city anchor texts like "violin teachers in boston", "violin teachers in new york", "violin teachers in los angels" etc. Am I right? or Is he right? and Why?

    Link Building | | Avin123
    0

  • Hey folks I have a fairly complicated SEO issue we have been looking at for a few years now. There are two parts to this problem so would be interested to get the input of the community here and any experienced in Penguin and Local SEO issues. I am going to have to change the names to protect the innocent a bit here as some of the issue relates to a competitor and a shared address. History My client originally worked for company A which we will call Events R us. He then set up on his own at a new address and lets call his company Fantastic Events. EventsRus never had a good website or SEO Fantastic Events set up a great website and really focused on adding tons of relevant content for all the myriad event options available and subsequently did really well. This is a few years back and they were also doing some article marketing on sites like ezinearticles.com to build links (1). As time went on they did get a bit carried away with these low quality links and were buying $5 spun content articles and other low quality links. They ranked really well for a few key terms. There was a suspected local SEO issue as fantastic events used the same office as their fathers business called fantastic finance and the citations / phone number issues etc all had to be cleared up (2). Fantastic Events and Events R Us remained friends and over time Fantastic Events moved to the same farm address as Events R Us so they could offer a wider range of services based on the farm (and ran by fantastic events) and to some extent run away from the address confusion with the same office and very similar name to the other fantastic finance business. Events R Us wanted some of the Fantastic Events success and built a new website and largely copied the website of Fantastic Events - at times even lifting entire pages of content but certainly mirroring the structure of the site. Fantastic Events tussled with them for a few years over this and over time they updated the content but the structure and services and address all pretty much mirrored what was offered on the Fantastic Events site. (3) Two companies - same address (it's a farm so whilst there are different barns I believe Google can only get as far as the farm gate so same address to all intents and purposes. Same services give or take. Events R Us was the older company overall by several years and was at the farm address many years longer than Fantastic Events (4). Fantastic Events starts running a blog and adding regular, useful event orientated content. The first true team building blog out there as far as we could tell and traffic tripled over a six month period. Penguin hits and Fantastic Events loses a lot of traction - this gets worse with Penguin 2.0. Both the homepage and the evening events page lose visibility and traction. The owner gives up on the blog to a large degree. Subsequent clean up happens and is rigorous - all bad links are pretty much removed and the remaining elements are disavowed. (90% of it is actually gone by now). Penguin 3.0 comes and no recovery at all. Nothing. If anything it gets worse and the once strong blog is now losing traction. Events R Us starts to do really well in search for exactly the same terms that Fantastic Events used to do well for. In particular one page ranks for exactly the same keywords and in exactly the same position (#1) as what was believed to be the primary traffic driver on the Fantastic Events site. It is almost like they exchanged positions and Events R Us went from nowhere to a strong footing with some national and local keywords and Fantastic Events fell from grace. A new website is built. All content is refreshed and bought up to date. Some light investment back in the blog. Some light link building is done around digital PR and infographics. Some initial movement in the right direction but overall this did not move the dial. Certain pages on the site that used to rank are nowhere - looks very much like a page level / keyword level penguin penalty. These same pages rank great, often first on the competitor site (an exchange of positions to some extent). Advice from myself and other esteemed consultants was to clean up, build some good links and wait for Penguin 4.0 to remove that eventuality. Also that the address issue could be causing some local SEO issue where Google believes the two businesses are one and has somehow merged the two with some local SEO filter or some such (same business with multiple websites at same address). Penguin 4.0 comes along and no improvements. Events R us sit pretty. Feeling is that the local issue must play a part here now that Penguin should be eliminated due to the extensive link clean up etc and there must now be some action to resolve this address / local issue. Issues low quality links - but cleaned up 100% now. same business name and address as fathers business initially older business copied the structure and content of newer business moved to same address as older more established business with very similar content older business now seems to have taken all the exact keywords and positions the newer business used to occupy Penguin 4.0 and no resolution. Local SEO issue seemingly remains Summary So we are left in a difficult position. The business does not want to move. But if there is some filtering or merging going on here then how can we get around this? The client is likely collateral damage to an algorithmic component designed to stop single businesses having multiple websites. I know there are reports of this happening but I have never seen such a thing for an innocent business like this but the nature of the address (two separate barns on a gated farm) and the history and similarities between the businesses makes this difficult. Things are somewhat desperate though - a move has to be made now. Even if that is a physical one. The client has considered a virtual address to take that variable out the picture but I have advised caution. I am even cautious about a change in physical address. Google has a long memory. If such a move was made at considerable expense would it help or would the other business retain Is the best option a new start? New brand, address, website, services etc - cut all ties with the historic Fantastic Events brand and by association the Events R Us brand. This is not a recommendation I can quickly or easily make so would be really interested to hear the feedback on anyone who has come across such a multi faceted and complex issue before. This is a tough one. We know what we are doing on the local front. We know what we are doing on the Penguin front. We know how to build links and authority. We are doing this work of the clock to help a long term friend / client get back to where they really deserve to be. The history is not spotty clean but the good work and effort far outway a short spell building dodgy links several years ago now. As an SEO consultant I don't want to advise for the company to rebrand and move offices at considerable expense but whilst I have a theoretical understanding of the issue how can we prove it and be sure this is the best possible advice? Thanks folks - hope this at least makes for interesting reading. This is something of an edge case. A good business likely caught up in a filter designed to stop abuse. Cheers
    Marcus

