Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

  1. Home
  2. Latest Questions
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!

  • Charity2841


    In Missouri real estate once a home hits our MLS it sydicates out all over the world. The question is this: How do I help each listing rank high organically over trulia, zillow, realtor and nationally owned companies such as Remax or Bershire Hathaway. We are a local firm who dominates our market and our website is the highest ranked in the area. The listings are not. Thoughts?

    Local Listings | | Charity2841
    0
  • Wagada


    We are seeing big delays in search console data this month. In the past we have seen delays of a few days, but I have never noticed it being this long before. At the moment we have no data since 23rd February. Have I just never noticed this before or is this particularly long? Is anyone else seeing the same thing?

    Reporting & Analytics | | Wagada
    0
  • Inevo


    The reason for this mights be obvious to the right observer, but somehow I'm not able to spot the reason why. The situation:
    I'm doing an SEO-audit for a client. When I'm checking if the rel=canonical tag is in place correctly, it seems like it: view-source:http://quickplay.no/fotball-mal.html?limit=15) (line nr 15) Anyone seing something wrong with this canonical? When I perform a site:http://quickplay.no/ search, I find that there's many url's indexed that ought to have been picked up by the canonical-tag: (see picture) ..this for example view-source:http://quickplay.no/fotball-mal.html?limit=15 I really can't see why this page is getting indexed, when the canonical-tag is in place. Anybody who can? Sincerely 🙂 GMdWg0K

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo
    0
  • wearehappymedia


    Hey Moz Does anchor text with punctuation effect anything, does google even read it? I know matching exact anchor text to high volume keywords doesn't matter as much any more - but it still definitely makes a different as our reports show. Thanks

    Technical SEO | | wearehappymedia
    0
  • Mark_Elton


    Howdy Moz fans! Okay so there's a mountain of information out there on the webernet about internal search results... but i'm finding some contradiction and a lot of pre-2014 stuff. Id like to hear some 2016 opinion and specifically around a couple of thoughts of my own, as well as some i've deduced from other sources. For clarity, I work on a large retail site with over 4 million products (product pages), and my predicament is thus - I want Google to be able to find and rank my product pages. Yes, I can link to a number of the best ones by creating well planned links via categorisation, silos, efficient menus etc (done), but can I utilise site search for this purpose? It was my understanding that Google bots don't/can't/won't use a search function... how could it? It's like expeciting it to find your members only area, it can't login! How can it find and index the millions of combinations of search results without typing in "XXXXL underpants" and all the other search combinations? Do I really need to robots.txt my search query parameter? How/why/when would googlebot generate that query parameter? Site Search is B.A.D - I read this everywhere I go, but is it really? I've read - "It eats up all your search quota", "search results have no content and are classed as spam", "results pages have no value" I want to find a positive SEO output to having a search function on my website, not just try and stifle Mr Googlebot. What I am trying to learn here is what the options are, and what are their outcomes? So far I have - _Robots.txt - _Remove the search pages from Google _No Index - _Allow the crawl but don't index the search pages. _No Follow - _I'm not sure this is even a valid idea, but I picked it up somewhere out there. _Just leave it alone - _Some of your search results might get ranked and bring traffic in. It appears that each and every option has it's positive and negative connotations. It'd be great to hear from this here community on their experiences in this practice.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Elton
    0
  • Taiger


    Hi does anyone know the correct hreflang for the UK Google webmaster error: International Targeting | Language > 'en-GB' - no return tags (sitemaps)Sitemap provided URLs and alternate URLs in 'en-GB' that do not have return tags.Thanks you all

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger
    0
  • Jon_Gibb


    Hello everyone, I am fairly new to SEO (I've learning as much as possible the last 2 weeks!) and its a fun and interesting process thats already helped immensely with my website thanks to the community members for answering questions. I am a wedding photographer and videographer on Kauai, and as with most photography sites we are fairly image heavy text light (Working to change that as we speak). That being said my competitor www.joshuagrantrose.com (my site is www.balihaiphoto.com) is growing his organic results very quickly. Is this due greatly in part to this Parent directory which then leads to single pages like this of images? With how many single pages there are like this linked in the background of the site with Im assuming with descriptive and proper text, keywords, and so on of each alum like this (lots and lots of images and pages/links). If someone could help with understanding this or implementing it would be of great help as I've only gotten my feet wet with SEO and don't want to be making wrong assumptions or analysis! Many thanks for any ideas or insight everyone, -Jon

