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.
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Scammer or Legit?
Okay so I keep on seeing stuff like this, I know it's been going on for ages but it seems to be increasing in intensity. Anyway, thanks to Facebook knowing I click on their ads to do with SEO it shows me pretty much just those ad types now. I'll get to the point. I saw an ad for the "Search Marketing Business Academy", or "SMBA" so I was curious and clicked. There's a chap who professes 12 years experience in internet marketing and has a bunch of companies and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, he's offering himself up as basically an expert of experts, one that can show other search marketers how to make it. www.searchmarketingbusinessacademy.com/ There's a few things that look fishy though. The testimonials have common names and no business names There's no mention of what these companies he runs are There's no work to see in the form of case studies or a portfolio Under "Meet Lee Gilbert" it states that they've been supporting other SEM companies since 2004, yet a quick Google of the company and the name shows little to support this. Googling the chaps name just gets you his own website www.leegilbert.co.uk which professes more of the same and just a bunch of products Of just a few pieces of advice given for how to rank on Google it includes keyword density The chap seems to still place a lot of importance on Page Rank (As in the old PR that we all know means nothing now, and his blog about this is only a month old) From searching, it doesn't seem that there is any history at all, let alone this history of mass success There doesn't appear to be any social presence for the company or the man, except that ad. It seems just like an average SEO (albeit one that's a bit behind on the times) who knows an average amount, trying to say he can tell other SEO's how to master the arts. He's not even a member on SEOmoz, that's the biggest give away haha. So, could I be wrong? Am I being too harsh?
Industry News | | SteveOllington1 -
One big site or lots of little sites? Which is better for SEO and my business in general?
I realize there are some aspects of what I'm asking that only I can answer. With that said, I'm looking for some discussion about the pros / cons of each, and what are the most important factors that will push me one way or another. Let's say I have a company that has three products. One big brand, three little brands. Each of the little brands is focused on a particular sub-niche, all of which are in the general health & wellness niche. Either, I could create a large site for the big brand, with subsections for each product, and work hard on turning that domain into a goto site, with lots of articles, etc. The domain name for this one would be a made up word so I can fully control the search results. Or, another strategy would be to create smaller, "sniper" sites for each product, maybe even sites for each major search term that is interested in that product. These sites would have fewer articles. Descriptive, exact match domain names. Which is the best strategy? #1, #2, or a mixture of both? #1 seems legitimate, #2 seems a bit spammy. What are the pros and cons to each? Can anyone speak from experience about both these practices?
Branding | | monetize-2660060 -
Combining web pages and it's affects on SEO?
We are looking into amending a website we are working on to try and combine 2 or 3 current pages onto one page. This site is similar to an estate agents site and currently has images, map, floor plan sub pages etc. Can anyone tell me, if we were to combine these pages and include the above details on one page, how that would affect the current search engine rankings?
Web Design | | SoundinTheory0 -
Partners and Customers logo listing and links
We have just created a program where we list the customers that use our software and a link to their websites on a new "Customers" page. We expect to have upwards of 100 logos with links back to their sites. I want to be sure this isn't bordering on gray or black hat link building. I think it is okay since they are actual users of our software. But there is still that slight doubt. Along these same lines, would you recommend adding a nofollow or noindex tag? Thanks for your help.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PerriCline0 -
Best practice to redirects based on visitors' detected language
One of our websites has two languages, English and Italian. The English pages are available at the root level:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Damiano
www.site.com/ English homepage www.site.com/page1
www.site.com/page2 The Italian pages are available under the /it/ level:
www.site.com/it Italian homepage www.site.com/it/pagina1
www.site.com/it/pagina2 When an Italian visitor first visits www.mysit.com we'd like to redirect it to www.site.com/it but we don't know if that would impact search engine spiders (eg GoogleBot) in any way... It would be better to do a Javascript redirect? Or an http 3xx redirect? If so, which of the 3xx redirect should we use? Thank you0 -
Why is a 301 redirected url still getting indexed?
We recently fixed a redirect issue in a website, and although it appears that the redirection is working fine, the url in question keeps on getting crawled, indexed and cached by google. The redirect was done a month ago, and google shows cached version of it, even for a couple of days ago. Manual checking shows that its being redirected, and also a couple of online tools i checked report a 301 redirect. Do you have any idea why this could be happening? The website I'm talking about is www.hotelmajestic.gr and its being redirected to www.hotel-majestic.gr
Technical SEO | | dim_d0 -
Should we change our site domain name to include our keyword?
