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!

  • Stuart26


    Hi there, Moz has highlighted that my 404 page is returning a 404... Looking at webmaster tools within crawl errors, it's the same story. The only big change on the website is that we recently moved to https for the entire site, so all pages have a 301 to the corresponding https page, including the old 404 http page. I don't know if that makes any difference? Any help or advice on how I reasolve this will be much appreciated. Thanks, Stuart

    Technical SEO | | Stuart26
    0
  • WeAreDigital_BE


    Hi Mozzers, The background: I have this very corporate .com domain which is used worldwide. Next to that, we have another .com domain which is specifically created for the US visitors. Within the organic rankings, we notice that our corporate domain is ranking much better in the US. Many visitors are arriving on this domain. As it is a corporate domain being used worldwide, they get lost. My questions: I know there are ways to redirect by location. Would it be smart to automatically redirect US visitors for the corporate domain to the commercial US-specific domain? Is it possible to only redirect US visitors and leave the website as it is for visitors from other countries. Won't this harm the corporate website (organically) worldwide? If this would be a good idea, any recommended plugins or concrete procedures? Thank you so much for helping me out!
    Sander

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE
    0
  • chewythedog


    Hi MoZ Community, Key word inclusion in URL has been discussed a fair bit on here and curious for some feedback on two options on URL structure. Ran’s #3 tip from his recent ‘15 SEO Best Practices for Structuring URLs’ states that key word inclusion still has some value but I’m not too sure if we’re going too far with the below examples. We sell footwear and only footwear for Women, Men & Kids and use those words as our key menu headings at the top. Under each of the main headings within a mega menu the users then has the choice to ‘shop by style’, ‘shop by brand’ etc… The key question or feedback is about including the word ‘shoes’ in my URLs as many of the top ranking competitors do it. e.g. /women-shoes-heels, womens-shoes-sandals or womens-shoes/heels, womens-shoes/sandals I think Google is smart enough to determine we have a shoe store and not sure of the value from a SEO or user experience perspective of adding the additional word. Thoughts on going with option A or B would be valued.... Option A - http://shopname.com/womens/sandals, http://shopname.com/womens/heels   OR Option B - http://shopname.com/womens-shoes/sandals, http://shopname.com/womens-shoes/heels Thanks, |   |   |
    |   |   |   |
    |   |   |   |
    |   |   |   |
    |   |   |   |
    |   |   |   |
    |   |   |   |
    |   |   |   |
    |   |   |   | |   |   |
    |   |   |   |
    |   |   |   |
    |   |   |   |
    |   |   |   |
    |   |   |   |
    |   |   |   |
    |   |   |   |
    |   |   |   |

    Algorithm Updates | | chewythedog
    0
  • McTaggart


    Hello, I was looking at Moz Local and saw that you are supposed to enter a business "description". However, I'm pretty sure local directories will not want duplicate descriptions - can I leave the description blank and then add varied descriptions directly? Is that a way around this issue? Your thoughts would be welcome.

    Moz Local | | McTaggart
    0
  • RoxBrock


    I am being asked to change these product links on the home page: Home/Condo
    Watercraft/Boat to Home
    Condo
    Watercraft
    Boat (Along with several other product links) How does this affect the customer experience/usability, and SEO? Is it a good idea or is it confusing? Thank you.

    Web Design | | RoxBrock
    0
  • Kung_fu_Panda


    Hi, Someone know the exact differences between the following Google Analytics metrics: "New Users" "User" Hope to get your support. Thanks in advance.

