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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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  • NoisyLittleMonkey


    When submitting compressed sitemaps to Google I normally use the a file named sitemap.gz A customer is banging on that his web guy says that sitemap.xml.gz is a better format. Google spiders sitemap.gz just fine and in Webmaster Tools everything looks OK... Interested to know other SEOmoz Pro's preferences here and also to check I haven't made an error that is going to bite me in the ass soon! Over to you.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoisyLittleMonkey
    0
  • GlenBOB


    Hi, My website is based in Ireland on a .ie domain & now I would like to enter the UK market on a .co.uk Is it ok for me to duplicate my .ie website and provide all the information on a .co.uk OR is this considered duplicate content in terms of Google. (I'm led to believe that your own content on my domain's is not considered duplicate & this is only considered duplicate content when you go from .com to .ie, .co.uk etc). (all content, images, branding are my own).

    Content Development | | GlenBOB
    0
  • kchandler


    So i have a client that sends me a link once a week about buying followers for social media profiles. Each time i tell him if it seems to good to be true... then its too good to be true! What are your guys thoughts, experiences, feelings? Here are a few examples: http://www.targetedtraffic.int.tc http://www.fbfandamonium.com

    Social Media | | kchandler
    0
  • adriandg


    Do you have any tricks to getting reviews to stick on yelp? Whenever we ask out customers to review us on there their reviews end up getting "detected" as fakes. I have tried it out myself, and the only way i've gotten them to stick is making several reviews of various different local businesses with average ratings and then dropping one in for the client with a better rating. Perhaps this is a little on the blackhat/greyhat side of things.  But if our customers are legitimatly trying to review us and it doesn't stick, i don't feel all that bad taking this route, the only real problem is time consumed. What about google? has anyone had any luck gaining more reviews for their client on google?

    Image & Video Optimization | | adriandg
    0
  • simoncmason


    Does anyone have a recommendation for the best xml sitemap plugin for wordpress sites or do you steer clear of plugins and use a sitemap generator then load it up to the root manually?

    Technical SEO | | simoncmason
    0
  • Mulith


    Hi All, I've assembled a collection of 5 closely related articles each about 700 words for publishing by linking to them from on one of my pages and would appreciate some advice on the role out of these articles. Backround: My site is a listings based site and a majority of the content is published on my competitors sites too. This is because advertisers are aiming to spread there adverts wide with the hope of generating more responses. The page I'm targeting ranks 11th but I would like to link it to some new articles and guides to beef it up a bit. My main focus is to rank better for the page that links to these articles and as a result I write up an introduction to the article/guide which serves as my unique content. Question: Is it better to drip feed the new articles onto the site or would it be best to get as much unique content on as quickly as possible to increase the ratio of unique content vs. external duplicate content on the page that links to these articles**?** Thank you in advance.

    On-Page Optimization | | Mulith
    0
  • SEOed


    Hey guys, been a longtime SEOmoz user, only just getting heavily into SEO now and this is my first query, apologies if it's simple to answer but I have been doing my research! My website is http://www.lyricstatus.com - basically it's a lyrics website. Rightly or wrongly, I'm using Google Custom Search Engine on my website for search, as well as jQuery auto-suggest - please ignore the latter for now. My problem is that when I launched the site I had a complex AJAX Browse page, so Google couldn't see static links to all my pages, thus it only indexed certain pages that did have static links. This led to my searches on my site using the Google CSE being useless as very few pages were indexed. I've since dropped the complex AJAX links and replaced it with easy static links. However, this was a few weeks ago now and still Google won't fully index my site. Try doing a search for "Justin Timberlake" (don't use the auto-suggest, just click the "Search" button) and it's clear that the site still hasn't been fully indexed! I'm really not too sure what else to do, other than wait and hope, which doesn't seem like a very proactive thing to do! My only other suspicion is that Google sees my site as more duplicate content, but surely it must be ok with indexing multiple lyrics sites since there are plenty of different ones ranking in Google. Any help or advice greatly appreciated guys!

    Technical SEO | | SEOed
    0
  • thenorrisgroup


    I've been moved to a busines development part of the business but I'm still in charge of all of our SEO and SEM. I was only an advanced beginner to begin with but our needs have grown. I'm not sure whether to contract with one or two people. Can someone be extremely well versed in all things SEO and SEM or is it better to get two people on board that might serve as a better sounding board? While they certainly work together, both are a constant moving target and it requires us to stay on top of trends and white hat policies of all the major players. My worst nightmare is to get someone that tries to game the system and screws up our rankings long term.

    Industry News | | thenorrisgroup
    0
  • adriandg


    I just recently learned that changing your page title earns you a google penalty.  Unfortunately i learned this after playing around with my page titles a bit to get the most optimal page titles.  Does anybody know how long this google penalty lasts? is it forever? or just temporary?

