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!


  • Hey Gang! So I have a client with multiple locations in different metros. I would like to set up a page in WordPress for each metro that the technician can give to the happy client so they can review us. I would like to have a link to my GMB, Yelp, Yellowpages, and whatever else I can grab. Is there a badass plugin for this or what would you guys do? Much love.

    Reviews and Ratings | | Meier
    0

  • I'm tracking keyword “keyword city” nationally and “keyword” locally in city. Ranking for these show different position. Considering that we’re working with local businesses or businesses that service only one city and it’s surrounding areas, what would be the best way to set up campaign? Looking for suggestions. Thank you.

    Moz Local | | kat.halushka
    0

  • I noticed that my Google Local page does not show in any search results anymore.  Looking at Moz Local, it appears that I had 250 views on August 30th and 0 after that.  It just dropped overnight.  I looked at Google My Business and I noticed that I had a duplicate listing (no idea where it came from).  It wasn't verified though.  I deleted that.  I also noticed that my address has been changed to Drive instead Dr.  I was very careful in making it the same everywhere, but it changed without me changing it.  Perhaps someone so kindly "suggested an edit" and I didn't see that happen. Anyone have any ideas.  My organic search ranking is still strong.  #3 for most search terms.  And we have a very strong Google Local reviews.  I mean, it even shows business that have been permanently closed over me!!!  And we have photos, great reviews, and regularly post to Google+. I seriously need some help.  I am a small business owner that does all of my own SEO because I can't afford a good SEO. 😞

    Local Listings | | CalicoKitty2000
    0

  • Hi everyone! Long time reader, first time-submitter. I'm working with a client who has an old, established domain and brand name, decent DA score (43 overall, 52 for their home page), but almost all the rest of the pages of their small-ish website have a PA of 1. The domain itself has been around since 2000. The pages ranking at a 1 are not new URLs, they have a sitemap submitted to Google, are not being blocked by robots.txt, there's no auto-redirects or meta-refresh, and the response code for all pages is 200.  What else am I missing? What could be causing this? TIA for the help!

    Link Explorer | | camarin_w
    0

  • Hi there Just had a quick question about links on Reference.com or Ask.com. I have been looking at my competitors link profiles to get ideas of who and where I should/could be linking from. One of my main competitors seems to have links on Reference.com and Ask.com which are being listed in there profile. Reference.com are dofollow. Our site is also appearing on these sites, but the links are being listed under our profile. We have been up and running for more that 3 years now. The obviously have high DR and I think must be a contributing factor to their rank, having looked at other links in their profile. It seems strange because I thought these sites are effectively search engines and therefore wouldn't count towards your backlink profile? Can anyone explain? Would be most grateful if someone can. Many thanks in advance. Clojo

    Link Building | | Clojobobo
    3

  • Is it possible to App Index within a knowledge graph? I would like to app index my app within the knowledge graph instead of it going to the website but is that possible?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattdinbrooklyn
    0

  • Hi all,
    We have a 301 redirect problem. Google seems to continue indexing a 301 redirect to our old home page. Even after months. We have a multiple language domain, with subfolders: www.example.com (ex page, now with a redirect to the right locale in the right country) www.example.com/it/home (canonical) www.example.com/en/home (canonical) www.example.com/es/home (canonical) www.example.com/fr/home (canonical) www.example.com/de/home (canonical) We still see the old page (www.example.com) in Google results, with old metadata in English and, just in some countries (i.e.: France), we see the correct result, the "new" homepage, www.example.com/fr/home in first position.
    The real problem is that Google is still indexing and showing www.example.com as the "real" and "trusted" URL, even if we set: a 301 redirect the right language for every locale in Google Search Console a canonical tag to the locale url an hreflang tag inside the code a specific sitemap with hreflang tag specified for the new homepages Now our redirect process is the following (Italy example).
    www.example.com -->301
    www.example.com/en/home --> default version --->301
    www.example.com/it/home --> 200 Every online tool, from Moz to Bot simulators see that there is a 301. So Correct. Google Search Console says that: on www.example.com there is a 301 (correct) in the internal link section of Google Search Console the www.example.com is still in first position with 34k links. Many of these links are cominig from property subdomains. Should we change those links inside those third level domain? From www.example.com to www.example.com/LOCALE/home? the www.example.com/LOCALE/home are the real home page, they give 200 code Do you know if there's a way to delete the old home page from Google results since this is 301? Do you think that, even after a 301 redirect, if Google sees too many internal links decides to ignore the 301? Thanks for your help! Davide