    Reporting & Analytics | | Kung_fu_Panda
    0
  • oxfordseminars


    Hello, The situation is that someone is arriving on my main website https://www.example.com and being redirected to http://m.example.com. When this happens my analytics says that the traffic is all direct coming to my mobile site. However, I know people clicking on my google cpc, and some google organic users are hitting the main website and being redirected. Before we didn't have as good of a redirect on our main website so I could tell organic and cpc traffic coming in, now my main website has a huge drop in these categories because they are redirecting to mobile but I can't tell on my mobile how much traffic from each is going to the mobile site. Is there a way to fix this? Is it because my main website is https:// and mobile is a http:// (as I know that sometimes makes traffic direct) or is it a bigger problem that can't be resolved? Thanks

    Reporting & Analytics | | oxfordseminars
    0
  • FWC_SEO


    Hi I have a doubt about Google Webmaster Tools or Central as it is call today. I remember that google recommended to have one profile of your website for each domain structure. Let me try to be more clear one profile for http://www.yoursite.com, an other for http://yoursite.com, an other for https://www.yoursite.com, etc. Then in each of them we uploaded our sitemaps and cross our fingers. Now from my experience always the complete url have better index status from the sitemap. Now my question is, today as Google requested all our websites run under https, so conserving the other profiles is affecting how google index our pages? shall we have to delete the old profiles or is better to maintain them? Thanks. Pablo

    Reporting & Analytics | | FWC_SEO
    0
  • ATP


    Hey moz, Im currently converting my site to mobile as its an older template based on tables it will make a lot of CSS redundant. I cant delete as i go incase a page uses it im unaware of so need to clean it up when its done. Is there a tool that crawls my entire website and highlights the unused CSS in the files? Ive found a few paying tools that claim to do so but am reluctant to just spend money on something without a recommendation. Cheers!

    On-Page Optimization | | ATP
    1
  • RickyShockley


    Also suggesting a WBF topic. Ive read and researched with no luck here... would love a Moz staff reply too! Is it better to blog repeatedly on the same topic (writing multiple blogs around the topic of "content marketing" for example in hopes Google sees you as an authority on the topic over time) OR is this keyword cannibalization? Is it better to have one powerful and comprehensive page on a topic if it makes sense. Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley
    0
  • FutureSolutionsMedia


    Hello Moz Forum, Thanks in advance for any help. My website was recently featured in a bunch of high DA journals and magazines. I don't see the inbound links on the open site explorer, but I do see them in recently discovered. My website's Domain Authority hasn't changed a wink. How long does it take, typically to see the recently discovered links under the inbound links portion? Thanks! j1pqVRt

    Link Explorer | | FutureSolutionsMedia
    0
  • joncombridges


    I'm a newbie for Local but I want to learn it well. How soon will the data be propagated so I can see if there are inconsistencies or duplicates. Thanks!

    Moz Local | | joncombridges
    0
  • cheaptubes


    I launched a new website at www.cheaptubes.com and have recovered my search engine rankings as well after penguin & panda devestation. I'm continuing to improve the site but moz analytics is saying I have 288 medium issues and i see the warning "45% of site pages served 302 redirects during the last crawl".  I'm not sure how to fix this. I'm on WP using Yoast SEO so all the 301's I did are 301's not 302's.  I do have SSL, could it be Http vs Https?

    Reporting & Analytics | | cheaptubes
    0
  • Bevelwise


    I do SEO in an agency and have many clients. I always get the question, "Will that hurt my SEO?". When it comes to Meta Title and even Meta Description Length, I understand Google will truncate it which may result in a lower CTR, but does it actually hurt your ranking? I see in many cases Google will find keywords within a long meta description and display those and then in other cases it will simply truncate it. Is Google doing whatever they want willy-nilly or is there data behind this? Thank you!

    Algorithm Updates | | Bevelwise
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, Where do you guys go to get inspiring new ideas for web design layouts. I'm making a portfolio and need one more design. I'm thinking 4 is enough sample sites. So far I have 3. Thanks!

    Web Design | | BobGW
    1
  • Dan-Moz


    currently using seo quake and moz tool bar but wondered if there is a better suggestion that will look at pages that are only accessible on the internal network on development server.   Very restricted in what can be installed

    Moz Bar | | Dan-Moz
    0
  • BrianAlpert78


    Hey folks, I've been working on a site recently where I took a bunch of old, outdated pages down. In the Google Search Console "Crawl Errors" section, I've started seeing a bunch of "Not Found" errors for those pages. That makes perfect sense. The thing that I'm confused about is that the "Linked From" list only shows a sitemap that I ALSO took down. Alternatively, some of them list other old, removed pages in the "Linked From" list. Is there a reason that Google is trying to inform me that pages/sitemaps that don't exist are somehow still linking to other pages that don't exist? And is this ultimately something I should be concerned about? Thanks!

