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!
-
Should I leave the updating to Moz Local (App) or do it myself?
Hello. I am using the Moz Local service to submit my site to directories. There seems to be a bit of conflicting information/Instructions. Do I just sit back and let Moz continue with providing updates to the sites, or do I have to manually go in to each of the partner sites to make sure that they are all updated correctly? I seem to remember reading one instruction telling me to let Moz do it, and another saying that I should be doing it. There are missing categories on some of the sites, which I am being told to make sure are correct, whilst the Moz Local site is saying 'Update in progress'. I am a bit confused :0)
Moz Local | | Nanuq0 -
UK Yelp: How to add county
I am using Moz local in the UK. Yelp is showing as inconsistent, because the county is missing from their listing. There is not a filed to add the county. Any ideas or clues about how to make this data consistent?
Moz Local | | Nanuq0 -
(301 Redirect) [No Title] ???
For my main URL litgen.com in Open Site Explorer its showing a (301 Redirect) [No Title] for litgenconcrete.com/ with a spam score of 9. Why spam? should I fix it? what's up? Thanks DJ
Link Explorer | | bjan13130 -
Remarketing List at Impressions Level
Is it possible to make a re-marketing list in Adwords at Impressions level. Let's say i have a placement campaigns running at a particular site & my banner shows up on that site. Irrespective of whether the user clicks it or not the re-marketing list tracks it. Is it possible?
Branding | | welcomecure0 -
On Page Optimization Limit?
Is there a limit to the number that I can track and monitor? Is that why some of these don't have names? optimization.jpg
Product Support | | leannegoff0 -
Concerns of Duplicative Content on Purchased Site
Recently I purchased a site of 50+ DA (oldsite.com) that had been offline/404 for 9-12 months from the previous owner. The purchase included the domain and the content previously hosted on the domain. The backlink profile is 100% contextual and pristine. Upon purchasing the domain, I did the following: Rehosted the old site and content that had been down for 9-12 months on oldsite.com Allowed a week or two for indexation on oldsite.com Hosted the old content on my newsite.com and then performed 100+ contextual 301 redirects from the oldsite.com to newsite.com using direct and wild card htaccess rules Issued a Press Release declaring the acquisition of oldsite.com for newsite.com Performed a site "Change of Name" in Google from oldsite.com to newsite.com Performed a site "Site Move" in Bing/Yahoo from oldsite.com to newsite.com It's been close to a month and while organic traffic is growing gradually, it's not what I would expect from a domain with 700+ referring contextual domains. My current concern is around original attribution of content on oldsite.com shifting to scraper sites during the year or so that it was offline. For Example: Oldsite.com has full attribution prior to going offline Scraper sites scan site and repost content elsewhere (effort unsuccessful at time because google know original attribution) Oldsite.com goes offline Scraper sites continue hosting content Google loses consumer facing cache from oldsite.com (and potentially loses original attribution of content) Google reassigns original attribution to a scraper site Oldsite.com is hosted again and Google no longer remembers it's original attribution and thinks content is stolen Google then silently punished Oldsite.com and Newsite.com (which it is redirected to) QUESTIONS Does this sequence have any merit? Does Google keep track of original attribution after the content ceases to exist in Google's search cache? Are there any tools or ways to tell if you're being punished for content being posted else on the web even if you originally had attribution? Unrelated: Are there any other steps that are recommend for a Change of site as described above.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PetSite0 -
Do exact keyword matches exclude "in", "based" etc?
I am trying to build a landing page for the search term "web design london" and I have included this search term as well as some variations such as "web design in london", "web design based in london" as the content doesn't really read well if I don't put in a connector word (I can't remember what the term for the use of "in" etc is). However I am using the Moz On-Page Grader to make sure I'm dotting every i and crossing every t, but it doesn't seem to pick up on the search term when "in" or "based" is used. Now is this a limitation of the On-Page Grader or should I expect Google and other search engines to not pick up on the search term when it contains these sorts of words?
