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!
-
How do sites without access to a site's analytical data, determine a site's organic traffic?
I've recently used a organic traffic checker that showed you your traffic compared to each google algo update. I was interested in how they derived the organic traffic totals for each month, without having access to our site's google analytics? I've since compared the data to historical google analytics data and it's not wrong, isn't 100% match either but isn't far from fact. So if they're predicting or making a guess, it's rather spot on, site crawlers and SERPs snapshots only provide so much info, I'm just wondering where they get the rest from and how?
Reporting & Analytics | | Deacyde0 -
Website Indexing Issues - Search Bots will only crawl Homepage of Website, Help!
Hello Moz World, I am stuck on a problem, and wanted to get some insight. When I attempt to use Screaming Spider or SEO Powersuite, the software is only crawling the homepage of my website. I have 17 pages associated with the main domain i.e. example.com/home, example.com/sevices, etc. I've done a bit of investigating, and I have found that my client's website does not have Robot.txt file or a site map. However, under Google Search Console, all of my client's website pages have been indexed. My questions, Why is my software not crawling all of the pages associated with the website? If I integrate a Robot.txt file & sitemap will that resolve the issue? Thanks ahead of time for all of the great responses. B/R Will H.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarketingChimp100 -
Is my client's site penalized and if not, why are other lesser quality sites ranking with lower metrics than my client's?
Hello, I'm trying to explain to a client, as to why certain websites that appear in the top 50 listings for a keyword are there when they don't have very good backlink profiles, and for this keyword, seems you need a high PA above 20 or DA above 25, just to page for page 2 - 3. Running a full SERPs report, I have seen that backlinks to the page that's ranking seems to be as high of a factor as PA, followed by DA and overall backlink profile. Having a high score in one of these 4 areas seems to increase your ranking. However, going into page 3 and beyond, seems that things kinda take a weird turn. After comparing the client's site to those ranking on page 2 I could see that all of them had better PA and more links to the page ranking for that keyword, so page 2 I understand why we don't rank on yet. However, looking at page 3, I see that the client's site in question has better PA, DA, links to page and overall links to domain. Which leaves me to think we have a penalty that's keeping us ranking 50 or beyond. Since our metrics across the boards for what MOZ is showing as ranking factors. The more odd issue is that looking at the line graph, shows right at the time we implemented sitewide https our ranking for this one keyword dropped, while rankings for our other keywords increased. Am I to assume it's a keyword density penalty? What penalties are there with a outcome of ranking limits?
Competitive Research | | Deacyde0 -
Splitting down pages
Hello everyone, I have a page on my directory for example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBayPublishing
https://ose.directory/topics/breathing-apparatus The title on this page is small yet a bit unspecific:
Breathing Apparatus Companies, Suppliers and Manufacturers On webmaster tools these terms hold different values for each category so "topic name companies" sometimes has a lot more searches than "topic name suppliers". I was thinking if I could split the page into the following into three separate pages would that be better: https://ose.directory/topics/breathing-apparatus (main - Title: Breathing Apparatus)
https://ose.directory/topics/breathing-apparatus/companies (Title: Breathing Apparatus Companies)
https://ose.directory/topics/breathing-apparatus/manufacturers (Title: Breathing Apparatus Manufacturers)
https://ose.directory/topics/breathing-apparatus/suppliers (Title: Breathing Apparatus Suppliers) Two Questions: Would this be more beneficial from an SEO perspective? Would google penalise me for doing this, if so is there a way to do it properly. PS. The list of companies may be the same but the page content ever so slightly different. I know this would not effect my users much because the terms I am using all mean pretty much the same thing. The companies do all three.0 -
New Page Not ranking?
One of this client's top keyword is "oak beams". They already rank well in the UK for other related terms like "reclaimed oak beams" at /reclaimed-oak-beams/ and "air dried oak beams" at /air-dried-oak-beams/ We have created a page at /oak-beams/ but this page ranks nowhere? Instead the reclaimed oak beams or air dried oak beams page ranks for the term "oak beams". Any ideas why Google is swapping between those pages and not choosing the /oak-beams/ page? A few notes are that the /oak-beams/ page is newest page on the site and yes I know there are no links pointing to it but there are no links pointing to the other pages either?