    Moz Pro | | Jon_Gibb
    0
  • Jon-S


    Hi All, I've been doing a bit of research for a customer and whilst I was looking through the google results pages I came across this interesting rich snippet for a Wikipedia page (see screen shot attached). Its returned some extra information i.e Owner, Water Source, Number of Stills and Capacity. Is this just Google playing around or is this something I've missed and you can markup additional information for your rich snippet? Thanks in advance Jon 4TmGvJh.png

    On-Page Optimization | | Jon-S
    0
  • Brando16


    I'm wondering if the moz bot is seeing my rel="canonical" on my pages. There are 2 notices that are bothering me: Overly Dynamic URL Rel Canonical Overly Dynamic URL - This notice is being generated by urls with query strings. On the main page I have the rel="canonical" tag in the header. So every page with the query string has the canonical tag that points to the page that should be indexed. So my question...Why the notice? Isn't this being handled properly with the canonical tag? I know I can use my robots.txt or the tool in Google search console but is it really necessary when I have the canonical on every page? Here is one of the links that has the "Overly Dynamic URL" notice, as you can see the the canonical in the header points to the page without the query string: https://www.vistex.com/services/training/traditional-classroom/registration-form/?values=true&course-title=DMP101 – Data Maintenance Pricing – Business Processes&date=March 14, 2016 Rel Canonical - Every page in my report has this notice "Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical". I'm using the rel="canonical" tag on all of my pages by default. Is the report suggesting that I don't do this? Or is it suggesting that I should?  Again...why the notice?

    Moz Bar | | Brando16
    0
  • Jacob_A


    Quick question: When choosing the most important keyword set that I would like to rank for, would I be better off optimizing my homepage, or a sub page for this keyword. My thinking goes as follows: The homepage (IE www.mysite.com) naturally has more backlinks and thus a better Google Page Rank. However, there are certain things I could do to a subpage (IE www.mysite.com/green-widgets-los-angeles ) that I wouldn't want to do to the homepage, which might be more "optimal" overall. Option C, I suppose, would be to optimize both the homepage, and a single sub-page, which is seeming like a pretty good solution, but I have been told that having multiple pages optimized for the same keywords might "confuse" search engines. Would love any insight on this!

    On-Page Optimization | | Jacob_A
    2
  • GLabs


    I use the Page Optimization tool to evaluate and make updates to a page until I get a grade of "A." But when I add the page and the keyword to the Page Optimization section of my campaign, it scores a 76% or 85% (which looks like a C or B to me). What would account for the difference in the evaluation results? Thanks for your help!

    Moz Bar | | GLabs
    0
  • AL123al


    Hello, In a muddle here. A website has a .co.uk and a .com version. They want to target the UK market and the USA market respectively. The content for the UK version has been localised for the UK audience (e.g. spellings etc) but the content is the same in both sites. There are errors in .co.uk version in webmaster tools : International Targeting | Language > 'en' - no return tags__URLs for your site and alternate URLs in 'en' that do not have return tags.**Q 1) What does this mean?**I can see that both the .com and .co.uk version has only this in place:**2) Should they actually have respectively?**3) Do they also need rel=canonical from the .co.uk to the .comAny help would be appreciated.

    International SEO | | AL123al
    0
  • bcmull


    The following question is in regards to http://footeschool.org/.  This site is not getting indexed with google(googlebot) This only happens when the user agent is set googlebot. This is a recent issue.  We are using DNN as CMS. Are there any suggestion to help resolve this issue?

