Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. Latest Questions
Log in to post

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!

  • kheberger


    My client's organic traffic has been on the decline ever since January of 2015. We suspected it had to do with some spammy link farm pointing to his site. We disavowed those links in August 2015. Still, we are seeing huge drop offs in rankings and organic traffic. I am at a loss of what to do. Are we being penalized by Google for some reason? Has this happened to anyone else? If so, how did you remedy? Feel free to ask my any more questions if you more information. KDc8dMp fyVtrYo

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kheberger
    0
  • Mekounko


    I made new website meko.lv. I put many work to it, to make page SEO friendly, sprites, reduced requests added SSL, got google page speed insights score 100/100, but in 2. october all pages in google webmasters disappeared from index. Could you please look at website and say whats wrong with it? They are all search results present in google but for how long. it is so annoying, you put so many work but in result get high spam score. It is obvious that new pages can not get good links in one month https://meko.lv/ google webmasters google page speed score: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmeko.lv%2F&tab=mobile q1LDHTn

    Technical SEO | | Mekounko
    0
  • flightcentre20


    This issue is about website properties' information showing on Google's search index with brand keywords. We have 8 different domains that operated separately in 8 countries. All are responsible for their individual domain. When I Google it with our brand name 'Flight Centre' in Google.ca, Google's search index shows company website link with flightcentre.com and detects all information, social profile etc..  from Flight centre Australia. Please see the screenshot. How to change this information that Google shows or detects website link and all other properties from flightcentre.ca? Anybody about with a quick answer would be awesome? IqWeymZ

    Branding | | flightcentre20
    0
  • Patrick_at_Nebraska_Medicine


    Hello Moz Community! We are building a separate hospital related to a single service line that is currently part of our main website. Traditionally all our hospitals are folded into one website with the same brand. Problem: Our organization's leaders want to market the new hospital as "Brand Name X" nationally, and not use our locally strong brand name at all. Therefore is the smarter long-term decision to begin building content on a new website with the new "Brand name X" even though it will take longer and be harder, than building it on our big, established website with a 60+ DA site? What I fear is our current website's DA won't matter much if people nationally are using Brand X, which isn't part of our traditional brand name? And they won't be using the traditional brand name at all. Example Scenario: We create a new hospital just focused on heart-related issues. Do we move the bulk of information for this new hospital from http://www.nebraskamed.com/heart,  to a new website that will better rank with the new brand X and for just heart-related keywords? Or is it still better to try and stick with the same domain in a subfolder?

    Branding | | Patrick_at_Nebraska_Medicine
    0
  • simplyworld


    Hi there, I submitted a sitemap for a new 64 page website 6 weeks ago and only a few pages have been indexed. The website shows in Google search but with a large amount of information on the website it should show higher. I have fetched and rendered 30 plus pages on the 9th September and others on the 16th September, today is the 5th October but in Webmaster tools, Google only acknowledge 1 page as indexed. I have checked the robots txt file which shows it is allowed. There are no messages for problems with crawl and no errors showing. The domain is www.urbaneforms.com . Can you offer a suggestion as to why we are not being indexed?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simplyworld
    0
  • JoaoCJ


    Hi everyone, I'm trying to find a way to give each post we are creating a quality status. Since bounce rate on this case isn't really a viable option (Blog Behavior) since people could stay 10 mins reading it and then go elsewhere without interacting. I'm looking for a way to focus on facebook sharing, lets say something simple like "Facebook Shares / Sessions" per each blog post, while I can have an idea on my own data, lets say my highest is 4.1% of all people that go to that post end it up sharing it. But I wonder on average what would you consider a good engagement post, what would that percentage might be? Thanks in advance.