    Local Listings | | Marcus_Miller
    1

  • I submitted the image sitemap in GWT and only few of them get indexed in google, but now the indexed images are also getting de-index. Any solution for it? See the attached E4hPDQE

    Technical SEO | | tigersohelll
    0

  • Hello community My question is most of the domains on the first page has non-WWW URL thereby If I consider High domain authoritative sites including https://moz.com/ and https://ahrefs.com/ : the site URL is without www on the contrary, when I take Google it has https://www.google.co.in/ It just confused me, could anyone solve my issue that which one is better for SEO?

    Web Design | | Tabassum
    0

  • Hi I’ve got a query around optimising websites for keywords. The organisation I work for has 3 websites that all sell aluminium joinery. Each website site represents a separate brand but the product is essentially the same across all three. In terms of optimising these sites for key words should I use different keywords for each site so as too not to make the brand compete with each other. Any advice would be great

    On-Page Optimization | | APLNZ1
    0

  • One of my clients came to me today asking to mirror their current website and host it on a different domain (i.e domain.com and domain.ca). Their reasoning is that there is no actual way to confirm via form entries from their website which visitors are submitting the form from an organic perspective and which ones are submitting the form through an Adwords ad campaign referral they are running (which I have nothing to do with). I know Google Analytics will show you visits to pages on a site and then you can find out which source (organic vs. cpc) they came from, but it won't confirm the source on the actual form entry. So my client feels the only way to find out this information would be to mirror the website so that the separate analytics would validate  their Ad spend. Does anyone know of any tools that I could use for something like this? I do NOT want to mirror the website as I am fearful of duplicate content and the YEARS of organic SEO work I have put into this website going to waste. The other element I should mention is the client only wants to have this "mirorred" site up for 2 months. Any thoughts, suggestions and arguments for a mirorred website are welcomed! Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MainstreamMktg
    0

  • Not long ago, I had a couple of peers asking why I was using sessions to evaluate page performance. They said it wasn't a good metric for evaluating a single page because it only looked at how many site visitors began their journey through you site form that page. They were trying to convert me over to pageviews, which they said was a superior metric because it show you every time that page had been loaded and therefore provided better insight. Moz uses sessions on their landing page report. Is this because it's an SEO tool, so all they are concerned with is how individual URLs attract site traffic? Signed, Confused in California

    Reporting & Analytics | | PGD2011
    0

  • I am trying to block roger from crawling some UTM urls we have created, but having no luck. My robots.txt file looks like: User-agent: rogerbot Disallow: /?utm_source* This does not seem to be working. Any ideas?

    Product Support | | Firestarter-SEO
    0

  • Hi all, first question (eek) Could I pick the brains of fellow users around an issue we are having with canonical urls on a magento website. At the moment we do not have these enabled as it seems to break our indexing. Cut a long story short, we have thousands of products but haven't rewritten many of the descriptions from the manufacturers yet and so have noindexed all the product pages (freeing them as we go). The goal, for now, is to pull in traffic via the filtering options we have on the site The goal, for now, is to pull in traffic via the filtering options we have on the site. For example, if you go to Dresses, there then are several filtering options which would allow you to choose a colour, shape and material - if you wished to filter that precisely.  These filtering options are all crawlable and so we would then have a page that google could index for, for example,  Green Lace Maxi Dress. All good there, few people search for specific products and a lot search for types of products so we are covered. To get back to the issue at hand. If we enable the canonical option on our magento plugin it will stop us from being able to target these terms. Whereas the filtering option would create domain.com/dress/green/maxi/lace with the page title of Green Lace Maxi Dress, if we enable the canonical part of the seo plugin the canonical link which would be added to the page would be  - instantly removing our ability to rank for longer tail dress related searches (we are not going to compete with the big players on the premium terms, yet!). There are alternative plugins we can buy for magento to add the correct  tag, however, if every page's canonical just points back it itself like this, is there really much point spending nearly $1000 on the 4 licences we would need to cover our range of sites.  Is it really necessary, in this case, that we have a canonical for the product filtering? Sorry for the long post, hope it made sense. Thanks for any assistance.