On-Page Optimization | | Marketing_Today0 -
Capitalization of first letter of each word in meta description. Catches more attention, but may this lead to google ignoring the meta description then more frequently?
Capitalization of first letter of each word in meta description. Catches more attention, but may this lead to google ignoring the meta description then more frequently? Same for an occasional capitalized FREE in meta description. Anybody had experience with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse1 -
Why HTML entities gets crawled as content keywords in Google search console?
My Google search console shows HTML parameters such as div, class, img, src, gif, align as content keywords, but why google crawls HTML parameters as keywords? because of this, I would be losing traffic for my on-page content keywords. Please let me know how to solve this. Thanks, Jenifer
Technical SEO | | Jenifer300 -
Mobile Friendly Penalty?
My website, http://www.stephita.com/ used to appear on the first page of my "locally" searched terms on www.google.ca. Specifically, when users searched for "wedding invitations", we would appear between 1-3 on the rankings. Sadly, I "ignored warnings" of making my site "mobile friendly" for too long, and only recently made drastic changes to my site to get it to "mobile friendly" status. So, I've fallen far in the SERP, down to the dreaded second page, for my keyword search: "wedding invitations". The "mobile friendly" version of my site has been up and running for about 1 month now. My site's home/index page has a PR3, compared to all the other sites that have leaped frogged mine are all at PR1. Does anybody know the likelihood that my site will ever see the page 1 daylight again? 😞 Or has Google Penalized my rankings 😞 Very much appreciated any help the community can provide!
Local Website Optimization | | TysonWong0 -
Paid Link/Doorway Disavow - disavowing the links between 2 sites in the same company.
Hello, Three of our client's sites are having difficulty because of past doorway/paid link activity, which we're doing the final cleanup on with a disavow. There are links between the sites. Should we disavow all the links between the sites? Thank you.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Should I 301 this ecommerce site, or turn it into a blog?
Hey everyone, I have a couple of ecommerce sites - Site 1 (DA33) and Site 2 (DA24). They are in the same niche and have the same products, a relic of how our business started in 2007. But now we just want to manage one brand, Site 1. This is our question: Is it better to 301 Site 2 into Site 1 (page by page redirect), or would it be valuable to instead turn Site 2 into a blog site? Site 2 currently has some good relevant links to it that would be nice to 301 to Site 1, but the value of 301 redirects seems to have been steadily diminishing since roughly 2011. If we take Site 2 and turn it into a WordPress blog, develop some good industry-relevant content on it (and outsource/allow guest posts on it for relevant quality content as well), and sometimes we drop a link or two into the content to help promote Site 1 - would that be more valuable than a 301? Obviously, a lot more "work" goes into creating a content site than just 301'ing it over. I guess the question is: does a page-by-page 301 of a niche-identical and even product-identical site into another have more of a benefit for SEO than getting some content-relevant anchor text links on a blog site? What would you do in my position?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mozUser14692350692210 -
GWMT / Search Analytics VS OpenSiteExplorer
Just had the experience of using OSE data to show what we call "linkrot" to a client -- only to find that GWMT / Search Analytics shows no such thing. Fortunately the client is an old friend and no face was lost, but it was dicey there for a bit as I have come to rely on and reference OSE again and again and again, OSE showed Domain Authority dropping by about 1/3 in the last 12 months, presumably due to old links getting broken, linking sites changing their architecture etc. And of course, ranking is tanking, as you would expect. But Google shows many more (and much more spammy looking!) backlinks. Has anyone had any experience benchmarking the 2 data sets of backlinks against each other? Dr Pete?