    Local Website Optimization | | David1986
    0

  • Just a quick one, i have the following example scenario. Main Domain: http://www.test.com Sub Domain: http://sub.test.com What I am wondering is I can add onto the sub domain a rel=canonical to the main domain. I dont want to de-index the whole sub domain just a few pages are duplicated from the main site. Is it easier to de-index the individual sub domain pages or add the rel=canonical back to the main domain. Much appreciated Joseph

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Joseph-Vodafone
    0

  • Hi everyone I have a question on trailing slashes in URL. The crux of it is this: is having both: example.com/subdirectory/ and: example.com/subdirectory on all of your subdirectories considered duplicate content by Google - or in some other way really bad? We have done a heck a lot of research into this, and it would seem...no one knows for sure (it is easy to get lost in a sea of Webmaster tool forums from 2012). Google itself has both URLs for it's subdirectories (try https://www.google.co.uk/maps and https://www.google.co.uk/maps/) as does Moz; and yet there are some rumblings on the internet of people who think you must put a 'redirect' (although not really a redirect as it isn't a 301) in your htaccess file to one or the other (so for example.com/subdirectory/ would 'forward' to example.com/subdirectory); and this is what bbc.co.uk do. We tried putting this htaccess 'forward' in as an experiment, but I noticed our site then stopped being fully crawled by Google bot, so we reversed it. Can any one shed any light?

    Technical SEO | | NickOrbital
    0

  • If I have funnel with more options on same step. E.g. PDP (product detail page) --> "Sign in page A" or "Sign in page B" (customer can choose) --> "Thank you page" How can I track both options in same funnel? Because if I set funnel in analytics like: 1. step: PDP, 2. step: Sign in page A and step 3: Thank you page -->
    I would see "Sign in page B" like exit page, but it is not, because customers can choose and come through A or B "sign in" page. Pls help. Ty. 🙂

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | Tormar
    0

  • I believe Google stopped reporting search terms for privacy reasons. All my searches show as "unknown". I found a video that showed how to get around this but it's not current. Is there any way to get your Google terms search information? Thanks, Jo-Ann

    Keyword Research | | VinJGirl
    0

  • I would appreciate the opinions of my fellow SEOs on this one. I haven’t seen any other threads on this exact subject and others that touch on it are somewhat older so I am hoping this also proves to be a good resource for others going forward. I have an existing client that I did local SEO for about a year ago. They are a propane service provider and they had multiple locations. So we did local SEO for the company primarily by updating NAPs and creating more individual content for each of the branches such as specific landing page for each branch on their website and individual listings in citations for each branch. Now they have sold one of the branches to a competitor and they need to remove all listings for it. I am trying to develop a comprehensive list of actions to take and I would appreciate any feedback on the best way to go about accomplishing this task. Here is what I have so far: Remove all mention of sold branch on client website, including specific landing page Delete any branch-specific social media accounts Some specific areas I have questions about are: What do I do with Google My Business listings for the sold branch? Do I try to delete/unregister/close them? Or should I just leave them be with an updated link to our website homepage? Should I even bother contacting the main NAP listing sites to remove the old listing or just leave it to fall off on its own? Thank you again for all your help!

    Local Listings | | Ayres-SEO
    0

  • Hello, Moz Community My client's site hasn't been indexed by Google, although it was launched a couple of months ago. I've ran down the check points in this article https://moz.com/ugc/8-reasons-why-your-site-might-not-get-indexed without finding a reason why. Any sharp SEO-eyes out there who can spot this quickly? The url is: http://www.oldermann.no/ Thank you
    INEVO, digital agency

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
    0

  • Hello Mozzers! Apologies if this question has been asked before, but I couldn't find an answer so here goes... Currently I have one robots.txt file hosted at https://www.mysitename.org.uk/robots.txt We host our shop on a separate subdomain https://shop.mysitename.org.uk Do I need a separate robots.txt file for my subdomain? (Some Google searches are telling me yes and some no and I've become awfully confused!