    On-Page Optimization | | DSCarl
    0

  • Hi There, When i look into my site crawl i have thousands of duplicate content issues. Now they are essentially product pages which are in multiple categories - however we have added the canonical tag so im confused as to why all of these are appearing as if there is an error, does the MOZ bot not take canonicals into account? Kind Regards Gemma

    Moz Bar | | acsilver
    0

  • Hi all, So, I have done nothing SEO heavy on my site for a couple of months, I deleted a page and moved the content to the homepage, but thats about it. Anyway, for our main keyword we have dropped from a pretty regular 20-30th position we have enjoyed for the past 4-5 months right down to 95th. Other keywords have also dropped by a few pages but not as drastic. I got hit by some spammy 'forex' links on the UK Business Forums clones appearing (as per my other post), but they started AFTER the 8th October. Something happened on that day which very rapidly ruined my rankings. Has anyone else seen this happen? Or could it be Penguin 4 checked out my site on that date? I have not dropped at all for my Brand Name or other keywords, it seems to be the higher searched keywords I have taken a plummet on. Thanks,

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | phero
    0

  • Hi all, Just been looking at my referring domains and it seems someone is taking the pleasure of cloning the UK Business Forums website and adding 'forex' based links on all the external anchors. This includes everyone who is listed in their directory. I've put below the domains I know of, but if anyone else knows of more please add them so we can all get them disavowed. domain:redwood96.ru
    domain:zanier.it
    domain:selskie-zori.ru
    domain:gabrielloni.it
    domain:reserva-ideal.com
    domain:imexaf.com
    domain:rassemblementpourjouy.com
    domain:windsorlegion.ca
    domain:powerconector.com
    domain:eltallerdelorfebrewd.com
    domain:aepedome.net
    domain:spkvarc.ru
    domain:mtdnk.ru
    domain:koning.rs
    domain:rassemblementpourjouy.com
    domain:imexaf.com
    domain:gabrielloni.it

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | phero
    0

  • Hi all. I work for an e-commerce site called TOAD Diaries and we've been building some landing pages recently.  Our most generic page was for '2017 Diaries'.  Take a look here. Initial results are encouraging as this page is ranking top page for a lot of 'long tail' search queries, e.g) '2017 diaries a4', '2017 diaries a5', '2017 diaries week to view' etc. Interesting it doesn't even rank top 50 for the 'head term'... '2017 diaries'.  **And our home page outranks it for this search term.  **Yet it seems clear that this page is considered relevant and quality by Google it ranks just fine for the long tails. Question:  Does this mean Google 'chosen' our home page over the 2017-page landing page?  And that's why the 2017-page effectively doesn't rank for it's 'head term'?  (I can't see this as many times a website will rank multiple times such as amazon) But any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Also, what would you do in this scenario?  Work on home-page to try to push it up for that term and not worry about the landing page? Any suggestions or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Hope that makes sense.  Do shout if not. Thanks in advance. Isaac.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isaac663
    0

  • So Opencart allows the use of product tags (please note, this 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. 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.

    On-Page Optimization | | moon-boots
    0

  • I'm currently reauthoring all of the product pages on our site. Within the redesign of all the pages is a set of "why choose us?" bullet points and "what our customers say" bullet points. On every page these bullet points are the same. We currently have 18% duplicate content sitewide and I'm reluctant to push this. The products are similar but targeted at different professions, so I'm not sure whether to alter the text slightly for the bullet points on each page, remove the bullet points entirely or implement some form of canonicalisation that won't impact the profession-specific pages' ability to rank well.

