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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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  • I've done all of my keyword research, and now I'm selecting the KW's. In a previous question, seomoz had answered to pick a mix of easy, medium, and difficult words to rank for. How do I know which are easy, medium, difficult? The KW Difficulty Tool is not very specific. Is the level of difficulty related to where the phrase pops up for my company in search results? Are hard words ones that you do not already rank in the top 50 search results? When selecting KWs should I choose words that rank already in the top 50 that I'd like to try to move up? Or look for NEW phrases/words not in the top 50 results? Also, when entering KW phrases int the KW Difficulty Tool, Rank Tracker, and in Campaigns - do I need to use quotation marks if it is a phrase? I noticed that the KW difficulty tool has different results if you use quotation marks. Lastly, The person who did SEO before me has a list of KWs he optimized for, would it be valuable for me to include his words in my On-Page optimization efforts?

    Keyword Research | | aircyclemegan
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  • We've noticed a 100% increase in our traffic over the last three days. However, the page views have not increased proportionately. The traffic sources seemed to be dispersed naturally. Could this be a Ddos in the making or some other type of attack as it seems unlikely that we suddenly started receiving thousands of extra visitors. Its a leading news website with a consistent heavy traffic daily which just doubled over the last three days. What should we be looking at?

    Reporting & Analytics | | RishadShaikh59
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  • Hi! We have our content under two subdomains, one for the English language and one for Spanish. Depending on the language of the browser, there's a 302 redirecting to one of this subdomains. However, our main domain (which has no content) is receiving a lot of links - people rather link to mydomain.com than to en.mydomain.com. Does the 302 passing any link juice? If so, to which subdomain? Thank you!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bodaclick
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  • Howdy everyone, I'm pretty new to the whole SEO thing, in fact I hadn't even heard the term until this past Fall when a company I was doing a little freelance writing for fired their SEO guy and asked if I thought I could help them with it. I have a (old) background in HTML coding and web design, but have been out of the business for over a decade. This may be a simple question, but it has come up in discussion several times... How do you make sure that users are directed to your site even if they enter keywords with spelling errors?  I know that Google offers "did you mean..." links for a lot of words.  Is that the best method and if so, how do you manipulate the data so the misspellings continue to result in your site being listed? Any help on this is greatly appreciated! Marty K.

    Web Design | | MartinKlausmeier
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  • I have a client who serves a local market and who has had trouble in the past with people out of her service area clicking on ads. She asked how accurate the geo-targeting option is.  I know it's not possible to be completely accurate resolving the location of IP addresses, but was wondering if there are any recent statistics out there regarding how accurate or inaccurate geo-targeting is.  I did some quick searches but did not see any current numbers. Many Thanks!

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | JKuly
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  • In the case of an e-commerce website, can you optimize multiple pages using the same keyword ‘root’ but including different long-tail variances of that ‘root’?  For example, say I’m optimizing for a site that sells wallpaper. I found search traffic for the keyword “buy wallpaper online,” but no traffic for “Blue Tinted Wallpaper” (or its variants) and no taffic for “Yellow Plaid Wallpaper” (or its variants). Could I effectively optimize both of these pages using the root “Buy wallpaper online”, yet distinguish the pages by using long-tail variants such as “Buy Blue Tinted Wallpaper Online” and “Buy Yellow plaid Wallpaper Online”?   Any examples of this you can point to?

    Keyword Research | | EricVallee34
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  • Hello all, If I wanted to know if a domainname has a google ban on it would the following be a good idea to test it. Place an article on the domain page with unique content and then link to the page so its gets indexed and then link to the article from a well indexed page. If it doesn't get indexed there might be a ban on the page, if it does get indexed there is no ban on the page... Or are there other points I should keep in mind while doing this. All help is very welcome. Cheers, Arnout

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hellemans
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  • I just ran https://www.majesticseo.com report for back links and showed me that I have one link at porn site ... not sure if it will be appropriate to post it here. The link was discovered on 03.05.11 and when I visited today link is not there... I dont know who put that link there. Can I get penalty for that from google? Can it be a mistake?

    Link Building | | DiamondJewelryEmpire
    1

  • Hi!! Another noob question: Should I be nofollowing my site's cart and checkout pages? Or as SEs can't get to the checkout pages without either logging in or completing the form is it something I shouldn't worry about? Have read things saying both. Not sure which is correct. Thank you! Appreciate the help. Lynn

    Technical SEO | | hiphound
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  • Hey All, I am trying to understand link juice as it relates to duplicate navigation Take for example a site that has a main navigation contained in dropdowns containing 50 links (fully crawl-able and indexable), then in the footer of said page that navigation is repeated so you have a total of 100 links with the same anchor text and url. For simplicity sake will the link juice be divided among those 100 and passed to the corresponding page or does the "1st link rule" still apply and thus only half of the link juice will be passed? What I am getting at is if there was only one navigation menu and the page was passing 50 link juice units then each of the subpages would get passed 1link juice unit right? but if the menu is duplicated than the possible link juice is divided by 100 so only .5 units are being passed through each link. However because there are two links pointing to the same page is there a net of 1 unit? We have several sites that do this for UX reasons but I am trying to figure out how badly this could be hurting us in page sculpting and passing juice to our subpages. Thanks for your help! Cheers.