    Technical SEO | | sjbridle
    0

  • Hi, Moz community For some of the category-pages, Google is showing some of the brands in the SERP, like this: http://www.screencast.com/t/62wldbwc
    This is the page-url: https://www.gsport.no/sport/loep/lopeklaer/loepebukse For other category-pages that seemingly is built with similar code and settings, Google doesn't show brands in the snippet: http://www.screencast.com/t/zU9cg7odf
    The page-url: https://www.gsport.no/sport/loep/lopeklaer/loepejakke This all begs the questions:
    If the two pages contain the same code/html in terms of schema.org / rich snippets, why is Google choosing to display the brands in the SERP for only one of them? And is there something I can do in order to make them display the brands for all my pages? Thank you
    Sigurd Bjurbeck, INEVO (digital agency)

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
    0

  • Hi all, As everyone is most likely aware, Google have recently announced that if a site has intrusive intersitals that push the main content below the fold, will be downgraded in the SERP's from January 10th. At the moment we have a range of international sites, .ca, .com.au, .co.uk, .fr etc - if a user from a UK IP goes to a .ca site - a country switcher dialog will appear. I am aware that this may affect our sites performance in mobile search when the update comes out - however, if we block Google from seeing this - will they still pick it up? Thanks.

    Algorithm Updates | | Brett-S
    0

  • What is the best keyword ranking tool you have used? I have used various tools by which I am expected to identify and input the keyword I want to track... However, recently I was introduced to Searchmetrics, which I think automatically pulls in the keywords a website ranks for, without the need for manual input from the SEO (I haven't used this tool yet, so apologies if I am incorrect!). Do any other rank trackers work like this? Thanks, Luke

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
    1

  • Hi, We have rel=canonical set up on our ecommerce site but Google is still indexing pages that have rel=canonical. For example, http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/novelty.html?colour=7883&p=3&size=599 http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/novelty.html?p=4&size=599 http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/children.html?colour=7886&mode=list These are all indexed but all have rel=canonical implemented. Can anyone explain why this has happened?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HappyJackJr
    0

  • Firstly, this is quite extensive so thank you to anyone who answers some or all of the below! So this is quite a lengthy ordeal, and I'm going to start by saying that I'm no SEO expert (yet). I've paid for SEO for years and only on the odd occasion has it made any real difference. It has come to the point now where I've spent so much money on SEO over the years with practically no benefit that I can't afford to do it anymore, so I am teaching myself. So, back in July my website was hacked for a total sum of three weeks. My SEO/Hosting company at the time didn't do anything about it, let the hack sit there and didn't even take the site offline. It just so happened that at the time I was changing over to a new site at the time anyway, so I launched the new site (completely different in structure to the old one), did all of the relevant 301 redirects, and my traffic hasn't recovered since. I have gone from around 100-150 daily visits to 0-10. The descriptions, keywords, alt image tags, h1 & 2, meta data, etc. is all much better (a lot of it was empty on the previous site) on the new site than it was on the previous site so I was assuming it would be better, but it isn't. Anyone got any suggestions as to why this might be? Here are some specific questions: Canonical Problem? My site is ecommerce and lists some products in several categories, that has resulted in a high duplicate content rate. Is it expected/accepted by google that this would be the case for an ecommerce website or do I need to sort out some serious canonical urls to fix the issue? The site structure of my website could also be a problem, but I'm not qualified enough to know for sure. If you view a product/sub-category, then remove the category section of that link, the product will still appear. I don't know if this structure is good or not? i.e. if you click both links below, the link will appear all the same. http://thespacecollective.com/space-clothing/nasa-and-space-t-shirts http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-and-space-t-shirts Is this a problem for SEO? Duplicate Product Tag Problem? I have many duplicate product tags appearing on many products, should these be blocked in the robots.txt? i.e. http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/space-flown/apollo-11-flown-cm-meteorite-acrylic http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/space-flown/apollo-11-flown Site Code Structure When choosing the template I would use for my website I did not stop to consider if the code was SEO friendly, this on my part was due to my ignorance on the subject. Is the site structure SEO-friendly or is it hindering my efforts? Website: http://thespacecollective.com Again, thank you to anyone who takes the time to read/care about the issues facing a newbie. My only option now is to learn SEO myself (which is well overdue), so any advice/answers are appreciated!