Moz Pro | | seo_plus
Does one update more frequently than another? Do you trust one more than another?? If so, why?? Thanks!0 -
CcTLDs vs folders
My company is looking at expanding internationally, we have sudomains in the UK and Canada currently. I'm making recommendations on improving SEO and one of the parts that I'm struggling with is the benefits of ccTLDs vs using folders. I know the basic argument about Google recognizing the ccTLDs as being geo specific so they get priority. But I'd like to know HOW much priority they get. We have unique keywords and a pretty strong domain, is having a ccTLDs so much better that'd be worth going that route rather then creating folders within our current domain? Thanks, Jacob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jacob.young.cricut0 -
CSS background image links bad for seo?
On one of the websites I manage SEO for, the developers are changing how our graphical links are coded. They're basically coding in such away where there is no anchor text and no alt tag, so for example: So there's no anchor nor alt context for Google's crawler. How badly will this affect SEO, or is it extremely minimal and I shouldn't worry about? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | JimLynch0 -
I am a seller on Amazon and am looking for an agency/consultant to help optimize my products
Anyone do this kind of work or know anyone who does? Looking to act quickly. Our product is selling well and the team wants to put more money behind it and I'm not sure if that's necessary or if we just need to optimize our organic listing. Trying to understand scale and how Amazon differs from Adwords
Paid Search Marketing | | Eric_OWPP0 -
Google finding my meta descriptions
I recently had my site redone (about a year ago). Since then google has not been using my meta descriptions much and more so using the descriptions within my site. Is there a reason for this? An example would be http://www.waikoloavacationrentals.com/vrp/unit/kolea-14/
On-Page Optimization | | RobDalton0 -
Citation verifications with phone trees
We have several clients whose practices have phone trees enabled for their primary number, which means we aren't able to send automated verification calls for Google, Yelp, ExpressUpdate (Infogroup), YellowPages, etc. Sometimes our clients are able to temporarily disable their phone trees, and sometimes said site's support teams manually verify for us once we have proven our association with the businesses. We just wanted to reach out to see if anyone had alternative solutions or workarounds, since phone trees usually cause a significant hangup. Thanks!
Local Listings | | copyjack0 -
Rank Tracker Tool Accurate?
Hi Everyone, Just wondering if you all have been noticing inaccurate information in the rank tracker tool. Many terms are showing not in top 50, yet when i search from random devices that have never accessed my website before i find the url to be in the top 50. Anyone experiencing similar issues and anyone have any ideas why the inconsistency? Thanks
Moz Bar | | Prime850 -
Do I need to use a trailing slash to homepage in canonical and hreflang?
Currently I have a 301 redirect from
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
https://www.mysite.com/
to
https://www.mysite.com And in my canonical and hreflang and also insite links I use consistently https://www.mysite.com without trailing slash. Is this OK? Or do I need to add a trailing slash?0 -
Any suggestions why I would rank 1 on google and be on 3rd page for bing/yahoo?
Currently the site I'm working on ranks very well on google rankings but then when we cross reference into yahoo and bing we are basically in the graveyard of keywords. (bottom of 3rd page). Why would that be? Any suggestions or things I can do to fix this or troubleshoot it? Here are some things I can think of that might affect this but not sure. 1. our sitemap hasn't been updated in months and URL changes have been made 2. Onsite for yahoo and bing is different from google? 3. Bing is just terrible in general? 4. Inbound links? This one doesn't make sense though unless the search engines rank links in different ways. All jokes aside I would really appreciate any help as currently the few top ranked keywords we have are about 30% of our organic traffic and would have a huge affect on the company if we were able to rank as we should across all platforms. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | JemJemCertified0 -
External media URLs
In the template there is a section called external media URLs , this section is for videos and other things? because within the template are already a category called images. Besides I want to know if I'm with MOZ oregon or seattle. Thanks n the template there is a section called external media URLs , this section is for videos and other things? because within the template you are already a category called images . Besides I want to know if I'm with MOZ oregon or seattle .
