Latest Questions
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Need advise/strategy for cleaning up backlinks to my site
I recently redesigned my website (studio35design.com), and with that, I'm finally paying attention to SEO. I used a few different tools to find the amount of backlinking domains I've built up through the 7 or so years. The numbers are the following: 52 Total Backlinking Domains (800+ links):
Moz Pro | | rubennunez
• 17 of those are from blog commenting - they are pretty much all NF
• 20 of those are from sitewide footer credits on websites I've built. They are all old, as I stopped adding sitewide links to my client sites over a year ago.
• 7 of those are from spam. My site was hacked last year which contributed to alot of it. I've since then completely scrapped my old site and built this one on webflow (Not self-hosted like my old WP site).
• The other 10 or so are from forums, and the odd photo credit. As you can tell, almost none of these backlinks links are really any good. I'm surprised that my DA is 27 really. So moving forward, I need to know the best strategy dealing with these "bad" links. For the spam, I'm going to disavow in google webmasters. As for the rest, here are my questions... QUESTION 1:
As for the sitewide links, would the best thing be to remove the link altogether from the footer of each one of those sites? Some I can't because they are really old, and I don't have access to them (I'll probably disavow), but the rest I can still go in and update. QUESTION 2:
Will removing a ton of links at once hurt my DA and my google ranking? I can probably eliminate 500-600 links within a few days just by removing the sitewide links. How quickly can I expect those links to drop off? A few months? QUESTIONS 3:
Should I disavow blog commenting links even though they are NF? Does it matter at all? QUESTION 4:
I noticed 5 or so of the domains I have links one aren't working domains anymore. How quickly can I expect those links to drop off? Thanks in advance for your help.0 -
Ranking 2 pages on the same domain in the same SERP
I thought it was generally said that Google will favour 1 page per domain for a particular SERP, but I have seen examples where that is not the case (i.e. Same domain is ranking 2 different pages on the 1st page of the SERPs...) Are there any "tricks" to taking up 2 first page SERP positions, or am I mistaken that this doesn't always happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ullamalm0 -
How long for google to de-index old pages on my site?
I launched my redesigned website 4 days ago. I submitted a new site map, as well as submitted it to index in search console (google webmasters). I see that when I google my site, My new open graph settings are coming up correct. Still, a lot of my old site pages are definitely still indexed within google. How long will it take for google to drop off or "de-index" my old pages? Due to the way I restructured my website, a lot of the items are no longer available on my site. This is on purpose. I'm a graphic designer, and with the new change, I removed many old portfolio items, as well as any references to web design since I will no longer offering that service. My site is the following:
Algorithm Updates | | rubennunez
http://studio35design.com0 -
Effect of Publishing Blog Posts Resembling Classified Advertisements
Our site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) markets commercial real estate for lease in New York City. Any potential negative impact in terms of ranking and traffic by using our blog post in an unconventional manner? I am considering publishing a weekly post describing the latest commercial listings for lease. The post would be formatted and resemble classified advertising appearing in such newspapers as The New York Times. The ads are concise and appealing. Property listings drive a high click thru rate, so I believe blogs posts based on property listings and formatted like old newspaper ads might really improve visitor engagement. Each add could have a link to a corresponding listing page. Would using the blog in this manner every week have a detrimental effect or could prove beneficial? Thoughts??? lr6MIiR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Community Discussion: Are You Practicing Awareness Of Your Own Marketing Questions?
