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!


  • Hi, I analysed our conversion data in the model comparison tool. However, there seem to be o lot of data missing - overall conversion value and conversion value for every channel is much lower than shown in the regular acquisition report. Does anybody else experience the same problem? Thanks. Veronika

    Reporting & Analytics | | healthpostnz
    0

  • I've been doing Local SEO for 9 years and have never had an issue that frustrated me as much as this one. I have a client who I can't get past the 15th page of Google's SERPS for their #1 KW. Here are the details: The domain is 4 months old In that 4 month span the site has gone from a DA 1 to a DA 24 Spam score is a 0. I know this doesn't mean a ton but I can tell you from closely reviewing their AHrefs report, there's no influx of spammy links or anything like that. The design is a custom wordpress design The content is 100% unique and professionally written content The backlink profile (in my opinion) is full of high DA and PA sites from authority sites with high trust flow ... in my opinion their backlinks are superior to all but maybe a handful of competitors. I was not expecting 1st page results by now but I would have expected top 50 results a the very least. But to not crack the top 15 tells me there's some major issue here. I really need some insight as to what could be holding me back here ... I don't want to share the domain publicly but but I will PM you it if you're interested in taking a crack at it. I will seriously pay someone a small fortune if they can help me figure this out.

    Local Listings | | BrianJGomez
    0

  • Hey guys! We got a rather large product range (books) on our eCommerce site (+150,000 titles). We get book descriptions as meta data from our publishers, which we display on the product pages. This obviously is not unique, as many other sites display the same piece of description of the book. It is important for us to rank on those book titles, so my question to You is: How would you go about it? I mean, it seems like a rather unrealistic task to paraphrase +150,000 (and growing) book descriptions. As I see it, there are these options: 1. Don't display the descriptions on the product pages (however then those pages will get even thinner!)
    2. Display the (duplicate) descriptions, but put no-index on those product pages in order not to punish the rest of the site (not really an option, though). 
    3. Hire student workers to produce unique product descriptions for all 150,000 products (seems like a huge and expensive task) But how would You solve such a challenge?
    Thanks a lot! Cheers, Tommy.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacob_Holm
    0

  • Hi, I'm trying to gather all the 404 crawl errors on my website after a recent hacking that I've been trying to rectify and clean up. Webmaster tools states that I have over 20 000+ crawl errors. I can only download a sample of 1000 errors. Is there any way to get the full list instead of correcting 1000 errors, marking them as fixed and waiting for the next batch of 1000 errors to be listed in Webmaster tools? The current method is quite timely and I want to take care of all errors in one shot instead of over a course of a month.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPK
    0

  • For example, when a person first lands on a given page, they see a collapsed paragraph but if they want to gather more information they press the "read more" and it expands to reveal the full paragraph. Does Google crawl the full paragraph or just the shortened version? In the same vein, what if you have a text box that contains three different tabs. For example, you're selling a product that has a text box with overview, instructions & ingredients tabs all housed under the same URL. Does Google crawl all three tabs? Thanks for your insight!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlo7613
    0

  • Hi Everyone, http://www.palaceresorts.com/cozumelpalace/en/cozumel-ironman-triathlon I found an out-of-date event in the clients' crawl report that returns a 404 not found Status Code.  I remember to have read an article advising webmasters to don't ever remove a single landing page, but instead to advise that the sale/event it's expired and some information about the upcoming event. Does anyone have had this experience before ? Could you provide me with a real case scenario. Thank You

    Technical SEO | | Ariadna-US
    0

  • Hi, We run MONTHLY Moz custom reports that compares rankings from the previous month, but some of the data just doesn't make sense. As an example, in the previous month’s report our ranking for “keyword X” was #3, when we look at the current month’s report our ranking for “keyword X” is still #3, but it shows that it’s gone up by 3 positions. This position change is not true if you compare to the previous month’s report! How can we know what dates we are comparing against? All the best, Lee.

    Moz Bar | | Webpresence
    0

  • Hi, part of my link building strategy is ideally going to be from outreach to local businesses. I run a local service business operating in multiple locations (with no physical base). I have created local landing pages on which I'm showcasing local businesses and photographers (relevant not in terms of industry but location). Its my intention to show off their business as best I can, then get in touch to say "hey, we love what you're doing with X product/service, check out our site here [link]. We'd love it if you could link to us etc etc". Assuming that this is a valid strategy, what is the best way to find locally relevant sites with the highest domain authority?

