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!
-
Why is my site ranking so poorly compared to my competition?
I own a car shipping business (www.carshippingcarriers.com) and I was ranking very high last year, but around the end of August our site lost a TON of rank. Afterwards I had my SEO team at the time (no longer working with them) do a complete overhaul of the website (rewrote content, combined many pages together so no duplicate content issue, made it mobile friendly, etc.. Since then we continue to still lose rankings on Google. Yahoo and Bing seem to keep performing decently, but Google we are getting destroyed. I have been a member of Moz for a few months and I have been using the open site to check my competitors and their linking profile. One in particular, www.joescarshipping.com, has been ranking extremely well and the site looks horrible, doesn't have many links, hardly a social media presence, etc.. Compared my my website which has ton of content, articles on our website, social profile is great (tons of Google+ usage), not a ton of links so a decent amount of links, etc.. Why would a company like that be ranking so high while I keep falling? Any advice or reasoning as to what is wrong or what could be done to get better rankings? I am just at my wits end on this matter. 😕
Technical SEO | | Dutko23851 -
Download all GSC crawl errors: Possible today?
Hey guys: I tried to download all the crawl data from Google Search Console using the API and solutions like this one: https://github.com/eyecatchup/php-webmaster-tools-downloads but seems that is not longer working (or I made something wrong, I just receive a blank page when running the PHP file after some load time)... I needed to download more than 1.000 URLs long time ago, so I didn't tried to use this method since then. Is there any other solution using the API to grab all the crawl errors, or today this is not possible anymore? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | antonioaraya1 -
Any possibility to track goal completions/conversions at a sub-page (non-landing page) level in Google Analytics?
We’re promoting our sub-page it's http://www.flightcentre.ca/flights/london on our homepage under the slideshow so I need to see how many people went to the homepage, then went to this page, and then converted (enquired or booked.) What I can’t see is how many people did that. I know how to look up how many people landed on that page and then converted, but I need to know how many people navigated there and then converted. Is that possible? I can only see Goal Completions if I look at that page as a landing page, but that only presents a very slim view of the total visits when compared to those pages generally. Any way to check the entire behavior or activities happening through this page i.e. /flights/london?
Conversion Rate Optimization | | flightcentre200 -
MOZ vs Ahrefs vs SEMRush vs Spyfu and so on
Hello, fellas. I've been trying to find some type of comparison analysis for online SEO related tools and I couldn't find any, which are fresh and overview more than three. I'm interested to see if anybody saw good comparison reviews of such tools, as well as your own thoughts (back your thoughts up with more than just "I like it", please 🙂 The tools I'm interested in comparing are: MOZ Ahrefs Majestic Spyfu SEMRush Raven Wordstream whatever else you use or have in mind
Competitive Research | | DmitriiK2 -
Redirect /label/ to /tags/
Hi guys, I have noticed loads of errors in webmaster, page not found.. /label/..... what i need to do is to a 301 redirect to /tags/... can some one tell me the redirect code to help fix this issue Regards T
Technical SEO | | Taiger0 -
Outrank sb if PA and DA equal
Hi ! Is it correct to say that if I have the same DA and PA I should outrank a competitor if I do my On-Page SEO right ? Cheers Marc
Competitive Research | | RWW0 -
Advice needed! How to clear a website of a Wordpress Spam Link Injection Google penalty?