    Social Media | | JoaoCJ
    0
  • tripcentral


    Hey Mozzers, I've been working at this for a while now, and I can't figure out why the rich snippet data is not getting pulled for our reviews and product rating. I've included a sample URL where we have reduced the schema.org markup: http://www.tripcentral.ca/vacations-packages_00_03_JN_gran-bahia-principe-coba.html | } | Any thoughts? I was told not to list multiple reviews, so I took them out. But it's still not being picked up in the SERPs, and we would really like the star rating data to appear. Any useful advice would be appreciated!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tripcentral
    0
  • WSIDW


    Hi, Whenever I done a lookup for a client we were hoping to get on Moz Local, the listing that appeared has a repeating street address. For Example 123 Some Street, 123 Some Street, Some City, Some ZIP Code I have checked Google Plus / Google My Business and no such repetition is there. If anyone has any input on the matter it would be greatly appreciated.

    Moz Local | | WSIDW
    0
  • monicapopa


    Hi Moz Guru's Our website was hacked a few months ago, since then we have taken various measures, last one being redesigning the website all together and removing it from a WordPress platform. So far all is going well, except that the 404 not found errors keeps coming up in Google Webmaster tools. The URLs are spam pages that were created by the virus. And these spam pages have been indexed by Google, and now we are struggling to get rid of them. Is there any way we can deal with these 404 spam pages links? Is marking all of them as fixed in the webmaster tools - search console- crawl errors helpful in any way? Can this have a negative impact on the SEO ? Looking forward to your answers. Many thanks.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monicapopa
    0
  • JackMSVaughan


    Hi there everyone. I'm a Moz Local user and I have a quick question. I'm a music teacher.  Can I add multiple listings for my business for the different services I provide? For example - Saxophone lessons, Piano lessons etc...? That way I would have different listing profiles for each instrument - all pointing to a different landing page on my website? Or is this considered to be bad practice? Many thanks for your help in advance.

    Local Listings | | JackMSVaughan
    1
  • SeenDigital.co.uk


    Hi, How would you retain the organic search traffic for your old brand after a full rebrand? Website redesign, new company name, new domain name etc If we change from blahservices.com to fooservices.com and do all the things you would for a regular domain migration, will Google still return pages from the new brand fooservices.com when a user searches for old brand "blah services keyword"? We will be doing the following to try and not lose organic search traffic for our old brand: Keep PPC running on our old brand name keywords
    Mention our old brand on the new website in the footer i.e. "Copyright blah services trading as foo services"
    Publish a press release about the rebrand on our blog
    Say something like "blah services has rebranded as foo services" in meta descriptions for a while
    Put old and new brands in meta title for a while
    Keep 301 redirects from old domain in place forever Is there anything else you would add to that? Thanks, K

    Technical SEO | | SeenDigital.co.uk
    0
  • Veebs


    Hi All, I have a pretty extensive question but wanted a starting point if you don't mind. I have a situation where I created 4 sites that I would say are almost identical other than I have loaned my other websites to other agents. My content is rewritten but it's still roughly the same. You will see, when I give the URL's, that they are similar, and almost identical in templates.My question is going to be, Since I have built some authority on all of these sites, is it wise to simply take them down, or just change the templates and take away the content and start over. If so, what do I do with the existing pages?  Or is there a better idea I'm not thinking of? My other question is, this site: goo.gl/Tf00rc Is my main site. It has a higher domain authority and page authority than any of my other local competitors, yet I'm still ranked #13-15 for my main keywords. I will say, many of my other competitors have older domains and I'm sure didn't try to manipulate the serps either.  Thoughts and recommendations? Here are my other similar sites which have almost identical templates and very similar content but not copied and pasted content. 1. goo.gl/Wwb0Tg  2. goo.gl/3gpR1X  3. goo.gl/FwD8Bk  4. goo.gl/vpuQv2 My dilemma: I want to make sure that my other agents have a great site that can perform well, as well. If I completely remove these sites, they have no site. I'll say that right now the sites that get the most traffic are the goo.gl/Tf00rc and goo.gl/Wwb0Tg then is the goo.gl3gpR1X, and lastly goo.gl/FwD8Bk so they all get about 3k, 2k, and 1k  and 500 visits a month respectively.  The total visits of all of these is pretty good. I feel like the max would visits would be around 10k per month in my market. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I have spent a lot of time and money getting these sites where they are only to be penalized, I'm sure, for duplicate content.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Veebs
    0
  • iamgreenminded