    Technical SEO | | bcmull
    0
  • Aquatell


    About 2 months ago we relaunched our Ecommerce store on Shopify Plus and have since seen a massive drop in traffic, sales and our most valuable pages are nowhere to be found. Also, GWT is showing that Google is indexing about half of our pages and none of the images are being indexed. We did extensive keyword research, created/implemented a keyword framework, wrote brand new category/product page content, implemented schema markup, optimized our blog content and even did link building where we got some 90+ DA links. We are literally at a loss for what is causing this. Our experience with Shopify Plus has been very poor because it doesn't even do basic SEO stuff so we've had to do a lot of workarounds to make it "SEO friendly". Has anyone else ever switched to Shopify Plus and had similar issues? Is there a silver bullet that you can think of that we are missing that could get the site being indexed/ranking again?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aquatell
    0
  • Umesh-Chandra


    Hi, Our website of 3K+ pages currently has more links coming to internal pages (2nd & 3rd Level), compared to links to homepage. Just wanted to know if this is bad for rankings ? Please share your thoughts. Thanks.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Umesh-Chandra
    0
  • BeckyKey


    Hi I wanted to ask if anyone knew how much, if at all, product page titles/descriptions affected the rankings of the category page they're linked from? I am looking for ways to improve the ranking of category pages, but we don't want to put too much content which overshadows the product listings. Thanks!

    Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey
    0
  • Neo4j


    Beginning in early in Feb, we got a big bump in duplicate pages.  The URLs of the pages are very odd: Example URL:
    http://firstname.lastname@website.com/dir/page.php
    is duplicate with  http://website.com/dir/page.php I checked though the site, nginx conf files, and referral pages, and could not find what is prefixing the pages with 'http://firstname.lastname@'. Any ideas?  The person whose name is  'Firstname Lastname' is stumped as well. Thanks.

    Moz Bar | | Neo4j
    0
  • Rahim119


    Hi pls look at the below page, http://www.powerwale.com/store/exide-xplore-xltz4-3ah-battery/76933 is questions and review should be in seperate page, as  i think that in the future the comments, will become Key word stuffing for the product page. Pls suggest.. If yes, suggest the best url as well.. thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rahim119
    1
  • jayoliverwright


    Hi guys, We had aN SEO agency do a disallow request on one of our sites a while back. They have no trace of the disallow txt file and all the links they disallowed. Does anyone know if there is a way to recover this file in google webmaster tools or anyway to find which links were disallowed? Cheers.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright
    0
  • E2E


    I am setting up a remarketing campaign and wonder if anyone has any thoughts on whether to do this via Analytics or Adwords?  Doing it through Analytics appears to be more straight forward - and I like the idea of broadening the data set that comes from an Analytics report.  I therefore I wonder if it comes down to personal preference?  Would be grateful to any thoughts for or against.

    Paid Search Marketing | | E2E
    0
  • nchachula


    There are websites that have linked to my site. Whenever I hover over link I see my direct website URL and I am not seeing "no follow" when viewing source code so I assume these are passing link juice. However when I click on link it directs briefly to shareasale (affiliate account) in web address bar, but then quickly directs back to my website URL as directed. I was curious if these good links I am acquiring truly pass juice or since they briefly pass through an affiliate site if that cancels or dilutes the link juice. Also I am noticing when inspecting element that after the HREF it says class="external-link" I am just not sure if my link building efforts are being ruined by having an affiliate account running.I did not tell them I had one. I guess they are searching to see that I have one and trying to make a few extra commission dollars.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nchachula
    0
  • Deacyde


    Hello, My client wants to launch a redesign early, problem is they want to do this without a majority of their product pages, since the bulk of their sales aren't from these missing categories, will the resulting 404s hurt them? What is up, is the major pages structured around their primary keyword, most of their sales isn't from the product pages, but from the quotes turned into sales. Big ticket items aren't sold through the cart, they are call or email for quotes and normally those quotes are turned into sales once they realize the price is better. We will be adding these missing categories and products, just one section at a time. Since 404s don't hurt, and we don't rank very well from the products missing, should I be concerned about any thing else? Thank you

