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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.

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  • activitysuper


    Hi, I'm a member now of myblogguest.com website, I have paid for the pro subscription and have uploaded 1 article (basically to just see how the system works). I've got 15 articles a month which I want to pump out to blogs but has anyone got any tips using the myblogguest system to get blog websites to pick these up? I think I have been fair, 500 words of unqiue content with 1 anchor text link in the body, thats it. In an ideal world I would love it if I had 15 articles all being grabbed by 15 different blogs each month. By the looks of it, that's wishful thinking!

    Link Building | | activitysuper
    0
  • JavaManOne


    I'm reading some reports from my first crawl of 10K pages and I'm wondering if it's wise to mark the archives "no-follow." I have a WP tool that provides a tool that offers the no follow for categories or archives recommending to choose either one or the other but not both. What would be the best solution?

    Reporting & Analytics | | JavaManOne
    0
  • adresanet


    Hello, I wish I know your position regarding backlinks from chinese websites. I am able to get a text link(from homepage) from a very big site in chinese. It has PR8 and over 10M users monthly. My site is in english. Will it help me ? Will I be penalised (my site is 5 years old, PR4) and some decent traffic(6-7k daily) Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adresanet
    0
  • TheARKlady


    One of the web designers I work with asked me to do a preliminary site assessment on a small business website. The owner of the business had a falling out with his previous web designer and moved over to the one I work with earlier this year. The site has been redesigned but when analyzing the back links I discovered that the previous designer had created directories to create backlinks to the page. The PR 0 links from the site number about 150 and are from unrelated topic pages. So, it made me wonder, how much damage can spammy backlinks do? What is the best practice to deal with spammy backlinks if you find them?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheARKlady
    0
  • CommercePundit


    I am working on my website to edit structure with help of Google's search engine optimization starter guide. There is really good instruction to define URL structure which help us to perform well over Google's organic search. I have resolved issues regarding category pages but, I have confusion to define best URL structure for product pages. My website's product page URL structure is as follow. http://www.vistastores.com/marketumbrellas-californiaumbrella-slpt758-f13-red.html http://www.vistastores.com/homefurniture-winsomewood-93630.html URL structure is constructed with following terms. 1. Root Category Name (Market Umbrellas or Home Furniture or ....) 2. Brand Name 3. Manufacturer Part Number I am not happy with this structure and also not performing well over Google's organic search. I am thinking to include product name or title tag in URL after root domain. But, it may create very long URL and create issues in organic search display. Does it really matter to perform well over Google's organic search? How can I define best URL structure for product pages?

    On-Page Optimization | | CommercePundit
    0
  • WillBlackburn


    Hi, I have a sitemap on my site, that updates but it isn't a XML sitemap. See here: http://www.designerboutique-online.com/sitemap/ I have used some free software to crawl the site and create a sitemap of pages, however I think that if I were to upload the sitemap, it would be out of date as soon as I listed new products on the site, so would need to rerun it. Does anyone know how I can get this to refresh daily or weekly? Or any software that can do it? I have a web firm that are willing to do one, but our relationship is at an all time low and I don't want to hand over £200 for them to do one. Anyone with any ideas or advice? Thanks Will

    Web Design | | WillBlackburn
    0
  • ukss1984


    We are in the process of launching a couple of new sites and while we know it will be a long process to get them to rank, achieving some long-tail keywords would be beneficial. What sites would you recommend for getting some easy links to start with that can help the indexation and ranking process along in the preliminary stages? Or another way to put the question - when you launch a new site, what steps do you go through?

    Link Building | | ukss1984
    0
  • jaybrn1


    Ok I did a search and didn't see an answer to this exact question.  Most of them were about if a blog should be in a sub folder and not the blog posts themselves... so here it goes.  I have a blog on my website the blog itself is in /blog/ but the blog posts themselves are situated in the root folder so it looks something like mydomain.com/cool-seo-blog-post/ Is there any reason I should change this and make it read mydomain.com/blog/cool-seo-blog-post/

    On-Page Optimization | | jaybrn1
    0
  • brycebertola


    We receive lead forms from interested visitors that include their name, email, grade level, and academic goals, and we would like to also know which specific phrase they used when searching for us. I need to find a way to grab the referring keywords and pass them as a hidden form field. Can this be done, and are there scripts available that can do this?

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | brycebertola
    0
  • rdreich49


    In running one of my campaigns in SEOMoz Pro, it was recommended that I reduce the amount of times a keyword is used to 15.  On the actual page, there are fewer than 15, but when you include the number of times it is used in drop-downs from the nav bar, the number is 53. I know there is really no hard and fast rule about how many instances of a keyword make for keyword stuffing and the drop-downs only use the term where needed.  Without it's use, it would be difficult to navigate the site. Is this a problem or should I focus on more important fixes?

    Moz Pro | | rdreich49
    0
  • AndreVanKets


    Meaning heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc) are a critical part of good on-page optimisation. Fair enough. It helps humans and bots make sense of a page's content. 3 questions regarding implementation of heading tags: Should heading tags appear in sequence in the HTML code. I.e. H1 first, then H2 lower down, etc.? Can the page contain more than one H1 tag? Can the page contain multiple H2, H3, H4 tags?

