Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

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!


  • Is there a way to consolidate link prospects in Moz or should we look for an external tool e.g. Raven Tools, Buzz Stream etc.? Thanks. 🙂

    Link Building | | HeatherBakerTopLine
    0

  • Hi Guys, Was wondering if anyone knows of any tools which can group large lists of keywords. Currently using http://www.wordstream.com/keyword-grouper Any other good tools to check out? Cheers.

    Keyword Research | | jayoliverwright
    0

  • UPDATE: Found a source that says that Google recognizes the redirects, so it should be fine leaving backlinks as is - https://www.seroundtable.com/google-link-https-20552.html Hi again Mozers, When a site's protocol is changed from http to https, what impact would it have on the backlinks? Especially, when the backlinks doesn't contain any protocal mentioned. Thanks in advance Malika

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika1
    0

  • Hi Mozers, I have come across some websites with their https version going to a totally different website. For example, http://www.samplesite1.com will load fine but when the protocol is changed to https (https://www.samplesite1.com) it will go to a total different domain say, https://www.samplesite2.com How does this happen, in technical sense? In the warning from browser, it says the the security certificate is from the other website but I would like to understand how this happens and how it impacts SEO. I seem to be not able to understand the relationship of this error and SEO impact. Thanks in advance for your response. Malika

    Web Design | | Malika1
    0

  • I am working around development site. All pages are 'nofollow'. What can I advice on, when it come to SEO and is there any good article or checklist that I can go through. One thing I wanted to know is how can I check for broken links or meta data or any other SEO analytics if the page is 'nofollow' and I cannot crawl it with screaming frog or any other tools.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atlanticocean
    0

  • Do you focus on article submission, social media backlinks or what?

    Content Development | | shauna7084
    0

  • Hey there, just a brief opinion question: Do you see any benefit of adding schema.org structured data markup to my breadcrumbs if they are already displaying in SERPs without markup? Are there mayble other long term benefits to using the markup even if I will not notice any short-term effect in SERPs? Cheers, Jochen

    On-Page Optimization | | Online-Marketing-Guy
    0

  • Hi there, I've spent hours reading posts on duplicate content and googling this but I'm still not sure what to do. We created a site that has two WP installs for a company with two different locations - the landing page is website.com and links to WP install 1 (website.com/city1),  and WP install 2 (website.com/city2). They specifically wanted two different sites so they could be managed by staff at either location. However some of the pages have the same content - ie. services, policies, etc. so all of those are showing errors for duplicate content. All pages have different city-specific URL's and meta-descriptions but that clearly doesn't help. We can't redirect the "duplicate" pages because then it would take the user to the other city's specific site. Is there anything we can do?? Is this going to significantly damage rankings? Thanks kindly for any help you can provide.

    Moz Bar | | charlie007
    1

  • I've noticed that Google Plus seems to have a larger influence on ranking than other social networks, especially for one of our competitors. We haven't started using Google Plus, and I'm wondering if, from an SEO standpoint, it's worth putting energy into after last month's changes. TL;DR: After last month's changes, is Google Plus still an important ranking signal?

    Social Media | | 4RS_John
    1

  • We have a situation on twiends where a number of our 'dead' user pages have generated links for us over the years. Our options are to 404 them, 301 them to the home page, or just serve back the home page with a canonical tag. We've been 404'ing them for years, but i understand that we lose all the link juice from doing this. Correct me if I'm wrong? Our next plan would be to 301 them to the home page. Probably the best solution but our concern is if a user page is only temporarily down (under review, etc) it could be permanently removed from the index, or at least cached for a very long time. A final plan is to just serve back the home page on the old URL, with a canonical tag pointing to the home page URL. This is quick, retains most of the link juice, and allows the URL to become active again in future. The problem is that there could be 100,000's of these. Q1) Is it a problem to have 100,000 URLs pointing to a primary with a rel=canonical tag? (Problem for Google?) Q2) How long does it take a canonical duplicate page to become unique in the index again if the tag is removed? Will google recrawl it and add it back into the index? Do we need to use WMT to speed this process up? Thanks

    On-Page Optimization | | dsumter
    0

  • What should you do with private 'logged in' pages from a seo perspective? They're not visible to crawlers and shouldn't be indexed, so what is best practice? Believe it or not, we have found quite a few back links to private pages and want to get the ranking benefit from them without them being indexed. Eg: http://twiends.com/settings (Only logged in user can see the page) 302 them: We can redirect users/crawlers temporarily, but I believe this is not ideal from a seo perspective? Do we lose the link juice to this page? 301 them: We can do a permanent redirect with a short cache time. We preserve most link juice now, but we probably mess up the users browser. Users trying to reach a private page while logged out may have issues reaching it after logged in. **Serve another page with rel=canonical tag: **We could serve back the home page without changing the URL. We use a canonical tag to tell the crawlers that it's a duplicate of the home page. We keep most of the link juice, and the browser is unaffected. Yes, a user might share that different URL now, but its unlikely. We've been doing 302's up until now, now we're testing the third option. How do others solve this problem? Is there a problem with it? Any advice appreciated.