    Reporting & Analytics | | BrianAlpert78
    0
  • RoxBrock


    After changing my complete site, citations, etc to a certain brand spelling--capitalize the first letter, I am being asked to add another capital in the spelling. Could this affect customer usability or ranking in any way? i.e. Mozcon to MozCon Thanks.

    Branding | | RoxBrock
    0
  • RoxBrock


    A manager wants change our 800 phone number to use letters instead of numbers. This would involve changing our toll free number, changing phone number on website/blog/quote forms (different platforms) and changing on Social Media, Local and citations. i.e. 1-800-GoReds1   versus 1-800-555-5555 Is there any research that shows customers appreciate a Brand Named phone number over simple numbers? It seems it would make using the phone number more difficult except on mobile, where it can be clicked. I have looked online but have found nothing, but am not sure I'm searching the correct terms.

    Local SEO | | RoxBrock
    0
  • ahw


    Google adwords not allowing us to reactivate after GWT violation removed and site deemed clean by Google. Attempts at reaching them for guidance have been unsuccessful. Any suggestions? Thank you.

    Paid Search Marketing | | ahw
    0
  • BeckyKey


    Hi We regularly have products which are no longer sold and discontinued. As we have such a large site, webmaster tools regularly picks up new 404's. These 404 pages aren't linked to from anywhere on the site any longer, however WMT will still report them as errors. Does this affect site authority? Thank you

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey
    0
  • maxcarnage


    Hello all, I have a client who currently has a very poor URL structure. As it stands, their URLs are formatted in the following manner: http://www.domain.com/category/subcategory/page In all my years of SEO, however, I have always tried to implement the following format: http://www.domain.com/category/page The web designer for this particular project has been very reluctant to change the structure for obvious reasons, but I'm convinced that by modifying the URL structure, SEO will improve. I am correct in thinking this? Likewise, if I am able to get the URL structure changed, what do I need to look out for to make sure we don't lose any traction for our keyword terms? Any and all insight/suggestions is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!

    Web Design | | maxcarnage
    0
  • maxcarnage


    Hello all, I have a client who currently has a very poor URL structure. As it stands, their URLs are formatted in the following manner: http://www.domain.com/category/subcategory/page In all my years of SEO, however, I have always tried to implement the following format: http://www.domain.com/category/page The web designer for this particular project has been very reluctant to change the structure for obvious reasons, but I'm convinced that by modifying the URL structure, SEO will improve. I am correct in thinking this? Likewise, if I am able to get the URL structure changed, what do I need to look out for to make sure we don't lose any traction for our keyword terms? Any and all insight/suggestions is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!

    Web Design | | maxcarnage
    0
  • ATP


    Hey Mozzers, Im having a go at making our site mobile friendly without enlisting the help of developers and incorporating additional costs. I am ok with most of it as its just CSS work bar the odd occasion when i need to reposition some elements within the code. However, i have found myself wanting to use display:none {} on many elements that are just not practical on a mobile site. Some pages may have to hide substantial content. Would this be considered an issue or will google just see it as me hiding impractical elements for a different sized screen. I have googled this question for the past hour and there is a whole bunch of conflicting advice. As always, Many thanks

    Technical SEO | | ATP
    0
  • MickEdwards


    A Wordpress site has a footer widget for facebook with some images, all of which are served within an iframe.  The FB CDN robots is blocking the images from being crawled so Webmaster Tools rendering tool is reporting these 8 or so images as blocked.  Should I be concerned?