    On-Page Optimization | | EdLongley
    0

  • Dear Moz community, I have a multilingual site and there are pages with content that is supposed to be translated but for now is English only. The structure of the site is such that different languages have their virtual subdirs: domain.com/en/page1.html for English, domain.com/fr/page1.html for French and so on. Obviously, if the page1.html is not translated, the URLs point to the same content and I get warnings about duplicate content. I see two ways to handle this situation: Break the naming scheme and link to original English pages, i.e. instead of domain.com/fr/index.html linking to domain.com/fr/page1.html link to domain.com/en/page.html Leave the naming scheme intact and set up a 301 redirect so that /fr/page1.html redirects to /en/page1.html Is there any difference for the two methods from the SEO standpoint? Thanks.

    Technical SEO | | Lomar
    0

  • Hello, A subdirectory consolidates domain authority vs a ccTLD approach. However, for example, if a domain has been well established in the UK i.e example.com, is that domains authority diluted if a subdirectory is created i.e example.com/es Will some of the link juice attained on www.example.com be shared throughout www.example.com/es and therefore initially impact search visibility for www.example.com? I understand it works both ways as well, as any links attained on www.example.com/es will benefit the example.com domain. Thanks

    Technical SEO | | SEONOW123
    0

  • Hi, I haven't tested this yet, so before I do I wanted to see if anyone had some experience with this. I have lower level categories I want to rank for SEO for example: Say I want to rank 'Standard Metal Lockers' - with the way our site is set up, I have to work within a classification, which isn't always easy. So it would be categorised as follows: Cupboards & Lockers > Lockers > Standard Lockers > Standard Metal Lockers The URL structure would remain /standard-metal-lockers & I would link this from the 'Lockers' page. Is this too deep in the site structure to rank? I think if it's linked properly & promoted it will be fine, but I'd like to see if anyone else has had this issue. Becky

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey
    0

  • My question is regarding the URL structure best practices of a sitemap. My website allows search any number of ways, i.e. 1. http://www.website.com/category/subcategory/product 2. http://www.website.com/subcategory/product 3. http://www.website.com/product However, I am not sure which structure to use in the sitemap (which is being written manually). I know that for SEO purposes the 3rd option is best as the link is more relevant to that individual product, but the Moz tool states that the home page should have less than 100 links (although Google doesn't penalise for having more) and by writing my entire site in the 3rd way it would result in a lot more links adjoining to the home page. It is either the 2nd or 3rd option, I think, as the 1st category is not keyword specific (rather a generic term, i.e. novelties). Does anyone have experience with this?

    Moz Pro | | moon-boots
    0

  • Our situation is similar to YouTube. We have an original content on every subpage that is genuinely useful when embedded as a widget on 3r party websites. That is why we offer an embeddable widget that shows slightly simplified version of the content - exactly like a YouTube video embedded on your blog. The embed code is simply an iframe sourcing from our subpage: <iframe src="wikibudgets.org/subpage"></p> </blockquote> <p>1/ Does the iframe itself pass any link value at all to the subpage?</p> <p>2/ If yes, what would be the equivalent of anchor text in iframe?</p> <p>3/ If not, will any link in the subpage pass link value from the 3rd party website to my domain/subpage?</p> <p>4/ If not, will I be punished/rewarded if I ask users to put a visible, unobfuscated link to the subpage below the iframe?</p> <blockquote style="background: #f7f7f7; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 2px; padding-bottom: 5px; white-space: nowrap; overflow-y: auto; font-family: monospace;"> <p><iframe src="wikibudgets.org/subpage" /><a href="wikibudgets.org/subpage">rich anchor text</a></p> </blockquote></iframe>

    Link Building | | wikiBudgets
    0

  • Hey Everyone, its Muhammad Umair Ghufran I have one question about Link Building ? As my Knowledge Google Love the Quality content but Link building rank some low quality website Right ? So, what is the future of link building ; please explain indeep with complete reference for better understanding Thanks Regards: Muhammad Umair Ghufran

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muhammadumairghufran
    0

  • Hi, See attached image. We received a non-manual penalty on March 22, 2015. I don't think we ever came out of it. We have moved up due to the Penguin update, but we should (by DA PA) be up on the first page for tons of stuff and most keyword are lower than their true strength. What kind of quality errors could be causing this? I assume it was a quality update. I am working on the errors, but don't see anything that would be so severe as to be penalized. What errors/quality problems am I looking for? We have tons of unique content. Good backlinks. Good design. Good user experience except for some products. Again, what am I looking for? Thanks. non-manual-penalty.png