Moz Bar | | mickburkesnr0 -
"redirects" with no "redirect address"?
Episode 2 of "Damon the idiot noob" web series . . . I have like . . ..90 plus temporary redirects in my moz "medium priority diagnostics". But the majority of them have a url, but no redicret url. How can it be a temporary redirect if there is no redirect address? Some of the addresses simply don't make any sense. Like: http://www.thirdcoastsigns.com/catalog/seo_sitemap/product How on earth would a "seo_sitemap" be followed my a "/product"? This is a Magento site, so I know some of these things get created automatically . .. but what on earth is going on here? Help welcome, appreciated, and welcome. Did I mention it is welcome and appreciated?
Moz Pro | | damon12120 -
Magento Site "Title Missing or Empty"
Hi everyone . . ..bear with me as I am "noob". My moz analysis brought up a few "critical" issues, one of which was a missing or empty title for a page. That page is: http://www.thirdcoastsigns.com/sales/guest/form Which does not even appear to be a working page . . . so I'm at a bit of a loss ow to fix this. I suspect it's a little bit of SEO expertise and a little bit of Magento expertise. Thoughts and suggestions welcome! P.S. Look forward to my NEXT noob question about a bunch of pages I have flagged as "Pages with temporary redirects". Stay tuned!
Moz Pro | | damon12120 -
Products description from third party vendor creating duplicate content issues?
Hi, I am running my client's e-store. The store sells different products from various vendors. Vendors provide us product descriptions. The problem is that these vendors also give these description to display their products on other similar sites and hence creating duplicate content issue. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | Kashif-Amin0 -
Disavow both www. and non www. version of site?
I just submitted my disavow file to Google after several months of work. A few months ago a saw a partial match unnatural link penalty in the www. version of my site's Search Console account. The penalty has since expired. Should I also upload the file to the non www. side of the Search Console account? No penalty ever appeared there.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pajamalady0 -
Transactions from some sources not showing up?
Hi all, For one of my clients it seems that we're not seeing conversions for one particular source (an online banner). I've been recommending that they do away with that paid advertising since it hasn't been converting. However, my client recently made a purchase from the ad to test it, and it's not showing up in conversion data. All other conversion data seems right on, so I have no idea what could be going on with this one referral source. It's showing accurate page views, accurate time on site, but no e-commerce data. Any ideas what would cause this source to not show up in conversions? The campaign info is also showing accurately in Analytics. I've attached what the redirect looks like, from the banner to the actual URL. Thank you! N6eUjT1GJv
Reporting & Analytics | | newwhy0 -
Uses for Fiverr?
Hi,
Web Design | | ChrisHolgate
I'll keep this really short and sweet... I'm just intrigued more than anything. With the exception of user testing has anybody ever had a good experience with Fiverr? Obviously I'm not contemplating SEO services for $5 but I'm just curious as to whether anybody has found any services that were genuinely useful in a day to day capacity?2 -
Two websites, same business name, same NAP
Hi, A client of mine offers loft conversions and wants to make a go of it. So he has a website dedicated to loft conversions. He is also a joiner/carpenter and has another old website which offers general joinery work and insurance work. Both websites have the same business name and same address and phone number. There is only one Google place page for the loft conversions website. The loft conversions website is not ranking as well as we would like locally. Could it be due to the same NAP? What are the best options? Redirect the old website to the loft conversions one (he might not like that idea) Change the address and phone number on one website?(and all subsequent citations?) Would love some help on this!
Local SEO | | AL123al0 -
Can I move analytics campaigns from one Moz Pro account to another?
Hello all, hoping someone can help - couldn't find anything on this subject in the Q&A already... I'd like to associate some existing Moz analytics campaigns with a different Moz Pro account, is this possible? I know I could just start a new analytics campaign in the different pro account, but I don't want to lose all of the data Roger has already collected on the site; I feel it would be a tragedy after all his hard work, and it wouldn't be convenient for me. Hoping someone can help!
Product Support | | sbridle0 -
Google Change of Address for previously penalised website?