Getting Started | | 2308930 -
Robots txt is case senstive? Pls suggest
Hi i have seen few urls in the html improvements duplicate titles Can i disable one of the below url in the robots.txt? /store/Solar-Home-UPS-1KV-System/75652
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rahim119
/store/solar-home-ups-1kv-system/75652 if i disable this Disallow: /store/Solar-Home-UPS-1KV-System/75652 will the Search engines scan this /store/solar-home-ups-1kv-system/75652 im little confused with case senstive.. Pls suggest go ahead or not in the robots.txt0 -
Im scoring 100% in the page optimization, wht else I need to do, because I rank 7-12 in search results
Hi All, Pls check the below url http://www.powerwale.com/inverter-battery for inverter battery keyword in google.co.in im scoring 100% in the page optimization, wht else I need to do, and also I still rank in between 7 to 12 in search results.. How can be in Top 3 search results.. Pls suggest.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rahim1191 -
Ecommerce SEO: Title Tags for pagination
Here's a specific question about title tags for ecommerce website... We've got lists of products (category list pages) that stretch for many pages... is there any benefit to added a something to make the title tag unique. For example: Page 1: <title></span><span class="html-tag" data-mce-mark="1">Category List Page Example</span><span class="html-tag" data-mce-mark="1"></title> Page 2: <title></span><span class="html-tag" data-mce-mark="1">Category List Page Example - Page 2</span><span class="html-tag" data-mce-mark="1"></title> Page 3: <title></span><span class="html-tag" data-mce-mark="1">Category List Page Example - Page 3</span><span class="html-tag" data-mce-mark="1"></title> FWIW, we've got the pagination and canonicalization nailed down tight. Moz crawl actual brought a dupe content issue based on title tags.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 19prince0 -
Our client's site was owned by former employee who took over the site. What should be done? Is there a way to preserve all the SEO work?
A client had a member of the team leave on bad terms. This wasn't something that was conveyed to us at all, but recently it came up when the distraught former employee took control of the domain and locked everyone out. At first, this was assumed to be a hack, but eventually it was revealed that one of the company starters who unhappily left the team owned the domain all along and is now holding it hostage. Here's the breakdown: -Every page aside from the homepage is now gone and serving a 404 response code -The site is out of our control -The former employee is asking for a $1 million ransom to sell the domain back -The homepage is a "countdown clock" that isn't actively counting down, but claims that something exciting is happening in 3 days and lists a contact email. The question is how we can save the client's traffic through all this turmoil. Whether buying a similar domain and starting from square one and hoping we can later redirect the old site's pages after getting it back. Or maybe we have a legal claim here that we do not see even though the individual is now the owner of the site. Perhaps there's a way to redirect the now defunct pages to a new site somehow? Any ideas are greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Google News - How to be featured in different countries with same domain
Hello, I am sure I am not the first to go through this but I did not find the answers in the previous Q&As. So, sorry if this question is bit redundant for some folks. We have a site in English with readers in multiple english speaking countries. How to make www.mysite.com accepted in Google news for US, UK, India, Australia and Canada at the same time? It is currently accepted in the US but, as I stated above, we do have a strong audience in other countries. I have read about sub-domains, but wouldn't it be considered duplicated content if I had the exact same article in different sub-domains? We are talking about creating 4 copies on mysite.com just to be added to Google News in those specific countries www.mysite.com/same-article/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Koki.Mourao
uk.mysite.com/same-article/
au.mysite.com/same-article/
in.mysite.com/same-article/
ca.mysite.com/same-article/ Isn't there a better way of having mysite.com included in Google News for all English speaking countries?0 -
Redirecting old html site to new wordpress site
Hi I'm currently updating an old (8 years old) html site to wordpress and about a month ago I redirected some url's to the new site (which is in a directory) like this... Redirect 301 /article1.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article1/
Technical SEO | | briandee
Redirect 301 /article2.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article2/
Redirect 301 /article3.htm http://mysite.net/wordpress/article3/ Google has indexed these new url's and they are showing in search results. I'm almost finished the new version of site and it is currently in a directory /wordpress I intend to move all the files from the directory to the root so new url when this is done will be http://mysite.net/article1/ etc My question is - what to I do about the redirects which are in place - do I delete them and replace with something like this? Redirect 301 /wordpress/article1/ http://mysite.net/article1/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article2/ http://mysite.net/article2/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article3/ http://mysite.net/article3/ Appreciate any help with this0 -
Google Open Graph
Hi I wanted to find out what makes Google select a site to show the answer to a question you type in search? For example, typing What is COSHH, brings up this site http://rospaworkplacesafety.com/2013/01/08/what-is-coshh-about-coshh/ and this answer top of Google SERPs. COSHH stands for 'Control of Substances Hazardous to Health' and under the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002, employers need to either prevent or reduce their workers' exposure to substances that are hazardous to their health.8 Jan 2013 Is it their open graph mark up only? Becky
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
Is pagerank still a ranking factor for Google?