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW
    0

  • Hello everyone. It's been several weeks since the problem persists, Here: https://moz.com/community/users
    There are rankings that are incorrect and some users that have the same ranking than other users. I've attached some pics. GR 25603b49292acd5d68f7dd6a43977f94 6d8fea557f6ed2de23466f6c7df850eb

    Moz Bar | | Gaston Riera
    0

  • Hi all, I have a bit of a conundrum for you all pertaining to a tracking link issue I have run into on a clients site. They currently have over duplicate content. Currently, they have over 15,000 pages being crawled (using Screaming Frog) but only 7,000+ are legitimate pages in the sense of they are not duplicates of themselves. The client is using Omniture instead of Google Analytics and using an advanced tracking system on their site for internal and external links (ictids and ectids) in the URL parameters. This is creating thousands of duplicated pages being crawled by Google (as seen on their Search Console and on Screaming Frog). They also are in the middle of moving over from http to https and have thousands of pages currently set up for both, again, creating a duplicate content issue. What I have suggested for the tracking links is setting up a URL parameter in Search Console for these tracking links. I've also suggested they canonical all tracking links to point to the clean page so the pages that have already been indexed point to the correct clean url. Does this seam like the appropriate strategy? Additionally, I've told them before they submit a new sitemap to Google, they need to switch their website over to https to avoid worsening their duplicate content issue. They have not submitted a sitemap to Google Search Console since March 2015. Thank you for any help you can offer!

    Reporting & Analytics | | Rydch41
    0

  • one of my international clients from China does not believe that his site is now on page #2 for a national search term. He said he had a colleague search from a location in the United States and his site did not come up in any of the top 10 Google search page results. Suggest any ways to back ranking up? Maybe use an additional rank report? appreciate any/all suggestions. THanks! Chris

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Sundance_Kidd
    0

  • Hi, we re-branded and launched a new website in February 2016. In June we saw a steep drop in the number of URLs indexed, and there have continued to be smaller dips since. We started an account with Moz and found several thousand high priority crawl errors for duplicate pages and have since fixed those with canonical tags. However, we are still seeing the number of URLs indexed drop. Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google? I can't seem to find a definitive answer on this. A good portion of our URLs have canonical tags because they are just events with different dates, but otherwise the content of the page is the same.

    Technical SEO | | zasite
    0

  • Hi all, we run a furniture store and our results in Google.co.uk almost always use the page's content as the description in the search results, even though we have a correctly implemented meta description tag. The rival's pages that rank above and below us almost always show the ranking page's meta description in Google's results page. Our developer seems to think it's because we added the meta description tags long after the pages were first indexed by Google and he seems to think Google has "fixed" on the page content and is happy with that over our meta description ...but I've never heard of that before. Thank you.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee159
    0

  • Hey folks Hoping to get some more eyes on a specific problem I am seeing with a clients site. Site: http:www.ukjuicers.com  We have checked everything we can think of and the usual suspects here are not present: Canonical URL is in place Site is shown as indexed in search console No Crawl, DNS, Connectivity or server errors No robots.txt blocking - verified in search console No robots meta tags or directives Fetch as Google works Fetch & render works site command returns all other pages info command does not return the homepage homepage is cached and cache has been updated since this issue started: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ukjuicers.com homepage is indexed in yahoo and Bing all variations redirect to the www.ukjuicers.com domain (.co.uk, .com, www, sans www etc) The only issue I found after some extensive digging was some issues with the HTTP and HTTPS versions of the site both being available and both specifying the canonical version as themselves. So, http site used canonicals with http and https site used canonicals with https. So, a conflict there with the canonical exacerbating the problem it is there to solve. The HTTPS site is not indexed though and we have set this up in webmaster tools and now the web developer has set redirects to ensure all versions even the https now 301 redirect to the http://www.ukjuicers.com page so these canonical issues have been ironed out. But... it's still not indexing the homepage. The practical implications of this are quite scary - the site used to be somewhere between 1st and 4th for keywords like 'juicers', 'juicer' etc. Now they are bottom of page 1 or top of page 2 with an internal page. They were jostling with the big boys (amazon, argos, john lewis etc) but now they are right at the bottom of the second page. It's a strange one - i have seen all manor of technical problems over the years but this one seems to defy sensible explanation. The next step is to do a full technical SEO audit of the site but I am always of the opinion that with many eyes all bugs are shallow so if anyone has any input or experience with odd indexation problems like this would love to get your input. Cheers
    Marcus

