Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

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

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!


  • Is it possible to generate an XML sitemap for a site without PHP? If so, how?

    Technical SEO | | jeffreytrull1
    1

  • Has anyone had any experience submitting to DMOZ and waiting times. The category i've submitted to has only a few links (http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/United_Kingdom/England/London/Westminster/Arts_and_Entertainment/) Yet I submitted the site (www.capitalalist.com) over a month ago! Can anyone give examples of waiting times, or a way to perhaps get some feedback from DMOZ? Thanks in advance as always...

    Link Building | | AdenBrands
    0

  • On our web site (http://www.betxpert.com) we have a mega menu with quite a lot of links in it. I am getting warnings in SEOmoz saying we have far to many links in our pages. But a lot of pages have large menus with a lot of links - are all pages punished for this then? My primary question is: Since the menu is on all pages, the pages linked in the menu will have a link in from all of our pages (200K+ pages) and a lot of these do not have a good ranking. So what I want to know is if the pages linked in the menu will have lower ranking because of the many links in - or is this a good thing? Should I consider setting "nofollow" for som of the links on other pages than the homepage (since this is the page with the best rank)?

    Link Building | | rasmusbang
    0

  • Hi, I am making the SEO reports for a travel agency  and I have the following problem. SEOmoz shows me the website is on page 1, for a keyword. Yesterday, a google search with firefox showed me the same position, while, searching from a different computer on google using firefox gave me another position. The URL shown was also different. I asked some friends to do the search - the results were the same - first page. Today, firefox shows me the second URL on the 4'th page, and the result from the first page of google does not appear, while Chrome still shows me the first URL on the first page. I have no idea why the URL that was ranking well does not appear on the first page with Firefox, and why it appears on the first page with Chrome, or why the URL that was ranking bad -meaning page 4, appears on Firefox but does not appear on Chrome. Can someone give me some advice?

    Competitive Research | | Netlogiq
    0

  • Greetings!  On Dec 1, 2011 in a SEOMoz campaign, two crawl metrics shot up from zero (Nov 17, Nov 24). "Title missing or empty" was 9,676. "Duplicate page content" was 9,678. Whoa!  Content at site has not changed. I checked a sample of web pages and each seems to have a proper TITLE tag. Page content differs as well -- albeit we list electronic part numbers of hard-to-find parts, which look similar. I found a similar post http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-crawl-error-title-missing-or-empty-when-there-is-already-title-and-meta-desciption-in-place . In answer, Sha ran Screaming Frog crawler.  I ran Frog crawler on a few hundred pages.   Titles were found and hash codes were unique.  Hmmm. Site with errors is http://electronics1.usbid.com Small sample of pages with errors: electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_10.html
    electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_100.html
    electronics1.usbid.com/catalog_1000.html I've tried to reproduce errors yet I cannot. What am I missing please? Thanks kindly, Loren

