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  • Hi I have found a lot of links from a majestic report (not found on moz open site explorer).  inwhich I have found lots of links from 2010 and possibly earlier which either I can't get hold of the webmaster.  Is a disavow the right way to go if I can't get them removed myself? Also I have noticed that there are a lot of free directories listing new pages from our site and I am concerned Google are going to find these.  I surpose there is nothing I can do about this, does anyone have any recommendations.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia
    0

  • Hi, After reading Mr. Shepard's amazing article on the 7 concepts of advanced on-page SEO (https://moz.com/blog/7-advanced-seo-concepts), I decided to share my own experience in hopes of helping others. I started doing legal SEO back in 2013. At the time I really didn't know much about SEO. My first client (my brother) had recently left the D.A.'s office to become a criminal defense attorney. I told him to write content for the following areas: domestic violence, sex crimes, and homicide. He finished his first content piece on domestic violence and I was not impressed. It seemed too unique, individualized, and lacked the "generic" feel that many of the currently ranking pages had. Please note that I don't mean "generic" in a negative way. I just mean that his content regarding domestic violence felt too personalized. Granted, his "personalized" approach came from a Deputy D.A. with over 13 years handling domestic violence, sex crimes, and murder cases. I was inclined to re-write his content, but lacking any experience in criminal law I really had no choice but to use it. IMPORTANT:  Please note that I barely knew any SEO at the time (I hadn't even yet discovered MOZ), and my brother knew, and continues to know, absolutely nothing about SEO. He simply wrote the content from the perspective of an attorney who had spent the better part of 13 years handling these types of cases. The result?  Google: "Los Angeles domestic violence lawyer/attorney", "Los Angeles sex crimes lawyer/attorney", and "Los Angeles homicide attorney." They have held those spots consistently since being published. I know that MANY other factors contribute to the success of content, but at the time I published them we had few links and very little "technical SEO." Unfortunately, I started learning "SEO" and applied standard SEO techniques to future content. The result? Never as good as the articles that were written with no SEO in mind. My purpose in writing this is to help anyone about to tackle a new project or revamp an existing site. Before getting too caught up in the keywords, H tags, and all the other stuff I seem to worry too much about, simply ask yourself - "is this great content?" Thanks again to the MOZ team for the great advice they have shared over the years. Honestly, I think I sometimes become overly reliant on SEO b/c it seems easier than taking the time to write a great piece of content. P.s. Any "SEO" stuff you see on the above-mentioned pages was done by me after the pages ranked well. P.p.s. I don't mean to imply that the above-mentioned pages are perfect, because they are not. My point is that content can rank well even without any emphasis on SEO, as long as the person writing it knows about the subject and takes the time to write something that readers find useful.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez1440
    3

  • We know about Panda... Penguin... Hummingbird... but I heard another major update is going to happen. Where do you find out the google updates ahead of time? Maybe a stupid question.

    Local SEO | | kpexpressions
    0

  • The traffic on my site (http://www.tbreak.com) has been stagnant over the last few months. We're a news posting site and posting a good 4-8 posts per day and using Yoast plugin to make sure they are optimized, but traffic has not grown at all. What could be the reason for that?

    On-Page Optimization | | tbreak.ae
    0

  • I suddenly have 4xx errors in my crawl diagnostics because pages with “/%3C/div” added to the end of the URL that are linked from the normal page can't be found. I didn't create the pages, and they don't exist, but Moz thinks that they do. I went back through to see if any changes in WordPress, theme or plugins versions might be the cause, but this is the only site that I have this issue, so I don't think that is it. Does anyone have an idea what causes this?