    Local SEO | | Cleanily
    0

  • Hey guys, i know there is a lot of chatter about a potential google update on / around June 28th... well, one of the sites I manage was hit pretty bad. I have attached an image showing what our ranking looked like before and after the unconfirmed update. As you will see, we plummeted that day and have not yet recovered. Has anyone else experienced drops? I'm trying to identify potential causes. I've started an SEO audit and so far I have identified 1 big fish and a few niggly bits. Big Fish: non-www version of site had redirect rule overwritten by CloudFlare page rules and is using a 302 redirect instead of a 301. Now could this be the cause? Niggly bits: technical SEO issues and optimisations like having unique meta titles etc. If you have noticed drops or think you can shed some light on my situation that will help me then I would love to hear from you 🙂 Thanks upload.png upload.png

    Algorithm Updates | | OptiBacUK
    0

  • The main problem I have is that the most serious issues facing my site have been dealt with using Google Tags, but Moz doesn't take this into account (this has been verified by a Moz employee) so I can't get an accurate account of what crawl issues need fixing and which ones are resolved. Does anyone know a way to make Moz Tools account for Google Tags?

    API | | moon-boots
    0

  • Hello All, Many seo tools I am using in that few tools do not allow me to test my site with https but it force me to check with http and then give report. So my query is do these tools give accurate report with http same like https? Thanks!

    Competitive Research | | wright335
    0

  • I'm considering the move to TLS/SSL obviously will be setting up the version in Search Console, do I need to re-upload the disavowal file previously generated before the move? Look forward to your response.

    Technical SEO | | seoman10
    0

  • Hi, Our website has many broken links/non-existing pages. But there might be many backlinks for such non-existing pages. We want to find-out all such backlinks pointing to our non-existing pages (404). All the tools I tried so far including Moz OSE have been listing only backlinks for current existing pages. So please guide me how to find the backlinks we are looking for. Thanks, Moz member

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi there, A while ago we took over the domain www.hoesjes.nl and forwarded it to our website www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl. If you perform a search for the keyword 'hoesjes' in Google then we (www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl) show up on an organic number 1 position. The problem is that the page title isn't correct. Google shows the page title of the website hoesjes.nl we took over and (correctly?) redirected to our domain www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl. Does anybody have any idea how to get rid of this wrong page title in Google?
    Here you can find a screenshot of what I mean. Thanks! Marcel

    Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
    0

  • A. Do nothing
    B. Redirect to legacy site (current domain)
    C. Create a placeholder with information about the rebranding
    D. Other... What do you think is best?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maxaro.nl
    0

  • Hi Moz, We are currently doing SEO for a hand therapy company called the Hand Therapy Group. They rank well, however, one competitor, Sydney Hand Therapy, is ranking higher than them for the term "hand therapy Sydney" (which is one of our highly focused keywords) with three different URLs (their home page, contact page and about page) despite the latter two pages have no backlinks. I understand why Google might see their homepage as being more relevant because their name is Sydney Hand Therapy (even though the Hand Therapy Group have more backlinks) but why do the other two URLs rank so well? Any help/info/advice would be brilliant! Cheers!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wearehappymedia
    1

  • Working on a website for a business with distinct lines of business, one is more B2C and one is B2B yet the type of service is related.  To think of an example, let's say it's for a photographer who does weddings, but also does real estate photography.  He wants to make sure he can market to each audience separately so when they go to his homepage the homepage content is oriented for the services that audience is looking for. If you use two separate websites, they have to be totally unique to avoid dupe content flags, and you also end up diluting each website's domain authority since you are spreading your inbound links between two different websites.  However would this be the optimum strategy then? One website hosted on: bozophotography.com A second domain: bozoweddings.com that has a 301 redirect to the wedding section home page on bozophotography.com A third domain: bozorealestatephotos.com that has a 301 redirect to the real estate section home page. So on certain advertising, business cards, etc, the business could choose which domain they want to publicize to insure the audience sees a home page related to that line of business. I suppose you could publicize it as a subdomain like: realestate.bozophotography.com or as a slash address: bozophotography.com/weddings but those seem much less professional, visually, than just having bozoweddings.com. There is rumor you don't quite get 100% of the link juice, but the main domain would be used the majority of the time so I really see no downside?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jazee
    0