Hey guys Would you use the 'change of address' tool (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en) for a site that was previously penalised, pointing it to the new URL? Cheers Jeremy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeremycabral0 -
Should I stop redirectin 301, sometime?
Dear All, I work for a southamerican ecommerce, I would like to know if you can help me out with the following. This site is full of 404, more than 45K, so we are doing 301 to corresponding pages. The development team is asking me if we could stop doing the 301 in some time...In order to do this search engines should index only the url we are redirecting to, and not the one that is redirecting to the new one. Currently they are redirecting in the HTML no by htaccess, so this means they have one page for each URL that needs to be redirected, and this is not efficient. Bests, Pablo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pablo_carrara0 -
URL Change Best Practice
I'm changing the url of some old pages to see if I can't get a little more organic out of them. After changing the url, and maybe title/desc tags as well, I plan to have Google fetch them. How does Google know that the old url is 301'd to the new url and the new url is not just a page of duplicate content? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
No Index Question
Hello, We are attempting to have the following page removed from Google search results: view-source:http://www.mndaily.com/1998/04/08/missing-student-has-disappeared A noindex tag was added but we aren't sure if it was done correctly. I'm wondering if there are any experts here that might be able to confirm that this was added correctly and will result in the removal of the page from search results. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasonMPLS0 -
How new website / blogs can earn backlinks?
Hi, As link wheels, link pyramids and paid links are penalized by google and the only chance to get back links is to earn them. My Question is that with a new website / blog, how a newbie with no relationships with established bloggers, can earn links? Because writing quality contents and detailed posts (e.g. more than 3000 words posts twice a month) still would benefits for those blogs having already traffic to share these contents and in case of new blog, due to very low traffic, it would take months or years to enter in the game. Please propose step by step strategy / plan / footprint for newly born website and marketers. Thanks
Link Building | | Kashif-Amin0 -
Does duplicate content not concern Rand?
Hello all, I'm a new SEOer and I'm currently trying to navigate the layman's minefield that is trying to understand duplicate content issues in as best I can. I'm working on a website at the moment where there's a duplicate content issue with blog archives/categories/tags etc. I was planning to beat this by implementing a noindex meta tag on those pages where there are duplicate content issues. Before I go ahead with this I thought: "Hey, these Moz guys seem to know what they're doing! What would Rand do?" Blogs on the website in question appear in full and in date order relating to the tag/category/what-have-you creating the duplicate content problem. Much like Rand's blog here at Moz - I thought I'd have a look at the source code to see how it was dealt with. My amateur eyes could find nothing to help answer this question: E.g. Both the following URLs appear in SERPs (using site:moz,com and very targeted keywords, but they're there): https://moz.com/rand/does-making-a-website-mobile-friendly-have-a-universally-positive-impact-on-mobile-traffic/ https://moz.com/rand/category/moz/ Both pages have a rel="canonical" pointing to themselves. I can understand why he wouldn't be fussed about the category not ranking, but the blog? Is this not having a negative effect? I'm just a little confused as there are so many conflicting "best practice" tips out there - and now after digging around in the source code on Rand's blog I'm more confused than ever! Any help much appreciated, Thanks
Technical SEO | | sbridle1 -
Unnamed Update — February 4, 2015
Does anyone have any more information about this shift in the search rankings. For us it seemed to affect few SERPs but those it did impact were highly competitive. I have heard speculation that it had to to with whether your site was mobile friendly or not. I don't believe this to be the case however since it impacted us nagatively and we have been mobile friendly (per google's test) since a year before this update. https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change Our website has clean backlinks and all original content.
