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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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  • gregalam


    In the tile of my post, shoudl I used my blog's name in it at the end or emit the blog name. EX: title of post with keywords | name of blog OR EX: title of post with keywords The site's name is 3 words long, so I'm worrying that those extra words are diluting the keywords in the post's name that I'm trying to target.

    On-Page Optimization | | gregalam
    0
  • davebrown1975


    Hi All, I ask the question as I was trying to GeoTarget tool which happened to not recognise a business address I place in the footer on one of my sites. The tool states that including the address on page helps the search engines identify your location, so I'm curious whether a specific format works best when optimizing for local search? Thanks.

    Moz Pro | | davebrown1975
    0
  • Markus111


    I have been emailed asking if I sell links on one of my sites.  The person wants to link out to slotsofvegas[dot]com or similar. Should I be concerned about linking out to this and does it reduce the link value to any of the other sites that the site links out to? Thanks, Mark

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Markus111
    1
  • RobM416


    Though my company is based in Canada, we have a .com URL, we're hosted on servers in the U.S., and most of our customers are in the U.S. Our marketing efforts are focused on the U.S. Heck, we even drop the "u" in "colour" and "favour"! 🙂 Nonetheless we rank very well in Google.ca, and rather poorly on Google.com. One hypothesis is that we have more backlinks from .ca domains than .com, but I don't believe that to be true. For sure, the highest quality links we have come from .coms like NYTimes.com. Any suggestions on how we can improve the .com rankings, other than keeping on with the link building?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobM416
    1
  • DavidS-282061


    It seems that .html pages do better for the long tail...

    Technical SEO | | DavidS-282061
    0
  • SWKurt


    An example of something I'm looking for but I want to check multiple checkers: http://web-sniffer.net/

    Paid Search Marketing | | SWKurt
    0
  • tclendaniel


    RSS feeds, at least on paper, should be a great way to build backlinks and boost rankings.  They are also very seductive from a link-builder's point of view- free, easy to create, allows you to specifiy anchor text, etc.  There are even several SEO articles, anda few products, extolling the virtues of RSS for SEO puposes. However, I hear anecdotedly that they are extremely ineffective in getting their internal links indexed.  And my success rate has been abysmal- perhaps 15% have ever been indexed,and so far, I havenever seem Google show an RSS feed as a source for a backlink.  I have even thrown some token backlinks against RSS feeds to see if that helped in getting them indexed, but even that has a very low success rate. I recently read a blog post saying that Google "hates aRSS feeds" and "rarely spiders perhaps the first link or two."  Yet there are many SEO advocates who claim that RSS feeds are a great untapped resource for SEO.  I am rather befuddled. Has anyone "crackedthe code" onhow to get them,and the links that they contain, indexed and helping rankings?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tclendaniel
    0
  • fabiank


    Hi Moz Team, somehow the last question i raised a few days ago not only wasnt answered up until now, it was also completely deleted and the credit was not "refunded" - obviously there was some data loss involved with your restructuring. Can you check whether you still find the last question and answer it quickly? I need the answer 🙂 Here is one more question: I bought a website that has a huge forum, loads of pages with user generated content. Overall around 500.000 Threads with 9 Million comments. The complete forum is noindex/nofollow when i bought the site, now i am thinking about what is the best way to unleash the potential. The current system is vBulletin 3.6.10. a) Shall i first do an update of vbulletin to version 4 and use the vSEO tool to make the URLs clean, more user and search engine friendly before i switch to index/follow? b) would you recommend to have the forum in the folder structure or on a subdomain? As far as i know subdomain does take lesser strenght from the TLD, however, it is safer because the subdomain is seen as a separate entity from the regular TLD. Having it in he folder makes it easiert to pass strenght from the TLD to the forum, however, it puts my TLD at risk c) Would you release all forum sites at once or section by section? I think section by section looks rather unnatural not only to search engines but also to users, however, i am afraid of blasting more than a millionpages into the index at once. d) Would you index the first page of a threat or all pages of a threat? I fear duplicate content as the different pages of the threat contain different body content but the same Title and possibly the same h1. Looking forward to hear from you soon! Best Fabian

    Technical SEO | | fabiank
    0
  • kevin1


    A competitor of mine has appeared out of nowhere with various different websites targetting slightly different keywords but all are in the same industry. They don't have as many links as me, the site structure and code is truly awful (multiple H1's on same page, tables for non-tabular data etc...) yet they outperform mine and many of my other competitors. It's a long story but I know someone who knows the people who run these sites and from what I can gather they are using black hat techniques. But that is all I know and I would like to find out more so I can report them.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kevin1
    1
  • eyepaq


    The SEO moz is showing an error on one of the sites within my SE Moz account campaign under Crawl Diagnostics: Title tag missing or empty. No problem here but the file associated with this issue is sitemap.xml and that just dose't look right as as far as I know xml files are title tag free. I've searched around and i've  been able only to confirm my initial thought that sitemap.xml dose't use a title tag .. like any other xml. is this an issue ? (the error that is) or i should let it slide. can it be fixed ? if yes, how ? Thanks !