    Technical SEO | | moon-boots
    0

  • I'm clocking up nearly 1 second on time to first byte on a Joomla 2.5 site. It is on shared hosting so don't think there's much option for improvement from the hardware or core configuration angle. There isn't much in the way of plug-ins and it is using SSD, the problem seems to be with the CMS itself. Any ideas how I could produce the TTFB? Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman10
    0

  • Is there any research or detailed review of whether the jetpack wordpress firehose has a definite benefit for seo? https://wordpress.org/support/topic/enhanced-distribution-to-where/

    Content Development | | jezweb
    0

  • I have a customer who is currently a local business but with aspirations of franchising and becoming a national concern, historically I have had quite a lot of success in the Local space, but this will be the first national account so I am looking for any advice on SEO best practice for national businesses. Particularly I am looking at where the business will have a common set of products / services but will have multiple trading addresses / service areas. Any advice would be much appreciated.  TIA

    Web Design | | Excal
    1

  • Dose anyone know of a good CDN?  Free if poss!! It is for use on a joomla v2.5 site Thanks Richard

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman10
    1

  • My company's site has a large set of pages (tens of thousands) that have very thin or no content. They typically target a single low-competition keyword (and typically rank very well), but the pages have a very high bounce rate and are definitely hurting our domain's overall rankings via Panda (quality ranking). I'm planning on recommending we noindexed these pages temporarily, and reindex each page as resources are able to fill in content. My question is whether an individual page will be able to accrue any page authority for that target term while noindexed. We DO want to rank for all those terms, just not until we have the content to back it up. However, we're in a pretty competitive space up against domains that have been around a lot longer and have higher domain authorities. Like I said, these pages rank well right now, even with thin content. The worry is if we noindex them while we slowly build out content, will our competitors get the edge on those terms (with their subpar but continually available content)? Do you think Google will give us any credit for having had the page all along, just not always indexed?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | THandorf
    0

  • Hi Guys, Wondering if I can get some technical help here... We have our site britishbraces.co.uk , built in Magento. As per eCommerce sites, we have paginated pages throughout. These have rel=next/prev implemented but not correctly ( as it is not in is it in ) - this fix is in process. Our canonicals are currently incorrect as far as I believe, as even when content is filtered, the canonical takes you back to the first page URL. For example, http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/x-style.html?ajaxcatalog=true&brand=380&max=51.19&min=31.19 Canonical to... http://www.britishbraces.co.uk/braces/x-style.html Which I understand to be incorrect. As I want the coloured filtered pages to be indexed ( due to search volume for colour related queries ), but I don't want the price filtered pages to be indexed - I am unsure how to implement the solution? As I understand, because rel=next/prev implemented ( with no View All page ), the rel=canonical is not necessary as Google understands page 1 is the first page in the series. Therefore, once a user has filtered by colour, there should then be a canonical pointing to the coloured filter URL? ( e.g. /product/black ) But when a user filters by price, there should be noindex on those URLs ? Or can this be blocked in robots.txt prior? My head is a little confused here and I know we have an issue because our amount of indexed pages is increasing day by day but to no solution of the facet urls. Can anybody help - apologies in advance if I have confused the matter. Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HappyJackJr
    0

  • Hey guys! Thanks in advance for thinking through this with me. You're appreciated! I have 350 pieces of Cornerstone Content that has been a large focus of mine over the last couple years. They're incredibly important to my business. That said, less experienced me did what I thought was best by hiring a freelance writer to create extra content to interlink them and add relevancy to the overall site. Looking back through everything, I am starting to realize that this extra content, which now makes up 1/3 my site, is at about 65%-70% quality AND only gets a total of about 250 visitors per month combined -- for all 384 articles. Rather than spending the next 9 months and investing in a higher quality content creator to revamp them, I am seeing the next best option to remove them. From a pros perspective, do you guys think removing these 384 lower quality articles is my best option and focusing my efforts on a better UX, faster site, and continual upgrading of the 350 pieces of Cornerstone Content? I'm honestly at a point where I am ready to cut my losses, admit my mistakes, and swear to publish nothing but gold moving forward. I'd love to hear how you would approach this situation! Thanks 🙂

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ryj
    0

  • Hi Moz Community A new client approached me yesterday for help with their site that used to rank well for their designated keywords, but now is not doing well. Actually, they are not on Google at all. It's like they were removed by Google. There are not reference to them when searching with "site: url". I investigated further and discovered the likely problem . . . 26 000 spam comments! All these comments have been removed now. I clean up this Wordpress site pretty well. However, I want to connect it now to Google webmaster tools. I have admin access to the WP site, but not ftp. So I tried using Yoast to connect. Google failed to verify the site. So the I used a file uploading console to upload the Google html code instead. I check that the code is there. And Google still fails to verify the site. It is as if Google is so angry with this domain that they have wiped it completely from search and refuse to have any dealings with it at all. That said, I did run the "malware" check or "dangerous content" check with them that did not bring back any problems. I'm leaning towards the idea that this is a "cursed" domain in Google and that my client's best course of action is to build her business around and other domain instead. And then point that old domain to the new domain, hopefully without attracting any bad karma in that process (advice on that step would be appreciated). Anyone have an idea as to what is going on here?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlistairC
    0

  • I recently have moved a number of websites top a new server and have made the use of CNAME / URL flattening (I believe these are the same?). A network admin had said this is an unrecommended practice. From what I have read it seems flattening can be beneficial for site speed and SEO even if very little.