    Moz Bar | | samuelldrew
    0

  • Hello, One of my client has business in 5 different locations so he has URL's like: "www.abc.com/city-service" for which he has listing verified in each location. I can certainly say that Google Business allow sub pages URL in citations (correct me if I am wrong). I am not sure if it is possible to use the sub URL's like: www.abc.com/city-service in different citations websites? Also, if this would be a good approach or not? Please help me. Sam

    Local Listings | | BrianBotts.
    0

  • Hi all, Im thinking of creating a knowledge base with all many asked questions in my company. This could be a great Link-bait source but also nice ranking opportunities i think. But sometimes some new articles are so actual that i also want to blog them. 
    Can i for example double post them (or post a big excerpt) on the blog and canonicalise it to the KB article?
    Will links to the blog have equal value to KB links? And will this work?

    Content Development | | mdkay
    0

  • I have a personal site that is pretty strong (35 DA) likely from the fact that I have had it for so damn long (like. . . 15 years). So, since it's my own site of course I used it to link to my business site. Sadly, it looks like that site has "five spam flags" . . . which is ironic since it's totally legit. Anyway, what can I do to reduce spam flags?   It mentions "low trust", small proportion of branded links, and "large site with few links".   Pretty sure it's not the latter, since the site is just a wordpress site I use to share some of my music. (www.damonsongs.net in case anyone wants to hear it . . . ). So. . . 1) can I do much of anything to legitimze the site and 2) am I better off removing the site link I am trying to promote? Insights welcome!

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | damon1212
    0

  • In GWT, I wish to remove / resolve the following errors Mobile Usability > Viewport not configured Mobile Usability > Small font size Mobile Usability > Touch elements too close The domain www.sandpiperbeacon.com is responsive, and passes the mobile usability test. A new issue I noticed, is that GWT is reporting 200+ errors just for image index pages such as http://www.sandpiperbeacon.com/images/special-events/ for example. Website users cannot access these pages (without editing the URL manually) so I don't consider these usability issues. BUT, I hate to see 200+ errors, especially when Google itself says "Websites with mobile usability issues will be demoted in mobile search results." I could set the image directories to dissalow in Robots.txt, but I do not want the images to stop appearing in image search, so this seems like a flawed solution. I cannot be the only person experiencing this, but I have been unable to find any suggestions online.

    Technical SEO | | RobertoGusto
    0

  • Hi all, i have a small internet agency with services in several area's.
    Currently i structud my services in 2 different area's.
    General services and specialized products with services underneath. like so:
    domain.com/services
    domain.com/services/service1
    domain.com/services/service2
    and so on. domain.com/product
    domain.com/product/service1
    domain.com/product/service2 domain.com/product2
    domain.com/product2/service1
    domain.com/product2/service2 But now im thinking of create loads of different services i provide,
    there are some overlapping content of course, but all services are still individual.
    But i can write a lot of unique content about all the services. But is it smarter to make just a few big pages with the services more bundled.
    Or really long tail. Now i have around 15 services pages.
    when i make it a lot deeper im talking about 40 pages. Currently my complete website is around 35 pages.

    Content Development | | mdkay
    0

  • Hi All, We have a web provider who's not willing to remove the wildcard line of code blocking all agents from crawling our client's site (user-agent: *, Disallow: /). They have other lines allowing certain bots to crawl the site but we're wondering if they're missing out on organic traffic by having this main blocking line. It's also a pain because we're unable to set up Moz Pro, potentially because of this first line. We've researched and haven't found a ton of best practices regarding blocking all bots, then allowing certain ones. What do you think is a best practice for these files? Thanks! User-agent: * Disallow: / User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: Crawl-delay: 5 User-agent: Yahoo-slurp Disallow: User-agent: bingbot Disallow: User-agent: rogerbot Disallow: User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 5 Disallow: /new_vehicle_detail.asp Disallow: /new_vehicle_compare.asp Disallow: /news_article.asp Disallow: /new_model_detail_print.asp Disallow: /used_bikes/ Disallow: /default.asp?page=xCompareModels Disallow: /fiche_section_detail.asp