    Moz Pro | | eyepaq
    1
  • eyepaq


    Hello, Please let me know what are the exact right steps in order to get rid of the duplicate content issues related with: www.domain.com/index.html same as www.domain.com  without creating an infinite loop. Do you have a step by step guide posted within seomoz including 301 redirect for non www to www for all urls and index.whatever to main domain name without going into a infinite loop ? btw how to you spot the loop ? is it obvious like never ending refresh of the home page ? thanks a lot !

    On-Page Optimization | | eyepaq
    2
  • NextDigital51


    Hi guys, I am planning of setting up a blog within a client's website, due to limitations to their server environment, I can only setup the blog in a subdomain, I have read in some articles saying subdomains don't pass value as well as subfolders. My questions are: Is it true that subdomains can't pass SEO value? For example, if I set up a blog (say blog.mydomain.com), will that improve long tail searches for my website (mydomain.com)? What are some recommendations for subdomains so that it passes more value back to the root domain (for example, internal linking from subdomain back to root domain) Thanks guys.

    On-Page Optimization | | NextDigital51
    0
  • Romancing


    Basically my question is as follows, what's better: www.romancingdiamonds.com/gemstone-rings/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (this would fully match the breadcrumbs). or www.romancingdiamonds.com/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (cutting out the first level folder to keep the url shorter and the important keywords are closer to the root domain). In this question http://www.seomoz.org/qa/discuss/37982/url-length-vs-url-keywords I was consulted to drop a folder in my url because it may be to long. That's why I'm hesitant to keep the bradcrumb structure the same. To the best of your knowldege do you think it's best to drop a folder in the URL to keep it shorter and sweeter, or to have a longer URL and have it match the breadcrumb structure? Please advise, Shawn

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Romancing
    0
  • STPseo


    www.sierratradingpost.com We have a high volume e-commerce website with over 15K items, an average of 150K visits per day and 12.6 pages per visit. We are launching a new website this spring which is currently on a beta sub domain and we are looking for the best strategy that preserves our current search rankings while throttling traffic (possibly 25% per week) to measure results. The new site will be soft launched as we plan to slowly migrate traffic to it via a load balancer. This way we can monitor performance of the new site while still having the old site as a backup. Only when we are fully comfortable with the new site will we submit the 301 redirects and migrate everyone over to the new site. We will have a month or so of running both sites. Except for the homepage the URL structure for the new site is different than the old site. What is our best strategy so we don’t lose ranking on the old site and start earning ranking on the new site, while avoiding duplicate content and cloaking issues? Here is what we got back from a Google post which may highlight our concerns better: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=62d0a16c4702a17d&hl=en&fid=62d0a16c4702a17d00049b67b51500a6 Thank You, sincerely, Stephan Woo Cude SEO Specialist scude@sierratradingpost.com

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | STPseo
    0
  • scanlin


    What is the best SEO page/link structure for a blog with, say 100 posts that grows at a rate of 4 per month? Each post is 500+ words with charts/graphics; they're not simple one paragraph postings. Rather than use a CMS I have a hand crafted HTML/CSS blog (for tighter integration with the parent site, some dynamic data effects, and in general to have total control). I have a sidebar with headlines from all prior posts, and my blog home page is a 1 line summary of each article. I feel that after 100 articles the sidebar and home page have too many links on them. What is the optimal way to split them up? They are all covering the same niche topic that my site is about. I thought of making the side bar and home page only have the most recent 25 postings, and then create an archive directory for older posts. But categorizing by time doesn't really help someone looking for a specific topic. I could tag each entry with 2-3 keywords and then make the sidebar a sorted list of tags. Clicking on a tag would then show an intermediate index of all articles that have that tag, and then you could click on an article title to read the whole article. Or is there some other strategy that is optimal for SEO and the indexing robots? Is it bad to have a blog that is too heirarchical (where articles are 3 levels down from the root domain) or too flat (if there are 100s of entries)? Thanks for any thoughts or pointers.

    On-Page Optimization | | scanlin
    0
  • Technical_Contact


    Hi all, I'm new to SEO and excited to see the launch of this forum. I've searched for an answer to this question but haven't been able to find out. I  "attended" two webinars recently regarding SEO. The above subject was raised in each one and the speakers gave a polar opposite recommendations. So I'm completely at a loss as to what to do with some domains that are related to a domain used on a live website that I'm working to improve the SEO on. The scenario: Live website at (fictitious) www.digital-slr-camera-company.com. I also have 2 related domain names which are parked with the registrar: www.dslr.com, www.digitalslr.com. The question: Is there any SEO benefit to be gained by pointing the two parked domains to the website at www.digitalcamercompany.com? If so, what method of "pointing" should be used? Thanks to any and all input.

