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!

  • SEOptPro


    A client recently engaged my service to deliver foundational white hat SEO. Upon site audit, I discovered a tremendous amount of black hat SEO tactics employed by their former SEO company. I'm concerned that the efforts of the old company, including forum spamming, irrelevant backlink development, exploiting code vulnerabilities on BB's and other messy practices, could negatively influence the target site's campaigns for years to come. The site owner handed over hundreds of pages of paperwork from the old company detailing their black hat SEO efforts. The sheer amount of data is insurmountable. I took just one week of reports and tracked back the links to find that 10% of the accounts were banned, 20% tagged as abusive, some of the sites were shut down completely, WOT reports of abusive practices and mentions on BB control programs of blacklisting for the site. My question is simple. How does one mitigate the negative effects of old black hat SEO efforts and move forward with white hat solutions when faced with hundreds of hours of black gunk to clean up. Is there a clean way to eliminate the old efforts without contacting every site administrator and requesting removal of content/profiles? This seems daunting, but my client is a wonderful person who got in over her head, paying for a service that she did not understand. I'd really like to help her succeed. Craig Cook
    http://seoptimization.pro
    info@seoptimization.pro

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOptPro
    0
  • Ypsilon


    Hi, If a page in the source code has boht following elements: class="blogg_rubrik">TITLE OF THE PAGE Is that bad for SEO, since the first H1 is empty? Shouldn't a page use only one H1?

    Technical SEO | | Ypsilon
    0
  • ThomasHgenhaven


    Hi Mozzers, Any of you know a way to bulk check which CMS a list of sites run on? Let's say I'd like to develop a plugin for a CMS (e.g. Wordpress or vBulletin). But that'd only make sense if some of the sites in the niche use this platform. And I'd like to avoid checking them manually with WASP. Thanks! Thomas

    Competitive Research | | ThomasHgenhaven
    0
  • ARMofficial


    As it says on the tin; Is there such thing as a good text/code ratio? And can it effect SERPs? I'm currently looking at a 20% ratio whereas some competitors are closer to 40%+. Best regards,
    Sam.

    Technical SEO | | ARMofficial
    0
  • Trigun


    Hi Guys, Is there a way in Wordpress to transfer or redirect a category and all posts under it into a sub-domain? Thanks in advance..

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Trigun
    0
  • AndyMacLean


    A new client has mainsite.com and a large numer of city specific sub domains i.e. albany.mainsite.com. I think that these subdomains would actually work better as subfolders i.e mainsite.com/albany rather than albany.mainsite.com. The majority of links on the subdomains link to the main site anyway i.e. mainsite.com/contactus rather than albany.mainsite.com/contactus. Having mostly main domain links on a subdomain doesnt seem like clever link architecture to me and maybe even spammy. Im not overly familiar with redirecting subdomains to subfolders. If we go the route of 301'ing subdomains to subfolders any advice/warnings?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean
    0
  • TheEspresseo


    Anybody know of one?

    Moz Pro | | TheEspresseo
    0
  • wparlaman


    Hello Everyone, I'm stumped. My primary website has a horrendous bounce rate of around 75% My domain is www.radicalmarketingsolutions.com My home page has a bounce rate of around 68%. The funny thing is, I have a page on Google Analytics basics for small business owners that is my 3rd top page for content, I have an average time on page of over 3 minutes yet my bounce rate is 90%. I have another page on how to depersonalize your google searches in Chrome and Firefox that is a top page with a time on page over 5 minutes and this page has a bounce rate of 96%! I felt that my old design was really hurting me so I changed the design in the beginning of this month and it does not look like it's helped much. I really simplified the site, created a lot more white space and added some links to my other important pages in hopes to get more click throughs. I would really love some honest "constructive" feed back on my site as to why the bounce rate could be so high. I have a ton of content on my blog and I get a lot of positive feedback. One thing I did not do was exclude my IP from Analytics so I could be influencing the numbers. I've added this filter and hoping this will help. Another issue is I do email my list with each new blog post. This could mean those folks visit the post and then leave without reading anything else on my blog. So this could be hurting me as well. Would love your suggestions. Thanks, Bill Parlaman

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | wparlaman
    0
  • upick-162391


    I was thinking of using 301 redirects for trailing slahes to no trailing slashes for my urls. EG: www.url.com/page1/ 301 redirect to www.url.com/page1 Already got a redirect for non-www to www already. Just wondering in my case would it be best to continue using htacces for the trailing slash redirect or just go with Canonical URLs?