    Hello, Can anyone help me find a solution to Fixing and Creating Magento CMS pages to only use one URL  and not two URLS? www.domain.com/testpage www.domain.com/testpage/ I found a previous article that applies to my issue, which is using htaccess to redirect request for pages in magento 301 redirect to slash URL from the non-slash URL.  I dont understand the syntax fully in htaccess , but I used this code below. This code below fixed the CMS page redirection but caused issues on other pages, like all my categories and products with this error: "This webpage has a redirect loop ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS" Assuming you're running at domain root.  Change to working directory if needed. RewriteBase / # www check If you're running in a subdirectory, then you'll need to add that in to the redirected url (http://www.mydomain.com/subdirectory/$1 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Trailing slash check Don't fix direct file links RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
    RewriteRule ^(.)$ $1/ [L,R=301] Finally, forward everything to your front-controller (index.php) RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule .* index.php [QSA,L]

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iamgreenminded
    0
  • ravydavy


    Hi my customer has had a new website built for their custom home building company which has a testimonials page http://www.precisionhomes.com.au/testimonials.html This testimonials page has duplicate review content taken from another dedicated review site http://www.productreview.com.au/p/precision-homes.html My question is this, if I add review microdata to http://www.precisionhomes.com.au/testimonials.html will google recognize this in Rich snippets and the Brands Knowledge Graph or will it just consider it duplicate content?

    Reviews and Ratings | | ravydavy
    0
  • Alder


    Hello, I'm working with a client that is creating a new site. They currently are using the following URL structure: http://clientname.com/products/furry-cat-muffins/ But the landing page for the directory /products/ does not actually have any content. They have a similar issue for the /about/ directory where the menu actually sends you to /about/our-story/ instead of /about/. Does it hurt SEO to have the URL structure set up in this way and also does it make sense to create 301 redirects from /about/ to /about/our-story/?

    Technical SEO | | Alder
    0
  • Ideas-Money-Art


    Hi Mozzers, I have never setup a universal google analytics e-commerce tracking code before and my concern is what exactly do I need to add on the cart thank you page? Can someone send me a sample of code I need to be adding? What kind of customization does it require? The more details you can provide the better! Thanks!

    Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art
    0
  • Starelse


    i create 1000+ back links for my website Dramasapps.com but page authority and domain authority is 1. How To increase ??

    Link Building | | Starelse
    0
  • cat5com


    If my website were to purchase a sponsored article on a site with a powerful domain authority that contained a do-follow link, and the link would be "domain.com/articles/new-article" ... obviously new-article would have 0 page authority, being new... is that still considered a valuable link and why or why not?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cat5com
    0
  • schmeetz


    Schema seems to be properly set up according to Google Webmaster Tools and the Structured Data Testing Tool... https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/?url=http://www.myessentia.com/mattresses/classic-8 Are dates for reviews necessary to getting the star ratings to appear in the SERPS?

    Technical SEO | | schmeetz
    0
  • SkuidEmily


    Hi community, I'm having trouble viewing data for all of our pages. Moz is only crawling two of our pages, and we have a lot more than that. Any suggestions? Thanks, Emily

    Link Explorer | | SkuidEmily
    0
  • MEllsworth


    Many of our pages have the textual content stuffed at the bottom of the page because the manager doesn't think anybody reads it and it is an eyesore to have at the top: http://www.stevinsontoyotawest.com/schedule-service For some light reading here is Google’s official blog talking about content quality:
    http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html This references Ads vs Content showing above the fold. However, in our case it has to do with images vs ads and stuffing text at the bottom of pages. Here is a bit of heavier reading. You can do a quick search for "Fold" to see their interpretation. 
    http://macedynamics.com/research/content-quality-score/ I understand that images are still content, however hardly any of the images have Alt text and they are not even named with keywords so Google really can't distinguish what the page is about through images alone. I'm not about to go through the entire site and add Alt text and rename images because I have much more to do on my plate. So, the questions is: Is stuffing content at the bottom of the page, below all images/inventory/widgets ok to do or should we stick with the eyesore content at the top of the page? Thoughts?

