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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.

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  • I have an ecommerce website where the category pages have various sorting and paging options which add a suffix to the URLs. My site is setup so the root category URL, domain.com/category-name, has a canonical tag pointing to domain.com/category-name/page1/price however all links, both interner & external, point to the former (i.e. domain.com/category-name). I would like to know whether all of the link juice is being passed onto the canonical tag URL? Otherwise should I change the canonical tag to point the other way? Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | tjhossy
    0

  • Quick question to all you folks: does including the date in a blog article's permalink affect rankings? For example, here's an article with the month and year, as well as the blog title: http://www.ayzanyc.com/blog/2012/12/difference-between-hot-chocolate-hot-cocoa/ Is it better to omit the date and just put the blog title? Also, if is better to avoid using the date, is it worth it to change the link structure of our previous articles (given that the URL will now be different), or should we just focus on future articles? Thanks ahead of time for your advice.

    Technical SEO | | onurkiyak
    0

  • This seems silly, but I have errors on blog URLs in our WordPress site that I don't know how to access because they are not in our Dashboard. We are using All in One SEO. The errors are for blog archive dates, authors and just simply 'blog'. Here are samples: http://www.fateyes.com/2012/10/
    http://www.fateyes.com/author/gina-fiedel/
    http://www.fateyes.com/blog/ Does anyone know how to input descriptions for pages like these?
    Thanks!!

    Technical SEO | | gfiedel
    0

  • What is the best way to get a good cpc estimate other than actually running the campaign? I have had several people asking for budgets and wasn't sure how to answer. Any suggestions?

    Paid Search Marketing | | ClickIt
    0

  • Hello, I was thinking about putting a box down at the bottom of my client's main articles that let's the reader easily copy the html code it takes to link to the article they're reading.  Maybe I'd put it after the author bio. Do any of you do this? If so, what format do you use? It has to look nice of course. This is a non-techie industry. Thanks.

    Web Design | | BobGW
    0

  • I have  a client that currently has a side navigation and wants to know how changing to a top nav will affect her SEO. We always recommend top nav for user experience but I am not sure if there is a direct effect on SEO. Would the change affect it? Thoughts?

    Web Design | | hwade
    0

  • Hey SEOmoz Community! I've spent a bit of time now reading about SEO in books as well as online here within the SEOmoz community. However, I've still struggled to find a straight answer to whether or not directory submissions to non-penalized websites is acceptable.I suspect the reason I haven't found a straight YES or NO answer is because it isn't so straightforward and I respect that. My dilemma is as follows: I want to raise the domain authority for a few websites that I optimize for. I've submitted and gotten listed a bunch of excellent backlinks, however it still is a painfully slow process. My clients understandably want to see results faster, and because they have virtually no past outsourced link-building campaigns, I am beginning to think that I can invest some money for outsourcing directory submissions. I see more and more people talking about the latest Penguin updates, and how many of these sites are now penalized. BUT, is there any harm to submitting to directories such as the ones on SEOmoz's spreadsheet that aren't penalized? My concern is that in the future these will be penalized anyways, and is there a chance then that my site will also be de-listed from Google? At what point does Google completely 'blacklist' your site from its engine? Furthermore, I don't understand how Google can penalize a website to the point of de-listing it, because what would prevent other competitors from sending mass spammy back-links to another? What it all comes down to: At this point, are verified mass directory submissions through outsourcing still much more beneficial than detrimental to the ranking of a website? Thanks SEOmoz community, Sheldon

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | swzhai
    0

  • There are great tools like http://www.opensiteexplorer.org that will tell you all about the inbound links.  What about the more basic and easier question:  What outgoing links does this site have?

    Moz Pro | | SkinLaboratory
    2

  • So I just got the link - yippee! When I look at the source code href line with my url I don't see the term 'no follow'. Does this mean I have a followed link?

    Link Building | | Clicksjim
    0

  • Just published a static page 2 days ago on WordPress site but noticed that Google has indexed both http:// and https:// url's. Usually I only get http:// indexed though. Could anyone please explain why this may have happened and how I can fix? Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | Clicksjim
    1

  • Hey there. I'm a new Pro member and this will be my first question on the Q&A. Thanks in advance for your responses. I'm the owner of an ecommerce site that sells custom candles. www.prometheancandle.com in case anyone wants to take a peak. I've become somewhat of an expert on all-things-candles over the past 4 years and I am thinking about starting a candle related blog. My question is this. Should I build this blog on the ecommerce site itself, say @ www.prometheancandle.com/blog.php, or should I devote a separate site to answering candle related question, history of candles, etc? At first, I was thinking that the blog should remain on the ecommerce site so readers would have easy access to the shop to be able to purchase products. But then it occurred to me that people who may be interested in reading up on candle history, candle making, meditation & candles, etc., may not want to go to an obviously ecommerce site to do that. I know Google values informational sites more than ecommerce sites (at least I think they do), so that encourages me to lean towards the separate site. Well, I may have just answered this question myself, but I'd definitely be interested to hear feedback and opinions. Thanks so much guys and I look forward to hearing from you.

    Content Development | | Devynn
    0

  • I recently developed a nice article for a career site and they agreed to publish it as a guest post. Once they published the article I noticed they had removed the link back to my site in the byline. What is a best way to approach this situation? Would you ask them to take down the article if they are unwilling to link back to your site?

    Link Building | | Charlessipe
    0

  • Hi, Sitewide footer links, is this bad for SEO? Basically I see all the time the main navigation repeated in the footer, sometimes as almost something to just fill the footer up. Is this bad for SEO (im guessing it is) and can you explain why you think it is? Cheers

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper
    0

  • I know less than 70 is recommended. I am about to run a script to create some title tags and a few will be between 71-74. Is going just the few characters over ok until I can get in there and manually do them?

