Latest Questions
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Google crawling but not indexing for no apparent reason
Client's site went secure about two months ago and chose root domain as rel canonical (so site redirects to https://rootdomain.com (no "www"). Client is seeing the site recognized and indexed by Google about every 3-5 days and then not indexed until they request a "Fetch". They've been going through this annoying process for about 3 weeks now. Not sure if it's a server issue or a domain issue. They've done work to enhance .htaccess (i.e., the redirects) and robots.txt. If you've encountered this issue and have a recommendation or have a tech site or person resource to recommend, please let me know. Google search engine results are respectable. One option would be to do nothing but then would SERPs start to fall without requesting a new Fetch? Thanks in advance, Alan
Technical SEO | | alankoen1230 -
Woocommerce filter urls showing in crawl results, but not indexed?
I'm getting 100's of Duplicate Content warnings for a Woocommerce store I have. The urls are
Moz Pro | | JustinMurray
etc These don't seem to be indexed in google, and the canonical is for the shop base url. These seem to be simply urls generated by Woocommerce filters. Is this simply a false alarm from Moz crawl?0 -
Access to GA revoked
Hi, If the company gives me access to Google Analytics for two days, will I still be able to see the data after day three? I am interested in past data not the future or current.
Reporting & Analytics | | aliciaporrata10090 -
Seeking guidance setting up hreflang en-gb for international english website and en-us for North American site
Our website is configured like so: MyCompany.com Websites /en-gb - International English /fr-fr /zh-hans /m/en-us - North American site - completely different structure The first three bullets share a Drupal instance where the North American site uses a different PHP framework and has it's own unique look and structure. Currently none of the websites have hreflang tags which means that sometimes when searching in the US the en-gb results creep in. I want to turn on hreflang tags for the international english website (en-gb) but my fear is that Google may not return the en-gb results to English speaking users if they are not in the UK. We want these results to appear for anyone who is not in the US who speaks English. Just a note, Canada is not included in this since they'll be added to the North American site soon and will have their own hreflang tags.
On-Page Optimization | | bearpaw0 -
How to organise subpages for good SEO content without duplicate text?
We are working on many subpages for our services. We have original content for each page however there are few text which we need to always duplicate like: Contact sales window, why to choose us window, supported files etc. What's the best way to do this so it's not consider as duplicated text. Should we redirected it or add it as a picture and always change name of the picture? Thank you Lukas
On-Page Optimization | | Lukas-ST0 -
What's the difference between 'en-gb' and 'en-uk; when choosing Search engines in campaign set up?
Hi What's the difference search engine wise and which one should I choose, i presume GB since covers entire British landmass whereas UK excludes Ireland according to political definition, is it the same according to Google (& other engines) ? All Best Dan
International SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Ecommerce - SEO Quick Wins?
Hi I wanted to find out if anyone had any quick wins for an ecommerce site & SEO. I am the only SEO and we have a small online team and an ecommerce site with thousands of product pages. It's impossible to optimise everything, and we have taken the top 100 products and optimised them - starting from scratch with keyword research. I'm now struggling to prioritize what we need next - I know we need better internal linking, content, social and lots more, but this isn't something I can get through alone. I need a starting point and perhaps something with a quick win initially? Thanks 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
What is the effect of CloudFlare CDN on page load speeds, hosting IP location and the ultimate SEO effect?
Will using a CDN like CloudFlare.com confuse search engines in terms of the location (IP address) of where the site is actually physically hosted especially since CloudFlare distributes the site's content all around the globe? I understand it is important that if customers are mostly in a particular city it makes sense to host on an IP address in the same city for better rankings, all things else being equal? I have a number of city-based sites but does it make having multiple hosting plans in multiple cities/ countries (to be close to customers) become suddenly a ridiculous thing with a CDN? In other words should I just reduce it down to having one hosting plan anywhere and just use the CDN to distribute it? I am really struggling with this concept trying to understand if I should consolidate all my hosting plans under one, or if I should get rid of CloudFlare entirely (can it cause latency in come cases) and create even more locally-based hosting plans (like under site5.com who allow many city hosting plans). I really hope you can help me somehow or point me to an expert who can clarify this confusing conundrum. Of course my overall goal is to have:
Local Website Optimization | | uworlds
1. lowest page load times
2. best UX
3. best rankings I do realise that other concepts are more important for rankings (great content, and links etc.) but assuming that is already in place and every other factor is equal, how can I fine tune the hosting to achieve the desirable goals above? Many thanks!