    Technical SEO | | MEllsworth
    0
  • Macrofireball


    I've recently been asked by a client if I can foresee any issues with reverting back to their original domain name. With the original domain name they had a pretty decent DA for their sector which they have now lost. Although I do appreciate that over time this might come back, the CEO is very keen to switch back to the old domain. They do currently have 301 redirects from the old domain to the new and have implemented rel canonical. As yet they have not notified Google of the change of address using Webmaster Tools. Can anyone forsee any issues with returning back to the old domain name? They have only been using the new domain name for a couple of months which currently has a DA for 1.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Macrofireball
    0
  • highwayfive


    Hello Mozzers The issue I have is a client with a number of office locations (six) across the south of England and they want each to rank well for each location + the qualifier solicitors. IE Brighton Solicitors. Work has been undertaken on the office location pages to include the services offered from each location, full postcodes and phone numbers. These location pages are linked to from the footer of the website so have good internal links. The site has a DA of 49 and the office location pages have a PA of 33. Google in its wisdom keeps ranking the home pages for the searches. The result is that the site ranks well in one location (London) but poorly in all the majority of others (2nd,3rd and 4th page). Were it does pick up/choose the location page the rankings are better than the homepage. The other locations are less competitive than London according to the Keyword difficulty tool. Any tips on to suggest to Google that it should rank the office location pages and not the homepage for each location?  Thanks in advance 🙂

    Local Listings | | highwayfive
    1
  • Mulle


    Hi folks, i've got a question: we have about 3 million image sites with unique URL on our site. All images with a caption are transmitted to Google index, which regards 2/3 of all images. We are afraid that this could cause some problems due to thin content. Please take a look at one of our article sites with such a photo gallery: http://goo.gl/hq6bxG All gallery pics with a caption are indexed: http://goo.gl/gd9TQ6 Do you have any advices how to handle those photo galleries? How should they be flaged for Google? Every pic "noindex" and "canonical"-Tag to the article? Thx a lot! Matthias

    Technical SEO | | Mulle
    0
  • PeaSoupDigital


    Afternoon! An SEO client of ours has copied a load of landing/category page content from other sites. Lots of emails have been sent back and forth asking them to remove it, but they are adamant to keep it up there until we have time to amend it. We have explained to them: The Google penalty risks The copyright risks The short and long-term implications for their brand new business/website The money they are spending on our SEO package could be completely wasted if they're caught I think the above is pretty black and white, but the director of this company will not budge. Does anyone have any different approaches? The director said he's happy for us to amend the content but, in the meantime, the plagiarised content will not be removed. Cheers, Lewis

    On-Page Optimization | | PeaSoupDigital
    0
  • brandrsn


    If a startup has a tech blog (say, domain.com/tech) and a startup journey blog (on domain.com/journey — think groovehq.com/blog), will garnering high PA/DA links to those pages help the root domain rank for keywords related to the startup's services? For example, continuing the Groove example, will quality links to their aforementioned startup blog help them rank the homepage for Online Help Desk Software? Even when those links are from non-helpdesk content on non-helpdesk sites? My theory is that links from high DA sites won't be a bad thing — as long as they're not from spammy pages and done naturally. In some niches, where it's hard to get organic product-related links, this might be a worthwhile strategy. Am I right? Or sadly misguided...? 🙂 EDIT: BTW. The niche I have in mind is fairly uncompetitive, and it'd be easier to garner links from the startup/tech community than the niche community itself.

    Link Building | | brandrsn
    1
  • LoonyToons


    Hi guys, I am managing a real estate website, and obviously we have a LOT of pages detailing each property. As those properties get sold and removed from the website, I'm wondering how best to handle this - I know 404, 410 and 301's are all valid ways to go, but I want to provide the best UX combined with the best SEO effect. My thinking is to customise a 410 page to show the page has been permanently removed, and has a relevant message (rather than a generic 404 message) and shows a search box - possibly pre-populated according to the page they were looking for.
    I think this gives a good UX and helps Google to understand the importance of the 000's of pages on our website.
    I'd also like to clear property detail 404's as quick as possible to make it easier to see if we have problems elsewhere on the site. Having explained this to our development/SEO agency, they are strongly pushing for 301 redirects or leave as 404.
    I think 301's would be the worst for UX, and as explained earlier, the volume of 404's is massive and makes it difficult to see real errors. They seem to think this is a better UX and better for SEO. Just wondering what you guys would recommend?

