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After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

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  • Hey folks, I've got a question regarding URL structure. What is best for SEO given that there will be millions of lawyer names and 4 pages per lawyer www.lawyerz.com/office-locations/dr-al-pacino www.lawyerz.com/phone-number/dr-al-pacino www.lawyerz.com/reviews/dr-al-pacino www.lawyerz.com/ratings/dr-al-pacino OR www.lawyerz.com/office-locations-dr-al-pacino www.lawyerz.com/phone-number-dr-al-pacino www.lawyerz.com/reviews-dr-al-pacino www.lawyerz.com/ratings-dr-al-pacino OR www.lawyerz.com/dr-al-pacino/office-locations www.lawyerz.com/dr-al-pacino/phone-number www.lawyerz.com/dr-al-pacino/reviews www.lawyerz.com/dr-al-pacino/ratings Also, concerning duplicate file names: In the first example there are 4 duplicate file names with the lawyers name. (would this cause Google to not index some) In the second example there are all unique file names (would this look spammy to Google or the user) In the third example there are millions of duplicate file names (if 1 million lawyers then 1 million files called "office-locations"  etc (could so many duplicate filenames cause ranking issues) Should the lawyers name (which is the main keyword target) appear in the filename or in the folder - which is better for SEO in your opinion? Thanks for your input!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw
    0

  • I want to lead off by saying that I do not recommend trying this. My gut tells me that this is a bad idea, but I want to start a conversation about why. Since penguin a few weeks ago, one of the most common topics of conversation in almost every SEO/Webmaster forum is "how to remove spammy links". As Ryan Kent pointed out, it is almost impossible to remove all of these links, as these webmasters and previous link builders rarely respond. This is particularly concerning given that he also points out that Google is very adamant that ALL of these links are removed. After a handful of sleepless nights and some research, I found out that you can block traffic from specific referring sites using your.htaccess file. My thinking is that by blocking traffic from the domains with the spammy links, you could prevent Google from crawling from those sites to yours, thus indicating that you do not want to take credit for the link. I think there are two parts to the conversation... Would this work? Google would still see the link on the offending domain, but by blocking that domain are you preventing any strength or penalty associated with that domain from impacting your site? If for whatever reason this would nto work, would a tweak in the algorithm by Google to allow this practice be beneficial to both Google and the SEO community? This would certainly save those of us tasked with cleaning up previous work by shoddy link builders a lot of time and allow us to focus on what Google wants in creating high quality sites. Thoughts?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | highlyrelevant
    0

  • We are trying to find the best service to use to syndicate our articles. There are so many services to pick from. Our articles are from 500-600 words and are well written.  Can someone pass on a referral.

    Link Building | | spotya01
    0

  • One of our clients had a negative youtube review which is really hurting their reputation. The problem was solved and not even at fault of our client.  The uploader of the video was contacted, but has forgotten the username/password on the account. If you search for the brand name of the company, this video shows up 2nd on organic google results which is pretty embarrassing. What strategies would you all use to minimize the effects of this video?  Would you buy an adword for the company name to push the video down?

    Branding | | jastos
    0

  • A client of mine creates thought leadership articles and pitches multiple sites to host the article on their site to reach different audiences. The sites that pick it up are places such as AdAge and MarketingProfs and we do get link juice from these sources most of the time. Does having the same article on these sites as well as your own hurt your SEO efforts in any way? Could it be recognized as duplicate content? I know the links are great just wondering if there is any other side effects especially when there are no links provided! Thank you!

    Technical SEO | | Scratch_MM
    0

  • Please suggest which redirection we should use for 404 pages- 301 or 302. If you can elaborate it with reason then it will be highly appreciated.

    Technical SEO | | koamit
    0

  • Hi Guys I have been checking out a couple of my competitors and noticed that in site explorer there were sites that were passing what I would consider strong amounts of link juice for their banner adverts. I checked the anchor text which was always (Img ALT) Also the links are follow and placed on the home page too. So I wondered how google view this Im sure adverts were supposed to be no follow and if so then do you think there is a benefit from me taking one of these banner adverts to increase the level of link juice passing to my site.

    Link Building | | RankStealer
    0

  • Is it possible to use both Schema.org and Facebook Open Graph for structured data markup? On the Google Webmaster Central blog, they say, "you should avoid mixing the formats together on the same web page, as this can confuse our parsers." Source - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-schemaorg-search-engines.html

    Technical SEO | | SAMarketing
    1

  • I had recently come across a meta tag that could cause a auto refresh on a users browser when implemented.  I have been using it for a redesign and was curious if there could be any negative effects for using it, here is the code: All input is appreciated. Ciao, Todd Richard

