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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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  • Has anyone used paid likes for Google +, Facebook, etc. for liking articles, videos, etc. on your own sites? Is this a safe, SEO practice?

    Social Media | | Stevej24
    0

  • After reading this on the SEOMoz blog, I've decided to try some guest posting to gain some backlinks for our real estate site.  I have a few questions for those of you who do this regularly: 1. If the site you are posting on allows up to 3 links in the signature box, do you generally use them all?  My gut instinct is that one anchor texted link would give me the most bang for my buck. 3.  How much attention do you pay to PR or DA?  If a site is PR1 but relevant to your niche would you spend the time to write the article? 4. What negatives have you found when writing guest posts? Thanks!

    Link Building | | MarieHaynes
    0

  • Hi, I see a lot of sites with a year copyright statment in the footer like Copyright 2011 - DomainName.com or Copyright 2002 - 2012 - Domainname.com since new year a lot of sites (founded before 2011) still have 2011 instead of 2012 in the footer. Do you think the date gives any signals to google? Should someone update the date or remove it completely? I would tend to remove it completely since the page date for google is submitted in the HTTP header. But maybe the info could be of any use for the user. Any best practices?

    On-Page Optimization | | Autoschieber
    0

  • I was wondering what the purpose of submitting your blog articles to directories are.  Doesn't it require enough "points" or "+1's" for it to become a "do-follow" link? People on the forum talk about automating directory submission, can anyone recommend a good software for this?  I've been hearing that Google Penalizes you for article submission because it looks like spam?

    Link Building | | kevinyu1029
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  • hi we can get a valuable link with the desired anchor text from a news site. the destination url would be something like www.site.com/product. but in order to track conversions, our sales team would like to add an affiliate id to the url, so that it would look like this: www.site.com/product?sess_affiliate=ta how much link juice would a link to this affiliate url pass? would we be shooting our wad by linking to the ?sess-URL instead of the original URL?

    Affiliate Marketing | | zeepartner
    0

  • I have a client that wants to rank for a keyword phrase that has many permutations.. ex. "Alaska Hill Country Resort", "Hill Country Resort Alaska", "Hill Country Alaska Resort" But I'm wondering if I should target these all on the same page or not. I'm assuming all of these permutations are actually valid searches because I did my keyword research for 'exact match' keywords and got results like this.. (let me know if I'm missing something here, or if this sounds right) [Alaska Hill Country Resort] - 230 Local Searches [Hill Country Resort Alaska] - 140 Local Searches [Hill Country Alaska Resort] - 30 Local Searches The phrase we're targeting is their main keyword phrase, so I've chosen their home-page as the page to rank for this phrase. My thought is to optimize for the most popular phrase (ex. "Alaska Hill Country Resort"), and sprinkle in the other phrases throughout the copy. Next I would run a link-building campaign targeting the main phrase first.. then the next phrase, and so on, so that my anchor text is more heavily focused on the more popular terms, but I would also make sure to include the less popular terms. Do you think this is the best way to go about this? Do I really need to make individual pages for each of the permutations, or is it okay to target them all on one page since they are essentially the same keyword?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATMOSMarketing56
    0

  • I link back to my website via my company name on the footers of sites I develop.  Lately I've been changing this to my keyword and mixing and matching.  This has been done for new sites I create and old sites I've not seen any benefit so far after a couple of months. Most my clients are hosted on the same server as my main site that it links back to. 1. Is this a bad idea to link back on the same IP?
    2. Is footer backlinks to the main developer going to annoy Google?
    3. Should I change my main site's server, will it help? All my competitors seem to do it and as far as I can tell they seem to get better results than I do.  Because I'm now changing them the reason I see no benefit? Thanks

    Web Design | | sanchez1960
    0

  • Is this still a good way of getting backlinks? I do not plan on making it my only method. Most of my backlinking is done through content creation, press releases, and guest blogging. But looking for some variety in there that can be done quicker. Is it even worth the time or are the links too spammy now? If I did I would actually hand build the links and comment to the article.

    Link Building | | webfeatseo
    1

  • Hi I would like to hear if someone could help me decide whether or not it is important regarding SEO that the menu name is the same as the keyword we want to rank for. The site is a static site and one of our most important keywords. To give an example. Our menu name is "cars" and we want to rank for "cheap rental cars".