    Technical SEO | | MickEdwards
    0
  • peterm2


    Hello mozzers, I have an unusual question. I've created a page that I am fully aware that it is near 100% duplicate content. It quotes the law, so it's not changeable. The page is very linkable in my niche. Is there a way I can build quality links to it that benefit my overall websites DA (i'm not bothered about the linkable page being ranked) without risking panda/dupe content issues? Thanks, Peter

    Technical SEO | | peterm2
    1
  • bendyman


    Hi, I know there are several good answers regarding duplicate content issues on this website already, however I have a question that involves the best way to avoid negative SEO impacts if I change the urls for an ecommerce site. Basically a new client has the following website http://www.gardenbeauty.co.uk and I notice that it suffers from duplicate content due to the http://www version and the non www version of the pages - this seems quite easy to fix using the guidance on this website. However I notice that the product page urls are far from ideal in that they have several issues including:- (a) they are mostly too long (b) don't include the keyword terms (in terms of best practice) (c) they don't use Static URLS An example of one these product urls would be http://www.gardenbeauty.co.uk/plant-details.php?name=Autumn Glory&p_genus=Hebe&code=heagl&category=hebe I'd like to address these issues, but the pages rank highly for the products themselves, therefore my question is what would you recommend I do to fix the urls without risking the high positions that many of these product pages have? thanks, Ben

    Technical SEO | | bendyman
    0
  • ATP


    Hey Mozzers, I have several pages on my website that are for user search purposes only. They sort some products by range and answer some direct search queries users type into the site. They are basically just product collections that are else ware grouped in different ways. As such I didn't wants SERPS getting their hands on them so blocked them in robots so I could add then worry free. However, they automatically get pulled into the sitemap by Magento. This has made Webmaster tools give me a warning that 21 urls in the sitemaps are blocked by robots. Is this terrible SEO wise? Should I have opted to NOINDEX these URLS instead? I was concerned about thin content so really didnt want google crawling them.

    Technical SEO | | ATP
    0
  • CommercePundit


    Hello, We have customized product and we charge Handling Charge + Shipping Charge for blow $9.99 price products, other products not have Handling Cost but only Shipping Cost. If I apply Shipping Price from Merchant Center Shipping Table then it is required to mention Shipping Cost + Handling Cost at Shipping attributes?  Because we saw total Shipping Cost including with Handling Cost as given below, | Subtotal | £6.99 Super Saver (delivered on or before Fri,Oct 9th 2015)( £7.95 ) + Handling Fee (£3.00): | £10.95 | **                                                                                         Grand Total£17.94** (Incl. VAT) In this case how I can saw Handling Price ?? Thank you in advance.

    Paid Search Marketing | | CommercePundit
    0
  • LJHopkins


    I've just started to work for a company who've purchased masses of domains with every conceivable permutation based on all their products with every extension possible e.g .biz  . eu. .net (including .co.uk and .com of course). I have two questions: 1. Is it worth keeping all these (they want to add more) domains or let them expire? 2. All the purchased domains are online - is there any point (they redirect with a 301)?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LJHopkins
    0
  • prashanth123


    Hi guys, I have been brainstorming regarding a very unique SERP that i figured out while navigating search, the serp looks some thing like this http://postimg.org/image/phkol0d97/. i checked the site in structured testing tool but the only thing that i found is some PMR meta tags nothing except that. Can any one help me understand this and i would be more helpful if some one can guide me for the same. #peace

    Algorithm Updates | | prashanth123
    0
  • richdan


    I need a tool that will run through a long list of URLs (from multiple domains), look for a specific string in the source code and then produce a CSV showing in which URLs the the string was found. This is for legitimate research, not for any nefarious purposes Any ideas of such a tool already exists?

    Search Behavior | | richdan
    0
  • MillyShaw


    I'm working on a website where all the blog content is listed as separate pages from the homepage, eg: www.domain.com/first-blog-post
    www.domain.com/second-blog-post However, it would make my life easier if all blog content was listed under /blog/ so that I could analyse it better in Google Analytics. Eg I'd like it to be: www.domain.com/blog/first-blog-post
    www.domain.com/blog/second-blog-post The developer is not keen because it would create extra work for him, and he's also said it's a bad idea from an SEO point of view. But is this the case? Presumably with 301s in place it wouldn't make a difference? Thanks for your help!