    Technical SEO | | Technical_Contact
    0
  • BraveheartDesign


    Looking to do some paid directory submissions and was wondering if a) they were still worth the money and b) if you have $500-$1,000 what paid directories would you submit too? I am assuming that BOTW is still on the list, but I rarely every see a BOTW link in any backlink report. Are they still relevant or are they more a sign of quality to the engines rather than an actual link? Same with JoeAnt

    Link Building | | BraveheartDesign
    0
  • debi_zyx


    Hi! One of our clients has a site with the store on a subdomain: store.example.com.  When we've set up goals for order confirmation pages, we often see most of the sources attributed to example.com.  Is this because of the subdomain issue? How would we correct it so that we would see as the referring source for the goal the site that sent to the root domain originally, and not the site that sent to the subdomain? Thanks!

    Reporting & Analytics | | debi_zyx
    0
  • randfish


    See the attached image, showing a comparison of SEOmoz.org's search traffic from Google over the past 6 days and the prior week. farmer-3x.gif

    Industry News | | randfish
    2
  • Francisco_Meza


    I need to pay for some directories, but I don't know if BOTW, Business.com, Joe Ant and others are still worth it.  Anybody know if this is still viable? http://www.seomoz.org/directories All Mozzers, can you please give me a 'thumbs up' so I can get more MozPoints? 🙂

    Link Building | | Francisco_Meza
    19
  • RishadShaikh59


    Now, there are a number of do's and dont's when it comes to internal linking, but do those rules apply to news websites that have to interlink relevant news stories, primarily based on their relevancy to the user and the value that they have to provide rather than keeping the idea of page rank sculpting in mind? What's your take on this?

    Link Building | | RishadShaikh59
    0
  • MarloSchneider


    Not an unusual situation, I have a blog on blog.domain.com it has quite a few blog postings.  The platform is old and will be scrapped, but the blog content itself is going to be moved to domain.com/blog. The current process is we are manually listing all linked to/content pages and we are going to 301 redirect them to their counterparts on the new blog.  This is going to be a tedious process. A) Is there any way to automate the moving of the blog? B) What is the best way to do the massive 301 redirect, php headers, .htaccess?  Should we move the individual pages with redirects, or redirect the domain in the .htaccess (this will be very difficult to match all the titles and file structure)?

    Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider
    0
  • GrouchyKids


    Has anyone got any knowlege about software that I can use to submit PAD files? Would also love to hear about any techniques, for instance I imagine that the PAD detail should not be changed from one submission to the next, any thoughts? Thanks in advance, Justin

    Link Building | | GrouchyKids
    0
  • debi_zyx


    Hi, All! This is for any foreign language SEOs where articles or prepostitions such as "the" "to" "in" or anything else are actually part of the word they are modifying and not a separate word, as in English: How does Google understand those words on-page and in anchor text?  If you want to optimize for the word "house", and your content/anchor text says "the house" or "in the house" (again, all one word) - what does Google count that as?  Does it count toward "house"?  Does it count toward "in the house" only?  Does it count toward "house" but not as much as if you had just put "house"? I end up sometimes writing slightly grammatically-off content because I want to optimize for the keyphrase - but is that necessary? Obviously different languages might be different, but you can probably project a little from one to the others. Thanks in advance!

    Link Building | | debi_zyx
    0
  • Firestarter-SEO


    I have no clue how to set this up in the Bigcommerce store platform

    Technical SEO | | Firestarter-SEO
    0
  • NeilInFrance


    Hi Interested in your views on this and any references to research on the subject Using Google Books recently I have discovered multiple citations of a web site I produced years ago in a whole load of publication. Really quite touching to find these 10 years afterwards I imagine that this must have a positive effect on search engine listings for this site. The site has really good listings still. Has any research or any announcement been made by Google about this. Pushing this a bit further ; An advertising hoarding has a web site address http:// ... would Google StreetView pick this up and could it be used as a signal too ? Neil PS No I don't sell adversing hoardings 😉

    Image & Video Optimization | | NeilInFrance
    0
  • iSenseWebSolutions


    For those who are conducting SEO here in Australia: A lot of the info I read, and there is a lot, is generally from the States or UK it seems. Are there any things in particular I should look out for when doing SEO in Australia? Are there any SEO tips that are particular to Australia only? What directories are a must in Australia?

    International SEO | | iSenseWebSolutions
    0
  • Amjath


    Hi Everyone, This question is about URL best practice for multilingual websites. We have www.example.com in English and we are building the exact replica of English site in German www.example.de. On the Geman site, we are considering to translate some portions of the URLs for example last folder and file name as seen below: example.de/folder1-in-english/folder2-in-english/folder3-in-german/filename-in-german.html Is this a good idea? Will this help SEO and user experience both? or the mixed languagues in URL will confuse the users? Google guidelines say that this should be ok. Would love to get feedback from SEOMOZ community! Thanks, Supriya.

    International SEO | | Amjath
    0
  • Francisco_Meza


    I have a client I landed about 1 1/2 months ago. The only traffic coming to the site is from Google Adwords.  The goal page is the "Get A Quote" page and the closing ratio is 32.4%.  So about 1 in 3 visits fill out the quote form.  I usually do eCommerce and I am used to seeing 2-3% goal conversions. But 32.4%???? Is that normal for a regular static site (non-ecommerce).  It's been like that for a whole week! Should I toot my own horn here?

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | Francisco_Meza
    0

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