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReunionMarketing
    0

  • Hi, I am experience a weird issue. Google webmaster tools suggested me some HTML improvements a few weeks ago. The suggestions were about duplicate Title Tags and Short Meta Descriptions. I changed the Title Tags and Meta Descriptions. But after 3 Google Updates, webmaster still shows the same suggestion. Please advise Thanks

    On-Page Optimization | | Kashif-Amin
    0

  • Tools necessary for a Technical Audit of website with penalties and needs remediation? I am being tested for a job interview to prove and/or disprove a website has issues. I am familiar with Moz tools but I'm not sure of the procedure for this request? I am not finding anything online.  The client will be giving a website and I will be doing this audit. What tools would you use? What exactly should I be looking for? What are some obvious fixes? WHERE CAN I LEARN MORE?

    Moz Pro | | Joseph.Lusso
    0

  • Can having multiple H1 tags on a webpage be detrimental to its rankings?

    Technical SEO | | AubbiefromAubenRealty
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, This question has been asked a few times over the years, but opinion seems to have changed drastically and i wanted to get an updated opinion from sources i trust. On my category pages I have content above products. The content can push the product too far down, and if placed below is never viewed. To battle this I wanted to implement a "Read More" button so i could keep a couple hundred words there and expand it to the rest of the content if the user wanted. If not the products would remain near the top of the screen for better conversion. I have implemented this on this page to test if it affects my keyword rankings before i go site wide. But also wanted an opinion if this practice is ok. The example page with it implemented can be found here. The content im hiding isn't huge here but on other pages could be more. Is there a set ratio of text i should aim to keep / hide? Any pitfalls i should watch out for? I know google crawls the hidden content as its in the source code but should i be wary of a penalty is too much is hidden?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP
    0

  • Hi We are a UK company looking to expand our sales into the US market. We will be setting up a US office. Our (.com) site has a number of main sections relating to different products and services - but only two of these sections will be selling products to the US. /service1 - UK only
    /products1 - UK and US - different product names/descriptions for different markets
    /service3 - UK and US - not much difference for uk/us pages So the query is do we fully internationalise the site with sub folders /us & /gb and make all content on the site have a different language version. Or do we only give an alternate language version for the two areas that need it? Perhaps /products1/us & /products1/uk We also have top rankings and are concerned about changing the urls. Is one option to keep the existing urls as the 'default' language? The default perhaps being US as it is a .com domain. If not then how do you redirect a url that going forward splits into US or GB sub directories? Another option is to have the current .com become US only and create a .co.uk site. We are in a position to easily do this but research suggests subdirectories is the better way forwards due to aggregated link authority. Many thanks for any thoughts,
    Tristan

    International SEO | | AbsolutelyN
    0

  • Hi, our site is bringing in a lot of organic traffic and we want to convert more of these into leads and transactions. One way that we could do it is by pop ups to show after someone has interacted with the site. Can anyone suggest a reputable company that allows us to edit the functionality, capture email addresses, test and change the look of the pop ups?

    Whiteboard Friday | | The-Present-Finder
    0

  • Hi, Please can someone remind me how links in display ads are perceived by G ? A client of mine has purchased a display campaign with an industry related on-line publication that has lead to a massive spike in reported back links in Google Search Console (the new GWT).  Does Google automatically identify these as ads (due to tracker codes etc) rather than paid backlinks or should they, like links in press releases, be no-followed or other advice ? Cheers Dan

    Link Building | | Dan-Lawrence
    0

  • I'm looking at a site with the rel="prev" and "next" HTML attributes in place, to deal with pagination. However, the pages in each paginated category have identical page titles - is this an issue? Rand gives an example of how he'd vary page titles here, to prevent problems, though I'm not entirely sure whether this advice applies to sites with the rel="prev" and "next" HTML attributes in place: https://moz.com/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience  Any advice would be welcome - many thanks, Luke