    Technical SEO | | LoonyToons
    0
  • EnjinFrance


    Hi there ! A client want to sell some products on its future website but just a small range (the most part of this website will not be an online shop). The idea is to add a "shop" button in the menu to redirect clients in this shop. I would like your opinion about how should I construct this shop, what do you think is the best for SEO : "www.website.com/shop" or "shop.website.com" thank you in advance for your answers !

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnjinFrance
    0
  • Silverwaring


    Hey MOZ peeps, iv come across something strange. The website http://abundantiaentertainment.com/ displays a "blank" MOZ bar ?! Can anyone help me understand this Thank you in advance

    Moz Pro | | Silverwaring
    0
  • BeckyKey


    Hi I have done a site crawl and there are a lot of 302's on the 'Go to Basket' link when customers go through to pay. Should these be updated to 301's? On just the first part of the link so nothing after the ? /OrderCalculation? Thank you

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey
    0
  • anubis2


    Hi, I was wondering if blog commenting (no-follow links with names as anchor text) is a good way to counter possible overuse of exact match do-follow backlinks?

    Link Building | | anubis2
    0
  • EricLee123


    Hi Guys, We currently have a client that offers reviews and preparation classes for their industry (online and offline). One of the main things that I have noticed is how all of their product landing page urls are stuffed with keywords. I have read changing url's will impact up to 25% traffic and to not mess with url's unless it is completely needed. My question is, when url's are stuffed with keywords and make the url length over 200 characters, should I be focusing on a more structured url system?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricLee123
    0
  • PierreLechelle


    Hey guys, I've started working with this client a while back. Everything is working perfectly, we create great content, earn links and rank on a lot of interesting terms. Except for one term... It's keyword difficulty isn't even that high: 38%. (We rank on some keywords which have 60%). They got everything right: interesting and engaging content, a diversified backlink profile (with many organic good links), good on-page SEO but nothing can move them up. Some websites with a lower DA & MozRank are outranking them although they don't do anything regarding their SEO except buying scrappy links. The only thing I can see is that they transitioned to HTTPs and that plenty of their links directed to the HTTP domain. The 301 was done during the transition so I don't think we lost too much of link juice... Please note that during the Keyword Difficulty full-report, I noticed that all their metrics are similar to the first few results in SERPs and largely outpace the others... Any idea on what might be happening? Thanks for your help :)!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PierreLechelle
    0
  • Atomicx


    I am looking for a lot of insight into my gaming site hiddentriforce.com We have been growing a ton on our social networks, but the site is not growing as quickly as we would like. We have a pretty decent back link portolio from being the first to break news, some unique pieces, a scholarship, etc. But I would love another set of eyes on things.What could I do to drastically improve the site? To most improve its seo?

    Link Building | | Atomicx
    0
  • AlexisWithers


    Structured Data Markup Helper in Webmasters. Once i set the article or Movies with star rating etc should i replace the whole code from here into my page? is there some other way?

    Technical SEO | | AlexisWithers
    0
  • TVape


    So there is this exact match domain that gets about 500 visitors a day. it has trust flow 17 and citation flow of 23 which is just a little lower than our own website. The website talks about one of our keywords and rank on second page in SERPs. I am not interested in buying and running that website, but rather just to liquidate all the pages with 301s into our existing domain and onto relevant pages. So the 301s would be to relevant pages. The question is, would this strategy be worth it in todays SEO world and Google updates?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TVape
    0
  • AlexisWithers


    Can ALT tags for a Gallery be identical for all images with just the no changes? Will that create any issues?

    Technical SEO | | AlexisWithers
    1
  • AlexisWithers


    My SEO friend says my website is not being indexed by Google considering the keywords he has placed in the page and URL what does that mean? We have added some text in the pages with keywords thats related the page

    Technical SEO | | AlexisWithers
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Browse Questions

Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.