    On-Page Optimization | | EcommerceSite
    0

  • What I would like to know is how valued a link from the BBB is. I've searched various forums and websites to try and put a value on it, but I can't find a whole lot of useful discussion on it and how it can affect rankings. My ecommerce company has been approached by the BBB for Accreditation, which is something I've always been somewhat interested in. I realize many business owners either love/hate the BBB, but so far I have had several claims with them and they've always sided with my company, despite not being accredited. The BBB rep immediately started spouting off the benefits of having the BBB link to you, and I could see that as being true. They have a DA of 96, and obviously not everyone can get a link on that website (money and good reputation required). However, he probably exaggerated when he said often times businesses skyrocket in the rankings because of this backlink; he also seemed to think having the BBB code and badge that link to the BBB website seemed to affect rankings, which I don't think is correct. I also think that having their badge on our website could increase sales conversion (and maybe even increase the number of people that complain to the BBB). I'm not too worried about the complaints since we don't have ethics problems. The accreditation is $750 (seems high) and I'm not sure if it's really worth that amount, but I could be wrong. Would love some professional insight on if the BBB is worthwhile link or if it's overhyped and the money would be better spent elsewhere. At face value, it certainly seems like a good investment and I'd love to hear some insight as to how much value their backlink truly has to a company or if that money is better spent elsewhere.

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | CHEATERS
    3

  • For the past few weeks I’ve been trying to figure out why my client's site is not indexed on bing and yahoo search engines. My Google analytics is telling me I’m getting traffic (very little traffic) from Bing almost daily but Bing webmaster tools is telling me I’ve received no traffic and no pages have been indexed into Bing since the beginning of December. At once point I was showing ranking in Bing for only one keyword then all of a sudden none of my pages were being indexed and I now rank for nothing for that website.  From Google I’m getting over 1200 visits per month.  I have been doing everything I can to possibly find the culprit behind this issue. I feel like the issue could be a redirect problem. In webmaster tools on Bing I’ve used “Fetch as Bingbot” and every time I use it I get a Status of “Redirection limit reached.”. I also checked the CRAWL Information and it’s saying all the URL’s to the site are under 301 redirect. A month or so ago the site was completely revamped and the canonical URL was changed from non www to www. I have tried manually adding pages to be indexed multiple times and Bing will not index any of the sites pages. I  have submitted the sitemap to Bing and I am now at a loss. I don’t know what’s going on and why I can’t get the site listed on Bing. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,
    Stephen

    Reporting & Analytics | | VITALBGS
    0

  • I'm curious to know what tools others are using to get their content to index faster (other than html sitmap and pingomatic, twitter, etc) Would installing the wordpress pubsubhubbub plugin help even though it uses pingomatic? http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pubsubhubbub/

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate
    0

  • Ok, I'm really trying to wrap my self around all this SEO stuff.  Right when I think I'm grasping it, I come across something like this. When running a keyword difficulty report for the term "essay editing", the top two results are: www.papercheck.com/essay-editing.html www.gradesaver.com/essay-editing/ The first result has a PA of 37, 2 linking page domains, DA of 48, and 197 root linking domains. The second has a PA of 65, 32 linking page domains, DA of 68, and 2,572 root linking domains. What the heck is going on here!?!?  I can't understand it.  I checked anchor text and that doesn't appear to be it.  The only thing I can find is that the papercheck has a link from a site (marketwire) with a DA of 90 while the #2 guy's highest linking domain has a DA of 60. However, I have a really hard time wrapping my head around this considering the total linking domain stats compared to one another. Any insight is much appreciate... this is frustrating trying to grasp these situations! Thanks!

    Link Building | | Kibin
    0

  • Hey, I've recently upgraded to a pro SEOmoz account and have realised i have 14574 issues to do with 'blocked by meta-robot' and that 'This page is being kept out of the search engine indexes by the meta tag , which may have a value of "noindex", keeping this page out of the index.' How can i change this so my pages get indexed? I read somewhere that i need to change my privacy settings but that thread was 3 years old and now the WP Dashboard has updated.. Please let me know Many thanks, Jamie P.s Im using WordPress 3.5 And i have the XML sitemap plugin And i have no idea where to look for this robots.txt file..

    Technical SEO | | markgreggs
    0

  • Hi, I work for local yellow pages in Belgium, over the last months we introduced a succesfull technique to boost SEO traffic: we have created over 150k of new pages, all targeting specific keywords and all containing unique content, a site architecture to enable google to find these pages through crawling, xml sitemaps, .... All signs (traffic, indexation of xml sitemaps, rankings, ...) are positive. So far so good. We are able to quickly build more unique pages, and I wonder how google will react to this type of "large scale operation": can it hurt crawling and ranking if google notices big volumes of content (unique content)? Please advice

    Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories
    0

  • Hi there, Our site's forums include permalinks that for some reason uses an intermediary URL that 302 redirects to the URL with the permalink anchor. For example: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/ In the comments, there is a permalink to the following URL; en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/  (there is no content here, and never has been).  This URL 302 redirects to the following final URL: http://en.tradimo.com/learn/chart-analysis/time-frames/?offset=0&limit=20#50c450005f2b949e3200001b The problem is, Google is indexing the redirect URL (en.tradimo.com/co/50c450005f2b949e3200001b/) and showing duplicate content even though we are using the nofollow tag on these links. Ideally, we would directly use the last link rather than redirecting.  Alternatively, I'd say a 301 redirect would be preferable.  But if both aren't available, is there a way to get these pages out of the index? Is the canonical tag the best way?  I really wish I could just add /co/ to the robots.txt file, but I think they would still be in the index, right? Thanks for your help!

    Technical SEO | | etruvian
    0

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