Mark0 -
Problem with Google finding our website
We have an issue with Google finding our website: (URL removed) When we google "(keyword removed)" in google.com.au, our website doesn't come up anywhere. This is despite inserting the suitable title tag and onsite copy for SEO. We found this strange, and thought we'd investigate further. We decided to just google the website URL in google.com.au, to see if it was being properly found. Our site appeared at the top but with this description: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. We also can see that the incorrect title tag is appearing. From this, we assumed that there must be an issue with the robot.txt file. We decided to put a new robot.txt file up: (URL removed) This hasn't solved the problem though and we still have the same issue. If someone could get to the bottom of this for us, we would be most appreciative. We are thinking that there may possibly be another robot.txt file that we can't find that is causing issues, or something else we're not sure of! We want to get to the bottom of it so that the site can be appropriately found. Any help here would be most appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Website Ranking well in Mobile but not in Desktop
Hello guys, Recently we are experiencing good rankings for our targeted keywords in mobile but in desktop the rankings are not progressing. For example, in Mobile, our main targetted keyword ranks in 7th position but in Desktop we are stuck in 11th position. In desktop the website have been stuck in 11th position for quite some time now, any suggestion will help.
Link Building | | NkZagreus0 -
Footer pages on international sites
Hi guys, i have a question about footer indexed pages like about us, frequently questions, press or ads with us, among others. I'd like to put the same page in our website of .com.mx but i don't know how because i think it will be duplicate content. should i create new content for these pages? Thanks, J
International SEO | | pompero990 -
My SERP Rankings are unbelievably inconsistent, how is it possible
Almost all of the keywords i track in moz's keywords ranking report show insane inconsistency. nearly all my keywords (according to moz's rank tracker history) were in the first or second rank for a week or 2 during the last 6 month.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | datawork
nearly all my keywords were nowhere in the top 5 pages in the weeks prior or after the week that the keyword was ranked at the top of the first page. I'm adding a image of an excel chart showing the ranking - each row is a different keyword, each column is a different date. 51 means 51+ (or - nowhere to be found in the first top pages) Could you please help me make sense out of this? How can it change so frantically? Thanks, eZDVEEW.png0 -
Google does not index UK version of our site, and serves US version instead. Do I need to remove hreflanguage for US?
Webmaster tools indicates that only 25% of pages on our UK domain with GBP prices is indexed.
International SEO | | lcourse
We have another US domain with identical content but USD prices which is indexed fine. When I search in google for site:mydomain I see that most of my pages seem to appear, but then in the rich snippets google shows USD prices instead of the GBP prices which we publish on this page (USD price is not published on the page and I tested with an US proxy and US price is nowhere in the source code). Then I clicked on the result in google to see cached version of page and google shows me as cached version of the UK product page the US product page. I use the following hreflang code: rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://www.domain.com/product" />
rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://www.domain.co.uk/product" /> canonical of UK page is correctly referring to UK page. Any ideas? Do I need to remove the hreflang for en-US to get the UK domain properly indexed in google?0 -
Google not returning an international version of the page
I run a website that duplicates some content across international editions. These are differentiated by the country codes e.g. /uk/folder/article1/ /au/folder/article1/ The UK version is considered the origin of the content. We currently use hreflang to differentiate content, however there is no actual regional or language variation between the content on these pages. Recently the UK version of a specific article is being indexed by Google as I am able to access via keyword search, however when I try to search for it via: site:domain.com/uk/folder/article1/then it is not displaying, however the AU version is. Identical articles in the same folder are not having this issue. There are no errors within webmaster tools and I have recently refetched the specific URL. Additionally when checking for internal links to the UK and AU edition of the article, I am getting internal links for the AU edition of the article however no internal links for the UK edition of the article. The main reason why this is problematic is because the article is now no longer appearing on the UK edition of the site for internal site search. How can I find out why Google is not getting a result when the URL is entered but it is coming up when doing a specific search?