    Technical SEO | | upick-162391
    0
  • sesertin


    Hello, Can anyone show me some authority info on wheher links are better with or without a .html ending? Thanks is advance

    Technical SEO | | sesertin
    0
  • digisavvy


    Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy
    0
  • PeterAlexLeigh


    OK, before anyone says anything, I know this isn't the right way to do things properly and that if I want to build a genuine and interested following base, I need to create some great content, tweet great things of interest and build a genuine and engaged follower base.... BUT ....Has anyone got any actual experience of using paid for twitter followers and if so would you recommend it or recommend any particular company who does it in the UK? I know there's companies who do it by getting reciprocal followers and others who just use bots to give you lots of 'useless' followers. I essentially want to know if it can work at all on any level and get you some degree of useful followers (i.e. people who may actually read your tweets as opposed to fake accounts).

    Branding | | PeterAlexLeigh
    0
  • wdziedzic


    Hello all, We have 4 language domains for our website, and a number of our Spanish landing pages are written using Spanish characters - most notably: ñ and ó. We have done our research around the web and realised that many of the top competitors for keywords such as Diseño Web (web design) and Aplicaión iPhone (iphone application) DO NOT use these special chacracters in their URL structure. Here is an example of our URL's EX:  http://www.twago.es/expert/Diseño-Web/Diseño-Web However when I simply copy paste a URL that contains a special character it is automatically translated and encoded. EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone (When written out long had it appears: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone My first question is, seeing how the overwhelming majority of website URL's DO NOT contain special characters (and even for Spanish/German characters these are simply written using the standard English latin alphabet) is there a negative effect on our SEO rankings/efforts because we are using special characters? When we write anchor text for backlinks to these pages we USE the special characteristics in the anchor text (so does most other competitors). Does the anchor text have to exactly I know most webbrowsers can understand the special characters, especially when returning search results to users that either type the special characters within their search query (or not). But we seem to think that if we were doing the right thing, then why does everyone else do it differently? My second question is the same, but focusing on the use of Capital letters in our URL structure. NOTE: When we do a broken link check with some link tools (such as xenu) the URL's that contain the special characters in Spanish are marked as "broken". Is this a related issue? Any help anyone could give us would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, David from twago

    Web Design | | wdziedzic
    0
  • wellbo


    We are a small start-up in germany in the Sports and health sector. We currently are building a network of people in that sector and give each person a seperate wordpress blog. The idea is to create a big network of experts. My question is: How long is the period for google to trust a completely new URL? We set up each project and create content on the page. Each week the owner of the site puts up an expert article that contain keywords. And we set certain links from other blogs, etc. Also, do you think it is more important for a site to get say, 20 backlinks from anywhere. Or 5 backlinks from very trusted blogs, etc.?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wellbo
    0
  • Webat


    I am wondering if the urls should be in alphabetical order or if they should be set out in a way that reflects the sites hierarchy? Thanks.

    On-Page Optimization | | Webat
    0
  • sichristie


    Curious on peoples thoughts around this. Since restructuring our site we have seen a massive uplift in pages indexed and organic traffic with our pagination. But we haven't yet included a sitemap.xml. It's an ancient site that never had one. Given that Google seems to be loving us right now, do we even need a sitemap.xml - aside from the analytical benefis in WM Tools? Would you include pagination URL's (don't worry, we have no duplicate content) in the sitemap.xml? Cheers.