Hi Guys, I am currently working on website that has been penalised by Google for a spam link injection. The website was hacked and 17,000 hidden links were injected. All the links have been removed and the site has subsequently been redesigned and re-built. That was the easy part 🙂 The problems comes when I look on Webmaster. Google is showing 1000's of internal spam links to the homepage and other pages within the site. These pages do not actually exist as they were cleared along with all the other spam links. I do believe though this is causing problems with the websites rankings. Certain pages are not ranking on Google and the homepage keyword rankings are fluctuating massively. I have reviewed the website's external links and these are all fine. Does anyone have any experience of this and can provide any recommendations / advice for clearing the site from Google penalty? Thanks, Duncan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
Removing Unverified Listing From Google
We have an old unverified listing that has our information on it, but we can't get it off google. I told them months ago it was closed, and it is marked as closed in Google...but it still shows up. Moz Local is telling me this is an inconsistency that hurts our local rankings. I went to delete the page from our Google Business/Place, but if I did that, the warning said that I would just not have access to the page, and that the listing would still show up on google. How do I permanently get rid of those thing, so it's not longer an inconsistent listing? Ruben
Local Listings | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
804 error preventing website being crawled
Hi For both subdomains https://us.sagepub.com and https://uk.sagepub.com crawling is being prevented by a 804 error. I can't see any reason why this should be so as all content is served through https. Thanks
Link Explorer | | philmoorse0 -
Excellent performance in BING, terrible performance in GOOGLE
Dear all, We're struggling with the SEO of our platform www.taobao.nl for 6 months now. I posted some matters before on the MOZ forum and followed up the ideas that i received (tnx again 🙂 But so far there really isn't much result. Recently i found out that my platform is doing excellent in search engine Bing.com (ranking top 3/4 on my main keyword 'taobao') while my platform's homepage is still ranking dramatically in Google on the same keyword (ranking between position 180-280) Does anybody have some insight for me what could be the reason for this or how/where i can fund it out? Many thanks in advance! Sander
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benhond0 -
Would it be a valid "link building' strategy to pay youtube video owners, to link to our company website in the decription of a certain video. ( For popular video's that are relevant )
I was wondering if it would it be a valid "link building' strategy to pay / work out a deal with youtube video owners, to link to our company website in the decription of a certain video they posted? ( For popular video's that are relevant to our business. ) Anyone have any thoughts on this? Thanks in advance! Steven
Link Building | | RockyMountainFlyboard0 -
How do I find out where my "direct traffic" came from?
Last weekend we had a significant rise in traffic to our site. Digging in to Google Analytics, most of it has come from the USA, with some from Canada, Australia and a few other countries. It has all gone to the same article on our website. I have also found that it has mostly come from Safari (in app), on an ipad and iphone. Google Analytics has put this down as Direct traffic. My feeling is that it is not. Could it be from a social media app - perhaps someone with many followers has pinned from our site, or something along these lines. Could it actually be organic search traffic and Google misattributing it as Direct? Bounce rate and time on site is fine, so I don't think it's a bot / spam.
Reporting & Analytics | | TheJewelleryEd
Any ideas / places I could go to help me find out would be appreciated, thank you. Joss0 -
App Indexing
Can anyone please check if our app is indexed or not? Also check if deep linking done is correct or not rel="alternate" href="android-app://in.instafresh.app/http/www.instafrsh.com/" /> Website - http://instafrsh.com/ App - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.instafresh.app
Technical SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Could I optimize my homepage anymore ?
Hi everyone, My website is http://brownquarterhorse.com I was wondering if it would be possible to optimize my homepage anymore. I just feel like it's lacking SEO. The page grader has rated it an 'A', but im not sure if the page grader is a good reflection ?
Technical SEO | | BenDuncombe0 -
Pyramid link structure - how to noindex, nofollow
I'm talking about this article: https://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link Take this sample: HOME --> Shirts --> Plain shirt --> shirt#1 Product page: noindex, follow all links except 1 from breadcrumbs to nearest category (plain shirts). SubCategory page (plain shirts): noindex, follow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to nearest category (shirts) and all products belonging to current subcategory. Category page (shirts): noindex, follow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to front page (site.com) and links to own subcategories. Front page: noindex, follow all links except 12 links to main categories (shirts, pants etc.) Is it correct? If I noindex some parts of website, will it be harmful?
On-Page Optimization | | SilverStar10 -
Difference between anchor text pointing to an article in our section pages and the title of our article
My concern is described more in details in the following hypothetic scenario(basically this is the same method that CNN site applies to its site): In one page i have a specific anchor text e.g. "A firefighter rescued a young boy" and this one is linked to an article which if you enter you will see that it has a different title than the anchor text/short title that i mentioned above. So the internal titlte of the article is "A firefighte rescued a young boy in Philippines while it was rainy". I want to know whether this is a good SEO practice or not. Regards, Christos
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DPG_Media0 -
Moz cannot crawl domain. Also OSE does not work properly on this specific domain?
Hi all, Moz cannot crawl the domein http://www.hoesjescases.nl.
Link Explorer | | Guapa_zwolle
When I open the crawl report I only see one line: <colgroup><col width="229"><col width="287"><col width="420"><col width="370"><col width="141"></colgroup>
| URL | Time Crawled | Title Tag | Meta Description | HTTP Status Code |
| http://www.hoesjescases.nl | 2015-10-05T12:20:48Z | 404 : Received 404 (Not Found) error response for page. | Error attempting to request page; see title for details. | 404 | Also when running OSE on this domain, Moz only can find 4 root domains while Majestic can find 91 domains. Google seems not to have any problems. What can be the problem for MOZ? Greetings!0 -
Studies showing that social sharing does/doesn't affect rankings?
