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.
Latest Questions
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Creating Backlinks On Behalf of Client
I'm on my first SEO project with a law firm. I'm at the stage where I am doing competitive backlink research on other law firms that my client gave me. I saw a blog site called typepad. It has a high domain authority so I was going to recommend to my client that they set up an account and blog away! Since it's a law firm, I am not qualified to start blogging on behalf of my client and I know they are extremely busy so now I have to "ride" my client to get busy and start creating content. I feel like I want to do more for them on the blog side to keep things going but not having a law background, probably not doable. Question: Do most SEO's do the blogging for their clients, farm it out or keep pushing their clients to do it? I also want them to sign up with articlebase but the same thing is going to happen. I have to push them to write articles. I guess this is my job? -Bob
Link Building | | Czubmeister0 -
Setting Up Google Analytic with Sub Folder Sites
What is the best way of setting up Google Analytic for a website that has many sub folders? The main site is example.com and it has 40 sub folder sites like example.com/uk example.com/France etc etc Would it be advised to track a single domain in Google Analytic then create filters for the sub folder sites. Filters > Include traffic from > Sub directories Also with this method is it possible to view overall incoming website stats for everything? Previous experience would be great with this thanks 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | daracreative0 -
Looking to rank a .co.uk domain in the USA
Hello Mozzers, One of my clients sites is "domain.co.uk" and they are looking to rank in the USA with the same domain. They are looking to change host (for unrelated reasons) and I think it may be beneficial for them to get hosting in the USA. Essentially the business is moving to the USA but they want to retain their domain name as they cannot get their hands on a domain with their company name in that is .com / .net / .org etc. . . I know that the .co.uk domain will adversely affect click through rates in the states, but there seems to be no way around this if they want their retain the company name as their domain name. Would American based hosting help them rank better for searches from the USA or is the benefit of this negligible? Net66
Technical SEO | | net660 -
Social Sharing Buttons: SEO friendly ?
Any recommendations for an SEO friendly social sharing button company? Or ones that provide a good service and also actually helps your brand name in SEO? I think it is important for others to be able to share my pages with colleagues and others. Thank you, UtahTiger
Branding | | Boodreaux0 -
URL shortener and backlinks
Are there any SEO benefits drawn from creating backlinks with Google url shortener service(especially for the very deep links) or for the do-follow link juice I have to use a complete address?
Link Building | | SirMax0 -
How to block "print" pages from indexing
I have a fairly large FAQ section and every article has a "print" button. Unfortunately, this is creating a page for every article which is muddying up the index - especially on my own site using Google Custom Search. Can you recommend a way to block this from happening? Example Article: http://www.knottyboy.com/lore/idx.php/11/183/Maintenance-of-Mature-Locks-6-months-/article/How-do-I-get-sand-out-of-my-dreads.html Example "Print" page: http://www.knottyboy.com/lore/article.php?id=052&action=print
Technical SEO | | dreadmichael0 -
BOTW.Org - Worth It?
I noticed that BOTW.org has gone from a historic PR6 to a PR4 currently. They also have gone up significantly in price for $69 or so to $149 annually or $299 one-time fee. This is quite high and with PR4 now, I'm not sure if it's really worth submitting to for this price. Agree / Disagree? If you like this post, please help & give me a Big Thumbs Up!
Link Building | | applesofgold1 -
Image search and CDNs
Hi, Our site has a very high domain strength. Although our site ranks well for general search phrases, we rank poorly for image search (even though our site has very high quality images). Our images are hosted on a separate CDN with a different domain. Although there are a number of benefits to doing this, since they are on a different domain, are we not able to capitalize on our my site's domain strength? Is there any way to associate our CDN to our main site via Google webmaster tools? Has anyone researched the search ranking impacts due to storing your images on a CDN, given that your domain strength is very high? Curious on people's thoughts?
Technical SEO | | NicB10 -
Local SEO address question - adding a suite number for shared address for office building
Hi, I have a client that has an address that is shared for a few different businesses in the holistic health field. My client is a chiropractor. There is an eye doctor, massage therapist and acupuncturist aslo sharing the same address. It's a subburban setting with two buildings all sharing one address. In the interest of preventing any merged listings down the road, I recently added un unofficial suite number to his website and Google places business listing. I also did this for all of his online directory listings, and for Bing and Yahoo as well. Did I do the right thing here? It seems to be having a positive impact on his local SEO as far as I can tell. Or at least there has not been any negative impact in the last 6 months Your thoughts?