Hello Friends, Just want to confirm that the announcement by Google officials for no more pagerank update (Oct 14) is only for the Google toolbar update but pagerank still exists and still a ranking factor for Google? http://searchengineland.com/google-toolbar-pagerank-finally-officially-dead-205277 Please help. Regards
Moz Pro | | chakraseo0 -
How to get google to forget my old but still working page and list my new fully optimized page for a keyword?
Hi There! (i am beginner in seo) I have dynamic and static pages on our site. I created a static page for a specific keyword. Fully optimized it, (h1, alt, metas, etc.....maybe too optimized). My problem is that this page is alive for weeks, checked it in GWT and it is in robots.txt, google sees it, and indexed it. BUT whenewer i do a search for that keyword, we still appear with the dynamically created link in the google listings. How could i "redirect" google, if sy make a search for that keyword than shows our optimized page? Is there a tool for that? I cant delete the dynamic page... Any ideas? Thx Andrew
Technical SEO | | Neckermann0 -
If I put a piece of content on an external site can I syndicate to my site later using a rel=canonical link?
Could someone help me with a 'what if ' scenario please? What happens if I publish a piece of content on an external website, but then later decide to also put this content on my website. I want my website to rank first for this content, even though the original location for the content was the external website. Would it be okay for me to put a rel=canonical tag on the external website's content pointing to the copy on my website? Or would this be seen as manipulative?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO1 -
Some Content The Same
Hello. I am about to publish some landing pages that target different industries that we are trying to market to. X for Accountants
On-Page Optimization | | smithandco
X for Financial Advisors
X for Fitness Trainers
X for X While a good portion of the content is unique on each page "the benefits of using X for accountants" some of the content on the page is duplicate which explains more about how our software works (the features), this will be the same content on every page. Is this considered duplicate content? What should I be aware of in term of Google rankings and penalties? Thanks,
David0 -
Newbie Q: How soon should i see backlink from guest post
I recently got featured in couple of blog posts and there were back-links to my site. How soon should i expect to see these in Moz Open Explorer and also in Google Search Console? If i don't see these links, is there something I need to do? Thanks
Link Building | | gungam0 -
Google Analytics Question - Impressions & Queries Up, Sessions Down
I'm working with a client who, according to the Google Query report, impressions and sessions are up since we've started work with them about 6 months ago, but Google sessions are down. In moz, we're seeing a gradual, but steady increase in search visibility specifically with Google. Note: this is all organic. From when we started tracking queries, the first month we were tracking there were 43,581 impressions and 690 click throughs for the month. This past month there were 98,293 queries and 1015 clicks throughs for the month (granted not year over year data) - of these 1,015 clicks, 995 of them were from web. However, for those same time periods, sessions from Google are down over 30% - 1,750 vs. 1,189. I'm not sure how to interpret this. I realize that clicks and sessions are not a straightforward comparison, but I would think that if clicks were up according to the query report that sessions would also be up. Is it that some of these clicks are bouncing and therefore not being tracked as a session? Is there a potential issue with how data is being tracked?
Reporting & Analytics | | Corporate_Communications0 -
Recovery after recent Google update
Hi guys. This is somewhat a continuation for this topic: https://moz.com/community/q/january-2016-massive-rankings-fluctuations After that update, several of our clients and our website as well have experienced high fluctuation rankings period, which ended up in huge drops - 10-20 spots. Which, obviously, made everyone unhappy. Anybody knows what exactly the change was about? What should we fix/take a look at, analyze again? We aren't using any shady techniques or black hat. Everything is honest. All metrics, number of backlinks etc are going up, no major changes have been recently made. Please, help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
How to Increase PR? I am using joomla platform for my Website.
