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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.

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!

800 Number vs. Local Phone

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

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Helpful to utilize long-tail keyword URLs to point to parts of your website?

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

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.com or .co.uk in UK index? but the .com has higher domain authority...

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

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Keyword research in 5 different countries. Advice and tips?

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

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Are multiple embeds of the same video considered content duplication?

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

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TripAdvisor multiple listings

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

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Has anyone tried SECockpit as their Keyword Research tool ?

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

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What analysis exists for Out Bound Links (OBL) from your site

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

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Does keyword at the very front of meta description have impact?

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 | | A Former User

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"And" vs "&"

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

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Multiple URLs for the same page

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

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How can I verify who links to me?

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

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Invisible robots.txt?

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

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301 for "index.php" in Web.config?

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

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How to rewrite WordPress permalinks for reverse proxy?

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

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How to fix issues regarding URL parameters?

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

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Searching for a keyword on html source code of a website via Google

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

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Is there any SEO benefit to hosting your Facebook photos on your own site?

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

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How should I shorten my titles?

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

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Reliable Proxies

Can anyone recommend a reliable proxy service (paid or otherwise) to tunnel scraping requests through? I've been using free proxes which are sometimes a bit slow/ timeout or just refuse connections.
Technical SEO | | AlexThomas

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