I'm currently researching this area in order to show to a client that social shares aren't as valuable for SEO as they might think. Can anyone point me in the direction of the best studies done on this topic? Thanks in advance!
Algorithm Updates | | QubaSEO0 -
Best Sitemap Generator XML
Hello Everyone, Can Anyone Suggest best Site map Generator Software??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ieplnupur0 -
Keyword Difficulty Search Results: Can't tell which search engine
I ran a keyword difficulty search for 4 search engines: Switzerland in Italian, Switzerland in English, Switzerland in French and Switzerland in German. Now the results are in but it shows "Google.ch" for all of them so I can't tell which result is for which language. How can I check that? I ran the basic not full SERP.
Moz Bar | | WagMoreBarkLess0 -
In 2015, How Important is having a Local IP address (rather than a cheaper hosting overseas)?
Looking to move several sites from my current hosting provider, and am considering moving them to cheaper, overseas hosting providers. What's the current thinking of how this will impact local SEO results?
Local Listings | | SEO-NS1 -
Does Universal Analytics auto generate events?
Hi Mozzers, I have been noticing for one of my clients that there are thousands of events generating which I never added a code snippet for ga('send', 'event', 'button', 'click', 'nav buttons', 4);. The code I am seeing instead is following the syntax **PDF FILE NAME.**I don't even use Tag Manager. So are these auto generated? Label names of files aren't great though so I still believe that adding that piece of snippet _ga('send', 'event', 'button', 'click', 'nav buttons', 4);_can still bring some added value. Do you think it still does? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Google Plus Pages are No Longer Available From SERPs?
We have noticed that the links to our google plus pages have become inaccessible to all of our client google plus location profiles from search result pages. I am getting lots of questions about this from our clients and am just not sure what to say. Does anyone have any idea what is happening here? I do notice that some large brands have "profiles" links below their information on the right side of SERPs that includes google plus links: https://www.google.com/search?q=american+airlines and some do not: https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#safe=off&q=nike I can't imagine we are abandoning our business.google.com location profiles but what do we know if anything regarding the plan here is? Whatsthehaps?
Local Listings | | Sans_Terra0 -
Need to de-index certain pages fast
I need to de-index certain pages as fast as possible. These pages are already indexed. What is the fastest way to do this? I have added the noindex meta tag and run a few of the pages through Search Console/Webmaster tools (fetch as google) earlier today, however nothing has changed yet. The 'fetch as google' services do see the noindex tag, but it haven't changed the SERPs yet. I now I should be patient, but if there is a faster way to get Google to de-index these pages, I want to try that. I am considering the removal tool also, but I'm unsure if that is risky to do. And even if it's not, I can understand it's not a permanent solution anyway. What to do?
Technical SEO | | WebGain0 -
Multilingual SEO subdirectories structure
Hi, I have to optimize a domain for Google for 3 languages (.com with subdirectories)(Dutch, German and English) content is only served on domain.com/nl, .com/de and .com/en NO CONTENT is served on domain.com.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bmcinternetmarketing
How do I exclude domain.com from getting in Google? Because there is no content on the top level only on subdirectories. Is there a rule we have to add to htaccess? Or Robots.txt by disallow all and next lines allow /nl, allow /de and allow /en? Thanks a lot! Kind regards, Alain Nijholt0 -
Cannot crawl website with redirect intalled on subdomain url
Hi! I want to crawl this website : http://www.car-moderne.ch. I tried a got back the crawl just for that one url (not for all the pages of the website). This single line cvs says that the status of the http://www.car-moderne.ch is 200, but in fact it is a redirect 301 to http://www.car-moderne.ch/fr where the live home page is (actually the Moz bar sees the 301, not the 200 as the single-lined crawl does). How can I proceed in this case (a 301 redirect being installed on the subdomain url) to still be able to have a full-fledged juicy cvs with all the broken links, duplicate content, etc. Thank you for your help! Pascal Hämmerli
Moz Bar | | Ethos_Digital0 -
Google+ and youTube
Hi everyone, Question regarding Google+ and youTube - 2 things I'm not massively au fait with these days. We have a number of branches all of whom have a Google+ account (with GoogleMyBusiness).
Social Media | | LoonyToons
All of these branches will soon be setup with a Communications Manager login only (for GoogleMyBusiness) as we need to restrict them from changing branch details. The powers that be in my company, have decided that we need to have 2 youtube channels for each branch.