    On-Page Optimization | | adriandg
    0
  • teconsite.com


    Hello, We have 3 web directories, and I wonder if it is legal for search engines to ask people who want to be in the directory to link to a particular website in order to be in our directory. I mean, it is free adding the url in the directory but if they lwant to be in the directory they have to ink to a website we have decided.
    Is this correct, or is punishable? Thanks!

    Link Building | | teconsite.com
    0
  • Function5


    Hi, I have a WordPress-based site and overall everything is working well. However, I can't seem to figure out how to get apostrophes and other characters to display normally. Now, the problem isn't that they are displaying as code to normal visitors or up in the title bar, they are displaying as code to Google's bots as well as to SEOMOZ. Example: Normal visitor sees: About **** | **** - Metro Vancouver's IT & Web Experts Google and SEOMOZ see: About **** | **** - Metro Vancouver's IT & Web Experts I've played around with different ways of typing the title (not using character codes vs. using character codes) and nothing seems to work. Any help or explanation would be appreciated.

    Technical SEO | | Function5
    0
  • hfranz


    Should I park a domain or Redirect? And what is the best way? I need to switch our domain name. I currently have all of our domains redirecting to our main website. I have set up there own hosting in our cpanel account so I could redirect them to our main domain. Was this too many steps? I tried putting all of our domains in our main domains, .htaccess file, and redirected them to our main website, but they did not work. So that is why I set up there own cpanel accounts. Now they work fine. However, my hosting company told me that I could just park the domain on our current domains account.  If I can redirect all of these domain in one place, that would be great. I thought that a parked domain is considered duplicate websites, as both urls work, displaying the entire website with both urls. So Would I have to re upload our entire website to the account that I want as our main domain? Or is there another way of going about doing this?

    Web Design | | hfranz
    0
  • BradBorst


    I have a two-part question: 1.  I know that bold and italicized font can help keywords rank better.  I have a block of regular text on my site that is really more for SEO than anything else.  If I reduce the font size, will it have an impact on the importance of the text? 2.  If you reduce the size of font enclosed in header tags, such as, reducing h1 text to 8 px font, does that have an impact on the importance of the text within that h1 tag?

    On-Page Optimization | | BradBorst
    0
  • CPLDistribution


    I have been asked to review an old website to an identify opportunities for increasing search engine traffic. Whilst reviewing the site I came across a strange loop. On each page there is a link to printer friendly version: http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes That page also has a link to a printer friendly version http://www.websitename.co.uk/index.php?pageid=7&printfriendly=yes&printfriendly=yes and so on and so on....... Some of these pages are being included in Google's index. I appreciate that this can't be a good thing, however, I am not 100% sure as to the extent to which it is a bad thing and the priority that should be given to getting it sorted. Just wandering what views people have on the issues this may cause?

    Technical SEO | | CPLDistribution
    0
  • BenRush


    Hi All, Lets assume there is site A and site B, both sites are live on the internet today as standalone businesses, but they sell very similar products. Site B has built up some link equity and will eventually become the domain for site A due to an organisational re-brand. For the time being however site A will remain, but site B needs to disappear temporarily, but not lose the link equity which has been built up against it. My current thinking is to 302 redirect site B to site A such that users and search bots accessing site B will be redirected to site A whilst leaving the link equity that exists against site B fully intact and allowing us to continue to grow it should we wish to. The question is, does anybody have a view on how long it is safe to use a 302 temporary redirect for? i.e., is 8-10 months to long. Thanks, Ben

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BenRush
    0
  • PaulRogers


    I am working on a website that has a regularly updated Wordpress blog and am unsure whether or not the category and tag pages should be indexable. The blog posts are often outranked by the tag and category pages and they are ultimately leaving me with a duplicate content issue. With this in mind, I assumed that the best thing to do would be to remove the tag and category pages from the index, but after speaking to someone else about the issue, I am no longer sure. I have tried researching online, but there isn't anything that provided any further information. Please can anyone with any experience of dealing with issues like this or with any knowledge of the topic help me to resolve this annoying issue. Any input will be greatly appreciated. Thanks Paul

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulRogers
    0
  • jmansd


    If I have Hundreds of pages with 404 and 500 erros should set up 301 redirects for all of them?  Some of the pages have external links, some don't.

    Web Design | | jmansd
    0
  • Jingo01


    Possibly seems a strange question, but let me clarify... I have a new site in mind and all the domain names I was considering for it have been taken (I want a .com or a .net if at all possible). However, I can get the domain with a z at the end rather than an s Example: www.keyword-guides.com is taken, but www.keyword-guidez.com is available. Am I completely wrong in thinking that it will still match well for anyone searching Keyword Guide, and should match fairly well (even though it is a partial match) for people searching Keyword Guides. As the keyword is the most relevant bit of the domain, and as the first word on the domain is given the most weight, will having Z instead of S at the end make any difference at all? Personally, I don't really like the Z option, but if it would have no (or little) impact on my SEO efforts, I could live with it.