Technical SEO | | AndDa0 -
Value of URL Changes
Hi Guys, I have a question. Each product listed on my webstie has product number like /product.php?id=3624. After I spent many hours with MOZ, I figured out that this approach is wrong and I should use the product name as URL to achieve better SEO performance. Now I am planing to change the URL generating algoritm but should I do it for existing products. Some of them have already been linked to external websites. I am thinking to create mirror URLs but this may cause rather damage on my website. Do you know what is the right answer? Best, Tony
On-Page Optimization | | Threeding.com0 -
Google Analytics goals only show unique event triggers
I have some goals in GA which is linked to different event triggers. However I've found out that the goal is only showing the unique event triggers and not the total. I need it to show the total in order to be accurate. Is there any way to switch that option? I can't find any options like that in GA or guides to do so.
Reporting & Analytics | | WebGain0 -
Help with Google+ business name rules
I'm marketing a franchise gym business that has multiple locations within the same city. For the business name, I used to have it set as "Business Name" + City + Tagline. For example: "Ultimate Workout South Calgary Gym and Bootcamps". and "Ultimate Workout North Calgary Gym and Bootcamps". To comply with the google business naming rules I've updated all the listing to just business name. The problem is, now the local search results for my gym locations are confusing. Half the address is cut off in the results, the city is not displayed at all. And sometimes results from a neighbouring city are shown. Anyone have an idea on how to implement a strategy where people at a quick glance understand which location is best for them?
Local Listings | | John-Ray0 -
Getting spam Links pointing to our wrong url, what to do?
Hey Mozzers, Looking in my Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools), I'm getting links pointing to bogus pages on my website that result in a 404. What does one do so you can tell Google that it has been "fixed"? Do i just 301 it to another website? If I add it to my disavow list, does Google remove the error in my webmaster tools? Thank you!
Moz Pro | | Shawn1240 -
Outreach with your own name
I always send outreach under my own name. I use either my private e-mail address or an own e-mail address from the clients domain. I just send out 10 emails and I did get 6 replays which 4 of them started about my SEO background . The response rate was great, but my SEO background isn’t in this case. How do you guys handle this situation? I have always used my own name because it feels right. It’s also handy in case I pick up the phone or visit an link prospect in person. The disadvantage is that people directly doubt my sincerity or they want to sell me a paid placement. Love to hear your take on this.
Link Building | | Bob_van_Biezen0 -
Positions dropping in SERPs after Title and Snippet change
Hi! I switched to a better title and meta description today for our page. Instead of ranking us better and displaying the new title - google let us fall from Position 10 to Position 16 (still dip laying the old title and meta description). Why is that? (I only changed it for the homepage) Cheers Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
Campaign Update Notification Anomaly and some misc questions re Moz Analytics
Hi I received an email late last night (GMT) saying one of my campaigns had updated yet looking at the campaign online says last updated on the 13th ? Normally my campaigns have fully updated for the week by Wednesday latest. Other Notifications & Misc Queries: A Key Words on-page score has increased from 36 to 96 (these used to be letters, has grading changed ?) yet no on-page work has been carried out on this particular page for many months so how can it change so radically, is it just that Moz crawler has only just taken note of it ? When is the on-page opportunities section going to be complete/fixed (as in include a KW) i asked about this soon after it was launched but still lacks the all important kw to give it meaning/a useful tool. Am i right in thinking that until it includes the kw its totally meaningless ? When clicking Question Category (below) i cant change slection after clicking a radio button it cant be un-clicked, is this prob my side or yours ? All Best Dan
Product Support | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Is It Required to Clean Natural Backlinks from an Irrelevant Niche?
Hi Friends, My company website is a Travel related website and it is 18 years old domain. We purchased this domain in the year 2010 from a 3rd party person. That person was using the domain as a software portal like brothersoft.com. That person generated so many backlinks from software related websites like forums, gaming websites and so on. So, do I need to clean all those backlinks now because all those backlinks are from high page rank websites. Not only the above concern I have. My website is very popular in Saudi and we get lot of backlinks naturally sometimes from the irrelevant niche. So, is it necessary to clean up those backlinks also. Pls advice me on this.
Link Building | | Prabhu.Sundar0 -
Who gets punished for duplicate content?
What happens if two domains have duplicate content? Do both domains get punished for it, or just one? If so, which one?