    On-Page Optimization | | AndreVanKets
    1
  • GrantEllis


    Hi, In a meta description I was wondering which is best for click through rate: A Meta Description Written Like This With Leading Capitals and Some Fully Capitalized Words Eg FREE, BUY NOW Etc? OR A meta description written normally like this without leading capitals and fully capitalized words? My initial thoughts is the capitalised one stands out more and may get more click throughs, but I also don't see anyone else doing it this way so I was wondering what the generally accepted thought is on which one improves the CTR more?

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | GrantEllis
    0
  • SheriGolla


    We have a handful of inbound links to www.t-chek.com (note the hyphen). Our normal site is www.tchek.com (no hyphen). We own both domains and have some sort of domain-wide redirect set up now. This works fine for traffic, but I suspect it's not optimal for SEO purposes. I came to this conclusion by looking in OSE and noticing that none of the inbound links to www.t-chek.com were also being attributed to www.tchek.com. 2 questions: Is it immediately evident what type of redirect I have in place now, or do I need to figure that out? Is the fix as simple as editing the .htaccess file on the hyphenated domain? I don't have direct control over the hyphenated domain, and I'd like to be able to know exactly what we need to do so I can request help from my IT department. I'd appreciate hearing your wisdom. Thanks!

    Web Design | | SheriGolla
    0
  • GardenBeet


    The website in question was hacked four years ago and there was porn on the servers. It was used as a peer to peer torrent streamer.  The images were deleted. We have just found inappropriate inward bound links (with great link juice!!)  - how can we remove these links - or should we? any advice would be appreciated thanks

    Link Building | | GardenBeet
    0
  • themegroup


    Hello all! While doing some routine health checks on a few of our client sites, I spotted that a new client of ours - who's website was not designed built by us - is returning a 500 internal server error when I try to look at the robots.txt file. As we don't host / maintain their site, I would have to go through their head office to get this changed, which isn't a problem but I just wanted to check whether this error will actually be having a negative effect on their site / whether there's a benefit to getting this changed? Thanks in advance!

    Technical SEO | | themegroup
    0
  • kimwetter


    I've been confused by some URLs that are showing up as errors in our GWT account. They seem to just be randomly generated alphanumeric strings that Google is reporting as 404 errors. The pages do 404 because nothing ever existed there or was linked to. Here are some examples that are just off of our root domain: /JEzjLs2wBR0D6wILPy0RCkM/WFRnUK9JrDyRoVCnR8= /MevaBpcKoXnbHJpoTI5P42QPmQpjEPBlYffwY8Mc5I= /YAKM15iU846X/ymikGEPsdq 26PUoIYSwfb8 FBh34= I haven't been able to track down these character strings in any internet index or anywhere in our source code so I have no idea why Google is reporting them. We've been pretty vigilant lately about duplicate content and thin content issues and my concern is that there are an unspecified number of urls like this that Google thinks exist but don't really. Has anyone else seen GWT reporting errors like this for their site? Does anyone have any clue why Google would report them as errors?

    Reporting & Analytics | | kimwetter
    0
  • PeterAlexLeigh


    What does the forum think the best strategy for social bookmarking is? Obviously white hat, user generated would be preferable but looking slightly darker; you can obviously get services that create social bookmarks over a period of several weeks, but are they worth the investment?

    Branding | | PeterAlexLeigh
    2
  • Techboy


    I have a number of images on my website with a watermark. We changed the watermark (on all of our images) in May, but when I search for my site getmecooking in Google Image Search, it still shows the old watermark (the old one is grey, the new one is orange). Is Google not updating the images its search results because they are cached in Google? Or because it is ignoring my images, having downloaded them once? Should we be giving our images a version number (at the end of the file name)? Our website cache is set to 7 days, so that's not the issue. Thanks.

    Technical SEO | | Techboy
    0
  • TomBarker82


    Hi I am getting conflicting advice about using collapsible / Expanding content within a site I am working on and it effecting Google rankings, just wondered what the general consensus is. http://www.sethalling.com/plugins/wp-faqs-pro/ Mike

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomBarker82
    0
  • Melonmedia


    This is more of a conversion and usability question than an SEO question. Does anyone know if there's any comprehensive research about the accuracy of the well-known "How did you find out about us" question in web forms? I need to convince a customer that they shouldn't put the question in their form, at least not the way they do now. I hope someone can refer me to a credible online source / article about this subject?

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | Melonmedia
    0
  • gemcomp123


    Hi all, I'm very new to SEO and still learning a lot. Is it considered a black hat tactic to wrap a link in a DIV tag, with display set to none (hidden div), and what can the repercussions be? From what I've learnt so far, is that this is a very unethical thing to be doing, and that the site hosting these links can end up being removed from Google/Bing/etc indexes completely. Is this true? The site hosting these links is a group/parent site for a brand, and each hidden link points to one of the child sites (similar sites, but different companies in different areas). Thanks in advance!