    Web Design | | prima-253509
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  • Hi, My website having canonical issue for home page, I have written the .htaccess file and upload the root directory. But still I didn't see any changes in the home page. I am copying syntax which one I have written in the .htaccess file. Please review the syntax and let me know the changes. Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on #RewriteBase / re-direct index.htm to root / ### RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.htm\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(.)index.htm$ /$1 [R=301,L] re-direct IP address to www ### re-direct non-www to www ### re-direct any parked domain to www of main domain RewriteCond %{http_host} !^www.metricstream.com$ [nc] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.metricstream.com/$1 [r=301,nc,L] Is there any specific htaccess file format for apache server? Thanks, Karthik

    Technical SEO | | karthik-175544
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  • I'm working with a company that has a high page rank on it's main domain and is looking to launch a new business / product offering.  They are evaluating either creating a subdomain or launching a brand new domain.  In either case, their current site will link contextually to the new site.  Is there one method that would be better for SEO than the other? The new business / product is related to the main offering, but may appeal to different / new customers.  The new business / product does need it's own homepage and will have a different conversion funnel than the existing business.

    Technical SEO | | gallantc
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  • Hi Guys, I am in the process of developing some new areas of work and a good CMS is going to be required to make my SEO and everything included work to its best. What CMS systems are the best ones to use from an SEO prospective and generally all round? Thanks

    Web Design | | wazza1985
    0

  • I have a client that wants a Google local listing in a town he serves but does not have a physical location.  Is it an issue to share an address with an existing company?  Is is it better to use a P.O. Box? or is there a forwarding address company? Is this considered a black hat Local SEO tactic?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BonsaiMediaGroup
    0

  • What is a good keyword difficulty score to pursue when deciding which keywords to try and rank on? I'm in a very competitive field and I am currently in the process of doing keyword research to look for the low hanging fruit.

    Keyword Research | | 13375auc3
    0

  • I whant to specify a link rel cannonical for each category page, how to do that without changing the code (just from admin section), because filters and sorting search are making the site dublicate content with their parameters; If there is a way please specify the method, i whant to avoid hours of working in a script like this. Thank's.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oneticsoft
    0

  • We have hundreds of domains which are either alternate spelling of our primary domain or close keyword names we didn't want our competitor to get before us. The primary domain is running on a dedicated Windows server running IIS6 and set to a static IP. Since it is a static IP and not using host headers any domain pointed to the static IP will immediately show the contents of the site, however the domain will be whatever was typed. Which could be the primary domain or an alias. Two concerns. First, is it possible that Google would penalize us for the alias domains or dilute our primary domain "juice"? Second, we need to properly track traffic from the alias domains. We could make unique content for those performing well and sell or let expire those that are sending no traffic. It's not my goal to use the alias domains to artificially pump up our primary domain. We have them for spelling errors and direct traffic. What is the best practice for handling one or both of these issues?

    Technical SEO | | briankb
    0

  • We carry a few brands that have special foreign characters, e.g., Kühl, Lolë, but do search engines recognize special unicode characters? Obviously we would want to spend more energy optimizing keywords that potential customers can type with a keyboard, but is it worthwhile to throw in some encoded keywords and anchor text for people that copy-paste these words into a search? Do search engines typically equate special characters to their closest English equivalent, or are "Kuhl", "Kühl" and "Kühl" three entirely different terms?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TahoeMountain40
    0

  • Hi. I am new to this community, and new to SEO as well. A friend asked me to give them suggestions on onsite optimization for their Drupal website. I know page titles are very important, and usually they should be set to H1. (At least I think) This particular website has all their page titles set to H2 and they are using display:none in their stylesheet to hide them for graphic design reasons. What would be the most practical work around for this? We don't want this to appear sketchy in the eyes of the SE's, but putting page titles at the top of their pages really would take away from their graphical design. The second issue is that they use a module called Quicktabs for tabbed product specs on each page. Each tab is actually pulled from a post (called a node in Drupal), so each tab has it's own title that is an H2. So not only are they hiding the main page title, but they are hiding 5 others within the tabs, and their are 6 H2 elements showing up on each product page all set to display:none. Any creative suggestions? Hope that makes sense.... Thank you!

    On-Page Optimization | | aprilm-189040
    0

  • What are the pros and cons having exact match domain and how can you create a brand name and build backlinks? Say we have a domain personalizedbirthdaygifts.com We are quite stuck with what anchor text we need to use and how do we vary it? I've heard that we have to stay away from using commercial keywords as anchor text heavily. We have to also use our brand name. And here we get stuck as we don't have a brand name. In this case Our brand name should be personalized birthday gifts but this is also commercial keyword. I have seen before similar websites droped from ranking because they have commercial keywords in their domain and most of their backlink anchor texts are commercial. If I had a website called twentyfive.com selling birthday gifts it would be a lot easier. But when you have a website personalizedbirthdaygifts.com and trying to rank for personalized birthday gifts and birthday gifts it's tough. OR isn't it? I hope I explained it well and didn't confuse anybody... Thanks

    Link Building | | Jvalops
    0

  • Working on reducing page load time, since that is one of the ranking factors that Google uses. I've been using Page Speed FireFox plugin (requires FireBug), which is free. Pretty happy with it but wondering if others have pointers to good tools for this task. Thanks...

    On-Page Optimization | | scanlin
    0

  • I've been doing some site analysis for a new SEO client and it has been brought to my attention that their robots.txt file redirects to their homepage. I was wondering: Is there a benfit to setup your robots.txt file to do this? Will this effect how their site will get indexed? Thanks for your response! Kyle Site URL: http://www.radisphere.net/

    Technical SEO | | kchandler
    0

  • Do Forum Profile Links provided by Paul and Angela hold any SEO merit ? Will it help in improving SER?

    Link Building | | krishrun
    0

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