Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. Latest Questions

Moz Q&A is closed.

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.

Log in to post

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!

  • AdviceElle


    I used the keyword research tool to pull data on potential keywords, the report returns a percentage to represent the competition and difficulty of a keyword. Is there an ideal ratio of percent difficulty to search volume

    Keyword Research | | AdviceElle
    0
  • pwpaneuro


    Hello Everyone, I'm having a strange issue: I DO NOT have in my Google Analytics the "Social" tab under the Traffic Sources category. Look at the first image of this post: http://marketingland.com/google-analytics-social-reports-8138 How do you "get" that to show? Hope somebody has this issue and can help, Thanks a lot, Alex

    Reporting & Analytics | | pwpaneuro
    0
  • brianspatterson


    Hi Everyone, I am working with a pest control company that is looking to branch out into social media.  Their primary goal is to connect with their existing customers to improve retention.  The secondary goal is to potentially pick up new clients. With that said, I wanted to see if you all had some ideas on things that they could tweet/facebook about on a regular basis?  Posting about bugs on a daily basis gets pretty boring. I know Rand has been talking a lot lately about not being so narrow, so maybe we should talk more about general home improvement?  Any thoughts or ideas? Thanks! EDIT: I should clarify that this is a company that has maintenance plans.  You don't call them only when you have a problem. You sign up with them, and they treat your property every 3 months, or whenever you call.  Only about 2% of their customer base is one-off phone calls to fix 1 problem and never come back again. I don't think their existing customer base will have any issues with Liking them on Facebook or following them on Twitter. The initial plan is to incentivize them to do so, but once we get the like/follow, we want to continually be in front of them with interesting content, contests as Jay suggested, etc.

    Social Media | | brianspatterson
    2
  • ahw


    Since the launch of our newly designed website about 6 months ago, we are experiencing a high number of 500 server errors (>2000). Attempts to resolve these errors have been unsuccessful to date. We have just started to notice a consistent and sustained drop in rankings despite our hard sought efforts to correct. Two questions... can very high levels of 500 errors adversely effect our google rankings? And, if this is the case,  what type of specialist (what are they called) has expertise to investigate and fix this issue. I should also mention that the sitemap also goes down on a regular basis, which some have stated is due to the size of the site (>500 pages). Don't know if they're part of the same problem? Thanks.

    Reporting & Analytics | | ahw
    0
  • jorgediaz


    Can Google read and pass link juice in a link like this? <a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="#Link123" onClick="window.open('http://www.mycompany.com/example','Link123')">src="../../img/example.gif"/></a> Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | jorgediaz
    0
  • Grumpy_Carl


    I know there are too many variables for a certain answer, however do people take their domain authority into account when using keyword difficulty tool? I have a new domain which only has a score of seven at the moment.  When using the keyword searching tool what is the maximum difficulty level keywords people would target initially? Obviously I would seek to increase the difficulty of the words over time but to start off its a hard choice between keywords which can be ranked for in a reasonable period of time and the keywords which are getting enough traffic to make the effort worthwhile.

    Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl
    0
  • idiHost


    I am targeting the keyword AK-47 and it the  variants in search (AK47, AK-47, AK 47) .  How should I handle on page SEO?  Right now I have AK47 and AK-47 incorporated. So my questions is really do I need to account for the space or is Google handling a dash as a space? At a quick glance of the top 10 it seems the dash is handled as a space, but I just wanted to get a conformation from people much smarter then I at seomoz. Thanks, Jason

    Technical SEO | | idiHost
    0
  • dimanyc


    Aloha, This is probably a noob question, but here we go: I got a CMS e-commerce, which does not allow static "rel=canonical" declaration in the header and can only work with third-party modules (xml packages) that append "rel=canonical" to all pages dynamic pages within the URL. As a result, I have pages I'm declaring incomplete rel="canonical" as such: Instead of: rel="canonical" src="www.domainname.com/category.aspx" I get: rel="canonical" src="/category.aspx" Coincidentally (or not), after the implementation of the canonical tag, pages that were continuously increasing in rankings started dropping, and, within a week, disappeared from the index completely. Could the drop be a result of my canonical links pointing to incomplete URLs? If so, by fixing this issue, do I stand a chance of recovering my pages' SERPs?