  • Back in the middle of August we noticed a significant drop in organic traffic from Google for one of our clients. They had been averaging around 125 sessions per day but after that date it dropped to 50-60 per day. Their WordPress website has been kept updated but no changes to content were applied. No significant changes occurred in the marketplace, and this is not a seasonal drop. It came several weeks before the Possum and Penguin 4.0 updates, so we ruled them out. The only change we can confirm was that their Google My Business listing was claimed and setup on or around the day the traffic dropped off a cliff. Their listing is setup properly, as far as we can tell, and links to their website. I can't find any indication of why this would affect traffic in such a negative way and it hasn't recovered since. It's stable now, but still half of what they had before. It's down across the board, too. Mobile, desktop, geographically, new vs returning. Everything. Would love to hear your thoughts!

    Local Listings | | unitednetworks
    0

  • Why does your on-page grader show zero occurrences for the word "spiral" on stairwaysinc.com? Spiral appears many, many times.

    Moz Bar | | BCLLC
    0

  • Hello, I am adding a Facebook Like to Download button for each piece of free content on my website and wondering if a feature like that would be bad for the page SEO.

    Social Media | | ollie345
    0

  • Hello, I've just crawled our website https://www.i-escape.com/ to find we have a duplicate content issue. Every places to stay listing page has identical content (over 1,500 places) due to the fact it's based on user searches or selections. If we hide this pages using canonical tags, will we lose our visibility for each country and/or region we promote hotels? Any help on this would be hugely appreciated! Thanks so much Clair

    Technical SEO | | iescape
    0

  • Hi All, Can anyone please guide me on Geo Targeting for Google Organic Improvement? Thanks!

    Local SEO | | wright335
    0

  • Hi Mozzers I am geting this very annoying message keeps popping up "Confirm Oops! Something went wrong while trying to get your API Credentials. Please try again or check out the Help Hub if you are still experiencing issues" Issue is I cant even read it on my screen as it gets cut off and there is no scroll so had to copy and past into word to be able to read it. I had the issue for the last sever hours, is this my account or more general. Thanks Andy

    API | | Andy-Halliday
    0

  • I've got a .htaccess file set up on a site to redirect specific old pages to specific new pages on a different site: eg Redirect 301 /oldpage.html https://www.newsite.co.uk/newpage.html Redirect 301 /oldpage2.html https://www.newsite.co.uk/folder/ I have two questions: 1. Is that all the file needs? Or does it need any "rewrite engine on" type code? 2. I would also like to include code to "mop up" any other URLs and redirect them to the root, so that /anyotherpage.html redirects to newsite.co.uk Is there a way to do this?

    Technical SEO | | abisti2
    0

  • Hello, Do you know what can happen when i change domain.com to www.domain.com? Will it have an influence to my link-building portfolio (external links to domain.com), position on google search, etc. Thank you for help.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Reyzer
    0

  • how can we get a huge site index faster?

    Technical SEO | | Digikala
    1

  • Is too high a frequency of 'money' keywords  backlinks (eg. a money keyword backlink for moz.com would be "Seo tools") a considered factor for Penguin penalties even if the money keywords are only on reputable pages, with decent PA, DA and trust ?

    Link Building | | jpeg80
    0

  • With regards to link trust are backlinks from .ac.uk (wiki on .ac.uk) count in the same way as .edu backlinks ?

    Link Building | | jpeg80
    1

  • Hello Experts, I want to do A/B testing for my page. In google analytic experiment we have to create two pages 1) Original Page 2) Variant 1 but I don't want to go in this method that is I donot want to create two pages is it possible only via one page but two different events or something else ? If yes then which is the best tool? Thanks! Wrigths!