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichFinnSEO
    0

  • Hi, I am trying to rank a health related website. This is the url: www.ridpiles.com Domain age is 1 year 6 months. Done Directory submissions Blog Comments + Forum posts Done Social Bookmarks Article submissions (Not much) I have done competitor analysis. All of my competitors are just had links from directories and some link exchanges. They got links from quality sites like Yahoo dir. I know my site is far better than my competitors and has 100% unique content. I have submitted to yahoo directory inclusion, but still no luck i hadn't accepted into it. I am planning to go for a sponsered review but dont know, weather the link will be valuable for that much of money. I was left with Guest Blogging. I see this is the only option for me to build links. But i have a very tough competiton, i must compete with most reputed sites like webmd.com etc, i need to get more good links. But i cant get what other ways to get authoritative links. If Guest blogging is the only option for me, how many posts do i need to do daily? And can someone suggest me good Guest blogging sites? Anyhelp would be appreciated.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Indexxess
    0

  • Hi all, We have thousands of PPC landing pages for our products. Usually, these pages are very similar and may differ only slightly for the keyword in question. The landing pages are sitting in a sub-domain of our site. From SEO perspective, assuming we don't want to get hit by Panda, Penguin and other animals Google stuffed into its ranking algorithm...Is it a good idea not to index these landing pages at all (i.e. add meta robots - noindex, nofollow to these pages)? What say you? Thanks!

    Paid Search Marketing | | ShivaS
    0

  • Had a few calls recently from agencies offering bulk discount on Google Adwords spends if we pass management over to them and spend more than £5,000 ($7,500) a month, they claim they can offer a 5% discount over what we're currently paying... Can't find anything about this, does Google offer such a deal to agencies?

    Paid Search Marketing | | digitalarts
    0

  • This is one querstion I've been thinking about for a while: where is the best location for a blog on your website for SEO purposes? In this case I'm thinking the blog as part of a commerical website. Sub domain: You could put it on a subdomain such as blog.mydomain.com which seems quite popular (blog.kissmetrics for example) but surely this is giving the blog.mydomain sub domain the SEO value and not the www.mydomain sub domain. The one value I see here is that you could host this on another server and so any links to my main website would be from a different IP address. You could also point the sub domain to a WordPress.com blog. Internal: There are two ways the blog could be run internal to the website: 1) if the website is a WordPress.org installation you could just use one category as the blog or 2) a fresh WordPress.org installation in a sub folder such as www.mydomain.com/blog. The benefits I see with #2 is that any guest posters would only have access to the blog and not the main company website and you could make the look and feel of the blog to be more "bloggy" than the main commerical website. External: TBH I don't think there is any benefit to running a blog completely external to the commerical website (such as a WordPress.com blog) unless the company provides online services so that if the main website goes down, the blog will still be running. So, from the above, which is the best way to run a commerical site blog? Or have I missed some other options?

    Branding | | Essjay
    0

  • I have some clients that recently got hit by "Penguin" they have several less than desireable backlinks that could be the issue?  Does anyone have any suggestions on getting these removed?  What are the odds that a webmaster on these spammy sites are going to remove them, and is it worth the time and effort?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RonMedlin
    3

  • Will outbound links to a related topic on an authority site help, hurt or be irrelevanent for SEO purposes. And if beneficially, should it be Nofollow?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VictorVC
    0

  • hi, I was trying to locate resources on the topics regarding how much the google bot indexes in order to qualify a 'good' site on their engine. For example, our site has many pages that are associated with logged in users and not available to the public until they acquire a login username and password. Although those pages show up in google analytics, they should not be made public in the google index which is what happens. In light of Google trying to qualify a site according to how 'engaged' a user is on the site, I would feel that the activities on those member pages are very important. Can anyone offer suggestions on how Google treats those pages since we are planning to do further SEO optimization of those pages. Thanks

    Algorithm Updates | | jumpdates
    0

  • Hello, The site I work with has a number of unwanted, unrealted and just generally spammy sites linking to our site.  What is the best way to ask them to remove the links (formal notice asking to remove or more of a "hey, can you get remove this for us as a favor" tone)?  Do you have any tips for getting rid of these links? Thank you!

    Link Building | | airnwater
    2

  • I have a site that provides online education and as such, most of the user activity happens behind a login. This has me thinking about potential SEO impacts with a few questions that maybe someone could lend some light on: How important is activity (above just search activity) to the search engines Would it help to enter these pages, even though they're behind a login, into GA as we have with the front-end of the site Does a subdomain make a difference (right now we implement the course as a subdomain of the main site Lastly, as I was looking at compete.com, I am wondering how they get these use statistics?

    Web Design | | uwaim2012
    0

  • We are using Wordpress Multisite. so www.mysite.com is our English website and www.mysite.com/sub is our Chinese website Can I redirect Chinese visitors who type "www.mysite.com"  to "www.mysite.com/sub" ? so we want to force redirection to www.mysite.com/sub if our website is visited by Chinese IP Address. I've realized that this is called GeoIP Redirection. and our hosting company already has those database, I guess my job is just to simply insert some code in .htacess My question is, would it affect our SEO later on? and what .htacess code is the best practice here?