    On-Page Optimization | | dsumter
    0

  • Hi, Is there anything wrong with over 100   301 reditects on my wordpress website and how do you go about redirecting a 301 again  for example   abc.com redirects to bca.com now i want to redirect bca.com to ert.com any problems with this setup? Regards

    Technical SEO | | ReSEOlve
    0

  • Hi, I have a client with a wix platform and I was wondering about the letters and numbers on the url website.com/#!my-blog/lw27x  when it comes to SEO will this effect the overall rankings as I can not seem to change them and any tips for ranking in the weddings niche? Regards Steve

    On-Page Optimization | | ReSEOlve
    1

  • What is the thoughts on the following? Does it look dodgy to you?  Is there any SEO value? 1. Social Bookmarking
    2. Reddit Sharing
    3. Stumbleupon Sharing
    4. Profile Creation
    5. PPT Submission
    6. PPT Promotion
    7. Blog Submission
    8. Blog Promotion

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman10
    0

  • Hi there added a competitors metrics to see what they were doing and to my amazement they seem to have 1000+ links surely this is link farming considering we stay in a very remote area. also why would he be rewarded for this not punished? imgur.com/18dUqNL 18dUqNL 18dUqNL

    Technical SEO | | ShauniBROWN
    2

  • Hi guys this is a 2 part question so hoping someone is able to assist! 🙂 I own the www.industrytix.com.au/ website which ive been updating manually in Dreamweaver for last 6+ years, it has very high Organic Rankings for most of my targeted keywords which are: industry tix
    Industry tickets
    breakfest tickets
    Stereosonic tickets
    CUban Club tickets
    etc etc - essentially names of events Im currently about 90% of the way through replicating/improving the content of the website using a Wordpress Theme which is located at www.industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/ so all the URLs/Sites are currently running concurrently. Im using Eventum Theme for hosting events and Woocommerce plugin for products so there is a slighy disconnect between the 'Event Page' and 'Buy tickets/Product page" **For example: 
    Event page: **http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/breakfest-perth/ Ticket/product page: http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/product/breakfest-ticket-perth/ Next step is to kill off the old outdated homepage and recirrect all the event pages to the new ones - for retaining SEO value is there a best practices for completing this? (I am planning to move the New WP Installation into the root folder from the /buy-tickets/ folder where its currently staged. For example of OLD to NEW redirrection requirements:
    OLD http://www.industrytix.com.au/cuban-club-perth-tickets.php
    NEW http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/cuban-club-perth-nyd/ OLD http://www.industrytix.com.au/breakfest-tickets.php
    NEW EVENT PAGE http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/breakfest-perth/
    Nicket/product page: http://industrytix.com.au/buy-tickets/product/breakfest-ticket-perth/ Any other feedback improvements as far as retaining SEO and not keyword stuffing etc? Thanking you all in advance for taking the time to read this 🙂

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IsaCleanse
    0

  • Hi everyone, I hope you all had a wonderful week! This week's discussion question comes from Tuesday's (December 😎 blog post by John-Henry Scherck, The Step-by-Step Guide to Turning Link Prospectors into Lead Generators. From the post: "Digital marketing is a pretty introverted industry. This tends to make us a bit hesitant to embrace sales and outbound selling. There’s no beating around the bush: Sales can be difficult, scary, uncomfortable, and awkward — but if you want to grow your client base, it may require getting out of your comfort zone." John-Henry shows us the opportunity for people who are good at link prospecting to apply those skills to lead generation, improving business opportunities by creatively using the skills they already have. SEOs and marketers wear many hats, and have a diverse skill set at their disposal—how else can we apply the skills we already have in creative ways?