    Technical SEO | | gemcomp123
    0
  • fdb


    I just signed up for SEOMoz and sent my site through the first crawl. I use the tilde in my rewritten URLs. This threw my entire site into the Notice section 301 (permanent redirect) since each page redirects to the exact URL with the ~, not the %7e. I find conflicting information on the web - you can use the tilde in more recent coding guidelines where you couldn't in the old. It would be a huge thing to change every page in my site to use an underscore instead of a tilde int he URL. If Google is like SEOMoz and is 301 redirecting every page on the site, then I'll do it, but is it just an SEOMoz thing? I ran my site through Firebug and and all my pages show the 200 response header, not the 301 redirect. Thanks for any help you can provide.

    Moz Pro | | fdb
    0
  • JesseCWalker


    I noticed one of the negatively correlated ranking factors was length of URL.  I'm building a page from scratch, we are trying to rank for 'Minneapolis Fitness' and 'Minneapolis Massage'. Is www.minnnepolismassageandfitness.com  just ridiculously long?  Or does the exact match outweigh the penalty for URL length?

    On-Page Optimization | | JesseCWalker
    2
  • RobertFisher


    We utilize a dedicated server to host roughly 60 sites on. The server is with a company that utilizes a lady who drives race cars.... About 4 months ago we realized we had a group of sites down thanks to monitoring alerts and checked it out. All were on the same IP address and the sites on the other IP address were still up and functioning well. When we contacted the support at first we were stonewalled, but eventually they said there was a problem and it was resolved within about 2 hours. Up until recently we had no problems. As a part of our ongoing SEO we check page load speed for our clients. A few days ago a client who has their site hosted by the same company was running very slow (about 8 seconds to load without cache). We ran every check we could and could not find a reason on our end. The client called the host and were told they needed to be on some other type of server (with the host) at a fee increase of roughly $10 per month. Yesterday, we noticed one group of sites on our server was down and, again, it was one IP address with about 8 sites on it. On chat with support, they kept saying it was our ISP. (We speed tested on multiple computers and were 22MB down and 9MB up +/-2MB). We ran a trace on the IP address and it went through without a problem on three occassions over about ten minutes. After about 30 minutes the sites were back up. Here's the twist: we had a couple of people in the building who were on other ISP's try and the sites came up and loaded on their machines. Does anyone have any idea as to what the issue is?

    Technical SEO | | RobertFisher
    0
  • ShaMenz


    Hi, A client's site was previously built in Joomla and he wants us to reproduce content that was in there, but the Joomla site is no longer live and has come to me as an archive containing all the files and folders that were included. So, I am looking at the files and folders without Joomla installed. Can someone tell me quickly how to find the where the actual page content was stored? I started looking, but there are some folders I cannot open and nothing that looks as I expected. Would appreciate a hint or two from someone who knows Joomla well.. Life is too short! Thanks Sha

    Technical SEO | | ShaMenz
    0
  • adriandg


    Hey Mozzers, I've been working on a bunch of different templates lately to approach various companies in our industry for link exchanges.  But I'm somewhat stumped on what the best approach would be.  I want to convey the message that a link exchange would be beneficial to their ranking in search engines, but I don't want to come off sounding overly spammy. Do you have a template that you have found worked well for you? Share it with us!

    Link Building | | adriandg
    0
  • bizarro1000


    Hi, I have recently been getting my comparison website redesigned and developed onto wordpress and the site is now 90% complete. Part of the redesign has meant that there are now dynamic urls in the format: http://www.mywebsite.com/10-pounds-productss/?display=cost&value=10 I have other pages similar to this but with different content for the different price ranges and these are linked to from the menus: http://www.mywebsite.com/20-pounds-products/?display=cost&value=20 Now my questions are: 1. I am using Joost's All-in-one SEO plugin and this adds a canonical tag to the page that is pointing to http://www.mywebsite.com/10-pounds-products/ which is the permalink. Is this OK as it is or should i change this to http://www.mywebsite.com/10-pounds-products/?display=cost&value=10 2. Which URL will get indexed, what gets shown as the display URL in the SERPs and what page will users land on? I'm a bit confused so apologies if these seem like silly questions. Thanks

    Technical SEO | | bizarro1000
    0
  • jorgediaz


    Hi there! We have similar websites in different countries (it's an ecommerce site). Some times, those websites share the same language and, for example, people from Mexico end up in a page from our website in Argentina. Therefore they see our products in their language buy in a foreign currency. We would like to show them a pop-up (like a shadowbox) depending on their IP to allow them to go to their local website. There wouldn't be any redirect. Would that affect our rankings in any way? Would Googlebots see that as well? Thanks!

    International SEO | | jorgediaz
    0
  • FastLearner


    I have a site that I had removed from the wayback machine because I didn't want old versions to show. However I noticed that in many seo tools the site now always shows a domain age of zero instead of 6 years ago when I registered it. My question is what do the actual search engines use to determine age when they factor it into the ranking algorithm? By having it removed from the wayback machine, does that make the search engines think the site is brand new? Thanks

    Technical SEO | | FastLearner
    0

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