    On-Page Optimization | | KennethK
    0

  • Hey folks, I am a little out of my depth here because I have never SEO'd a website that is not in English - and especially in China. I have a few questions that I hope someone can help with? What are the primary SE's in China Are there any specifics with regards Keyword Research Are there any specifics around SEO techniques and climbing up the SERPs? I know I don't speak Chinese but I will need to be advising. Thanks, Andy

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | Andy.Drinkwater
    0

  • Hi, I know that this is a 'How long is a piece of string?' type question but at what point should the ranking value of site A pass over to site B following a domain 301 redirect? I have shifted a domain over to a new URL, same hosting server, same IP address. I haven't made any URL changes or any content changes other than to change the site logo to match the new domain name. Domain B is basically an exact clone of domain A. I have redirected Domain A to domain B using the following line at the top of the .htaccess file:- Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/ I have submitted a sitemap for the new domain via google webmaster tools. It looks like the original domain as been completely indexed by google following the redirect as all rankings have been dropped from the results and there are no results for a site:olddomain.com search. Surely the rankings should have switched over at this point? Any help would be much appreciated.
    Ade.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdeLewis
    0

  • Does publishing a white paper good for SEO? We are trying to decide to publish one or not for the purpose of SEO. If it will not help, we will spend money for other things.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AppleCapitalGroup
    0

  • I see no reason why PDF couldn't be considered duplicate content but I haven't seen any threads about it. We publish loads of product documentation provided by manufacturers as well as White Papers and Case Studies. These give our customers and prospects a better idea off our solutions and help them along their buying process. However, I'm not sure if it would be better to make them non-indexable to prevent duplicate content issues. Clearly we would prefer a solutions where we benefit from to keywords in the documents. Any one has insight on how to deal with PDF provided by third parties? Thanks in advance.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gestisoft-Qc
    1

  • I could have posted this somewhere else, but I cannot find it. So, I have keywords that rank well in Google US and many that do well in Google UK too. I thought all of my keywords ranking well in the US would also rank well the UK. I have figured out today that it is not the case. Why would I rank in the top 3 in the US and not even show up in the top 50 in the UK? It is very strange. Thanks for your help! I am not super new to SEO or web business. I have had a very good company that has been ranking well since 2004.

    International SEO | | journeybeyondtravel
    0

  • Hello Everyone, I was looking for some strategies for doing SEO on a site that offers multiple services. Here is the example: There is one company with ONE physical address. They perform the following services: Pest Control Mold Remediation Home Inspections Waterproofing They also handle these services in several surronding cities. They want to maintain one website for branding purposes. Obviously I will create individual pages on their site for each service but was wondering how diffiuclut it will be to rank one website for these various services. Thank you!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wparlaman
    0

  • A team member is porting over documentation from a .org wiki that will be placed on the company's root domain. The problem with MadCap is that it uses frames as well as javascript navigation. Has anyone encountered this problem before? I'm unfamiliar with the software and the project is pretty far into the pipeline at this point (I'm new at the company as well). Any advice on work-arounds or alternatives would be greatly appreciated.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AnthonyYoung
    1

  • With large database/template driven websites it is often possible to get a lot of pages with no content on them. What are the current thoughts regarding these pages with no content, options; Return a 200 header code with noindex meta tag Return a 404 page & header code Something else? Thanks

    Technical SEO | | slingshot
    0

  • Hi everyone, an interesting question here. How do you determien what link volume you should try and get into your website? What analysis do you do to determine the number of links you feel is right to go into a back-link profiel every month? obviously there is no magic number but its an interesting question to know what others do. Obviously you don't want to build too many or too little. If you have been penalised for bad links in the past and are now back on track - how do you calculate the volume? Do you take links dropping out into consideration?

    Technical SEO | | pauledwards
    0

  • Hi everyone, Something weird has happened to one of our client's site. First of all I want to explain that the client's name is something like a Person Name plus another generic keyword, for example Truxy Lawyers. Before when you searched for the brand keyword (in my example Truxy), Google would show in the SERPs the client's site as first result with six sitelinks below. Now when searching for the same branded keyword (for example Truxy), Google doesn't show the sitelink anymore, but the first result is the home page and the second and third results are subdomain pages. Does anybody know why Google all of the sudden decided to stop showing the site link? Things get more weird when you search the complete brand name "Truxy Lawers" for example, because in this case Google shows the site link. Does anybody know what has caused this? Thank you!

    Algorithm Updates | | Aviatech
    0

  • I know that it's worth adding qualifiers to high value keywords to create long-tail variations which will later have the potential to rank well for the main keyword as well... My questions is, how important is it that the newly-formed keyword/phrase also be evaluated for search volume? E.g. "tips for job interviews" has a high search volume, but scores 72 in the Keyword Difficulty tool - quite high. I would therefore be tempted to create a "10 tips for job interviews" articles or something similar, yet THIS particular phrase is searched for <10 times per month... If there are not any easy-to-find qualifiers that also create a well-searched for keyword/phrase, is it still worth adding them?

    Keyword Research | | staingurus
    0

  • I have a URL string which I don't want to be indexed. it includes the characters _Q1 ni the middle of the string. So in the robots.txt can I use 2 wildcards in the string to take out all of the URLs with that in it?  So something like /_Q1.  Will that pickup and block every  URL with those characters in the string? Also, this is not directly of the root, but in a secondary directory, so .com/.../_Q1.  So do I have to format the robots.txt as //_Q1* as it will be in the second folder or just using /_Q1 will pickup everything no matter what folder it is on? Thanks.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo123456
    0

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