    Technical SEO | | MillyShaw
    0
  • PeaSoupDigital


    Hi, So we've just purchased the Agency version of Moz Local and decided to submit our agency first. Moz pulls addresses from Google and Facebook, both of which have the correct address for our business. However, when I search for our agency on Moz Local, a line from our address is missing. Moz doesn't allow you edit most of the address for spam reasons, but it lets you enter a manual 'Address Line 2', which is perfect as that's what's missing.... Unfortunately, it appears this has a very low character limit and it only accepts two of the three words in the address - 'Teesside Industrial' instead of 'Teesside Industrial Estate'! For local SEO, your address needs to be perfectly consistent across every single directory... so how do I overcome this if Moz won't allow me to enter our correct address? Cheers, Lewis

    Moz Local | | PeaSoupDigital
    0
  • jampaper


    Hey everyone. I recently took on a side project managing a family member's website (www.donaldtlevinemd.com). I don't want to get too into it, but my relative was roped into two shady digital marketing firms that did nothing but a mix of black-hat SEO (and nothing at all). His site currently runs off a custom wordpress theme which is incompatible with important plugins I want to use for local optimization. I'm also unable to implement responsive design for mobile. The silver lining is that these previous "content marketers" did no legitimate link building (I'm auditing the link profile now) so I feel comfortable starting fresh. I'm just not technical enough to understand how to go about migrating his domain to a new theme (or creating a new domain altogether). All advice is appreciated! Thanks for your help!

    Local Website Optimization | | jampaper
    1
  • gdavey


    Hi There, I am about to implement analytics for a customer site and I am wondering if I should use Google Analytics or https://www.afsanalytics.com ? I am leaning towards Google since it's pretty mainstream but I would love some feedback on the AFS ! Thanks everyone! Gary

    Reporting & Analytics | | gdavey
    0
  • SecondSEOMOZAcct


    We are redoing a hospital site, and one of the goals is to increase traffic for the various practices associated with the hospital. Which brings up an interesting dilemma -- how to optimize these practices with respect to local SEO. Currently, the sites are listed as in a directory, one after the other, with multiple addresses. Would it be best to create individual pages to each one? Should these then link to the practice's website, if applicable? Any other insights would be appreciated.

    Local SEO | | SecondSEOMOZAcct
    0
  • eaglenestmedia


    We lost our site in an actual meltdown at our hosting provider in January, and decided to do a new site instead of bring back a dated backup. So we've only been "active" at our URL since about May. That said, I have not seen any irregular or unexpected penalties. Not showing up is natural if you have literally nothing to show. We have had a site since then, though, and while it isn't going to win any award, we've built it with best practices using sites like this, trying to use natural, helpful, actual language to convey what we do and why we do it (we're web developers for small business making WordPress sites). Paying attention to titles, keyword frequency and variability, alt tags, etc. Always erring on the conservative side. While we build sites for people across the country (and a few in places like the UK), we just moved into an actual office space in our hometown so it's never been more important to push our visibility locally. We've just come back on the scene, in relative terms, so there's no expectation we'll crack the top five or ten; they all have teams of people and bags of capital and have been around many, many years, plus they link to the dozens upon dozens of sites they have done and promote their appearances in press releases and such. Their content is not bad, and most of it is good and not spammy. They are being genuine. That said, we're in the late 40s to late 50s right now. Happy to show up at all, but after that first group of legitimate sites, there are automatically generated webpages (which I thought couldn't even be listed...one is an MP3 download site that mentions one of the top companies in the page title, and just has a random video on the page) local companies touting themselves as SEO "experts" that say things like "Here at Company X, we work hard to bring you the best Rochester, NY web design in the hopes that when you make your Rochester, NY web design decisions, you'll think of us first Rochester, NY web design." I changed the company name and the location, but that's an actual line from their site job listings from places like Craigslist and Indeed hair stylists dentists (?!) Our code validates, we've incorporated Schema for our addresses, our site is usually fast (650ms to 1.3s in Pingdom from Dallas). We don't do any redirecting, our metas likes everyone else's don't count for ranking but are thoughtfully produced, we pay attention to using concise and accurate URLs without stop words, etc. There are also very very few resources loaded on a given page. That said, there's not a lot on the blog that's new and all told we have I think 13 total pages including a few posts. Is it even possible to get close to the actual pack if we, for example, posted more regularly? I was just reading here about how we shouldn't put our links in the site footers of our clients (which we don't always anyway), so I have them only as branded links, only on the homepages, and only on sites that, when crawled, didn't have nonzero spam scores (everyone else has a nofollow link in our portfolio). I realize this is a super generic question but I wasn't quite sure how to search out this particular use case given that our aspirations are so basic...just trying to figure out if there's something obvious we're missing and shooting ourselves in the foot over. A thousand pledges of gratitude! (if this is too common and I just didn't see a duplicate, let me know and I will delete it or ask for it to be deleted....also, I don't want to appear spammy so I am not linking to my site unless it's absolutely necessary...not sure what protocol is...I'm pretty self-aware so I do believe everything I've said above is true).