    Industry News | | MattRoney
    5

  • Hey there, 
    certain pages of our website have mobile versions like m.mysite.com/content-xyz. On the desktop pages (i.e. mysite.com/content-xyz) we have "rich snippets for ratings" marked up and displayed in SERPs. However the ratings also appear in mobile search results when SERPS reference the mobile version of the page (m.mysite.com/content-xyz) which doesn't have any ratings or markup? I am trying to figure out how Google treats mobile versions of a page in relation to the desktop version in relation to structured data (breadcrumbs etc.)? Would you always mark up both versions to be the same? Any ideas and thoughts on this are greatly appreciated. Cheers, Jochen rich Snippets for Ratings

    On-Page Optimization | | Online-Marketing-Guy
    1

  • I am hoping someone could help us determine why we generally rank quite poorly compared to our competition, despite leading in every single Competitive Metric.  We get outranked on a term where the Page Grade gives us an "A", and we best the competitor on each of the metrics.  Where would those with more experience suggest we start looking? rank.jpg

    Moz Pro | | Yardboy
    0

  • Hi Moz community! So when i ran a site crawl to analyze page issues for a site that has been in our account for some time now, it only showed 10 high priority (404) issues...yet when i logged into wordpress and installed yoast premium and connected to google search console, around 900 404s showed up....(we have not blocked off any pages to be crawled) does anyone know a reason why this happens?

    Feature Requests | | rooify
    0

  • I have a question about Google my Business. Currently I have a business that's been verified. I would like to add another business with the same address. The businesses are different (name, website, phone number) but the primary address is the same. Is this something that can be done? Thanks for your help.

    Local Website Optimization | | Kdruckenbrod
    0

  • Hi Guys, I am helping out an agency who have had a couple of site hacked on their server. I can confirm by correlating increase in not found errors and drop in rankings, that the drop was definitely hack based although the site had no manual action notice from Google. The site looks to have been fixed i.e all not found pages look to have been sorted. Obviously there are some dodgy backlinks to now non existant pages but it looks like two months on no sign of a recovery. Is this normal?, Could the site still be hacked and the web designer is claming it has been cleaned up? I am used to dealing with hacked sites when there has been a manual action listed and then it's quite easy to complete the clean up work, submit a reconsideration and then get the manual action revoked but when you don't receieve a manual notification and the site doesn't recover, what do you do? Kind Regards Neil

    Technical SEO | | nezona
    0

  • Occasionally some of our clients receive editorial mentions and links in which the author adds utm parameters to the outbound links on their blog. The links are always natural, never compensated, and followed.  However, they are sometimes listed as utm_source=affiliate even thought we have no existing affiliate relationship with the author.  My practice has been to ask the author to add a rel="norewrite" attribute to the link to remove any trace of the word affiliate. I have read that utm parameters do not affect link juice transfer, however, given the inaccurate "affiliate" source, I wouldn't want Google to misunderstand and think that we are compensating people for followed editorial links. Should I continue following this practice, or is it fine to leave these links as they are? Thanks!

    Industry News | | Terakeet
    0

  • Hi I work on an ecommerce site and wondered if anyone had tested grid view vs. list view on product listing pages? We use list view, but I think grid view might work better. Thanks

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | BeckyKey
    0

  • We recently switched over a .com site to a new server. The .com site had a .co.uk domain redirecting to it previously, but when the switchover happened, the .co.uk was forgotten about. We have now realised what has happened, but not before taking a hit with our rankings. The .co.uk is still indexed in Google and now that we have sorted the redirects they are pointing to the right places. My question now; is there anything further I need to do? I know that the .co.uk will soon be removed from the SERPs, but I just want to make sure I haven't forgotten anything.

    Technical SEO | | Ben_Malkin_Develo
    0

  • Hello Every one, I have a Wordpress website in which i installed All in SEO plugin and wrote meta titles and descriptions for each and every page and posts and submitted website to index. But after Google crawl the Meta Titles and Descriptions shown by Google are something different that are not found in Content. Even i verified the Cached version of the website and gone through Source code that crawled at that moment. the meta title which i have written is present there. Apart from this, the same URL's are displaying perfect meta titles and descriptions which i wrote in Yahoo and Bing Search Engines. Can anyone explain me how to resolve this issue. Website URL: thenewyou (dot) in Regards,

    Technical SEO | | SatishSEOSiren
    0

  • Hi MOZers, This probably is a dumb question but I have a case where the robots.tags has an image url blocked but this image is used on a page (lets call it Page A) which can be indexed. If the image on Page A has an Alt tags, then how is this information digested by crawlers? A) would Google totally ignore the image and the ALT tags information? OR B) Google would consider the ALT tags information? I am asking this because all the images on the website are blocked by robots.txt at the moment but I would really like website crawlers to crawl the alt tags information. Chances are that I will ask the webmaster to allow indexing of images too but I would like to understand what's happening currently. Looking forward to all your responses 🙂 Malika