    Local Website Optimization | | Dissident_SLC
    0

  • I have one quick question. Maybe you can just point me to the correct post... We have currently been adding our own website link in the wp copyright footer of clients websites that we build and design.  We understand that this is not the best option for SEO since it might be punished by Google as spam. Can you please recommend a better solution for this? From an SEO standpoint is it best to just remove the links?  Make them nonfollow? Add it to a "Website Credits" page or "About Us" page.  I always discuss this link with all clients and offer a discount which 100% of them take in the end.  I just need to work on our ranking a bit now and see that this could be hurting things more than good.

    Branding | | SeattleWebGuy
    0

  • One of the main pages on my site, http://www.waikoloavacationrentals.com/kolea-rentals/condos, I have been having a hard time getting google to index it correctly or at all.  It is one of the top pages on my site and should be in my sub links in google, but it is not even showing up in searches.  Any input would be appreciated. The only red flap issue is the number of outgoing links, but that is the way the page is supposed to be.  I would assume most real estate listing pages are very similar. Ultimately when you look at traffic, time on page, inbound links, etc. it is one of the top pages on my site in all those categories. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

    On-Page Optimization | | RobDalton
    0

  • The site in question has been operating for around 3 months and for the first two months was nowhere to be seen in google results (literally page 10, 11 etc for all but branding searches). Then through a lot of hard work and the help of MozPro I managed to build it to a respectable 6th-10th place for the main keyphrases. Overnight on Wednesday we suddenly dropped half a dozen places or so and were rooted firmly mid table page 2 for both these phrases. Last night however we suddenly dropped from 14th to the very last result on page 10! for the biggest keyphrase where it has slowly dropped through the day to currently be sitting in 8th on page 11. Nothing is showing in Dashboard, theres no reason that I know of to be penalised, however even if we were penalised then surely that would be the site as a whole and not just 1 keyphrase? The weird thing is, when you look at the 1st 2 pages of the search a number of items have changed, a competitor which closed down is suddenly sitting mid table while other newcomers that were doing well have dropped, some of the older faces have gone up suddenly. If I didnt know better I would say that google has suffered a timewarp and is now serving results from a month ago for this keyphrase. Ive now noticed that the MozCast is reporting very stormy weather last night, surely however this couldnt be down to a change in Algorithm etc, not to produce such a massive drop for a site that has followed the rules (I refuse to link with a site that even remotely could be thought of as spam). Someone please tell me that google has been glitching and all will be well when I wake in the morning? Peter

    Algorithm Updates | | Pwhitfield
    0

  • I'm curious to know what us MOZ folks have to say about an update on Google. Article here: http://searchengineland.com/big-google-search-update-happening-chatter-thinks-258142 Any ideas?

    Algorithm Updates | | Chenzo
    0

  • I'm struggling to reach the last few spots for my client's main keyword, hovering around mid-page on the first SERP. I have continuously built more links to this page but have not seen a correlation in movement, until I finally realised that I have too high a ratio of links pointing to the home page relative to those pointing to other pages on the site, which doesn't look natural (stupidly, for the last year we have mainly only been trying to rank the home page). I already have links on most UK directories - since the links I need are really just safe links (they don't need to have power), can anyone suggest the best/cheapest source of link-building that I could use to point more links to other pages on the site, to balance the site's overall profile? A press release, perhaps? Thanks in advance!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg
    0

  • Hi! I have previously hired a developer to put up my site and noticed afterwards that he did not know much about SEO. This lead me to starting to learn myself and applying some changes step by step. One of the things I am currently doing is inserting sitemap reference in robots.txt file (which was not there before). But just now when I wanted to upload the file via FTP to my server I found multiple ones - in different sizes - and I dont know what to do with them? Can I remove them? I have downloaded and opened them and they seem to be 2 textfiles and 2 dupplicates. Names: robots.txt (original dupplicate)
    robots.txt-Original (original)
    robots.txt-NEW (other content)
    robots.txt-Working (other content dupplicate) Would really appreciate help and expertise suggestions. Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | mjukhud
    0