    Technical SEO | | groovykarma
    0

  • Hey guys, I want to give you a bit of background to help you understand what I'm trying to do, and the motivation why. I understand that there are a variety of opinions and beliefs regarding what I'm trying to do online, and I hope this post doesn't turn into a list of everyone's views, or a place for someone to say mean / disrespectful things regarding what I'm doing.  I feel like this group is a professional one, so I don't think any of what I've mentioned above will be a problem. Last year we were surprised to learn (in the delivery room) that our first child was born with Down syndrome.  Not having any interaction with anyone with Down syndrome I had no idea what my new life was going to be like and set out to find some information online (videos, blogs, etc.)  I was surprised to learn that there isn't much quality content out there.  Much of the information is outdated, cheesy, lame, etc...In fact many of the videos that I found by searching online about Down syndrome were by people making fun of those born with Down syndrome (comedians, etc.)  Very few of them gave me any sort of idea what the future over our family was going to be like. A few months went by, I met many many parents and others who personally knew someone with Down syndrome whose lives have been greatly enriched by their interaction.  In addition to that I realized that our life was much more normal than I could have ever imagined.  In addition I released that there have been tremendous medical advances in the last two decades and today children born with Down syndrome can attend regular classes, attend college, get married, have jobs, and live productive life's. They no longer ride "short buses", forced to stay in special needs classes, or destined to live a life in some sort of institution.  I was surprised that our son (at 3 weeks old) was going to physical / occupational / speech therapy at such a young age.  The idea today is that children born with Down syndrome work hard at a young age to stay ahead of the curve. I couldn't believe the things they had him doing at such a young age. (At just a few months old they had him on a treadmill so he could get a head start on learning to walk! ----> http://noahsdad.com/treadmill/) All of that to say, I decided I wanted to be an online resource to help give people an idea of what life is really like raising a child born with Down syndrome. I do a daily one minute video where I'm creating an online narrative by telling his story every day. 
    I have a growing Facebook page (http://facebook.com/noahsdadcom) and twitter account (http://noahsdad.com/) and our blog readership is growing everyday.  
    I own a lot of good domains, and am trying to figure out the best way to use them to create awareness.  I've been trying to read about SEO as much as I can. I've only been going on NoahsDad.com since May and my page rank is 4. (I'm not sure if that really means anything, but just wanted to share it.) All of the SEO info can be a bit overwhelming and I'm not sure  I'm doing things the best way. I was wondering if someone would mind taking a look at my site and I'll be happy to give any info you need (info from google webmaster tools / antlytics, etc…).
    I think I'm doing all the 'basics."  But I'm not sure what I need to be doing to really step it up. I think the tag line / title page for the home page could be changed up, and perhaps doing some different things on my home page. When I first started my idea was to have a few different categories, Noah's Minute (which is where I was going to put my daily video), resources (posts counting helpful info), Noah's Mom, MD (medical posts by my wife who is a doctor), twitter/iPhone photos (I used one of these catigories and excluded it from my home page to post random pictures form twitter).. Not that I'm 6 months into it, I've relaized that it didn't work out the way I thought at first..every post is a Noah's Minute post pretty much (and lots of twitter pictures)…and the Noah's minute posts could be broken down into sub - categories. Or…I could not have a "noah's minute" category and change my catagories to "resources" "therapy" "toys" "how-to's" etc…and break up what I used to call "Noah's Minute" into those categories..if that makes sense. The reason I didn't do that before is that I wanted someone to be able to watch every video in the order they were created to see the whole story..since I'm doing one minute every day, someone could come and watch his story unfold from birth until present day..but I guess you wouldn't really need a category for that…you could just go to the last page of the blog. The key words I'm trying to rank well for (and I know some of these wont't be possible) are: Down syndrome Down syndrome videos Down syndrome facts Down syndrome information Down syndrome Blogs (I actually own the domain downsyndromeblogs.com as well..I wanted to make a list type website where i list out a lot of the good blogs on down syndrome) Down syndrome families Down syndrome pictures Down syndrome toys (I own this domain also…thinking of doing an amazon affliate page or something..) Down syndrome physical therapy Down syndrome occupitonal thearpy Down snydrome speech thearpy Also there are some mis-spelling of these terms that I would like to try to rank for as well..and I'm not sure how to do that in a post without my post looking like I made an error. I know that is a lot of info, but I wanted to lay everything out there. I'll be happy to post any more details that anyone needs to help me out.
    Thanks again and I'm looking forward to the feedback. Rick NoahsDad.com UPDATE: I thought I would include a picture for you guys to see what your dealing with...! 🙂  Warning: His cuteness is contiguous! down-syndrome-cute-boy-halloween1.jpg

    Social Media | | NoahsDad
    26

  • Hello folks, I wanted to implement hcard to my client website, so i wanted to know the procedure to go about. Thanks in Advance!!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tpt.com
    0

  • What are the best  5 ( or 10 ) social bookmarking sites to promote a new site ? If we were to launch a new site, what bookmarking sites would be beneficial to spread the word about it. Thanks

    Social Media | | seoug_2005
    0

  • Are reverse proxies that much better than 301 redirects? Should I invest the time in doing this? I found out about reverse proxies here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianmcc
    0

  • Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page.  For example on this site: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/ Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages?  Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied. Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
    0

  • My Client had a site that ranked for a pretty competitive two word phrase, but for a variety of reasons had to transfer the site to a different domain name (with none of the previous keywords). We've 301'd everything just fine to the new site, but our traffic for that two word phrase, as well as related long tail traffic, is beginning to drop. Could the drop be related to something that we didn't do well in the transfer? Or is it due to the new domain name now not being an exact match? Sitenote question: Our Google Analytics is still set up for the former domain name and shows data just fine. Is there any reason to switch GA to the new domain? What are the pros/cons? Much thanks in advance!

    Technical SEO | | TrevorMcKendrick
    0

  • I am working on online retail stores. Initially, Google have indexed 10K+ pages of my website. I have checked number of indexed page before one week and pages were 8K+. Today, number of indexed pages are 7680. I can't understand why should it happen and How can fix it? I want to index maximum pages of my website.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
    0

  • Hi, We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical. Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site? Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies. Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet? Thanks, Anthony

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi
    0

  • Hey Mozzers! I am facing a problem and I need advice. I have recently opened my new website, which purpose is to offer quality articles, optimized for SEO. The problem is that I cannot find the right keyword to use for the main(root) domain (http://xxxxxx.org) as it is consisting of many niches. Is it a good idea to build backlinks on pages (http://xxxxxx.org/the-keyword-for-ranking) instead of building them on my root-domain? So basically, my root-domain will have less backlinks than my pages inside? Please give me some advice and way to act with. Thank you

    Link Building | | Ralchev
    0

  • The page in question receives a  lot of quality traffic but is only relevant to a small percent of my users. I want to keep the link juice received from this page but I do not want it to appear in the SERPs.