Technical SEO | | Tobii-Dynavox0 -
Location-Aware Browsing issue. Could it cause a drop in rankings
Hello Mozzers. A client has seen big drop in their organic rankings in google.co.uk. Desktop results have dropped from page one to page three and mobile results have completely gone. They have recently added Location-Aware Browsing to the site so that it attempts to find you location and add this to the search box. However this appears to be in a loop and doesn't then turn off once you have allowed it. It keeps appearing in both Firefox and Chrome and asking for permission to use you location. Could this have resulted in the ranking drop? There have also rolled out a new mobile version and this has the same issue. Any ideas? Thanks in advance TH
Technical SEO | | highwayfive0 -
How much can our page title, URL and alt-tag differ without negatively affecting SEO?
We are a bridal store selling wedding dresses and bridesmaids dresses. We are wanting to know how much our URL and page title can differ, whilst still optimising SEO. For example, for the category Wedding Dresses, the URL contains wedding dresses, so can we use " the best wedding dresses in Sydney" in the page title? For the bridesmaid dresses (URL is /bridesmaiddresses/) can we use " buy best bridesmaid dresses online in Australia"? Can we use terms such as "buy best black dress in sydney", "buy online in australia" or "shop online in sydney" in the alt-tag, additional from the page title .i.e. adding extra keywords in the alt-tag that do not appear in the title? Would this be classified as keyword stuffing? In our main categories .e.g. Wedding Dresses, can we add "best wedding dress store", "buy wedding dresses from best wedding store in sydney" in the alt-tag? Thank you.
Image & Video Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
Help hiring someone
We are a medium sized cleaning service in the Baltimore area and really need help with our website and organic listings. We used to be on googles 1st page before penguin came around and it killed our listing. We have survived for the last few years because of our good reputation and referrals. We want to grow now but have been finding it VERY difficult to hire a SEO company/person. There are so many scammers out there and the only companies I can find REAL reviews on are in the 10k or more range. I have been reading here and elsewhere trying to learn SEO myself a bit, but finding it a bit overwhelming. Any advice, or could anyone recommend an honest SEO firm that a mid sized company can afford. Thank you in advanced
Local Listings | | mongor0 -
Link juice from links that are not on the page?
Hello, Thank you in advance for your help! I was doing research for backlinking opportunities by looking at competitor backlinks using Open Site Explorer and I ran into a puzzle. When I do an Open Site Explorer search for http://whatsdavedoing.com/ I find that link equity is being passed to the site from a number of pages on the http://www.travelsupermarket.com/ blog with the anchor text "What's Dave Doing" When I go to these pages and do a source code search I cannot find this anchor text. When I do a google search with the following: site:travelsupermarket.com "What's Dave Doing" I find that there are tons of items that come back with a list of blogs in their description: "Dec 5, 2013 - ... foXnoMad · Inside The Travel Lab · itravelnet · The Mad Traveler Blog · The Mad Traveler Online · Uncornered Market · What's Dave Doing?" Where is this coming from? What is going on here? Is this a linking tactic that sites use to pass link juice to contributors without linking to them directly? Any help is much appreciated! Thanks!
Competitive Research | | overlandundersea0 -
Page speed in relation to SEO
I cannot seem to find any information about this, so I thought I would try to get a few people's opinion. How do you think pagespeed is measured in terms of Google using it as a ranking factor? Do you think they use their internal Pagespeed app? Something during the crawl? Your GA site speed?
Technical SEO | | LesleyPaone0 -
Duplicate Content
Hello, I'm managing a site which shows as having duplicate page issues (in the crawl analyser) for 3 pages. Basically the site is offering 3 different options of the same product so depending on which size you select, you are directed to the relevant page. These 3 pages are basically identical apart from a slight difference in copy regarding the size (small, medium, large) Is this likely to be a big issue regarding SEO, and what would the moz community suggest re this? Thank you!
Moz Pro | | wearehappymedia0 -
What is the difference between the "Crawl Issues" report and the "Crawl Test" report?
I've downloaded the CSV of the Crawl Diagnositcs report (which downloads as the "Crawl Issues" report) and the CSV from the Crawl Test Report, and pulled out the pages for a specific subdomain. The Crawl Test report gave me about 150 pages, where the Crawl Issues report gave 500 pages. Why would there be that difference in results? I've checked for duplicate URLs and there are none within the Crawl Issues report.
Product Support | | SBowen-Jive0 -
What's the best way to track broad search terms?
I'm finding out that Moz only tracks exact match results for key terms. Does anyone know of a good tool for tracking broad search terms? So for example: keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 as opposed to "keyword1 keyword2 keyword3"? Any help is appreciated!