  • Hi all, I have come across the most weird situation ever in my SEO career. Google is displaying description in organic results for brand term under the website URL that doesnt exist on the website ANYWHERE but this description does appear on some directory sites created back in 2002 or so. Is there a possibility that Google is pulling info from directory sites and displaying as a description in the organic results? I am super confused! Help needed! Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika1
    0

  • So here's my situation: My company's website usually receives around 80 organic visits/month and 50 direct visits/month from Mexico. However, in July we saw a small uptick to around 170 for each and then in the last 7 days we are in the middle of a massive spike which has put us up to 1400 visits for organic and 820 visits for direct in August. The traffic spike continues as we are almost up to 500 visits just today! Things to know: The visitors are purchasing from our store, staying on our site, browsing around, basically acting like real traffic. I was unable to identify any new links, press, and we did not do any specific Mexico optimization (spanish keywords). We sell a ball and it is called The One World Futbol, but it's always been called a futbol before so nothing new here. our website is www.oneworldplayproject.com. Everyone coming organically is searching our name, not keywords. We updated our shopping cart a few days before the massive traffic spike and significantly lowered the cost to ship to Mexico. Our Latin America director went to Mexico to work there for a month a few days before the spike and sent out a bunch of emails, texts, phone calls, what's app notifications to his large network. From what I am told by others here he has a vast network throughout Mexico, Central America and South America. We have also seen large traffic increases in other Latin American countries during this same time period just nothing like Mexico. We just hired an awesome social media coordinator who is extremely focused and is implementing a kick-ass social strategy We launched a branding campaign called #MakeLifePlayFull with press releases and ad spend behind it. PHEW! That was a lot of info for you to digest. So on the surface this seems like great news. BUT I want to understand WHY this is happening. Could it really just be the combination of all these things listed above or is it just a combination of our connected guy being in Mexico with better shipping costs? Why is it mainly happening in Mexico? Why is it so sustained? I suspect that if it is from our guy it would drop off quickly. Any thoughts on what to look at? I'm stumped.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_OWPP
    0

  • I am working to improve SEO of a specific program offered by our school. The program's pages are located in a subfolder like school.edu/program. This program is different from other programs offered by the school, both in terms of content, audience, etc. Right now, I tried to add the subfolder, but I feel that Moz is giving me results on the whole website. Also, I tried to add some competing programs from other schools (by adding their pages' URL) but again Moz seems to give me comparison results of the whole websites.

    Getting Started | | loyolallm
    0

  • Hello everyone! I'm going through a large list of old 404 links that search console has given me and a lot of these links need to be 301'd. My question is, should I 410 some of these links if I can't find a good place to 301 to? Or is there another thing I should do that is better practice. Thanks!

    On-Page Optimization | | KathleenDC
    0

  • I want as much traffic as possible to my main site, but right now my blog lives on a blog.brand.com URL rather than brand.com/blog. What are some good solutions for getting that traffic to count as traffic to my main site if my blog is hosted on WordPress? Can I just create a sub-directory page and add a rel canonical to the blog post?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | johnnybgunn
    0

  • I am managing a woocommerce store selling prescription glasses/spectacles. We have a lot of categories with similar names and I want to adopt the best possible naming convention to get the best from search. So we have a number of similar categories for both Men's and women's glasses. Currently they are named as follows: Women's Glasses-Women's Rimless Glasses
    -Women's Semi Rimless Glasses
    -Women's Plastic Glasses
    -Women's Metal Glasses
    -Women's Retro Glasses Currently, this results in the following URL structure for sub categories: https://www.glassesonspec.co.uk/product-category/womens-glasses-2/womens-rimless-glasses/ (For some reason WooCommerce is adding -2 to the end of the primary category name, it will not let me change it for some reason, this is the subject of a further investigation!) So first question, is there too much duplication of the word glasses on the sub items? for example, should they read; Women's Glasses
    -Rimless
    -Semi Rimless
    -Plastic
    -Metal
    -Retro Hence giving this URL structure: https://www.glassesonspec.co.uk/product-category/womens-glasses-2/rimless/ OR, should we change the top level category name to just Women's and let the sub categories complete the picture?: Women's
    -Rimless Glasses
    -Semi Rimless Glasses
    -Plastic Glasses
    -Metal Glasses
    -Retro Glasses Giving this example URL structure: https://www.xxxxxxxxxxxxx.co.uk/product-category/womens/rimless-glasses/ This would solve my hyphenation problem, however my fear is the top level category on it's own is not descriptive enough when viewed as stand alone: https://www.xxxxxxxxxxxxx.co.uk/product-category/womens/ The second part of my question relates to how to deal with the change in URL structure. I am using Yoast Premium, so will that pick up the changes and automatically redirect to the new one as it does when done manually? Or will I need to take a different approach using HTACCESS commands? I hope the above makes sense, Many thanks, Bob