    Technical SEO | | surveygizmo
    0

  • I just want to copy my content on the page and use the first or as well the second sentence of the content self for my meta description tag. Is that OK? Or should the Meta description tag be different?

    On-Page Optimization | | paulinap1983
    0

  • Hello everyone, it's me again 😉 I've just got a Pro membership on SeoMoz and I am full of questions. A few days ago I found very interesting tool called: Search Engine Pingler And description of it was like this: Your website or your page was published a long time, but you can not find it on google. Because google has not index your site. Tool Search engine pingler will assist for you. It will ping the URL of your Page up more than 80 servers of google and other search engines. Inform to the search engine come to index your site. So my question is that tool really helps to increase the indexation of the link by search engine like Google, if not, please explain what is a real purpose of it. Thank you to future guru who can give a right answer 🙂

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | smokin_ace
    0

  • Hello, Someone approached a client of mine to sell a exact match domain name for a very competitive and high converting keyword. Would this be of any use and what are the best tactics to employ if it is purchased? I was of the opinion that the 'power' of exact match domain names are dying fast but would be interested to hear what people with experience in this think and what they have done with them (i.e. set-up a website on that domain or re-directed it)? Thanks, Rikki

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RikkiD22
    0

  • Hello everybody! I have quite simple question about URL rewriting from subcategory to category, yet I can't find any solution to this problem (due to lack of my deeper apache programming knowledge). Here is my problem/question: we have two website url structures that causes dublicate problems: www.website.lt/language/category/ www.website.lt/language/category/1/ 1 and 2 pages are absolutely same (both also returns 200 OK). What we need is 301 redirect from 2 to 1 without any other deeper categories redirects (like www.website.com/language/category/1/169/ redirecting to .../category/1/ or .../category/). Here goes .htaccess URL rewrite rules: RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&par4=$6&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/$ /index.php?lang=$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] There are other redirects that handles non-www to www and related issues: RedirectMatch 301 ^/lt/$ http://www.domain.lt/ RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.lt RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.lt/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.domain.lt/$1/ [R=301,L] At this moment we cannot solve this problem with rel canonical (due to our CMS limits). Thanks for your help guys! If You need any other details on our coding, just let me know.

    Technical SEO | | jkundrotas
    0

  • Hello, One of my clients has a question on a new Quebec, Canada version of their website. The website content and copy is in the French Canadian language, but the IT Director has asked if, for the purpose of SEO, should the URLs be in French as well? So, this questions has two parts... For SEO, should the URL's be in French or left in English, to avoid crawl errors? For visitor UX, is there any reason to have them in French versus English?

    International SEO | | Aviatech
    0

  • SEO Moz has reported 7 of my keywords declined dramatically overnight. One word even went down 18 positions in Google. I have a few ideas on why, but none of them really make sence. 1.) The night before the decline I deleted around 6 "test pages" from our website. None of them could be reached through our website but they could be found by typing in the url. Most of these pages only said things like "test", but one of them was a draft of a keyword rich page within my website that only included some of the keywords that went down in ranking. Could the fact that I deleted this page be the cause of the ranking decline? 2.) About two weeks ago I purchased a url volusion-store-design.com which is one of my keywords and forward the address to an internal page within my website http://netonesystems.com/E-Commerce-Volusion-Store-Design. Could have this hurt my rankings, like Google is considering it duplicate content or something? If anyone has some ideas please help. Here are the keywords that I lost ranking for: volusion developers ---- down 18 volusion features ----- down 5 volusion store design ----- down 2 volusion templates ------ down 11 volusion designers ------ down 4 free volusion templates ------ down 4 ecommerce volusion features ------ down 3 Here are the pages these keyword were pointing to: http://netonesystems.com/E-Commerce-Volusion-Store-Design http://netonesystems.com/E-Commerce-Volusion-Features http://netonesystems.com/E-Commerce-Volusion-Templates

    Search Behavior | | DTOSI
    0

  • Our rankings just plummeted on Tuesday across the board.  There was a DDOS attack on Tuesday and since then the rankings went down and have stayed down, even though the DDOS attack has been resolved.   Also, this is the 3rd or 4th attack they've encountered this year. How long could this last?  How can we deal with this? Thanks

    Technical SEO | | poolguy
    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


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