    Web Design | | dimanyc
    0
  • treeoflife


    I am starting to do some manual back-linking for a medium competition word with high traffic.  I plan to start back linking with like niche blogs with non spam comments, like niche directories, like niche forums, and guest blogging. My domain is over 3 years old and ranks for multiple keywords, but I'm going to concentrate specifically on this keyword, but need to know how many links to back-link a day.  Again none of these will be spam, but will be of real quality. I was thinking 10-20 a day, but unsure.

    Link Building | | treeoflife
    0
  • reallyitsme


    Hi Looking for a fix for the PrestaShop platform Look for the definitive answer on how to best stop the indexing of PrestaShop modules such as "send to a friend", "Best Sellers" and site search pages. We want to be able to add a meta noindex ()to pages ending in: /search?tag=ball&p=15 or /modules/sendtoafriend/sendtoafriend-form.php We already have in the robot text: Disallow: /search.php
    Disallow: /modules/ (Google seems to ignore these) But as a further tool we would like to incude the noindex to all these pages too to stop duplicated pages. I assume this needs to be in either the head.tpl or the .php file of each PrestaShop module.? Or is there a general site wide code fix to put in the metadata to apply' Noindex Meta' to certain files. Current meta code here: Please reply with where to add code and what the code should be. Thanks in advance.

    Technical SEO | | reallyitsme
    0
  • KS__


    Can somebody suggest me good softwares for : 1. Forum profile Creation 2. Web 2.0 profile creation Thanks, KS__

    Technical SEO | | KS__
    0
  • ScottBaxterWW


    I just ran an OSE on a competitor of ours that they have a few links from this website, http://www.tz-online.de/ would this not damage there site?

    Link Building | | ScottBaxterWW
    0
  • eVacStore


    I am currently updating some H1 tags for my site but the tags are generated automatically by the text that is entered into a field on our content manager software. However because we need an image in this area as well, the entire field including the code for the image is surrounded by an H1 tag. Is this bad for SEO?

    Technical SEO | | eVacStore
    0
  • DigitalJungle


    Do Press Releases sites still worth to engage in terms of link building and domain authority building? I heard they don't deliver link authority anymore? If they they still do,  Which top 10 free and paid site would you recommend? What is the up-to-date link building method would you recommend? Thank you very much!

    Link Building | | DigitalJungle
    1
  • Max_powers


    I'm quite new to SEO and initially I was learning from the wrong sources who suggested to submit content to as many article directories as possible and the same with website submission to other web directories. Most of the directories they had suggested were low quality, with the only quality ones being made for a niche, which was not my websites niche. They also recommended other bad on-page techniques such as spinning/scraping other websites content - not that I followed this method anyway. Anyway, after educating myself more on how SEO and the search engines themselves work, I know that this is not the best practice. My website initially benefited from having all of these links but now has dropped off ranking for the keyword entirely. It still ranks on the front page for other long tail keywords and the actual domain name, but not the primary keywords. I'm worried that Google has in some way blacklisted my website for the main keywords, which were also used in all of these articles, but not the others if that's possible. At the moment I'm restructuring my website by increasing the amount of content and especially the quality of content so that I can submit it to better directories such as DMOZ and other niche specific directories and websites. Will Google look past the links from the low quality directories if my website is included in DMOZ and other high quality, niche specific directories? Is it better to just abandon my current website and start fresh? Thanks for any answers and/or advice in advance.

    Link Building | | Max_powers
    0
  • tjsherrill


    So I have a client who uses PPC and Organic SEO to drive traffic.  Once a user gets to the site, the most common action is to fill out a form. I have Auto Tagging enabled in Adwords so all PPC clicks have "gclid" in the url. I am also grabbing the Google Cookie and parsing it out to determine if the visitor is PPC or Organic. So I have an if statement in my form code to pass PPC vs organic through the form for tracking purposes: $url = 'http://' . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; if (false !== strpos($url,'gclid'))  { ?> Essentially this is saying: If gclid is in the url, or if the cookie contains PPC 
    set the Web field as PPC Else
    Set it as Organic. this is working about 80% of the time. I am trying to raise the accuracy.  any ideas where I might be missing some data? thanks

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | tjsherrill
    0
  • Petersen11


    Hi, I will try to make my question clear, although it is a bit complex. For my site the most important keyword is "Insurance" or at least the danish variation of this. My problem is that Google are'nt indexing my frontpage on this, but are indexing a subpage - www.mydomain.dk/insurance instead of www.mydomain.dk. My link bulding will be to subpages and to my main domain, but i wont be able to get that many links to www.mydomain.dk/insurance. So im interested in making my frontpage the page that is my main page for the keyword insurance, but without just blowing the traffic im getting from the subpage at the moment. Is there any solutions to do this? Thanks in advance.