Image & Video Optimization | | MozMan20 -
Hreflang on non-canonical pages
Hi! I've been trying to figure out what is the best way to solve this dilemma with duplicate content and multiple languages across domains. 1 product info page 2 same product but GREEN
Technical SEO | | LarsEriksson
3 same product but RED
4 same product but YELLOW **Question: ** Since pages 2,3,4 just varies slightly I use the canonical tag to indicate they are duplicates of page 1. Now I also want to indicate there are other language versions with the_ rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _element. Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on the canonical page only pointing to the canonical page with "x" language. Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on all pages pointing to the canonical page with the "x" language? Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on all pages and then point it to the translated page (even if it is not a canonical page) ? /Lars0 -
Stop google indexing CDN pages
Just when I thought I'd seen it all, google hits me with another nasty surprise! I have a CDN to deliver images, js and css to visitors around the world. I have no links to static HTML pages on the site, as far as I can tell, but someone else may have - perhaps a scraper site? Google has decided the static pages they were able to access through the CDN have more value than my real pages, and they seem to be slowly replacing my pages in the index with the static pages. Anyone got an idea on how to stop that? Obviously, I have no access to the static area, because it is in the CDN, so there is no way I know of that I can have a robots file there. It could be that I have to trash the CDN and change it to only allow the image directory, and maybe set up a separate CDN subdomain for content that only contains the JS and CSS? Have you seen this problem and beat it? (Of course the next thing is Roger might look at google results and start crawling them too, LOL) P.S. The reason I am not asking this question in the google forums is that others have asked this question many times and nobody at google has bothered to answer, over the past 5 months, and nobody who did try, gave an answer that was remotely useful. So I'm not really hopeful of anyone here having a solution either, but I expect this is my best bet because you guys are always willing to try.
Algorithm Updates | | loopyal0 -
What is the most SEO friendly Shopping Cart?
What is the most SEO friendly shopping cart? I have been using zen-cart for 6 years. Seems Google doesn't like it as much as other carts. I started a new site about 6 months ago using Magento. When I build links to this site the terms move. The terms are very similar. So I would imagine the competition is the same. I am curious if anybody has tried with different carts and found anyone to be better than the others. Also the new site has about one tenth the amount of products but has a lot more pages indexed.
On-Page Optimization | | kicksetc0 -
Video SEO - Why are my videos not being indexed?
Hello All, I work on a site that has a lot of videos. The trouble is none of them are ranking. Here is an example of a page with a video on. If you click the play button you will see But none of these videos are being indexed, as you can see here. Is it because these videos are just mp4 files, rather than being embedded players (like SEOmoz use for instance)? Would embedding videos through Viddler / Wistia / Youtube etc help? Or is there some other issue at work here? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Rich
Image & Video Optimization | | JBGlobalSEO0 -
Exact keyword URL or not?
Hi all, I have a quick question about the proper use of permalinks. Let's say that I have a website about sports and I want to create an internal page dedicated to shoes. I know that the keyword "shoe" has 15.000 monthly visits, while the keyword "shoes" has 1.000 monthly visits. How do I have to name the internal page? http://www.example.com/shoe or http://www.example.com/shoes (with a final 's')? I would think that by naming the URL http://www.example.com/shoes, the search engine would consider that page for the keywords "shoe" and "shoes", but I am not sure about it. Should I create a URL that only focuses on one specific keyword ("shoe", in this example) or a URL that may encompass more than one keyword ("shoe" and "shoes")? I hope this is clear. Thank you for your time and help. All best, Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
How do I get rid of rogue listings?
Unfortunately, Google has taken bits and pieces of my business and combined it with non-existent businesses and other rogue information. So now my business has 3 locations. One proper listing that I created and manage. One that uses my website address but nothing else is correct in the listing. One that contains my name(incorrectly), but the address and everything else about it is incorrect. I have reported these places many times but they continue to hang around and I am lost/confused on what to do next. Please advise.
Technical SEO | | dignan990 -
How can you bulk search by email for social networks?