    Technical SEO | | sichristie
    0
  • anchorwave


    I have a client with a lot of 404 errors from Web Master Tools, and i have to go through and check each of the links because Some redirect to the correct page Some redirect to another url but its a 404 error Some are just 404 errors Does anyone know of a tool where i can dump all of the urls and it will tell me If the url is redirected, and to where if the page is a 404 or other error Any tips or suggestions will be really appreciated! Thanks SEO Moz'rs

    Technical SEO | | anchorwave
    0
  • jannkuzel


    Firstly I would like to comment on how helpful this site is. I haven't posted much before but have been reading tonnes of answers for many months now and have been finding it really useful. I used the SEOmoz scanner and the main problem highlighted was duplicate content so I started to add 'customer product reviews' I had received and unique 'further information' to each page (hopefully this was the right thing to do to solve duplicate content! : ) ) Then I looked at heading and title tags. Currently I set title tags for each product page to be "Brand Name- Product Name" but after doing some research we are thinking of putting Keyword Description of Product | Product Name | Brand Name (around 60 characters long). So is this the advised thing to do and create unique titles that are relevant to each specific product page for over 200 pages we have? In addition, any advice on setting optimum tags would be great. We keep reading varying tips online. I gather ideally h1 needs to be a shorter keyword rich version of the title tag? Many Thanks

    On-Page Optimization | | jannkuzel
    0
  • phatride


    Wondering if this is somehow possible. A site got hacked and created a /data folder with hundreds of .php files that are web pages selling all sorts of stuff. We deleted the /data folder and blocked Google from indexing it. Just noticed in Webmaster Tools that the site has 35,000 backlinks from other sites that got hacked with the same way. Is there a way to block these sites? I am assuming there isn't, but wanted to see if anyone ran into the same problem. It is a wordpress site is that helps.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | phatride
    0
  • seoroyal


    Good morning to all. I am looking for a good keyword research tool for spanish website. The google keyword tool does not give enought long tail keywords and wordtracker does not provide good results for spanish sites. Does anybody here have experience with a good keyword tool for spanish sites?

    Link Building | | seoroyal
    0
  • James77


    I've been doing a bit of stats research prompted by read the recent ranking blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables There are a few things that have come up in my research that I'd like to clear up. The below analysis has been done on my "conversions". 1/. What does "/aclk" mean in the Referrer URL? I have noticed a strong correlation between this and "gclid" in the landing page variable. Does it mean "ad click" ?? Although they seem to "closely" correlate they don't exactly, so when I have /aclk in the referrer Url MOSTLY I have gclid in the landing page URL. BUT not always, and the same applies vice versa. It's pretty vital that I know what is the best way to monitor adwords PPC, so what is the best variable to go on? - Currently I am using "gclid", but I have about 25% extra referral URL's with /aclk in that dont have "gclid" in - so am I underestimating my number of PPC conversions? 2/. The use of the variable "cd" is great, but it is not always present. I have noticed that 99% of my google "Referrer URL's" either start with:
    /aclk   - No cd value
    /search - No cd value
    /url - Always contains the cd variable. What do I make of this?? Thanks for the help in advance!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
    0
  • roundbrix


    If I have a website with thousands of products, is it a good idea to create a sitemap for this website for the search engines where you show maybe 250 products on a page so it makes it easy for the search engine to find the part and also puts that part closer to the home page? Seems like google likes pages that are the closest to the home page (less clicks the better)

    Technical SEO | | roundbrix
    0
  • djingel1


    By looking at the work from an SEO collegue it became clear that his weak linkbuilding graph probably is not the cause for his good rankings for a pretty competitive keyword. (also no social mentions where found) I was wondering what it could be, site structure and other on page optimization factors seems to be ok and I don't think there will be exceptionally good or bad user behavior... Finally I looked at the competitors and found that they have more links, better content en better design, so I got a little stuck. The only reason I can think of is that he is doing 301 redirects (or is rel=canonical tags). Is there a way to trace these redirects back to the source in order to include this important variable in your competitor research? thnx

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djingel1
    0
  • martyc


    Hi, I have seen significant SEO benefits from owning exact match domains and was wondering whether exact match subdomains hold the same (or some) of these benefits? eg. halloweencostumes.co.uk vs. halloween [dot] costumes.co.uk Many thanks.

    Technical SEO | | martyc
    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.