Good Afternoon Moz Friends! This week, one of my favorite bloggers in the Local SEO industry wrote a post to celebrate his 5 year blogging anniversary. Phil Rozek has brought an incredible level of knowledge to the industry and one of the things I've most admired about his writing is the consistency with which he tackles common, important problems everyone involved is facing. The tip from Phil's anniversary post that I'd like to discuss with you all this this one, about practicing awareness of the obstacles you encounter in your daily work, for the purpose of investigation and possible public sharing of the solutions you discover: "Jot down every idea you have, every question you ask yourself that stumps you, and every question someone asks you that stumps you. Those are yourraw materials. You probably won’t write on all of them, but you’ll want the ability to cherry-pick." As a Moz staffer and a marketer, I can testify to the fact that my brain exists in a whirl of possibilities, questions and a never-ending search for relevant solutions. Never a day goes by in which I don't say to myself, at least once,"I wonder why that's like that? Why doesn't this work? How do I do that? What is that? Why don't I get that?" or something similar about a new product, new technology, Google issue, customer issue, industry issue or what have you. What I've learned is that if I have a question about something that I can't instantly resolve, chances are, I'm not the only one who has that question. If you're a blogger, a copywriter, an email marketer, a social marketer, if you can solve a common problem, you have just discovered something to share. _But,_if you're not practicing mindfulness, little questions that arise in the course of an 8 hour day can come and go. They can simply get lost. This is why I value Phil's common sense suggestion of jotting each mental query down as it arises. A spreadsheet seems like a great idea for this task. Just think of how many talking/sharing points you could accumulate in a month ... and how that could translate into blog posts, newsletters, tweets, etc. Now, I'd like to ask if you've come up with a method for capturing your own thought process when questions arise so that you don't lose track of what might be some of your best queries and ideas. If you have tips to share, the community could really benefit! Thanks!
Local SEO | | MiriamEllis4 -
Website Redesign and Migration to Squarespace killed my Ranking
My old website was dated, ugly, impossible to update and a mess between hard-coded pages and WP, but we were ranking #1 in the organic searches for our key words. I just redesigned my website using Squarespace. I kept most of the same text on the pages (for key words) and kept the same Meta-Tags and Title Tags for each page as much as possible. Once I was satisfied that I had done as much on-page optimization as I could, I changed the IP in our Domain Name Registry so that it would point to our new website on the Squarespace host. And our new website was live! ...Then I watched in dismay as our ranking fell into oblivion. I think this might have something to do with not doing any 301 redirects from the old website and losing all of my link juice. Is this the case? And, if so, how do I fix it? Our website url is www.kanataskinclinic.ca Thanks
Web Design | | StillLearning1 -
SEO Automatic Reports for Ourselves and Clients
Hello, I am wondering if SEO Moz is able to provide automatic reports for us and our clients? Thank you!
Getting Started | | medaestheticsgp0 -
How do we build rank on a domain with an offsite blog?
We have a site (domain y) that we'd like to integrate a blog into but our team doesn't have the bandwidth to do this. So, we've been exploring the option of building the blog in WP and hosting on a separate domain (domain x) and redirecting from domain y to it. My concern is how this affects or undermines rank value on domain y (effectively all the value from the blog resides on the blog domain x). How might we go about integrating an offsite blog into the core domain while maintaining search value? Is there a way? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | J-Me0 -
Need references to a company that can transition our 1000 page website from Http to Https without breaking our SEO backlinks and site structure
Hi Ya'll I'm looking for a company or independent who can transition our website from http to https. I want to make sure they know what they're doing with a Wordpress website. More importantly, i want to make sure they don't break any seo juice from external sources while internally nothing gets broken. Anyone have any good recommendations? You can reply back or DM me. Best, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Website ranking issues
Hi Moz, I have a question about one of our websites that has been ranking very poorly on it's current domain (fancydoorsedmonton.com) lately, but was ranked at #1 for the search term "Edmonton Doors" until last month. The main search terms we're targeting are "Edmonton Doors" and "Doors Edmonton". I made another post regarding the on-page SEO value and had some feedback from that, but there is another issue that seems more likely to cause an issue. There are 2 more domains set up to forward to their main domain: fancydoors.com was their old domain but was registered by someone else and had some questionable, X-rated content put on it. The domain has now been reacquired and redirected to their main domain. There isn't any more questionable content on there anymore. Would this domain's past affect it's current ranking? fancy-doors.com was another old domain of theirs now set up as a redirect. In the past they had another SEO provider work with this domain and did some bad SEO work for them with automated citations, etc. We changed the domain to fancydoorsedmonton.com to get away from that and also include Edmonton in the domain. If you have any ideas or feedback to provide based on this information it would definitely be a huge help to us. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | Web3Marketing870 -
Error in Duplicate Content Being Reported - Pages Aren't Actually Duplicates
The recent crawl of one of our sites revealed a high number of duplicate content issues. However, when I viewed the report for pages with duplicate content I noticed almost all of them are not duplicates. For example, these two pages are marked as dupes:
Moz Bar | | M_D_Golden_Peak
https://www.writersstore.com/publishers/hollywood-creative-directory
https://www.writersstore.com/authors/g-miki-hayden These are thin as far as content goes but definitely not duplicates. Any recommendations or ways to adjust the settings so that these false positives aren't clogging up our site crawl report?0 -
Why are accuracy scores in the dashboard different than in the individual listing?