Moz Bar | | controlyours
Thanks! -David0 -
Nofollow on internal links
Hi, What do you all think about using nofollow on internal links? On pages that arent so important and use dofollow on important pages maybe for example from the sites menu.
On-Page Optimization | | Rob-0 -
404 error from linking page that does not exist
We migrated our site from php to wordpress about a month ago. All of the old website files have been removed. I ran Moz analytics and get 17 critical 404 errors from linking pages that do not exist. 404 : Received 404 (Not Found) error response for page. http://www.preventivesupport.com/freeestimates.php404010http://preventivesupport.com/freeestimates.phpN/AThe www thing is interesting but freeestimates.php does not exist?
Local Website Optimization | | KrisIrr0 -
Mass Product Page Upload - SEO Issue?
Hi We will be adding a lot of products to our site, in a mass referencing exercise, not all in one go, but 10,000 split into a few loads. This product content won't be duplicate, but the quality of the information may be sparse and not very high. My question is, whether adding a bulk of these pages will reduce the pverall domain authority on our site? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Changing Targeted Keywords on Landing Page
So we have a landing page that is ranking for a few of our targeted keywords but we are thinking about splitting the page into two and moving some of the content onto its own page. Our page at the moment has allot of content for keyword A and a little bit for keyword B, we are ranking for quite a few search terms around keyword A and a couple (but allot less) around keyword B, so we want to create a new page with content for keyword B ...hopefully that makes sense... So my question is are there any best practices around this sort of thing? We obviously dont want to negatively affect the rankings we are already gaining for keyword A and I'm worried that moving content around will do that. Thanks!
Keyword Research | | O2C0 -
Ask moz staff
Was trying to crawl a page and the moz on page grader tells that URL is not accessible. The URL is accessible thorugh my mobile and desktop. Any idea what is the issue ? The URL is https://www.practo.com/singapore/dentist IGrzzVe
Moz Bar | | ozil0 -
Is it possible?
Hi! Is it possible to have your UA code in a GTM and your e-commerce code in the code? Will it track the e-commerce data in the profile? Thanks,
Reporting & Analytics | | WeAreDigital_BE
Sander0 -
Question about placing links
My company have a website about car related business. I have found around 8-10 sites that is car related which can place links to me. I am wondering whats the best way to make this most effective. I have been writing 8 different texts with maybe 200-250 words each which i plan to use on the sites that is going to link to my site. Should i use exact anchors links or should i use different anchors on every site so it looks more natural? My site today does not have much quality links to it which i believe can make problem when you get 8-10 new sites linking that is very related and have a nice content? How long time should i wait when i put a link to each site to make it less unnatural? Happy for any answer! 🙂
Link Building | | Rob-0 -
Our domain is ranking quite ok on google.ru, but not at all on Yandex. What could be the main differentiator here?
Hi, The internet let me down on this one. What's the issue? We are ranking quite ok on the most important keywords for our business with our .ru TLD on Google.ru. On Yandex however we don't seem to rank at all. What could be the main differentiating factor here? Could the fact that our servers are in th US play a role? Thank you for your time. Jacob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Unilin0 -
Analytics Losing Connection
Hi All, I keep receiving the following message "Our connection to your Google Analytics account was lost. Don't worry, you won't lose any data. Please reauthorize now." I have reauthorized numerous times with no luck. Thanks
Product Support | | CaxtonFX0 -
Best free twitter monitoring tool to monitor who is not following you back
Hello Mozers Could someone recommend a free monitoring tool to keep a handle on who is not following you back on Twitter?
Social Media | | Catherine_Selectaglaze0 -
Two domains / same Content
Hi MOZzers, I have recently started working for a client who owns two domains (as recommended by their Web Development company), each omain is a complete duplication of the other. The only difference is one is a totally keyword focused domain name, the other is their brand name which also contains keyword. In a search for blocks of content the keyword focused domain comes up, the other doesn't and when I conducted a search for one of their primary services again the keyword focused domain name came up on the first page, but the branded search also appeared on the second. The web development company have been managing this company's Adwords account and promoting their brand name and up until today I was unaware of the other. Can I have some thoughts - do I ask the web developers to re-direct one to the other, or leave as it?
Technical SEO | | musthavemarketing0
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