    On-Page Optimization | | Jingo01
    0
  • bhsiao


    Hi, I have a website that is about 7 years old. I had been using index.html as the home page. When I redesigned my site about 3 months ago I changed it to default.html. The old index.html page was still on my server. I just realized my mistake. All of my links to the home page lead to the new default.html. However, people are still landing on the old index.html. I have change the old index.html to the new design  but that means i have 2 "home" pages out there. Should i delete one? Should I leave them both there but use the canonical tag for one so it is not considered duplicate content? What is best for my rankings?

    Content Development | | bhsiao
    0
  • A_Q


    Hello, We are looking at creating an eCommerce section to a website and we are just weighing up the options: Magento - host on hour own server - great but it can often be very slow when hosting a shared server. Shopify - hosted solution but hosting is in the US and we are in the UK and shop will be hosted on a subdomain as a result Build our own solution - time consuming and costly There are two issues that have arisen from this situation.... Is it worse for SEO to host your store in a different country or to host in your country but your store potentially run slower? I'm swaying to the side of the argument that says give your users a good and fast experience instead of worrying about where you host the store. Bearing in mind that the main website will be hosted in the UK anyway and it is just the subdomain that will be hosted in the US. Just wondered if anybody has had experience with this or if I'm missing something? All feedback greatly appreciated! Thanks, Elias

    International SEO | | A_Q
    0
  • scanlin


    The SEOmoz crawl diagnostic tool is complaining that I'm missing a meta description tag from a file that is an RSS xml file. In my <channel>section I do have a <description>tag. Is this a bug in the SEOmoz tool or do I need to add another tag to satisify the warning?</description></channel>

    Moz Pro | | scanlin
    0
  • DonnieCooper


    I'm curious to know what other mozzers think about silo's... Can we first all agree that a flat site architecture is the best practice? Relevant pages should be grouped together. Shorter, broader and (usually) therefore higher volume keywords should be towards the top of each category. Navigation should flow from general to specific. Agreed? As Google say's on page 10 of their SEO Starter Guide, "you should think about how visitors will go from a general page (your root page) to a page containing more specific content ." OK, we all agree so far, right? Great! Enter my question: Bruce Clay (among others) seem to recommend siloing as a best practice. While Richard Baxter (and many others @ SEOmoz), seem to view silos as a problem. Me? I've practiced (relevant) internal cross linking, and have intentionally avoided siloing in almost all cases. What about you? Is there a time and place to use silos? If so, when and where? If not, how do we rectify the seemingly huge differences of opinions between expert folks such as Baxter and Clay?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DonnieCooper
    7
  • dignan99


    If anyone here is familiar with local SEO, you may have noticed that there are different local results for: "city + Keyword" and just the "keyword". When building links will you end up targeting both with a geo modifier in the link, or is it beneficial to build links without the geo modifer for the keyword?

    Link Building | | dignan99
    0
  • lhc67


    Hi, I was recently approached by LinkWorth about their services. I've never used them or services like theirs before. Does anyone have recent experience with them? I haven't thoroughly reviewed their services yet but I'm curious. I'd love to hear from you if you've worked with them. Thank you! LHC

    Link Building | | lhc67
    0
  • theideapeople


    I'm attending for the first time this year and I am just curious as to what to expect with attendance, etc.  🙂

    Industry Events | | theideapeople
    0
  • netviper


    I have a friend whose client is giving away something for free if you leave a Google Review for his site.  I recall that being not well liked by Google and could potentially end up in a Penalty.  The site is ranking really poorly in Google but well in Yahoo/Bing so I am wondering if that is what happened. What are you opinions?

    On-Page Optimization | | netviper
    0
  • donthe


    Is it better to use the robots meta noindex, follow tag for paging, (page 2, page 3) of Category Pages which lists items within each category or just let Google index these pages Before Panda I was not using noindex because I figured if page 2 is in Google's index then the items on page 2 are more likely to be in Google's index. Also then each item has an internal link So after I got hit by panda, I'm thinking well page 2 has no unique content only a list of links with a short excerpt from each item which can be found on each items page so it's not unique content, maybe that contributed to Panda penalty. So I place the meta tag noindex, follow on every page 2,3 for each category page. Page 1 of each category page has a short introduction so i hope that it is enough to make it "thick" content (is that a word :-))  My visitors don't want long introductions, it hurts bounce rate and time on site. Now I'm wondering if that is common practice and if items on page 2 are less likely to be indexed since they have no internal links from an indexed page Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donthe
    0
  • MarloSchneider


    So the ratio is MozTrust to MozRank, but what is this good for?  What can I deduce from this and what can I use it for?

    Moz Pro | | MarloSchneider
    2

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