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
    0

  • Hi - I'm looking at an old website and there are lots of 301s internal to that site - what do I do with these when I move to a new site? Should I list them and adjust them so they redirect to the new site now (instead of from one URL to another URL on the old site) - I'm thinking that if I don't the user will have to travel through one 301 then another to get to the new site, which doesn't seem like a great idea? Your thoughts would be welcome.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
    0

  • Hello there, I'm using Moz for a while and I'm very pleased with the tool and community. But for the first time I encountered a problem. We are trying to run a crawler for a client's website but only one page (only the homepage) was crawled. We tried to do a test on a more detailed level (maybe there is something wrong with the homepage). My campaign test's crawl came back for the Producten folder (level deeper than homepage), and it was also only a 1 page crawl with a 200 status. I did look at the robots.txt file now, and it is very restrictive, but there is nothing that I can clearly see that would explain why the crawl isn't working. Hopefully someone can point us at the right direction. Thanks in advance, Jeremy

    Moz Bar | | mediaxplain.nl
    0

  • I"m trying out MOZ, wanting to make an informed decision (for myself and my blogging students) whether this is a useful program to buy and use. I've had no luck so far with the Open Site Explorer. Each time I try, I get the same error message, "There was an error getting your data". I used the URL: http://writetodone.com I asked about the problem in the chat, but my question was posed over an hour ago and is still marked 'unread'... I"m keen to continue studying the program as I'm creating a video about MOZ. How can I make the Open Site Explorer work? I've tried the Analytics module but it seems to take some days to get results. Mary "There was an error getting your data"

    Link Explorer | | MaryJaksch
    0

  • A couple of years ago the ranking on our site dropped over night. I believe someone working here at the time purchased links about that time. We have been doing lots of work on the site since then to improve it. We can not get our rankings back up on google searches. Can anyone give us some advise about what to do or where to go for some help that we can trust.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD
    0

  • I am working with a company that sells high-priced automobiles. Each Unit has its own URL We currently leave most sold inventory live on the site as it draws in many leads (the units are visually shown as sold, so it shouldn't be a UX issue in most cases). We are wanting to start pruning some old units (this is in WordPress - custom post type) and I'm not quite sure what the best solution for this site is with removed units. Some ideas: Remove the units pages that are no longer needed, resulting in any links 404'ing to a useful 404 page. Remove the units pages, and 301 them to the Homepage (I don't really want to do this, as it seems like really poor UX) Remove the units page, and 301 the user to a specific "This item has sold" page that is shared by all sold units, but may not be the sites full 404. another option I haven't thought of? I dont' want to do anything that would confuse or get search engines upset, and I'm not sure how bad 404's are, I see some info on how bad they are, some that say they aren't bad. I'm guessing it is as usual, some gray area in the middle.

    On-Page Optimization | | Andy_Staple
    0

  • We currently rank in the local 3 pack for multiple keywords for our first location. We just opened a second location which is currently hanging at around #20 in the local results.  We have decided to close the first highly ranking location seasonally. We do not want to send customers to that closed location. However we also do not want to list the address with google as "permanently closed" in fear of losing all ranking power of that listing. Is it possible to transfer ranking power from location to the other or merge 2 different locations? Has anyone had any experience with this, tips, advice?? Thanks in advance! Chris

    Local Listings | | enjoiart
    0

  • Our company website has needed a complete overhaul for some time now and the new one is almost ready to go live.  We also have a separate "news" site that is houses around 800 blog posts and news items.  (That news site will be thrown away because it's on a completely different domain and causes confusion.) So we have a main site with about 100 decent blog posts and a separate news site with 800 poor posts. I plan on bringing all the main site blog posts over to the new site (both WordPress), but my question is whether or not to bring over the news site posts?  All, handful, none? Another issue is the news site doesn't have Google Analytics, so I'm not sure if any posts actually generate traffic, but I can from the main site we do get some referrals from it. As far as quality of content goes, it's poor.  Not sure who wrote it all, but it's mainly text press releases that aren't very interesting. Is it worth bringing over for SEO purposes or simply delete the site and create a mass redirect so all of those pages will direct to the new website's blog page? Any help is greatly appreciated.