One for news and the other for advertising properties. Having researched this, we understand that if we setup a new youTube channel, that will create another Google+ page - which we don't want, and could cause no end of trouble with duplicate Google+ pages. We are obviously going to try and persuade management to use only one youTube channel per branch, but in the event of being overridden does anyone have any advice on how to achieve 1 Google+ page with 2 youTube channels?1 -
Removing blog posts with little/thin content
We've got quite a lot (I'd say 75%) of our blog posts which I'd consider as low quality. Short content (500 words or less) with few shares, no backlinks & comments; most of which gets 0-2 unique views a day (however combined this adds up). Will removing these pages provide an SEO benefit greater than the reduction in traffic from the removal of these pages? I've heard the likes of Neil Patel/Brian Dean suggest so, however I'm scared it will provide the opposite as less content is indexed and I'll actually see traffic fall. Sam
Reporting & Analytics | | Sam.at.Moz1 -
Blog keywords for wordpress/duplicate keywords an issue?
Would you treat the blogs that businesses do the same as their subdomains/landing pages and putting different focus keywords in their blogs/wordpress and meta tags? So you put something different for each of the blog based on content/location/etc and nothing duplicates? Would that affect the rankings that much in regards to blog seo keyword similarities/duplicate descriptions?
Social Media | | kpexpressions0 -
Canonical issues using Screaming Frog and other tools?
In the Directives tab within Screaming Frog, can anyone tell me what the difference between "canonicalised", "canonical", and "no canonical" means? They're found in the filter box. I see the data but am not sure how to interpret them. Which one of these would I check to find canonical issues within a website? Are there any other easy ways to identify canonical issues?
Technical SEO | | Flock.Media0 -
WhoIs, SEO & Privacy
Is WHOIS data used by Google as a ranking signal? We had a website that had some bad SEO work done a while ago hence took a knock, If I use the same WHOIS data on a new site is that likely to cause an issue? Also I don't like the idea of providing too much information for privacy reasons, so have tended to stick to general email addresses and department names rather than actual personal information. Is that a bad approach?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Can anyone recommend a good reliable blogging platform for a small to medium sized manufacturing and services company?
I've been asked by my manager to investigate the best blogging platform for our company website. On a recent CIM course it ways suggested that Wordpress is not necessarily reliable. Could anyone advise? The blog is required to provide a space for current industry news, casestudies etc. It is also envisaged that the blog will allow comments. I've only got good things to say about Wordpress, but have only used the platform for my own small SEO company.
Content Development | | Catherine_Selectaglaze1 -
Structuring navigation for maximum effect
Hi, I am working with a client (in the property niche) who has 200+ links on each page of their site mainly due to an extensive navigation menu. They have good domain authority (although some competitors have a lot better) and some excellent links from some fantastic domains but the keywords just aren’t moving. (Sidenote: most links point to the home page with some going to property detail pages not location pages which is where I’d like people to be landing). I am reviewing the site structure and other technical aspects and have some questions regarding how the navigation is structured. Firstly is 200+ links an ok number to have? Everything I read points to 100 being a magic number to aim for. Secondly, the site navigation menu contains a list of locations. The first tier being country, the second tier drops down to list the regions within that country, then a third tier drop down appears to list the towns and cities in those regions. So from any page in the site you can drill down to town/city locations. (Sidenote: I have run Hotjar on the site which shows most people are using the search facility not the navigation menu to search) Is this style of navigation ok or does it dilute the link authority/pagerank/juice being past to each page? Would a better option be to have the first and second tier in the drop down then the third level town navigation to appear in the sidebar at page level in the appropriate sections? What effect would such a change have on rankings?
On-Page Optimization | | caravan0 -
How to do LinkBuilding in 2015 without getting affected?
Hello. My name is Palla Sridhar. from India. small time blogger. I have a SEO site which recently had 12 pv/day. I recently did 2 guest posts on 2 sites. On 1 site, I included link to my site's article in the content and author bio. In another I just did it in author bio. After that my traffic dropped to 4 pv/day. Is there any official guide from Moz, on how to do link-building? Is the above process of doing link-building correct? How to do it without getting our traffic affected in the long run and short run?