Hi There, i have question how to increase the Pagerank? My website health according ahrefs is 90%. but still no pagerank. please help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GarySahota0 -
How to correctly move subdomain to subfolder (google webmaster)?
Hello, This is my first post in here 🙂 I just wondered what is the correct way to move a subdomain to subfolder? I've moved it, re-done sitemap, so that main website would include a subfolder, as they are part of one big website now (it was something like a blog on a subdomain). Subdomain now does correct 301 redirects. Submitted new sitemap to google, asked google to re-fetch the whole domain (thus subfolder should be re-fetched too, as it's part of main nav). The areas i'm in doubt: I can tell google that the domain got moved, however it is moved to the one that is already approved in the same account, but is in a subfolder, so should i do this? Or should i simply somehow erase it on webmaster? The blog was launched about a month ago, and it isn't perfectly optimized yet, it wasn't on google SERPs pretty much at all, excluding googling it straightly, and there are pretty much 0 traffic from google, almost all of it is either direct either referral, mostly social, Thanks, Pavel
Local Website Optimization | | PavelGro920 -
Only The Google Plus URL Appearing In Organic Search (No Images or Info)
Just a quick one, when I search for my brand in Google I see my normal listing but the Google Plus URL is appearing on the right hand side as a link on it's own. I see that other brands have there company info pulled in here. Is there anything I can do to make it appear like other brands have it, (with the images, text, etc.)? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
How do I reduce the amount of internal links on my site?
Hi, Can someone help me with reducing the amount of internal links on our site please? https://www.thepresentfinder.co.uk Thanks Charlie
On-Page Optimization | | The-Present-Finder0 -
I was penalized by Google? What do you think i have to do?
Id like some help, My site had a rank fall and I think I was penalized by Penguin, I compared running a 'Full SERP Report "and I see no reason for me to be in 4th place in the SERP.The Facts: I have a higher: Page Authority, # of Root Domains Linking to the Page, Domain Authority, # of Root Domains Linking to the Domain, MozRank, MozTrust My mT/mR is 0.955 against: #1->0.983 #2->0 #3->1.023 (but my mozrank and moz trust is higher My website is: https://www.soprojetos.com.br/ this occours since Nov 2015. I have 99 external links against: #1->15 #2->0 #3->11 Link to OSE:https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/links?site=www.soprojetos.com.br&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0&page=1&sort=page_authority&anchor_id=&anchor_type=&anchor_text=&from_site=What I think:I guess a have to Disallow some links that some crazy Real Estate Websites made to my website, but i'm afraid to do this, and id like an oppinion about why my website is not ranking first to "plantas de casas" and "projetos de casas" anymore, my competitors are not so well seen on google as me (according to moz) (sorry for my bad english i'm brazilian) Thanks in Advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | aneebelo0 -
Title tags drawn from breadcrumbs
My client has a magento site that we've recently started working on. After the site was crawled by Moz a couple of times we noticed there was an issue with title tags being too long. However, when we looked closer at the data, Moz was seemingly picking up the breadcrumbs as the title tag. The actual tag is a small part of the breadcrumbs, but Moz was reporting they were the same. For example:
Moz Pro | | Stone_Junction
Breadcrumbs - home>products>category A of products
Title Tag - category A of products I just wondered if anyone else has had this problem? Is it Moz's mistake or is the title tag auto generating from the breadcrumbs and cutting off the beginning somehow? Any information would be really helpful, thanks.0 -
HELP!! We are losing search visibility fast and I don't know why?
We have recently moved from http to https - could this be a problem? https://www.thepresentfinder.co.uk As far as I'm aware we are doing everything by SEO best practice and have no manual penalties, all content is unique and we are not doing any link farming etc...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | The-Present-Finder0
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.