Our niche has one keyword phrase that is much, much more active than any other comparable phrase. Let's call that phrase "math problems". Within this phrase, the "math" is absolutely the most important keyword, as it is also used in every spin-off search phrase, like "math answers", "math practice", etc. We've had our domain since 1996, and is currently the company name - "Rocketproblems.com". Over the last year (2010-2011) our SERPs have steadily dropped to the point where we're not getting a sustainable level of business from organic search, whereas in 2009 we were doing fantastic. However, we've also had "Rocketmathproblems.com" since about 2000, just gathering dust. What I've noticed from the top search results is that nearly every domain has either "math" or "math problems" in its URL. Do you think it's worth it to switch to the keyword-rich URL? It is a bit more verbose, and the "Rocketmathproblems.com" v.s. "Rocketproblems.com" example perfectly captures the different feeling. My inclination is that SEO is only becoming more competitive, and if we aren't getting worthwhile business from organic search at the moment then we should bite the bullet and make the switch for the future, along with ramping up our content generation. However, I also noticed that in late 2009 a previous webmaster switched to "Rogermath.com" but switched back within a month when our SERP for the key phrase was a page lower - I gleaned this from a Moz Juicy Keywords Report :). Thoughts?
Keyword Research | | ACann0 -
How to handle Meta Tags on Pagination... page 2,3,4....
Seems that SEOMoz reports are considering my paginated pages as duplicate Meta Tags. For example, I have a product catalog with 5 paginated pages. Obviously the content on each page is unique and the URL ends in =4, =5 for the page number, but the Title and Description are the same for all the pages. Any suggestions on how to handle this? The pages other than page 1 are not indexed, so it should not be a big deal. But wondering if I should programatically ad the page number to the additional pages to show a difference?
On-Page Optimization | | paddlej0 -
Custom URL's with Bigcommerce Issue (Is it worth it?)
We're building out a store in Bigcommerce, who for all intensive purposes is perfect for SEO besides the fact that you can not change the URL's to be custom. My question is, does this kill the SEO value of bigcommerce, despite everything else being great? So for example the URL's for a category page would be something like this www.mysite.com/categories/keyword and the product URL's are pulled in by product name, so product URL's could be something like www.mysite.com/products/Product-Description-Long-223.html (notice the words will be capitalized and their is no way to remove the trailing .html) I could go with Interspire (the liscenced version of Bigcommerce) or Magento so I can custom edit this stuff. But then its a lot more work for my employee's on the buildout.
Web Design | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Where should a knowledge base be hosted for max. SEO benefit?
A client would like to set up a knowledge base to work in conjunction with their website and we are tossing up whether to go with a hosted solution (and therefore set up as a subdomain) or find a solution that we host on the clients domain (which will presumably have more SEO benefit). We are leaning towards the latter (although are mindful that we need to balance the client’s desire for a quality KB solution). Appreciate your feedback.
Technical SEO | | E2E0 -
Xml sitemap advice for website with over 100,000 articles
Hi, I have read numerous articles that support submitting multiple XML sitemaps for websites that have thousands of articles... in our case we have over 100,000. So, I was thinking I should submit one sitemap for each news category. My question is how many page levels should each sitemap instruct the spiders to go? Would it not be enough to just submit the top level URL for each category and then let the spiders follow the rest of the links organically? So, if I have 12 categories the total number of URL´s will be 12??? If this is true, how do you suggest handling or home page, where the latest articles are displayed regardless of their category... so I.E. the spiders will find l links to a given article both on the home page and in the category it belongs to. We are using canonical tags. Thanks, Jarrett
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jarrett.mackay0 -
Spam Directories creating misleading Authority ratings
How does the website www.starsdirectory.com.ar get a Domain Authority of 54 and a Page Authority of 61 when Google quite correctly gives it a PR 0? It is clearly a spam directory, which Google has recognised. It is very misleading using OSE or Campaign Management when sites such as these (and there are hundreds more we have found) are skewing the results of competitiors through the use of spam links. Is there no way that SEOMoz tools can identify such spam sites when they create their ratings?
Moz Pro | | paulsmithlondon0 -
Can a XML sitemap index point to other sitemaps indexes?
We have a massive site that is having some issue being fully crawled due to some of our site architecture and linking. Is it possible to have a XML sitemap index point to other sitemap indexes rather than standalone XML sitemaps? Has anyone done this successfully? Based upon the description here: http://sitemaps.org/protocol.php#index it seems like it should be possible. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CareerBliss0 -
How to prevent Google from crawling our product filter?