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika1
    1

  • This newly created site has a DA of 1 and PA of 1, no backlinks, no optimized urls, the keyword they ranked better than us on was listed a total of 6 times on the homepage. Our PA is 29 and DA is 18 for the page that ranks for this keyword. They really copied a few elements of our site but made sure to change a few things, but also list at the bottom of their site 5 keywords that are crucial to our niche industry but they're all linking to the same page. Any ideas? It's an SEO guy running the site, we've watched them toy with adwords trying to be number 1, but not liking the price, so they are here and there with it. Mainly I don't see why they'd rank better for this keyword, we our site have prolly 500% more content that's both of quality and relevance to our customers, in the form of Pdfs, infographics, help sections, and video. Very baffled here, any advice would rock!

    Competitive Research | | Deacyde
    1

  • What would be the negative aspects to sending customer's requests for a backlink in conjunction with asking how their experience with us was? Backlinks are one of the toughest for our niche industry to acquire and this seems like one of the best angles to cover, since we have .edu , .mil , .gov , and many bigname companies making purchases from us. Would if be wrong to offer a small 5% discount during their next purchase if they create a backlink with us? Or if we added a " Customer's we've served " section including their logo or text link? Thank you! I hope you're all having an awesome day / week / month!

    Link Building | | Deacyde
    1

  • Hi everyone, I've been researching for the past hour and I cannot find a definitive answer anywhere! Can someone tell me if page anchors affect SEO at all? I have a client that has 9 page anchors on one landing page on their website - which means if you were to scroll through their website, the page is really really long! I always thought that by using page anchors instead of sending users through to a dedicated landing page, ranking for those keywords makes it harder because a search spider will read all the content on that landing page and not know how to rank for individual keywords? Am I wrong? The client in particular sells furniture, so on their landing page they have page anchors that jump the user down to "tables" or "chairs" or "lighting" for example. You can then click on one of the product images listed in that section of the page anchor and go through to an individual product page. Can anyone shed any light on this? Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz
    1

  • Hi, We had a site with many bad links pointing to it (.co.uk). It was knocked from the SERPS. We tried to manually ask webmasters to remove links.Then submitted a Disavow and a recon request. We have since moved the site to a new URL (.com) about a year ago. As the company needed it's customer to find them still. We 301 redirected the .co.uk to the .com There are still lots of bad links pointing to the .co.uk. The questions are: #1 Do we stop the 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com now? The .co.uk is not showing in the rankings. We could  have a basic holding page on the .co.uk with 'we have moved' (No link). Or just switch it off. #2 If we keep the .co.uk 301 to the .com, shall we upload disavow to .com webmasters tools or .co.uk webmasters tools. I ask this because someone else had uploaded the .co.uk's disavow list of spam links to the .com webmasters tools. Is this bad? Thanks in advance for any advise or insight!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia
    0

  • Hi all, I have scanned the community forum thoroughly to find a solution to this issue and noticed some detailed and informed responses, but I am not sure which apply to the issue we are currently having. We are receiving a lot of 803 Crawl Attempt Errors on a weekly basis for our site www.mangofurniture.co.uk and also our homepage isn't ranking and I can't help but think that the two are linked. We have some rankings for the internal pages and have a couple of other sites that use the same template as www.mangofurniture.co.uk that are doing well with no crawl attempt errors and strong homepage rankings. There are a lot of great resources out there on the Moz forum and elsewhere but I am little unsure what applies to our problem or whether to two are linked at all. We have tried rewriting the homepage and developing the internal linking system but to no success as yet. Also, because the site is fairly new so the link profile is quite small at present. Any advice regarding this would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks in advance.

    Technical SEO | | FurnitureGeek
    0

  • If a website has a low DA (not because of spam. Just because it's new or because there isn't a ton of content) but it is industry specific/relevant, then is that worth pursuing? I have read how relevancy is supposed to be a major portion determining a link's benefit, but I"m leery about about something with a low DA - like under 15 low. Thanks, Ruben

    Algorithm Updates | | KempRugeLawGroup
    0

  • Hello, My product sells in both USA and UK, childrens sleepwear.  I am not quite sure whether my onsite optimisation should be for "pajamas" or "pyjamas", or do I need both terms? Can someone please advise the best option? Thanks Astrid

    Keyword Research | | Lilala_Kids
    0

  • Hi Does anyone have any useful tools or ways of looking for long tail phrases apart from Google Keyword Planner? Thank you

    Keyword Research | | BeckyKey
    0

  • Hi Guys, How can check location wise results in Google. Can you please help me. Thanks, Akhilesh