How come when I search for my location in the Moz Local dashboard, it shows me the Score and the Accuracy, but then when I click into the individual location and the accuracy score is much lower? Which one is the source of truth, and is the best to report to clients? I don't want to report on inflated numbers.
Moz Local | | LM360_Digital0 -
App indexing with several subdomains
Hi, We are currently in the process of getting our app developed. From an SEO point of view I want the app to get indexed and am currently trying to get a step by step guide for it. I've come across this helpful guide: https://moz.com/blog/how-to-get-your-app-content-indexed-by-google but need to go a bit deeper now. Questions I have is related to the "apple-app-site-association" file As far as I could find out the JSON code of that file has the following syntax: {_ “applinks”: {__ “apps”: [],__ “details”: [__ {__ “appID”: “9JA89QQLNQ.com.my.bundle.id“,__ “paths”: [ “/myPath1”, “/myPath2/*” ]__ },__ ]__ }_ } My question is related to the key "appID" I'm wondering how the entry would look like if I have 10 country subdomains and would like to make sure that the deep link clicked in the browser is going to the right subdomain page within the app. Current website structure:
Web Design | | FashionLux
uk.example.com/english-path/
de.example.com/german-path/ Many Thanks in advance0 -
Multiple redirects for GA tracking
We recently replaced a high traffic online service with a new one that now resides at a new URL. We redirect the old site (https://subdomain.mysite.org) to a static page announcing the change (http://www.mysite.org/announcement.html) that links out to the new online service. The SSL cert on the old site is valid for two more months and then would cost $1K to renew. We'd like to measure traffic from the old link over the next two months to see if it's worth renewing the SSL cert to keep a redirect going. If I go into GA, filter the "announcement.html" page and set the secondary dimension to "referral path" I'm not seeing any traffic from https://subdomain.mysite.org. Guessing this is part of the "(not set)" group. First thought was to have that go to a unique intermediary page to log the referral, which then redirects out to the announcement page. Is this considered spammy or is there another way to track referrals from the https site that I'm not considering? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | c2g0 -
How to identify spammy website before making backlinks on them
Hi, I search in google but didnt find a proper answer for this! maybe search an incorrect keyword! The question is, How can I find out a website that I'm going to make a backlink on is a spammy website? For example I did this guest bloging on this good website: Best Sure-Shot Organic Pest Control Approaches Every Gardener Should Know | Balcony Garden Web But it seems to be spammy because I use SEO POWERSUIT software that shows this backlink is 20% risk of google penalty! Is it right!? So how can we rest assured for making a quality backlink? I can not think any other way 😞
Link Building | | Shervin0 -
Tool to check page size for multiple url's at once
In Google Analytics under Site Speed > Page Timings, you can see all pages and their loading time compared to the average. This is very handy to check which pages maybe need some optimization. I would also like to check the size for these pages in a similar way. There are multiple tools out there like GTmetix and Pingdom that give specific information and performance insights. The problem is that they are limited to check one url at a time. Does someone know about a tool to check the page size of multiple url’s at once (and if possible to easily export to Excel)? That way I can check which pages are big in size and research/optimize them. Thanks in advance
Reporting & Analytics | | Mark.0 -
Drop in Android organic search
Hay Moz Community, I have been analysing traffic fluctuations for a few websites and have found a noticeable drop in organic traffic from android devices. I initially thought it could be a generic mobile drop but iOS is holding its own? Can anyone share any insights they may have come across to explain the drop on android specifically. Thank you in advance
Search Behavior | | JBGlobalSEO
Alex0 -
Will Google penalise me if i noindex lots of pages?