Hello Everyone! We're trying to launch a Social Media campaign for our website and in order to reach more people and follow/invite them to our social profiles we thought of finding them by their email addresses (i read a post somewhere - maybe seomoz, maybe not can't remember). Can anyone suggest a tool or best way of researching ~20.000 email addresses to find out / filter what social networks have this email registered? Much appreciated! Alex
Social Media | | pwpaneuro0 -
Deferred javascript loading
Hi! This follows on from my last question. I'm trying to improve the page load speed for http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/. Currently, Google rate the page speed of the GZ site at 91/100 – with the javascript being the only place where points are being deducated. The only problem is, the JS relates to the trustpilot widget, and social links at the bottom of the page – neither of which work when they are deferred. Normally, we would add the defer attribute to the script tags, but by doing so it waits until the page is fully loaded before executing the scripts. As both the js I mentioned (reviews and buttons) use the document.Write command, adding this would write the code off the page and out of placement from where they should be. Anyone have any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
OK to block /js/ folder using robots.txt?
I know Matt Cutts suggestions we allow bots to crawl css and javascript folders (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNEipHjsEPU) But what if you have lots and lots of JS and you dont want to waste precious crawl resources? Also, as we update and improve the javascript on our site, we iterate the version number ?v=1.1... 1.2... 1.3... etc. And the legacy versions show up in Google Webmaster Tools as 404s. For example: http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global_functions.js?v=1.1
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.cookie.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/global.js?v=1.2
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/jquery.validate.min.js?v=1.1
http://www.discoverafrica.com/js/json2.js?v=1.1 Wouldn't it just be easier to prevent Googlebot from crawling the js folder altogether? Isn't that what robots.txt was made for? Just to be clear - we are NOT doing any sneaky redirects or other dodgy javascript hacks. We're just trying to power our content and UX elegantly with javascript. What do you guys say: Obey Matt? Or run the javascript gauntlet?0 -
Creating a sitemap
what is the best place to go to create a xml sitemap? I have used xml-sitemap.com but it only does 500 pages. Any suggestions? Does a sitemap have value on the SEO front?
On-Page Optimization | | jgmayes0 -
Recommended marketplace for SEO
Hi Mozzers! With the shut down of the SEOMoz marketplace what are some other resources for finding people to help with SEO tasks? Craigslist seems like the best resource for this, but are there any other good ones?
Industry News | | ProjectLabs0 -
Youtube SEO: Does your channel name / user name matter?
My predecessor left me a gift of what is arguably the worst kind of Youtube channel name: Our company's name condensed to an acronym with some additional gibberish that may or may not have meant something to her. In short: Our channel name will never be searched for, will never provide any ranking boost. Now our Youtube success has been very marginal so far: 31 subscribers, 7,300 video views. Given that situation, should I seriously consider scrapping my channel and starting something new with a keyword targeted channel name? Or does channel name matter so little that I should hold on to my 7300 video views?
Social Media | | AdoptionHelp0 -
Best Relevant Directory submission software
Hi Guys, Is there any really good relevant directory sumbission software out there?? Or am I just wishing for too much here! There must be a good sodtware tools out there where I can submit my property website to relvant property related directories with a jit of a button! Any help of poing me in the right direction would be very helpful! Thanks! G
Link Building | | GAZ090 -
Export Website into XML File
Hi, I am having an agency optimize the content on my sites. I need to create XML Schema before I export the content into XML. What is best way to export content including meta tags for an entire site along with the steps on how to?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0 -
Dmoz.Org listings - how much more difficult can it be?
We have had a quality website for 12 years. We have good rankings and good PR. But for some reason, I have never been able to get listed on Dmoz.org - it's like they're not even reviewing it. It's not like I got a rejection letter or anything, just a no response and we just can't seem to get listed there. It's almost like the editors for our category are just not responsive or just not around. Or maybe they're a competitor and don't want us listed? Questions: 1. How important is it for an established site to get listed? I imagine that dmoz being an authority site, it would still be very helpful for rankings. 2. There are dmoz "submission services" - where they claim to list your site the proper way. They don't guarantee their service, since they obviously can't, and you have to pay either way. Does anyone recommend these services and anyone know of a particular one that is up & up? Any help on getting listed would be appreciated!
Link Building | | applesofgold0
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