    Technical SEO | | joony2008
    0

  • I have a client that has a site that has had a number of people in charge of it. All of these people have very different opinions about what should be on the site itself. When I look at their website on the server I see pages that do not have any obvious navigation to them. What is the best way to find out the internal linking structure of a site and see if these pages truly are stranded?

    Technical SEO | | anjonr
    0

  • Hey all! I have a limited amount of time allocated to writing instructional blog posts for my company. When I complete an article I can do whatever I want with it: pitch it as a guest post on an industry blog, or post it on my company's onsite blog. I know there's not a magical solution regarding the percentage of time one should devote to guest blogging v. focusing on the company blog, but I figured I'd throw the conundrum out to the Mozzers anyway. In your opinion, how many of your writing resources should be devoted to guest posts, and how many should be devoted to maintaining the onsite blog? What if our onsite blog isn't currently receiving a lot of traffic? Thanks! Meg

    Content Development | | ClarityVentures
    1

  • So as of late I have been on something of a mission to mark up my news website with as much accurate and detailed Schema and Open Graph data as possible, in order to not only allow the search engines to understand my content properly, but also to ensure everything appears in the most ideal fashion when linked to from Facebook, Google+, etc. Here is an example of a typical article page: http://www.nerdscoop.net/technology/video-games-459 As you'll see I currently have news posts marked up as article because that is essentially exactly what they are, but is there a better way to emphasise that they are news rather than just generic articles? My second question is regarding the category pages and the home page. How would be best to mark these up? With OG the task is fairly simple, because I can specify the homepage as being a website, but not so with Schema from what I can see. Either way, this is an interesting subject to me and I look forward to any discussion as a result. Thanks for looking.

    On-Page Optimization | | HalogenDigital
    0

  • I am trying to establish my best keywords using the keyword difficulty tool. So if I want to come up with the best keywords, should I use the ones that come in at 50%??

    Keyword Research | | mmookie
    0

  • Hi, We recently held a charity night in store. And had a few local celebs turn up etc... We created a press release to send out to various media outlets, within the press release were hyperlinks to our site and links on certain keywords to specific brands on our site. My question is, should we be sending a different press release to each outlet to stop the duplicate content thing, or is sending the same release out to everyone ok? We will be sending approx 20 of these out, some going online and some not. So far had one local paper website, a massive football website and a local magazine site. All pretty much same content and a few pics. Any help, hints or tips on how to go about this if I am going to be sending out to a load of other sites/blogs? Cheers

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA
    0

  • If someone misspells our company name in Google, how do I get google to display **Did You Mean:  **xyz. Our company name is difficult to spell and could be spelled multiple ways. What is the trick to this?

    SERP Trends | | hfranz
    0

  • Last month my rankings dropped a couple of pages on Google and am no longer receiving as many visits from Google as I used to. It's coming up to summer which is the time my business naturally picks up yet I can't fix this problem. I have a crazy idea of redirecting my established site onto a new domain in hopes that the penalty would be removed. I have tried removing any manipulative links yet my ranking are not coming back. Anyone had success in redirecting to a new domain?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | penn73
    0

  • I have removed all pages from my old website and set 301 redirect to new website. But, I have verified old website with Google webmaster tools' HTML verification file which enable me to track all data and existence of pages in Google search for my old website. I was assumed that, Google will stop crawling and DE-indexed all pages after 301 redirect. Because, I have set 301 redirect before 3 months. Now, I'm able to see Google bot activity on my website with help of Google webmaster tools. You can find out attachment to know more about it. How can it possible & How Google can crawl removed pages? You can see following image to know more about it. First & Second

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
    0

  • I have a site that I'm trying to rank for the Keyword "Jigsaw Puzzles" I was originally ranked around #60 or something around there and then all of a sudden my site stopped ranking for that keyword. (My other keyword rankings stayed) Contacted Google via the site reconsideration and got the general response... So I went through and deleted as many links as I could find that I thought Google may not have liked... heck, I even removed links that I don't think I should have JUST so I could have this fixed. I responded with a list of all links I removed and also any links that I've tried to remove, but couldn't for whatever reasons. They are STILL saying my website is breaking the Google guidelines... mainly around links. Can anyone take a peek at my site and see if there's anything on the site that may be breaking the guidelines? (because I can't) Website in question: http://www.yourjigsawpuzzles.co.uk UPDATE: Just to let everyone know that after multiple reconsideration requests, this penalty has been removed. They stated it was a manual penalty. I tried removing numerous different types of links but they kept saying no, it's still breaking rules. It wasn't until I removed some website directory links that they removed this manual penalty. Thought it would be interesting for some of you guys.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTaylor
    0

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