    Technical SEO | | wright335
    0

  • Hello, Moz hasn't written anything about depersonalization for years. This article has methods, but I don't know if they are valid anymore. What's an easy, effective way to depersonalize Google search these days? I would just log out of Google, but that shows different ranking results than Moz's rank tracker for one of our main keywords, so I don't know if that method is correct. Thanks

    Algorithm Updates | | BobGW
    0

  • Hello, How long do you see small niche sites taking to rank where they should be for their strength? Our last site took at least 6 months. Our current site's home page for our main term is stuck at around the 40th page and not moving. It's an exact match domain so it should be on at least page 2. We have one site in the industry already that carries similar products but it is much bigger with a much wider scope of products. It took a while to rank too. Our only backlinks I'm working on are Google & Youtube (and DMOZ), we have a facebook fan page. Our site is nicer than the site in position #1. Working on making as many pages as possible 10X content. Thank You, Bob

    Algorithm Updates | | BobGW
    0

  • Hello everyone a website working on travel field with this address : https://goo.gl/4gaoAn Let me know what do you think about it and please give me some advises about it get improve on google rankings. If you be able to take time and give me some advises based on what you see on the website, would be great for me. Also what would work best for me to have a great link building strategy after penguin 4.0 update? and what does my site lack right now? Thanks and waiting to hear from you asap.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BahadorGh
    0

  • Hi, I have generated a dynamic sitemap and submit it in search console, but there is a huge gap between the number of submitted pages and the number of indexed pages. 143,206 URLs submitted 2,151 URLs indexedwhy we have this gap and what should I do to reduce it?

    Technical SEO | | Digikala
    0

  • Could someone please elaborate on the SEO effect of schema subtype deprecation?  Does it even matter? The Local business properties section of developers.google.com says to: Define each local business location as a LocalBusiness type. Use the most specific LocalBusiness sub-type possible; for example, Restaurant, DaySpa, HealthClub, and so on. Unfortunately, the ProfessionalService page of schema.org states that ProfessionalService has been deprecated and many of my clients don't fit anywhere else (or if they do it's not a LocalBusiness subtype). I find it inconvenient to have to modify my different clients' JSON-LD from LocalBusiness to ProfessionalService back to LocalBusiness.  I'm not saying this happens every day but how does one keep up with it all? I'm really trying to take advantage of the numerous types, attributes, etc., in structured data but I feel the more I implement, the harder it will be to update later (true of many things, of course). I do feel this is important and that a better workflow could be the answer. If you have something that works for you, please let us know.  If you think it's not important tell us why not?  (Why Google is wrong)  I understand there is always a better use of our time, but I'd like to limit the discussion to solving this Google/Schema.org deprecation issue specifically.

    Local Website Optimization | | bulletproofsearch
    0

  • Hello, I keep on hearing that social media signals have a role in the way Google ranks pages and sites, but for now, I haven't seen any hard evidence of that. Like any other company, we have pages on facebook, linkedin, google plus and twitter, to which we post daily. No, there are no clients coming in from social media, so I was wondering if it's worth investing time in adding every day updates, unless those count in ranking on Google. What do you think, is there a link between social media and Google rankings, and how much does this weight in ranking my sites? Thank you

    Social Media | | anitawapa
    0

  • Hello Everyone. I simply wanted to know if anyone had some useful insight on what it takes for a legitimate website to appear within the Google News results. I have rarely, or ever, had to dabble in this kind of SEO, but after coming across a situation with a perfectly legitimate website, I'm now scratching my head. The site in question is a very well established website, with 0 "seo" done to it. All links organic, all traffic legit and they have VERY strong social media presence. The site's current DA is 50. Its a 3 letter domain. Some of the points I believe are important quantity and quality of content (% of aggregated vs actually original content) overall % of "news" content vs rest of the site content authors/writers credentials (how would Google evaluate the authority of a writer, so his/her content is newsworthy?) overall site authority rich snippet and code needed to be indexed? I think rel publisher or rel author tags have something to do with it? making sure to have basic SEO in place: canonical tag, unique headers, etc. What am I missing? They have one particular competitor that seem to be ranking for almost everything news related, while being a similar site in content and authority, however they are nowhere. They have submitted to Google News before (not even sure what that means) but have failed to be included -- does this put a "stain" on them for any reason or impede the possibility of being indexed in the Google News results in the future? ANY input is appreciated.