    Moz Pro | | dotlineseo
    1

  • I keep getting the above error when I'm trying to look at the page optimization for a new blog page we have uploaded. It was posted over a week ago, so I assumed it would be indexed by now. Any thoughts on why it isn't working? The page is: http://www.esg.co.uk/blog/blog/2015/why-is-air-quality-testing-so-important/#.VmlBmLiLRpg Thanks

    Technical SEO | | Charley_Tangerine
    0

  • Morning Mozzers, We have finally come to the point where we can start to focus on making good original content. We were wondering how you guys come up with ideas for your content. We are currently doing lots of keyword research to gather ideas and subject areas. But we are struggling with 'angles of attack'. Being an eCommerce site it is easy to do lots of "The 5 best products for this" type of content. But we feel there is limited value in these especially if we want to gain links to our articles in future as valued content. How do you come up with your ideas for more valuable and linkable content especially in very niche product areas. Thanks all.

    Content Development | | ATP
    1

  • Hi, I have a question about the advised structure for a website that I'm currently building. It's a large international brand with it's main office in the UK. The main website is the .com but there is a growing international franchisee network. I've built the .com site on Wordpress but I'm not sure if I the best way forward would be to create each international website on a separate hosted site or just include it in the .com Wordpress structure using the The WordPress Multilingual Plugin. So to sum up... should I build the entire global network on one domain and then use WPML plugin or should I build separate websites for each International franchisee? Hope some one can educate me on the best route to take. Thanks Moz Community

    Web Design | | SeoSheikh
    0

  • So, I'm in 2 minds about this; let me start with a bit of background info. Context
    We have a new client who is in the final days of their new site design and were when they first contacted us. Their design essentially uses 5 pages, each with several pages worth of content on each, separated with the use of jquery. What this means is a user can click a menu item from a drop-down in the nav and be taken directly to that section of content like using internal anchor links as if it were a separate page, or they can click the top-level nav item and scroll through each "sub-page" without having to click other links. Vaguely similar to Google's "How Search Works" page if each sector of that page had it's own URL, only without the heavy design elements and slow load time. In this process, scrolling down to each new "sub-page" changes the URL in the address bar and is treated as a new page as far as referencing the page, adding page titles, meta descriptions, backlinks etc. From my research this also means search engines don't see the entire page, they see each sub-page as their own separate item like a normal site. My Reservations I'm worried about this for several reasons, the largest of them being that you're essentially presenting the user with something different to the search engines. The other big one being that I just don't know if search engines really can render this type of formatting correctly or if there's anything I need to look out for here. Since they're so close to launching their new site, I don't have time to set up a test environment and I'm not going to gamble with a new corporate website but they're also going to be very resistant to the advice of "start the design over, it's too dangerous". The Positives
    For this client in particular, the design actually works very well. Each of these long pages is essentially about a different service they offer and the continuous scrolling through the "sub-pages" acts as almost a workflow through the process, covering each step in order. It also looks fantastic, loads quickly and has a very simple nav so the overall user experience is great. Since the majority of my focus in SEO is on UX, this is my confusion. Part of me thinks that obscuring the other content on these pages and only showing each individual "sub-page" to search engines is an obvious no-no, the other part of me feels that this kind of user experience and the reasonable prevalence of AJAX/Paralax etc means search engines should be more capable of understanding what's going on here. Can anyone possibly shed some light on this with either some further reading or first-hand experience?

    Web Design | | ChrisAshton
    0

  • New pages on my site usually shoot right into the index - often in under 24 hours.  Lately they are taking weeks to get into the index.  Are your new pages slow to index lately? Thanks for anything that you can report.

    Technical SEO | | EGOL
    2

  • Hello, Moz is showing that a site has duplicate content - which appears to be because of tags and categories. It is a relatively new site, with only a few blog publications so far. This means that the same articles are displayed under a number of different tags and categories... Is this something I should worry about, or just wait until I have more content? The 'tag' and 'category' pages are not really pages I would expect or aim for anyone to find in google results anyway. Would be glad to here any advice / opinions on this Thanks!

    On-Page Optimization | | wearehappymedia
    1

  • How does one best go about optimizing a page, meta title, and meta description for two keyword when the two keywords mean the same thing (e.g. attorney vs. lawyer). It's awfully tedious, obnoxious, and spammy-looking to keep putting "attorney/lawyer," "attorney-lawyer," or "attorney or lawyer" into content, titles, and descriptions.

    Web Design | | micromano
    1

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


Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.