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!

  • Grumpy_Carl


    Hi all Mind it I pick some of your brains for a second opinion on something.... The current situation is thus: I have a fashion website which has over 10,000 free articles and videos, support forums with thousands of posts and user blogs. Also on the site is an affiliate store which is built using datafeedr. The store has about 90,000 products from hundreds of retailers. The goal of the site being a one stop fashion community site where people can get information, chat with other fashion fans and then use the store to search all the fashion sites at once. The problem I am having is despite endless seo work it is proving very difficult to rank the domain for even terms with low competition (We are used to ranking our clients for very competitive terms, often with several hundred million competitors including government websites, bbc, wiki etc). After testing we have come to the conclusion that it's the duplicate content in the store which is hindering our progress. Despite the exact layout of the store being unique, there is no original content on the product pages. There, we have decided to remove the store from the current url and on to it's own site. The question we have is would putting it on store.domain.com still hinder the main site? I recall reading that google are considering the subdomains and root domain as one these days, or if we were to put it on samedomainname.net would google then consider us to be sending users to another website? From a branding point of view I would favour the store.domain.com approach but the .net approach could be easier. Finally, if we were to move the store we have about 45,000 pages indexed which would all return 404's so I guess it would be best to set up 301 redirects from the old url to the new? Many thanks

    Affiliate Marketing | | Grumpy_Carl
    0
  • echo1


    I have started a long-term article marketing campaign and press release distribution. I will have about 4 articles and press releases in total every month. Although the press releases will not be self-promotional, sometimes they will be talking about a certain product that we unveil. The question is, due to the high quality of these press releases, should I put them on my website as well as publish them on third party websites? If so, because they target a specific service/product which we already have a dedicated page on our website, wouldn't that put Google in the position of choosing between the two pages? I was thinking to put them on my blog and link internally from there with the keywords that I target on those pages as anchor text. The same question for articles. Any suggestions?

    Link Building | | echo1
    0
  • Caleone


    I have a client with multiple locations throughout the US. They are currently using different 800 numbers on their site for their different locations. As they try to optimize their local presence but submitting to local directories, we are trying to determine two things: Does having a local number reroute to an 800 number devalue the significance of it being a local number (I've never heard of this, but someone told them it did) Locality and consistency are important. Assuming they can't remove the 800 numbers from the site, are they better off keeping the 800 numbers on their site and using local numbers every else online OR just using the 800 numbers for all of their local listings?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caleone
    0
  • laurieonorio


    Does it help, hurt or do nothing for SEO to utilize long-tail keyword URLs to point to specific pages of your website. For example, you're a vet and have your business name website, but what if you bought: CharlotteVeterinarianforCats.com CharlotteVeterinarianforDogs.com etc. and pointed them to specific pages in your business website.

    Keyword Research | | laurieonorio
    0
  • pauledwards


    Hi there i have a .com and a .co.uk for a site that has been around a while. However not much seo has been done on it, i was wonderign do i continue to optimise for the .com or switch to the .co.uk to rank in Google UK index for various search terms. .COM = 40 domain authority .CO.UK - 10 domain authority. Let the debate start 🙂

    Technical SEO | | pauledwards
    0
  • Profero


    Hi guys, We have been asked to research keywords in 5 different countries, Australia, India, South Korea, Brazil, Singapore (4 different languages inc. Portuguese, Korean, English, Indian). Being that I have never conducted keyword research outside of English, I thought maybe you guys could: 1. Point me in the direction of consultants/freelancers who can research terms in those languages. 2. Suggest tips one should bear in mind when designing an SEO strategy for multi-national websites (such as the different SE's used in countries and cultural-behavioral differences) Any articles, guides, tools etc. that can help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

    SEO Learn Center | | Profero
    0
  • Ray_UK


    We are considering using Wistia to host our “new” video content on our website. Currently we use YouTube and find many people watch our technical videos (Eg. Fitting videos have10k + views, which is very high for our niche industry) We currently have “the same” YouTube videos embedded on several different blog posts on our website, as the video is still relevant to what the post talks about Question: Since Wistia updates our video Robot.Txt file, would multiple embeds of the “same video” be seen as content duplication on google & “be harmful” as a result? Thanks

    Image & Video Optimization | | Ray_UK
    0
  • NeilTompkins


    Why do certain sites for example TripAdvisor rank for their multiple international sites e.g TripAdvisor.co.uk, TripAdvisor.com, TripAdvisor.fr, TripAdvisor.de etc for a English search phrase ? From my view point they are just spamming the index with the same content.  These searches are performed on google.co.uk

    Algorithm Updates | | NeilTompkins
    0
  • iung


    I'm looking for a tool to help with keyword research, and judging by the presentation and few reviews I could find, SECockpit at http://swissmademarketing.com/secockpit/ seems to be a nice product. They pull their data (partly) from SEOmoz, which is a good sign. Any feedback ? Thx Gil

    Keyword Research | | iung
    1
  • tstolber1


    Hi Maybe I am missing this but I can''t seem to see it. I am doing some analysis on a client's site and want to get a csv list of links from the client's site to external sites. So what I am looking for is a list of Out Bound Links (OBL) from the client's site. I want to run these past a black list / bad link neighborhood checking script I have. This would actually be a nice feature in SEO Moz Pro, unless it actually already does and I am just missing it or not setting filters correctly. Thanks Trevor

    Moz Pro | | tstolber1
    0
  • adriandg


    I know that it is important to have your primary keyword target as the first word or two words of your title tag.  But what about your meta description tag? does it matter where they keyword is in the description tag?  I see a lot of other sites stuffing their keywords right at the front of the description tag and it looks somewhat unnatural.  What's your take? do you put the primary keyword as the first word or two words of your description tag?