Hi All, We have a crawler problem on one of our sites www.sneakerskoopjeonline.nl. On this site, visitors can specify criteria to filter available products. These filters are passed as http/get arguments. The number of possible filter urls is virtually limitless. In order to prevent duplicate content, or an insane amount of pages in the search indices, our software automatically adds noindex, nofollow and noarchive directives to these filter result pages. However, we’re unable to explain to crawlers (Google in particular) to ignore these urls. We’ve already changed the on page filter html to javascript, hoping this would cause the crawler to ignore it. However, it seems that Googlebot executes the javascript and crawls the generated urls anyway. What can we do to prevent Google from crawling all the filter options? Thanks in advance for the help. Kind regards, Gerwin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | footsteps0 -
Iframes vs links
Obviously, websites can link to another web site using iframes, and Google and other search engines do seem to have some capability to index the content. What I want to know is what is the difference in value passed between a regular link and an iframe link. <iframe src="http://www.targetwebsite.com/targetlink"><br /><br />will have the same page ranking effect on the target web site as this link: <br /><br /><a href="http://www.targetwebsite.com/targetlink">link</a><br /><br />Alternative, would it work to include an invisible actual link right before the iframe, like this: <br /><br /><a style="display: none;" href="http://www.targetwebsite.com/targetlink">link</a><br /><iframe src="http://www.targetwebsite.com/targetlink"/></p> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">The reason is that we are building a product recommendation engine, for a branded cosmetology school in order to get our concept salons to link back to use and I was curious if creating a version they can use as an iframe will give us link benefit.</span></p></iframe>
Link Building | | incept0 -
Best Wordpress Hosting
I've had a horrible experience with the security on wordpress hosting with GoDaddy. Someone recommended Blue Host as my next option. Does anyone have any experience with BlueHost and what other hosting companies would you recommend for wordpress hosting?
Web Design | | ChristineCadena0 -
Best Dynamic Sitemap Generator
Hello Mozers, Could you please share the best Dynamic Sitemap Generator you are using. I have found this place: http://www.seotools.kreationstudio.com/xml-sitemap-generator/free_dynamic_xml_sitemap_generator.php Thanks in advanced for your help.
Technical SEO | | SEOPractices0 -
How do you block development servers with robots.txt?
When we create client websites the urls are client.oursite.com. Google is indexing theses sites and attaching to our domain. How can we stop it with robots.txt? I've heard you need to have the robots file on both the main site and the dev sites... A code sample would be groovy. Thanks, TR
On-Page Optimization | | DisMedia0 -
Google Analytics: how many visits from country Google domains?
Hello, I manage a site with visitors from many different countries. With Google Analytics, it is normal to see the number of visitors from each search engine. However, I would like to identify the number of visitors from each Google-search contry domain. How many visitors from Google.com? How many from Google.co.uk. And from Google.co.zm? And so on. Anybody knows if this is possible and if yes, how can it be done? Thank you in advance, Dario
Reporting & Analytics | | Darioz0 -
Can link juice be passed in an iframe from domain A to domain B
Need to give our web partners our booking form which must be loaded in an iframe calling back to our domain. Is it possible to pass any link juice from their domain loading our iframe back to us. Was thinking of a "Powered by" text link in the form footer, but I'm guessing the link needs to be outside the iframe. Would love to hear any thoughts or workarounds on this.
Link Building | | apolloseo1 -
Quick and easy Joomla 1.5 Duplicate content fix?
www.massduitrialalwyers.com has a TON of duplicate content based on the way joomla 1.5 uses articles. Do you have a tried and true method to eliminate (automated would be preferred) the issues>? if not, might you suggest a plug in that takes care of the rel canonical?
On-Page Optimization | | Gaveltek-173238
Cheers0 -
YoutTube vs Vimeo
I am just wondering if there are any SEO considerations when uploading a video to either YouTube or Vimeo? Should i choose one over the other or is it okay to upload to both? Haven't stepped into the video part of SEO waters before 🙂
Image & Video Optimization | | itrogers0 -
Google Analytics - paid & unpaid visits messed up
I guess Google Analytics messes up my paid and unpaid visits. In the list of top 10 kw's sending non-paid traffic it shows 5 very short kw's that we don't rank for at all (checked with RankTracker - we are not in first 50 search results). But these are the kw's we advertise for... One more proof: Webmaster Tools 'Search queries' shows 10 times less 'Clicks' from organic search than Google Analytics. Is there anyone who is experiencing this kind of problems with GA? Is there anything you can do with it?
Reporting & Analytics | | Alexey_mindvalley0 -
Permanent URLs for Twitter?
Hi everyone - The site I am working on is going to start giving users the option to tweet that they completed an action. It reads, for example, "I just took the first step to ( ) with (site): (shortened link) via (Twitter name)" Here's my question: Should I worry about the fact that the shortened URL (we're possibly going to use Twitter's shortener T.Co, but I'm not dedicated to it) changes each time? Should we instead have a permanent short URL for the homepage (where we are going to direct people who click the link in the tweet)? Thanks!
Social Media | | JohnECF0 -
Targeting Different Countries... One Site or Separate?
I have a client who has 3 ecommerce sites. They are somewhat differentiated but for the most part sell the same stuff. Luckily 2 of them are quite authoritative, old and rank reasonably well. Most of the visitors and sales come from the US. He wants to start targeting Europe, Mexico and Canada. What are your suggestions for doing this? Are we better targeting on the main domains? Not really sure how to do that? Should we use a subdomain and a new store front for each geo? Should we use a .co.uk .co.mx and .co.ca each with a unique storefront? It looks like we are moving to a Magento platform so setting up multiple storefronts on a single database is not a big issue. Anyone have any experience with this?
International SEO | | BlinkWeb0
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