    Technical SEO | | SushiUK
    0

  • Good day!
    We are thinking about replacing a traditional menu on an e-commerce website with a Shop button like on Amazon, with a dropdown and expandable sub-menus. Current menu: Category 1 | Category 2 | Category 3 | ... New menu: Shop | Search bar The Shop menu would expand on mouse hover. When clicked, it would link to a directory like on Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/site-directory/. Is there anything we should be worried about (ex. link juice, engagement) or considerations to think about (CSS-based vs JS)? Thanks for your time!
    Ben

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AxialDev
    0

  • I have recently started working at an academic publisher on their digital products. In this industry it's standard practice to use link resolvers - such as SFX from ExLibris - when updating a product as an easy way to manage URL migration. However, these link resolvers appear to use 302 redirects which makes me concerned about the potential for rankings to drop. Does anybody out there know about the use of link resolvers and their effects on search engine visibility? The main sources of information I've been able to find so far have been a Google Webmaster Central forum post and a piece on DOI news from 2005. Any information that's more up to date would be very useful, thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BenjaminMorel
    0

  • We have produces a website on a .company domain extension. We have produced a good sized website with unique content. However the DA remains at 1. There are no high priority issues in the page crawl. We suspect that the domain extension may be causing a lower DA. Is this a ranking factor?

    Technical SEO | | easydomains
    0

  • I'm hoping that Mozzers can weigh in with any recent experiences with eCommerce SEO..... I like to assume (perhaps incorrectly) that Google's 'Quality' filters (formerly known as Panda) have evolved with some intelligence since Panda first launched and started penalising eCommerce sites for having thin product pages. On this basis i'd expect that the filters are now less heavy handed and know that product pages with no or little product description on them are still a quality user experience for people who want to buy that product. Therefore my question is this...
    Do thin product pages still need noindex given that more often that not they are a quality search result for those using a product specific search query? Has anyone experienced penalty recently (last 12 months) on an ecommerce site because of a high number of thin product pages?

    Algorithm Updates | | QubaSEO
    0

  • Hi Moz community! I’ll try to make this question as easy to understand as possible, but please excuse me if it isn’t clear. Just joined a new team a few months ago and found out that on some of our most popular pages we use “custom URLs” to track page metrics within Google Analytics. NOTE: I say “custom URLs” because that is the best way for me to describe them. As an example: This page exists to our users: http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/Ram_HD/2012/photos-interior/ But this is the URL we have coded on the page: cars-trucks/used-cars/reviews/2012-Ram-HD/photos-interior/ (within the custom variance script labeled as “var l_tracker=” ) It is this custom URL that we use within GA to look up metrics about this page. This is just one example of many across our site setup to do the same thing Here is a second example: Available page to user: http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/Cadillac_ATS/2015/ Custom “var l_tracker=” /cars-trucks/2015-Cadillac-ATS/overview/ NOTE: There is a small amount of fear that the above method was implemented years ago as a work-around to a poorly structured URL architecture. Not validated, but that is a question that arose. Main Questions: Is the above implementation a normal and often used method to track pages in GA? (coming from an Omniture company before – this would not be how we handled page level tracking) Team members at my current company are divided on this method. Some believe this is not a proper implementation and are concerned that trying to hide these from Google will raise red flags (i.e. fake URLs in general = bad) I cannot find any reference to this method anywhere on the InterWebs -          If method is not normal: Any recommendations on a solution to address this? Potential Problems? GA is currently cataloguing these tracking URLs in the Crawl Error report. Any concerns about this? The team wants to hide the URLs in the Robots.txt file, but some team members are concerned this may raise a red flag with Google and hurt us more than help us. Thank you in advance for any insight and/or advice. Chris

    Reporting & Analytics | | usnseomoz
    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.