    Technical SEO | | Deacyde
    0
  • BrianAlpert78


    Duplicate Content for Non-SEO Purposes There are a few layers to this question, but at the most basic level the question is... -Will having the same article (in the form of archived e-newsletter issues) on multiple different websites' newsletter archives HURT those sites? I'm fairly sure it won't HELP any of them in terms of SEO, but will having these back issues of their e-newsletters archived on their websites get them penalized? For the purpose of this question, these are not clients we are doing SEO for, just hosting and their e-newsletters. So it's fine if the archives provide no SEO benefit, we just don't want to leave them up if they will become LIABILITIES for the websites. -If having the same article in archived issues of e-newsletters on multiple different websites WOULD be harmful, would moving these archives to a sub-domain change anything or would it be best to simply take the archives down altogether? -Alternately, would spinning these articles make any difference in whether or not these sites get penalized? -Lastly, would spinning make the articles usable for archived e-newsletters for clients that ARE signed on for SEO services? I have a hunch about this, but I'd love to hear your expert opinions. Thanks!

    Content Development | | BrianAlpert78
    0
  • RosemaryB


    I have a client who is a major player in the continuing education vertical.  They have recently noticed that the Google Knowledge Graph is displaying erroneous information whenever somebody searches for their brand name (no matter the location/IP address).  The brand Knowledge Graph is pulling information from a permanently closed location.  Our client has multiple locations.  Why Google decided to pull data from this particular (closed) location is beyond us. Our client has reclaimed the permanently closed location Google+ page and they are going to permanently delete it.  However we are wondering if there is anyway to expedite the process of updating the Knowledge Graph.  Is there anyway to submit feedback to Google about the KG?  Is there anyway to request a Knowledge Graph correction?  The erroneous "permanently closed" data is very embarrassing for our client.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
    0
  • danieldunn10


    Hi, we are not a big company and as well as creating our own blogs, a company for a while now has provided us each month with blog posts. But hey also provide other companies in the UK with the same content. Each month we create 2 or 3 of our own generated blog posts relating to the services we provide. Also we receive on average 10 blog posts (pulled in to the site through a word press add in and an rss feed from the company) to the site. The content is about specific topics which people will be searching for and they are really well optimized pages. Our own blog posts are looked at more often 80% to 20% but we do have a great link from a national site with a DA of 97 linking to one of their blog posts. But I wondered if google penalizes us because there will be other companies across the UK with the exact same content as us? Or whether these blog posts will help us because it is great content, even though other companies will probably have the same posts on their site? Nobody in our area uses this content as we have an agreement with the company which provides it. Many Thanks

    On-Page Optimization | | danieldunn10
    0
  • MichaelGregory


    For our site, Google is suddenly reporting hundreds of 404 errors, but the pages they are reporting never existed. The links Google shows are clearly spam style,  but the website hasn't been hacked. This happened a few weeks ago, and after a couple days they disappeared from WMT. What's the deal? Screen-Shot-2016-02-29-at-9.35.18-AM.png

    Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory
    0
  • 94501


    Working on an old site that currently has category urls (that productively rank) like this example: LakeNameBoating.com/category/705687/rentals I want to enhance the existing mid page one rank for terms related to "Lake Name Boat Rentals," 301ing the old urls to the new, would you construct the new urls as: LakeNameBoating.com/lake-name-boat-rentals or... LakeNameBoating.com/boat-rentals And why? It's all for one particular lake with "name" being just an anonymous placeholder example. Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 94501
    0
  • wzimmer


    Our website is running through WordPress. We've been running Moz for over a month now. Only recently, within the past 2 weeks, have we been alerted to over 100 duplicate pages. It appears something happened that created a duplicate of every single page on our site; "www.company.com/example" and "company.com/example." Again, according to our MOZ, this is a recent issue. I'm almost certain that prior to a couple of weeks ago, there existed both forms of the URL that directed to the same page without be counting as a duplicate. Thanks for you help!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wzimmer
    0
  • chrisjimallen


    Currently I'm looking at a competitor who owns a site with the following metrics: Domain Authority - 39 /100
    Page Authority - 49 /100
    Spam Score: 1 /17
    93 Root Domains
    2,199 Total Links
    Page Social Metrics
    Facebook - 431 Shares, 17 Likes I'm thinking it would take 12 months+ to become a viable competitor, but thats a complete guess. What are peoples thoughts on undertaking something like this?