Hey everyone.. I hope you can help! I have optimised my product landing pages for SEO keywords based on volumes. I've been doing PPC for 3 months now and I can see that a lot of the keywords which drive clicks are not showing as high volume in the SEO volumes. My Adwords quality scores for these PPC keywords are low, 6&7 /10... So this leaves me with a predicament - do I 1. Re-optimise my LP's for PPC instead of SEO keywords?
Paid Search Marketing | | Woav
2. Create new LP's just for PPC and no index them? (I could use DKI to good effect here I think thus reducing the necessity to have multiple LP's targeting numerous PPC keywords) But my concern was this... will Google frown on me having lots of similar LPs but only 1 indexed? Or maybe I'm going about this in the wrong manner? Really appreciate any advice anybody can provide on this!? Rick0 -
Wordpress SEO for ecommerce store
I have been working on a wordpress ecommerce website and want to check that I am doing something correctly so hope someone can help. The Wordpress theme did not allow for an introductory content so the developer built a content page Instead to work as a front end category page so there was more flexibility. I have set the product categories to follow- no index and set the content page as the canonical version and optimised the content page.. question is - is that the right thing to do?
Technical SEO | | musthavemarketing0 -
Unable to demote contact us & about us pages from sitelink?
Hey all, It's been 3 months now I demoted contact us & about us page via search console but it still appearing in my sitelink. Is there any other guidelines to be followed? Do anyone have the same experience? Susan.
Technical SEO | | promodirect0 -
Changing Brand and Domain Name - SEO Impacts
Hi everyone I'm hoping a few of you can help me out... We're an online-one retailer and we're currently looking at rebranding.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | piazza
This is for commercial reasons: Our current name is difficult for customers to spell It's not wholly representative of what we now offer We want to push offline and social marketing to help increase or DA In a nutshell, our current name implies 'cheap' and we're moving more upmarket.
Our DA is only 10, and a re-brand will make our brand more marketable.
A stronger brand and DA will help us climb up the rankings quickly - last year we ranked no 1 for a relatively competitive term before dropping a few places. In terms of current traffic: 30% is via SEO (we have a low DA but rank ok for certain phrases) 70% is via adwords We had our website redesigned last year and it performs well.
The idea is to have a new brand logo and colours and move to a new domain.
We will keep all our existing products and content. Please could anyone let me know the implications of this move?
What are potential pitfalls, and what will we need to do to alert Google?
I have read about 301 redirects, would these be required? As always, any help is very much appreciated. Many thanks Abs0 -
Google creating it own content
I am based in Australia but a US founded search on 'sciatica' shows an awesome answer on the RHS of the SERP https://www.google.com/search?q=sciatica&oq=sciatica&aqs=chrome.0.69i59.3631j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 The download on sciatica is a pdf created by google. Firstly is this common in the US? secondly any inputs on where this is heading for rollout would be appreciated. Is google now creating its own content to publish?
Algorithm Updates | | ClaytonJ0 -
How do you analyze a traffic drop with no historic Google Analytics data?
A client of mine has a large website with multiple sections (shop, forums, articles, etc.) that apparently had a significant reduction in rankings, traffic, and sales in the past. However, historic Google Analytics data is not available for the site, and I'm having troubles identifying anything concrete about the traffic drop, such as when it happened, what pages/sections it happened to, etc. The shop traffic drives most of the revenue, but it's a small number compared to the forums traffic, so it's hard to pick anything out of top-line trends like SEMrush offers. What tools or strategies might help in this situation?
Reporting & Analytics | | AdamThompson0 -
Instructables site - follow and nofollow
Hi, I haven't been able to find a clear answer to this issue yet, so I'm posting here for help. I have just created a profile on the site Instructables - http://www.instructables.com/ as well as an article. The issue is that I could find most of the published articles there have follow links in them - e.g links under materials: http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-a-Reclaimed-Industrial-Coffee-Table/ - however mine is attributed nofollow links. I simply don't know why this is or if there is a way around it to get the links followed. This question only relates to the links in the articles, not the profile links - which are followed. Anybody knows? Thanks, Alex
Link Building | | alexddseo0 -
MOZ Freshweb reported mentions that really does not contain any mention - anyone else experiencing this?