    Web Design | | codyfrew
    0

  • We just picked up a new client and I've been doing some digging around on their site. They have quite the wide variety of URL's that make for a rather confusing experience. One of the milder examples is their "About" page. Normally I would expect something along the lines of: www.website.com/about I see: www.website.com/default.asp?Page=About I'm typically a graphic designer and know basically nothing about code, but I just assume this has something funky to do with how their website was constructed. I'm assuming this isn't particularly SEO friendly, but it doesn't seem too bad. Until I got to another section of their site. It's a section that logically should look like: www.website.com/training/public-seminars It's: www.website.com/default.asp?Page=MT&Area=Seminars&Sub=MRM Now that's nonsensical to me! Normally if a client has terrible URL's, I'd say let's do some redirects, but I guess I'm a little intimidated by these. Do the URL's have to be structured like this for some reason? Am I missing some important area of coding here? However, the most bizarre example is a link back to their website from yellowpages.com. Where normally I would expect it to lead to their homepage, I get this bizarre-looking thing: http://website1-px.rtrk.com/?utm_source=ReachLocal&utm_medium=PPC&utm_campaign=AssetManagement&reference_id=15&publisher=yellowpages&placement=ypwebsitemip&action_target=listing_website And as you browse through the site, that strange domain stays. For example the About page is now: http://website1-px.rtrk.com/default.asp?Page=About I would try to google this but I have no idea where to even start! What is going on with these links? Will we be able to fix them to something presentable without breaking their website?

    Technical SEO | | everestagency
    0

  • No matter how much I research this one, there's no definite answer and there's a lot of contradictions. Basically we're looking to launch an article on 24 expert interior design tips for 2015. Each tip is submitted from a different interior designer we have chosen who have a reputable, trusted website. The main goal for this article is to generate various inbound links for our site from the designers and it will help to create engagement on social media. Although if we're giving out links to these designers for their contributions, the inbound links we receive in return will be little or no value as this is reciprocal linking? Some say this is okay as it's completely natural within the blog posts, others say to avoid it as it can be seen as an obsolete practice to deceive Google. Does anyone have any more information on this and how it should be carried out? Would a better process be to link to their social media accounts? Rather than reciprocal linking? Thanks

    Technical SEO | | Jseddon92
    0

  • We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations. I have Places set up and all, but we decided to create location pages on our sites for each location - brief description and content optimized for our main service. The path would be something like .com/location/example. One option that has came up in question is to create landing pages / "mini websites" that would probably be location-example.url.com. I believe that the latter option, mini sites for each location, would be a bad idea as those kinds of tactics were once spammy in the past. What are are your thoughts and and resources so I can convince my team on the best practice.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KJ-Rodgers
    0

  • After a site upgrade, we found that we have over 3.7 million URLs on our site. Many of these URLs are due to the facet options. Each facet combination yields a different URL. However, we need to do a deeper analysis into these URLs to see if this is the only reason why so many are returning. Does anyone know if there are any negatives of having so many URLs crawled, other than the fact that Google only spends so much time crawling a site? Is the number of URLs something that should be concerning? Any insight appreciated!

    Technical SEO | | Deluxe
    0

  • What is the best way to build backlinks from high domain and page trust sites?

    Image & Video Optimization | | WeissToyota
    0

  • Is there a way to migrate multiple Google Blogger blogs together into one?  Even better, would it be better to add the content to my main site blog?  If so how can I do that without copying each article and adding to main site blog then deactivating the google blogs.

    Moz Pro | | WeissToyota
    0

  • Hi, I would like to do an automated sitemap for my site but it has more than a million pages. It would need to be a sitemap index with a separation on different parts of the site (i.e. news, video) and I'll want a news sitemap and video sitemap as well (of course). Does anyone have any recommended way of making this and how much would you recommend it getting updated? For news and , I would like it to be pretty immediate if possible but the static pages don't need to be updated as much. Thanks!