    Branding | | chrisjimallen
    0
  • ATP


    Hey, I have noticed that for the last 3 weeks or so the emails from Moz have been displaying incorrect information. The results it shows in the email seem to be from previous crawls. For example The previous week a sitemap that didn't update that caused 400+ pages to appear as 404's. This wasn't reported in the email and it stated there were only 2 errors on the site. (Of which we knew about anyway and choose to ignore). Thankfully i checked the crawl report anyway out of habit and saw the onsite report to show 400+ crawl errors. I went on to fix these errors. This week, the crawl report showed 400+ crawl errors, I immediately logged on to the website to check the campaign to find there are only the 2 expected crawl errors. It is almost as if the info from the campaign is being pulled and emailed to me seconds before it is updated from the crawl info. I am finding this to be the case in both the keyword and crawl errors email reports.

    Product Support | | ATP
    0
  • aohostmaster


    We are a small inbound marketing team working in a very competitive industry with sites across the globe. We work very hard on our content marketing and social media and find that we are lacking manpower when it comes to outreach to third party sites and industry leaders... We were thinking of hiring a number of freelance marketers (individuals not agencies) to help us with this task. Does anyone have any experience with similar issues? Have you worked with freelancer marketers or agencies globally? Any recommendations would be appreciated.

    Link Building | | aohostmaster
    0
  • SmiffysUK


    Hi, Can anyone advise on the best internal linking practice for an eCommerce website? Should the introduction copy on each category page contain naturally placed links down to sub categories and products and should each sub category link back up to the main category page. Is there a 'best practice' method of linking categories, sub categories and products? In terms of internal linking product pages, I presume the best practice would be to link other relevant products to each each? Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SmiffysUK
    0
  • JohnPalmer


    Hello, I have many strange parameters in my search console that make many 404 pages, for example: mywebsite.com/article-name/&ct=ga&cd=CAIyGjk4YjY4ZDExNTYxOTgzZTk6Y29tOmVuOlVT&usg=AFQjCNFvpYpYpYf9DoyRBBu8jbiQB8JcIQ mywebsite.com/article-name/&sa=U&ved=0ahUKEwj1zMLR0JbLAhUGM5oKHejjBJAQqQIILSgAMAk&usg=AFQjCNEBNFx3dG5B0-16X6eXTS7k-Srm6Q Can someone tell me how to solve it?

    Technical SEO | | JohnPalmer
    0
  • Tormar


    Hi,
    I want to create good internal linking structure, but I have a problem with product to product link. E.g. I have a new model of product: iPhone 6, and old iPhone 5, and I want to put link from iPhone 5 to iPhone 6, but if I make link like this, I dropped for a few positions. Also, if I have similar product e.g. photography Kit for iPhone 6, and I put a link from this additional product to iPhone 6, I will lose my position.
    Why, do you have any recommendations?

    Image & Video Optimization | | Tormar
    0
  • BryanCroft


    so sorry if i offend anyone here ...but dang SEO Experts are the used car sale guy of 1999! we have a small eCommerce company in Jacksonville, FL - and we are always looking for improve our SEO - we have been members of moz for almost 10 years now!  We have learned alot with all the tools they offer, We have tried at least 5 local and national SEO consultants, agencies and consultants - NONE HAVE WORKED. The time has come for us to hire an in house SEO do you have any advise on how a small business that wants to grow our SEO can weed thru the thousands of SEO "GURU's" out there today - Everyone is an expert. On a side not if you want to move to Florida and help us grow - www.HolmesStamp.com/team

    Moz Pro | | BryanCroft
    1
  • Jon_Gibb


    Hi all, I'm having some issues getting my site graded www.balihaiphoto.com + Kauai wedding photographer with On Page grader, where as when I enter another photographer example www.jmoellerphoto.com and getting results. Is there any reason this is going on that I can correct? Many thanks for any help all! -Jon