    Technical SEO | | Marcus_Miller
    0

  • It may sound silly ... Just wondering to see your opinion about leaving link on blogs; keyword as name with site link or link in the comment text as long as its relevant.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Mustansar
    0

  • Hello Moz community. I'm keen to find out your experiences on the following: Have you ever experienced a migration whereby a large % of keywords are stuck in position #11 - post migration? The keywords do not move up or down (whilst competitors jump from 13 to 9 and vice versa) over a three month period. Please see the % difference in the attached e-mail. (sample 1,000 keyword terms) Question: Has anyone ever experienced this type of phenomenon before? If so - what was the root cause of this and did this happen post migration? What solution did you use to rectify this? Have you ever seen a cross-indexing issue between two domains (each domain serves a different purpose) post migration, which impacts the performance of the main brand domain? I will explain a little further - say you have www.example.com (brand site) and www.example-help.com (customer service site) and the day the brand website is migrated (same domain - just different file structure), www.example-help.com points to the same server that www.example.com is on (with a different file structure) and starts to inherit the legacy file structure. For example, the following is implemented on migration day: I will explain a little further - say you have www.example.com (brand site) and www.example-help.com (customer service site) and the day the brand website is migrated (same domain - just different file structure), www.example-help.com points to the same server that www.example.com is on (with a different file structure) and starts to inherit the legacy file structure. For example, the following is implemented on migration day: For example, the following is implemented on migration day: www.example.com/fr/widgets-purple => 301s to www.example.com/fr/widgets/purple But www.example-help.com now points to the same server where the customer service content is now hosted. So although the following is rendered: So although the following is rendered correctly: www.example-help.com/how-can-we-help We also have the following indexed in Google.fr - competing for the same keyword terms and the main brand website has dropped in rankings: www.example-help.com/fr/widgets-purple [legacy content from main brand website] Even when legacy content is 301 redirected from www.example-help.com to www.example.com, the authority isn't passed across and we now have www.example.com (as per Q1) a lot lower in Google than pre-migration. Question: Have you ever experienced a cross-indexing issue like above whereby Google potentially isn't passing authority across from legacy to the new setup? I'm very keen to hear your experiences on these two subjects and whether you have had similar problems on  some of your domains. E0hbb

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMVSEO
    0

  • Hi everyone, I'd like to know if it is possible to pay for the Moz Pro in a year term rather than by months. Our company work in a year time basis and we would like to know if this option is duable, I couldn't find any information regarding this. Thank you so much, Noelia Martín

    Product Support | | nmartinga
    0

  • I pulled the latest moz report and my category pages are being flagged as missing description tag, but not only is the description visible on each page, it is also in the code for all to see. Here is the code, what am I missing? | |
    |   | |
    |   | |
    |   | |
    |   | dir="ltr" class="ltr" lang="en"> | | |
    | | |
    | | |
    | | |
    | | |
    | | <title>Astronaut Costumes</title> |
    | | <base href="<a href=" http:="" www.interstellarstore.com="" "="">http://www.interstellarstore.com/" /> |
    | | |
    | | |
    | | http://www.interstellarstore.com/image/catalog/Earth.png" rel="icon" /> |
    | | catalog/view/theme/pav_WindOnline_Store/stylesheet/bootstrap.css" rel="stylesheet" /> |
    | | catalog/view/theme/pav_WindOnline_Store/stylesheet/stylesheet.css" rel="stylesheet" /> |
    | | catalog/view/theme/pav_WindOnline_Store/stylesheet/customize/1455569423.css" rel="stylesheet" /> |
    | | catalog/view/javascript/font-awesome/css/font-awesome.min.css" rel="stylesheet" /> |
    | | catalog/view/theme/pav_WindOnline_Store/stylesheet/animate.css" rel="stylesheet" /> |
    | | catalog/view/javascript/jquery/magnific/magnific-popup.css" rel="stylesheet" /> |
    | | catalog/view/javascript/jquery/owl-carousel/owl.carousel.css" rel="stylesheet" /> |
    | | catalog/view/theme/pav_WindOnline_Store/stylesheet/fonts.css" rel="stylesheet" /> |
    | | |
    | | |
    | | |
    | | |
    | | |
    | | |
    | | |
    | | |
    | | |
    | | |
    | | |
    | | |

    Moz Pro | | moon-boots
    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.