    Technical SEO | | Petersen11
    0
  • ProjectLabs


    Does anyone know if it is okay to use creative commons images on your company blog if they are under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license. Technically you are using it on a commercial site, but you are not directly making money from the image or selling it.

    Content Development | | ProjectLabs
    0
  • Romaine


    I am looking for a good pinging service that indexes my backlinks fast. After doing some research I found linklicious, backlinksindexer and pingfarm among others. My quesiton: do those services still work and if yes, which one is the best one out there at the moment. Thanks for the help.

    Link Building | | Romaine
    0
  • Caseman


    What Exactly Does "Linking Root Domains" mean?? And how does it affect your ranking for certain Keywords?? Thanks

    Moz Pro | | Caseman
    57
  • MangoMan16


    Hi, I am currently with a very slow server. Our website takes quite a while to load, FTP is very slow and content changes with Wordpress are slow because even the database connection takes a lot of time. However, my website ranks very well. Traffic has doubled in the last year. Our domain has been registered with this company for over 10 years. I am wondering if changing to a different hosting provider would have an effect on my rankings due to the change in IP.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MangoMan16
    0
  • CommercePundit


    Today, I was reading latest blog post on SEOmoz blog about. Uncrawled 301s - A Quick Fix for When Relaunches Go Too Well This is very interesting study about 301 & How it useful to maintain traffic. I'm working on eCommerce website and I have done similar stuff on my website. I have big confusion to manage 301 redirect. My website generates new URLs due to following actions. Re-write dynamic URLs. Re-launch entire website on different eCommerce platform. [osCommerce to Magento Commerce] Re-name category. Trasfer one product from one category to another category. I'm managing my 301 redirect with old practice. Excel sheet data from Google webmaster tools and set specific new URLs for redirect. Hoooo... Now, I have 8.5K redirect in htaccess... And, I'm thinking it's too much. Can we remove old 301 redirect from htaccess or not? This is big question for me. Because, all pages are not hyperlink on external website. Google have just de-indexed old URLs and indexed new URLs. So, Is it require to maintain 301 redirect after Google process?

    Technical SEO | | CommercePundit
    0
  • SamCUK


    Which passes most link juice a text link or an image with the correct 'alt' attribute? Do the pass the same amount or is one more valuable than the other?

    Link Building | | SamCUK
    0
  • Marketing.SCG


    I am working in Magento to build out a large e-commerce site with several thousand products. It's a great platform, but I have run into the issue of what it does to URLs when you put a product into multiple categories. Basically, "a book" in two categories would make two URLs for one product: 1) /books/a-book 2) author-name/a-book So, I need to come up with a solution for this. It seems I have two options: Found this from a Magento SEO article: 'Magento gives you the ability to add the name of categories to path for product URL's. Because Magento doesn't support this functionality very well - it creates duplicate content issues - it is a very good idea to disable this. To do this, go to System => Configuration => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization and set "Use categories path for product URL's to "no".' This would solve the issues and be a quick fix, but I think it's a double edged sword, because then we lose the SEO value of our well named categories being in the URL. Use Canonical tags. To be fair, I'm not even sure this is possible. Even though it is creating different URLs and, thus, poses a risk of "duplicate content" being crawled, there really is only one page on the admin side. So, I can't go to all of the "duplicate" pages and put a canonical tag, because those duplicate pages don't really exist on the back-end. Does that make sense? After typing this out, it seems like the best thing to do probably will be to just turn off categories in the URL from the admin side. However, I'd still love any input from the community on this. Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing.SCG
    0
  • VinceWicks


    I am seeing these terms, but for the life of mine I can't understand what they are. Could anybody explain that in layman's terms? Thanks.

    Content Development | | VinceWicks
    0
  • preventionaid


    Is there a way to track the history of keyword search over time. I.E. the frequency of the Google search of the phrase 'unpasteurized milk' from 2006-2012 to see trending patterns.

    Search Behavior | | preventionaid
    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


Browse Questions

Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.