    Moz Bar | | Jon_Gibb
    0
  • danieldunn10


    Hi, we refreshed our website a few weeks ago, with a new design. The structure has changed and pages do have new URLs. But the content, meta titles, etc have stayed the same and I have put 301 redirects in for all of the new pages (using the redirection plugin in word press). I have found that pages which ranked in the top 3 in the past are now nowhere. The page authority also shows as 1 for all of the pages. Is there something we should do to get the rankings and page authority back? Many Thanks

    On-Page Optimization | | danieldunn10
    0
  • lovemozforever


    I have two 301s from http://www. to https://non-www version of my site. I wonder how can get rid of one so it will look like this: 301-200 instead of 301-301-200 All other combinations work fine and give me 301-200 status codes. Thank you very much!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lovemozforever
    0
  • ronell-smith


    Data is an important element of content marketing. Storytelling, too, gets readers' attention and has been shown to be instrumental in prospects and customers forming strong connections to brands. But using data and storytelling helps produce some of the strongest content there is to be shared, says Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré in her latest YouMoz article, Here’s How to Combine Storytelling and Data to Produce Persuasive Content. What are your thoughts? Think data and storytelling work best separately? Read the post are share your thoughts below. RS

    Content Development | | ronell-smith
    2
  • z8YX9F80


    Hi there, I'm experiencing a problem where google is pick and choosing different links structures to rank my Wordpress site for my main keywords.  The site had pretty good #1 rankings for a long time but recently I noticed Google is choosing to rank the page in one of two ways.  Let me just say that the original way where it held good rankings looked like this for example: flowers.com/the-most-beautiful-wedding-bouquets/ this is just an example it' is not my site. And when google decides to switch it up it uses this link structure:flowers.com > weddings (this still points to this link flowers.com/the-most-beautiful-wedding-bouquets when I hover my mouse over it) however this link structure that never appeared before and now does, usually has much lower rankings.  Please note it's not both link structures being ranked at the same time for the keywords.  It's one or the other that google is currently alternating in ranking and I believe it's hurting the sites position.
    I'm not sure if this is a wordpress settings thats gone wrong or what the problem is but I do know when shows the expanded and descriptive link structure flowers.com/the-most-beautiful-wedding-bouquets  the rankings are higher and in 2nd place.  I'm hoping by rectifying this I can regain back my position. I'm very grateful for any insight you could offer on why this is happening and how I could fix it.  Thank you. PS Wordpress site has several SEO plugins

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | z8YX9F80
    0
  • edmundsseo


    What are the latest best practices for SPA (single page application) experiences? Google is obviously crawling Javascript now, but is there any data to support that they crawl it as effectively as they do static content? Considering Bing (and Yahoo) as well as social (FB, Pinterest, etc) - what is the best practice that will cater to the lowest-common denominator bots and work across the board? Is a prerender solution still the advised route? Escaped fragments with snapshots at the expanded URLs, with SEO-friendly URL rewrites?

    Algorithm Updates | | edmundsseo
    2
  • Ultramod


    I'm sure this has probably been asked somewhere before... We're implementing a URL re-write rule to convert non dub pages to the www. subdomain and also removing all trailing slashes as part of a basic canonicalisation exercise. The question is, as well as doing the URL rewrites within htaccess, should I also 301 those duplicate pages or does the URL rewrite do the job on it's own? Thanks mozzers.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ultramod
    0
  • LoganRay


    We have an internal debate going on right now about the use of a link list of SEO pages in the footer. My stance is that they serve no purpose to people (heatmaps consistently show near zero activity), therefore they shouldn't be used. I believe that if something on a website is user-facing, then it should also beneficial to a user - not solely there for bots. There are much better ways to get bots to those pages, and for those people who didn't enter through an SEO page, internal linking where appropriate will be much more effective at getting them there. However, I have some opposition to this theory and wanted to get some community feedback on the topic. Anyone have thoughts, experience, or data to share on this subject?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LoganRay
    1

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.