    SERP Trends | | 1stOTLJK
    0

  • Hi Mozzers! I'm working on a site that is a bit of a mess (http://www.selectequipment.net/) and wanted to ask for some feedback on a couple of items. In addition to organizing the site by product category types, the client also has brand pages that include all products of a certain brand. One problem, however, is that I want to be able to target the relatively large number of consumers who are using searches of BRAND + PRODUCT type in the most optimal fashion. For example, someone looking for "Cutler Hammer Transformers". We have several products with different part numbers that would fit this bill and I'm wondering if we'd be okay just having several products (ie Cutler Hammer Transform 100xa, Cutler Hammer Transform 110xb) or if we'd be better off adding an organizational page for all "Cutler Hammer Transformers for Sale". There are a LOT of different combos that we'd need to do this for. Is it a good call?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley
    0

  • Hi, I have a page with high traffic that is showing a list of flea markets in a unique URL. We are redesigning our website and we have created a listing directory of flea markets, so the users can look up and find the information for each. Each flea market will have its own URL in the future, and the listing directory shows only summarized info of each flea market in the results. Before activating the new flea market section, I would like to make sure which is our best bet: Option 1: Create pages with same URL/content as the current ones, which we won't link from frontend, and besides that, use the new flea market section on a separate page. Option 2: Redirect the current page to the new flea market section. As an inaccurate reference because it depends on many variables and SEO doesn't have an actual number, I understand this is more or less how it would work: Example Option 1 (after 1 week of launch): Old Flea Market Pages SEO traffic: 10,000 visits/month New Copied Flea Market Pages traffic: 9,700 (maybe a bit below 100 because of design changes etc) New Flea Market Section traffic: 500 visits/month (then increase over time) Example Option 2 (after 1 week of launch): Old Flea Market Pages SEO traffic: 10,000 visits/month New Redirected Flea Market Pages traffic: 9,000 (in principle PageRank wouldn't be affected, but other rankings might) New Flea Market Section traffic: (joined above, then increase over time) According to this, Option 1 would give us more total future visits compared to redirecting, plus the new flea market pages would add to it. If redirecting, the new flea market section would add up some SEO juice to the old page, but not as much as Option 1 (not redirecting). Please confirm. Which option is the best one and why? Thank you, New 301 Redirection Rules: https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
    0

  • Does anyone know how to add canonical tags to product pages in Opencart? Is this possible to do in htaccess? If so, how specifically should it be written in? Please do not post any links to other pages which reference generic canonical information as I've read them all and none help. I'm looking for an Opencart specific answer, or a way to do it in htaccess.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots
    0

  • Does Moz take into account Google Tag Manager or will it keep flagging up duplicate content, etc?

    API | | moon-boots
    0

  • Our developers are moving away from utilising robots.txt files due to security risks, so e have been in the process of removing them from sites. However we, and our clients still want to run Moz crawl reports as they can highlight useful information. The two sites in question sit on the same server with the same settings (in fact running on the same Magento install). We do not have a robots.txt files present (they 404), and as per Chiaryn's response here https://moz.com/community/q/without-robots-txt-no-crawling this should work fine? However for www.iconiclights.co.uk we got: 902 : Network errors prevented crawler from contacting server for page. While for www.valuelights.co.uk we got: 612 : Page banned by error response for robots.txt. These crawls were both run recently, and there was no robots.txt present. Not to mention, they are on the same setup/server etc as mentioned. Now, we have just tested this, by uploading a blank robots.txt file to see if it changed anything - but we get exactly the same errors. I have had a look, but can't find anything that really matches this on here - help would really be appreciated! Thanks!

    Moz Bar | | I-COM
    0

  • HI all, We can see that Google is now showing thumbnails of products in the search results on mobile.
    Very nice, but... What are specs of our snippets to show? Cause i see it at other search results of websites, but not ours?
    Please help us out. Thanks!
    Jeroen http://searchengineland.com/google-mobile-search-results-now-showing-images-snippets-258919

    Algorithm Updates | | RetailClicks
    0

  • We moved from our site from http:// to https://, redirecting all traffic to the new https connection. However, in our campaign all scores have dropped (only 1 page crawled). Is there something we can do to migratie the data, or update the existing campaign to reflect this minor change to our existing site?

    Feature Requests | | BentoPres
    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.