    Reporting & Analytics | | mattdinbrooklyn
    0

  • Did the keyword tool recently change? What is Grepwords? Why do all my long-tail phrases show as "not available?" Just wondering...

    Moz Bar | | amandasnowden
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, I have a couple of questions regarding starting out into social media with an e-commerce website. Most of my experience lies in niche content where a social media following is more natural. Having completed most of the site audit (at least the planning). Its time to begin planning the next move into writing articles on the blog and heading out into social media to facilitate link building whilst i finish off creating the last of the updated website content. I have plenty of subjects I can think to write about and many keywords to target with articles on the website. But I could do with some advice linking this into social media. We have youtube, google+, facebook and twitter accounts but all of them are inactive bar profile information and have almost no following. We sell technical measurement equipment across a selection of niches. My plan is as follows so far, 1. Write 5-10 amazing new articles across the selection of products
    2. Link to them all on each social media platform to begin populating each with content
    3. Populate the website homepage with links to all our social media accounts to encourage following
    3b. Include adverts stating discount codes etc can be obtained by following us on social media a little unsure where to progress from this point, I have no budget available at the moment, but may be able to obtain some if I can achieve some results without. As always thanks for your time.

    Social Media | | ATP
    1

  • I know Google says there is no limit to it but I have seen on many websites that too many 301 redirects can be a problem and might negatively affect your rankings in SERPs. I wanted to know especially from people who worked on large ecommerce site. How do they manage internal redirect from one URL to other and how many according to you are too many. I mean if you get a website that contain 300 plus 301 redirections within the website, how will you deal with that? Please let me know if the question is not clear.

    Technical SEO | | MoosaHemani
    0

  • Hello, I've tried a crawl for the site www.doctify.co.uk and it's only returned 1 link in the report which is the homepage. Do you know what the issue could be? Thanks, Nina

    Moz Bar | | Global_Blue
    0

  • We are building a new site which is a .com site and the client would like to be found in both Google.co.uk and Goolge.ie. What is the best practice to go about this? Can you geo-target two countries with the one site?

    Local Website Optimization | | WSIDW
    0

  • Hi Guy's I have a question about Google asking me to translate the page when i search on brandname. It's in the Dutch Google and the searchquery is: "rotomshop" I can find why Google wants to translate the page because all our settings are Dutch. Does anyone have a suggestion? Thanks!

    Algorithm Updates | | Happy-SEO
    1

  • My website onlineplants.com.au. It's a shopping cart website. I do have nearly 1200 images but none of the images are indexed in google webmaster? what should i do. Thanks

    Technical SEO | | Verve-Innovation
    1

  • I am working with a client that  has multiple locations across the nation, and they recently merged all of the location sites into one site. To allow the lead capture forms to pre-populate the locations, they are using the query string  /?location=cityname on every page. EXAMPLE - www.example.com/product www.example.com/product/?location=nashville www.example.com/product/?location=chicago There are thirty locations across the nation, so, every page x 30 is being flagged as duplicate content... at least in the crawl through MOZ. Does using that query string actually cause a duplicate content problem?

    Technical SEO | | Rooted
    1

  • Hello, I use Moz Local for our company's 12 locations. On August 15 we had a "Listing Reach" of 315. Today I noticed we're down to 29. How does one verify what the problem is with Moz Local? Thanks in advance,
    Erik

    Moz Local | | SmileMoreSEO
    0

  • Many SEOs I know simply upload the new sitemap once the new site is launched - some keep the old site's URLs on the new sitemap (for a while) to facilitate the migration - others upload both the old and the new website together, to support the migration. Which is the best way to proceed? Thanks, Luke

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
    0

  • Hi everyone - What is the best way to deal with 404s on an old site when you're migrating to a new website? Thanks, Luke

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
    0

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