    On-Page Optimization | | adriandg
    0
  • lwilkins


    I blog for hotels and I am wondering whether it is best to have on a wordpress tagline the name of the hotel such as Holiday Inn and Suites vs Holiday Inn & Suites. In Google AdWords, the "and" keyword always beats out the "&" word in exact search. The "&" just always looks cleaner. Also, when I refer to the hotel within a blog post, should I use the "and" or "&" in the name? Please help me understand which is best for seo. Thank you!

    On-Page Optimization | | lwilkins
    0
  • WebMarketingandDesign


    I am working with a client and recently discovered that they have several URLs that go to the same page. http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx
    http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx
    http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=FF
    http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=FS
    http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?nav=FF
    http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?nav=ffhttp://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=MShttp://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?nav=
    http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx?nav=FF#
    http://www.maps.com/FunFacts
    http://www.maps.com/funfacts.aspx?.nav=FF I am afraid this is happening all over the site. So, my question is: Is this hurting the SEO and how? If so what is the best way to go about fixing this problem? Thanks for your help!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebMarketingandDesign
    0
  • NiallTom


    I need to verify all the inbound links I have coming in to my site.  I've tried using OSE but have been told it does not scrape many smaller sites so cannot be sure of it's accuracy (especially since when I ran it, it returned a small % of the link i know are out there). Is there a way to do this in Analytics?  Or another way? Thanks

    Link Building | | NiallTom
    0
  • joshcanhelp


    So here's a weird one... Client comes to me for some simple changes, turns out there are some major issues with the site, one of which is that none of the correct content pages are showing up in Google, just ancillary (outdated) ones. Looks like an issue because even the main homepage isn't showing up with a "site:domain.com" So, I add to Webmaster Tools and, after an hour or so, I get the red bar of doom, "robots.txt is blocking important pages." I check it out in Webmasters and, sure enough, it's a "User agent: * Disallow /" ACK! But wait... there's no robots.txt to be found on the server. I can go to domain.com/robots.txt and see it but nothing via FTP. I upload a new one and, thankfully, that is now showing but I've never seen that before. Question is: can a robots.txt file be stored in a way that can't be seen? Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | joshcanhelp
    0
  • tdsnet


    Hi there, I'm trying to create a 301 redirect for the file "index.php" but I keep getting a "fail to redirect" message in Firefox whenever I insert it into the Web.config file. <location path="index.php"></location> Is there anyway around this? Thanks for any help According to Open Site Explorer, there are about 500 links to my index file but it only has a 302 status so will not be passing link juice.

    Technical SEO | | tdsnet
    0
  • ufmedia


    Our main site, www.domain.com, is on an IIS 6 server.  When we started our blog, we wanted to put it in a subdirectory (domain.com/blog), but we couldn't because our IT people refused to support it.  Instead, we built it on a third-party Apache server and configured it to open under blog.domain.com.  However, I came across this SEOmoz post about the glories of reverse proxies, so I've persuaded our IT people to take a swing at it. We got it to work on a staging server, but the permalinks won't change (still appear as blog.domain.com/slug).  The IT guys say it's due to a configuration problem with WordPress.  Can somebody out there point me in the right direction as far as working out the URL issues with this?

    Technical SEO | | ufmedia
    0
  • CommercePundit


    Today, I was reading help article for URL parameters by Google. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1235687 I come to know that, Google is giving value to URLs which ave parameters that change or determine the content of a page. There are too many pages in my website with similar value for Name, Price and Number of product. But, I have restricted all pages by Robots.txt with following syntax. URLs:
    http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?dir=asc&order=name
    http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?dir=asc&order=price
    http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?limit=100 Syntax in Robots.txt
    Disallow: /?dir=
    Disallow: /?p=
    Disallow: /*?limit= Now, I am confuse. Which is best solution to get maximum benefits in SEO?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
    0
  • merkal2005


    Is such a thing possible? Can we google for a specific keyword that can be found on the source code of a website? Is there any search operator for this? Thanks in advance!

    Industry News | | merkal2005
    0
  • MarieHaynes


    I will often post photos that I have taken to my Facebook page (either personal or my fan page).  Sometimes these can get lots of likes. I got thinking that perhaps I host these photos on my site (i.e. www.example.com/images/photo1.jpg) and then share that "page" on Facebook.  That way any of the likes would be counted towards my site. What do you guys think?

    Social Media | | MarieHaynes
    0
  • dbuckles


    I've read that page titles can't/shouldn't be more than 70 characters long. Out of around 1,000 products we have about 150 that have legitimate titles that exceed this character limitation. We plan on automatically truncating these. Should I just cut the titles off at 70 characters or should I cut them off and add a "..."? Does it even matter?

    Technical SEO | | dbuckles
    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.