Link Building | | karri20250 -
Canonical questions
Hi, We are working on a site that sells lots of variations of a certain type of product. (Car accessories) So lets say there are 5 products but each product will need a page for each car model so we will potentially have a lot of variations/pages. As there are a lot of car models, these pages will have pretty much the same content, apart from the heading and model details. So the structure will be something like this; Product 1 (landing page) Audi (model selection page)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidmaxwell
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) BMW (model selection page)
---BMW 1 Series (Model detail page)
---BMW 3 Series (Model detail page) Product 2 (landing page) Audi (model selection page)
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) BMW (model selection page)
etc
etc The structure is like this as we will be targeting each landing page for AdWords campaigns. As all of these pages could look very similar to search engines, will simply setting up each with a canonical be enough? Is there anything else we should do to ensure Google doesn't penalise for duplicate page content? Any thoughts or suggestions most welcome.
Thanks!0 -
Outgoing links
Hi Guy's, We have a website with no outgoing links (only Facebook). Is this a good way to score better in the SERPS? Or is it better to have some outgoing "relevant" links for a natural linkjuice? Thanks!
Link Building | | Happy-SEO1 -
When you think you know Google, but realise you don't
I've just typed "Private Investigator" into Google, location set to "Coleshill" (it's near Birmingham!)
Local SEO | | Solid_Web
The search results were surprising:
Position 6: <cite class="_Rm">birmingham-privateinvestigators.co.uk</cite>
Position 8: <cite class="_Rm">privateinvestigator-coventry.co.uk</cite> Both sites are the same source of information altered to suit the city - INCREDIBLY SPAMMY. They are just full of SEO text stuffing. No doubt any city you enter they will appear with [city]-privateinvestigators.co.uk..
How are they ranking with such old-skool dirty SEO tactics? You can't say they will be found eventually, because Google has released algorithm after algorithm updates to penalise sites like this. Could it be the importance of having a local phone number and (supposedly) physical address?0 -
Organic Listings showing Google Tag Manager + Google Page Title...?
I'm a bit stumped with this. I optimise all my titles etc for Australia - and now the organic liatings are showing something strange. For example ( we sell health supplements ) Meta title = "My Product , Buy Online Australia" If I type "My Product" - the title in the organic listings says "My Product - My Company Limited" - and the only place I can see it getting that from is a combination of Meta Data used in Google Tag Manager + the Name on my Google places page. This is much more obvious for categories.. but it's a pain in the butt. If I type "My Product Australia" Then the original "My Product , Buy Online Australia" comes up. Any ideas on policy etc? I have taken the "Limited" off the Google business page - so hopefully this will change over time - but I can't find any information on why google would do something like this. If you had shed any light on this - would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Content Mismatch
Hi, I've added my app to search console, and there are reported 480 content mismatch pages. How can I solve this problem?
On-Page Optimization | | Silviu0 -
Morally Right vs Strategic 404 Question
Hey, I bought my domain name not even thinking of the backlink profile advantages. However, now I have about 140 links back to my site delivering 404 errors. Some with DA only in the teens, but some more. What would you consider the right way to go about this? Should I redirect them to my homepage? Should I try to disavow them? Any thoughts are welcome.
Link Building | | Michael4g0 -
Insider Pages, Citysearch, and Bing Not Updating
Hello, I have a campaign for "Teasdale Fenton" that we started back in May, 2015 (5 months ago) and Insider Pages, Citysearch, and Bing have been sitting as "Pending" with no estimated update date I believe since we launched the campaign. Can you guys look into it and let me know if I did anything wrong or if there is something holding it back from updating? Thanks, Chris
Moz Local | | Cincinnati_WebTec0 -
2 version of meta description and title
Hi guys, I have seen two versions of meta descriptions and meta titles for one URL (this is happening on a few of my pages). Initially, I thought Google is pulling the information from my page content. However, it is not the case. I have realized the information showing on SERPs are very old description (years ago information). Just a bit background information, we had a new website launched in April this year. The issue stated since the new website launch. Anyone experienced similar situation?
On-Page Optimization | | pengiuns-al0 -
Changes to cookies, August 24 or 25? (organic search not being cookied?)
Hi folks. We've seen a precipitous change in the referral data that we're able to gather from cookies. Specifically: On August 24 or 25, traffic to our site that was cookied as coming from organic search dropped by ~25%, and traffic coming in with no referrer data at all (i.e., it appears to be "direct") rose by roughly the same amount. As far as we can see, we haven't changed anything in our systems that would have caused this (we're not just mis-reading the cookie info), so I'm looking for external reasons. Has anyone else seen this? Or have any ideas why it would happen?
Reporting & Analytics | | RobM4160
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.