MOZ Freshweb reported links from "traffic.fullcontentrss.com" that doesn't really contain any mention. Is this a MOZ error or is it maybe since fullcontentrss.com has a javascript that pulls data into their own RSS, MOZ ended up crawling partially and as a result not reporting the correct URL? Anyone else experiencing this anomaly?
Moz Bar | | CPR_PTANTONO0 -
Empty href damages SEO? (href="#")
Hello, I'm analyzing a website with thousands of pages.
Link Building | | prozis
I realized that on many of them they have empty links such href="#". I wonder if that will cause any SEO damage, or if Google will just ignore it as there isn't any link? I was reading about it and people seems to not be sure, although they recommend on forums to user the CSS pointer clickable instead of empty link. Let me know your opinion on this please! Thank you in advance!0 -
Link title tags on devices - product category page
I saw that any big page doesn't have a title tag on the product link on the category page. Title tag has any advantages on internal links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tormar0 -
Is content really king?
I have a good sized website with lots of pages. Many pages are designed around specific keywords and for the most part, they rank well. I have many pages packed with good content that don't rank well, but the keywords are related to those pages that score well. Are the under performing pages contributing to the good performing pages and/or to the overall benefit of the website because of the additional content? In short, if i remove under performing pages, will it affect good performing pages and the overall performance of the website?
Keyword Research | | KrisIrr0 -
Get All Campaigns
Hi , i can not find in api documentation how can I browse all campaigns in account in PHP. I need browse Tracked Keywords Overview table for every campaigns. But in documentation i can not find how put together query parameters. In response i need keyword, rank and URL for one project and every project in Campaigns. Is it possible ? Thank you for your answer.
API | | Sabanero0 -
Transferring ownership of a listing and renaming it - what can happen?
Hi All, We have a local business with multiple store fronts. We've recently bought a competitors store front, that store front has a local Google listing. We would like to do 2 things: 1. Transfer the ownership of the listing from their accounts to ours. 2. Renaming and re-branding the listing (and of course the office) My questions is, what can happen once we do that? Transferring the ownership is a simple task as i've seen it on Googles guidelines so is renaming it (technically speaking). Will this affect the listing itself? Rankings/Verification and anything else that may come up? Thanks a lot for the answers!
Local Listings | | OrendaLtd0 -
How long until links lead to a ranking increase?
I've gotten some good links to my homepage recently. How long until I'm likely to see an increase in ranking? Let me know, thanks.
Link Building | | RafeConnection1 -
AngularJS - How to check?
Hi all, I have read and understood how to make sure that a site in angularJS can be crawled and indexed by search engines efficiently. However, I have a question around the pages and their meta data (title, description etc.). Since, headless browsers will run the code and then return the completed HTML pages, for an SEO, how it is possible to do a check on the meta data? This information wont be available in the code at first instance that SEOs can pull. How does an SEO get the meta data information from the code of the website? Also, how will tools like ScreamingFrog, Google Page Speed tool, Xenu etc. read websites developed in AngularJS?
Algorithm Updates | | Malika10 -
Google Adding / Manipulating Page Meta Titles?
We have a client who is experiencing some heavy google modification to the title tags being displayed on the search engine. It is adding "- 0 Reviews" to an ecommerce site. Obviously a bad start. There were no instances of these keywords anywhere on any of these pages, header tag or otherwise (on only a handful of the affected pages there was a single commented out image with an alt tag 0 reviews - but it was commented out and since removed) We have attempted to rewrite the title multiple times and it will modify the title but still include the non-relevant addition. Has anyone ever experienced anything like this?
Algorithm Updates | | Spindle0 -
Can I set a canonical tag to an anchor link?