    Local SEO | | eaglenestmedia
    1
  • FranFerrara


    A question regarding International SEO: We are seeing cases for many sites that meet these criteria: -International sites that have www.example.com/ ip redirecting to country site based on ip redirect (ex. www.example.com/ 301 to www.example.com/us -There is a desktop + mobile site (www.example.com + m.example.com) The issue we see is Google shows www.example.com/ in US search results instead of www.example.com/us in search results. Since the .com/ redirects, there is no mobile version, and www.example.com/ also shows up in mobile SERPs instead of m.example.com/us. My questions are: 1. If www.example.com/ is redirecting users and Googlebot, why is Googlebot caching it with the content of www.example.com/us? 2. Why is www.example.com/ showing up in SERPs instead of www.example.com/us? 3. How can we help Google display www.example.com/us and m.example.com/us in SERPs instead of www.example.com/? Thanks!!

    International SEO | | FranFerrara
    0
  • Marlette


    We recently acquired a new domain to replace existing as it better fits our brand. We have little/no organic value on existing domain so switching is not an issue. However the newly acquired domain was previously used in a different industry and has inbound links with significant spam scores. How can we let Google know that these links are not valid for our business and start rebuilding reputation of the domain? Disavow tool?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marlette
    0
  • RosemaryB


    I have been doing a structured data test for a client who is looking to improve their local SEO.  After running several tests in Google Developer Tools structured data testing tool I have been noticing data sets for "Custom Search Result Filters" and "Unspecified Type" structured data properties. I have plans to apply Organization and Local Business schematic markup.  However my question is this:  do the "Custom Search Result Filters" and "Unspecified Type" offer any value at all?  I would like to have a response to our client if they ever ask about this. I attached a snapshot of what this looks like. ydu32k6.jpg?1

    Local Website Optimization | | RosemaryB
    0
  • MobileDay


    Hey Moz Community I ran a crawl test, and there is a lot of duplicate content but I cannot work out why. It seems that when I publish a post secondary urls are being created depending on some tags and categories. Or at least, that is what it looks like. I don't know why this is happening, nor do I know if I need to do anything about it. Help? Please.

    Moz Pro | | MobileDay
    0
  • Bob_van_Biezen


    Hi guys, Just wondering, what’s you take on doing international linkbuilding for an national company? In Holland there are very few websites / blogs / information platforms about certain niches. Let’s take SEO for example. There are a few marketing websites, a few SEO related websites but at an certain point my attention goes to what’s happening in America (on Moz for example). I think writing an YouMoz post is a great way to add something to the community. If that would reward an backlink, I’m all motivated to start writing! But does this help our rankings for Dutch query’s? I can see a lot of examples in which “the place to be” isn’t a Dutch website, but some big ass international forum / website etc. I would love to hear all of your opinions!

    Link Building | | Bob_van_Biezen
    0
  • Mekounko


    why moz do not show website competitive metrics? meko.lv and why site meko.lv has high spam score? I dont see any reason for that??? metrics website is meko.lv NKpqhns

    Product Support | | Mekounko
    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.