I have a client who is moving to a one page website design. So, content from the inner pages is being condensed in to sections on the 'home' page. There will be a navigation that anchor links to each relevant section. I am wondering if I should leave the old pages and use rel=canonical to point them to their relevant sections on the new 'home' page rather than 301 them. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Vizergy0 -
Abnormally high internal link reported in Google Search Console not matching Moz reports
If I'm looking at our internal link count and structure on Google Search Console, some pages are listed as having over a thousand internal links within our site. I've read that having too many internal links on a page devalues that page's PageRank, because the value is divided amongst the pages it links out to. Likewise, I've heard having too many internal links is just bad in general for SEO. Is that true? The problem I'm facing is determining how Google is "discovering" these internal links. If I'm just looking at one single page reported with, say, 1,350 links and I'm just looking at the code, it may only have 80 or 90 actual links. Moz will confirm this, as well. So why would Google Search Console report different? Should I be concerned about this?
Technical SEO | | Closetstogo0 -
Will GA Autotrack affect affiliate sites not using autotrack?
I want to add autotrack.js to affiliate quote forms hosted on my site. However, I do not know how it will affect affiliate websites (not associated with my quote forms, but with the same Google Analytics code, that do not use autotrack. I read that "Autotrack is not an official Google Analytics product and does not qualify for GA Premium". Will it harm my affiliates in any way to have autotrack on their quote form but not on their websites? It will have their GA website tracking number.
Affiliate Marketing | | RoxBrock0 -
HUGELY different ranking for a keyword between Bing and Google. Looking for ideas.
We rank really well for a brand in Bing (#2 behind manufacturer, and it's a competitive name) but are in about 15th place in Google. Any suggestions on what could be hurting us in Google are welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | absoauto1 -
Does social media presence + inbound links outweigh bad SEO?
Some of our competitors have SEO errors in the thousands, yet rank much higher than us for keywords that we're targeting. The SEO errors are duplicate content, titles, and 404 errors. We've successfully nailed down much of our SEO issues to a bare minimum, although not eliminated them completely, so we're at a loss as to why we aren't gaining much ground. From what we can tell, the difference between us and them is they have a large amount of inbound links to their site plus popular social media presence. Can it be inferred from this that an active social media presence and large inbound link count outweigh bad SEO practices? What else should we be looking for to help pinpoint why we're not gaining rank with the keywords we're targeting?
Link Building | | Closetstogo0 -
What is the difference between Multilingual and multiregional websites?
Hi all, So, I have studied about multilingual and multiregional websites. As soon as possible, we will expand the website languages to english and spanish. The urls will be like this: http://example.com/pt-br
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mobic
http://example.com/en-us
http://example.com/es-ar Thereby, the tags will be like this: Great! But my doubt is: To /es-ar/ The indexing will be only to spanish languages in Argentina? What about the other countries that speak the same language, like Spain, Mexico, etc.I don't know if it will be possible develop a Spanish languages especially for each region. Should I do an multiregional website or only multilingual? How Google sees this case? Thanks for any advice!!1 -
Which is the best youtube keyword tool ?
Hi i am in process of optimizing the youtube channels and i like to know which is the best tool for YouTube keyword research which can show search queries and other data something like google keyword planner.
Keyword Research | | NortonSupportSEO0 -
How can I make a list of all URLs indexed by Google?
I started working for this eCommerce site 2 months ago, and my SEO site audit revealed a massive spider trap. The site should have been 3500-ish pages, but Google has over 30K pages in its index. I'm trying to find a effective way of making a list of all URLs indexed by Google. Anyone? (I basically want to build a sitemap with all the indexed spider trap URLs, then set up 301 on those, then ping Google with the "defective" sitemap so they can see what the site really looks like and remove those URLs, shrinking the site back to around 3500 pages)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryggselv.no0 -
SEO - Vimeo vs. YouTube
Hi Does anyone have any good blogs or stats on which video hosting platform is better for SEO? I'm guessing YouTube as it's owned by Google - but I'd love some stats to support this for an internal debate. Thanks Becky
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Image Sitemap for non indexed Products
Hi, we have several ecommerce sites. We want to do an image sitemap, as we have lots of attractive images. The question is, can you put images for non-indexed products there as well, or does that conflict with the normal sitemap (the images would be indexed, the products not)? Thanks in advance. Dieter Lang
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco0
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