Algorithm Updates | | SB_Marketing0 -
Can ht access file affect page load times
We have a large and old site. As we've transition from one CMS to another, there's been a need for create 301 redirects using our ht access file. I'm not a technical SEO person, but concerned that the size of our ht access file might be contributing source for long page download times. Can large ht access files cause slow page load times? Or is the coding of the 301 redirect a cause for slow page downloads? Thanks
Technical SEO | | ahw1 -
Duplication in Meta Titles
Hi,
Technical SEO | | ChrisHolgate
In order to appease the Moz crawler we recently changed over 10,000 URL's in order to make our Meta Page Title less than 55 characters as it suggested. Unfortunately our rankings dropped dramatically pretty much overnight so I am getting the feeling that perhaps our titles are now just a little too concise and need elaborating on just a touch. Our competitors that rank well seem to use a small amount of keyword repetition. For example, whereas we may have:
Brother DCP-197C Inkjet Cartridges They will have:
Brother DCP-197C Inkjet Cartridges. Cheap Brother DCP-197C Ink. What are your opinions of the fact that: a) Their Title is over the 55 character figure that is suggested for displaying correctly in the SERPs.
b) The words Brother and DCP-197C are repeated in the title. The fact their title appears to be working better is almost enough to sway me but the competitors title just looks a little too spammy for me to make a sitewide change without asking some second opinions first. Cheers all!0 -
Does anyone know where I can find the Moz Video explaining how to use the Craw Diagnostic Feature? Thank!
I am starting to use the craw diagnostics(specifically duplicate content) and I know there was a very helpful tutorial video i saw earlier but I cant seem to find it now
Getting Started | | John-Francis0 -
The use of a ghost site for SEO purposes
Hi Guys, Have just taken on a new client (.co.uk domain) and during our research have identified they also have a .com domain which is a replica of the existing site but all links lead to the .co.uk domain. As a result of this, the .com replica is pushing 5,000,000+ links to the .co.uk site. After speaking to the client, it appears they were approached by a company who said that they could get the .com site ranking for local search queries and then push all that traffic to .co.uk. From analytics we can see that very little referrer traffic is coming from the .com. It sounds remarkably dodgy to us - surely the duplicate site is an issue anyway for obvious reasons, these links could also be deemed as being created for SEO gain? Does anyone have any experience of this as a tactic? Thanks, Dan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOBirmingham810 -
Digital Marketers Take on Traditional Advertising (Billboards, Radio, TV, etc.)
So I have some questions (probably more of a discussion really) about how to do traditional advertising in 2015. I started working with a local company that has done very well for themselves throughout the years but has lacked in the digital marketing space. Today we are doing a lot better digitally and I have been put in a position that will also affect how we do traditional...which I've never really done before (I'm a digital marketer so why would I?). Here's my question (or discussion item): If we have always done radio jingles (include Pandora here too), cheesy commercials, and traditional billboards and they seem to have done well through the years should we keep doing those? I have 2 issues here as a digital marketer: I have virtually no data on people that see or hear our advertisements because there isn't an Analytics platform for the real world. This means that I can't stay with them, better their experience, or nurture them along the way with my advertising. My thinking here is that I want to get them to my website then -- Please correct me if I'm wrong or if there are other ways of thinking for this out there that make sense. I want to test test test these jingles, commercials, and billboards but I'm unsure how to. How can you tell what's working and what's not? Also, are there others out there doing things like this that can at least show me that jingles work (or do not work)? My impression is that they work because people remember the cheesy jingles and such but also that they don't work because everyone's take on them is "they are so annoying!" -- Again, please shed some light here and correct me if I'm wrong in my thinking. My final note here and MAIN purpose for posting here is because I want to change the way things are done with traditional. It all seems to be the same thing over and over, and I want to get creative with this and push the limits. This is why I have turned to the Moz community, because I think we have those types of minds here.
Local SEO | | HashtagJeff1 -
Blank Cart Pages Showing as Duplicate, HELP
Hi Everyone, I'm seeing a bunch of URLs that look something like this [ domain.com/cart?add&id_product=42&token=776d4a08721f3d8c920e287248797547] showing as duplicate content in my Moz crawls. I think these are just blank pages for the most part. Is there anything to be concerned with here? Is there a way to clean this up? Thanks! Ricky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Google Product Ads
Hi,
Paid Search Marketing | | ChrisHolgate
I was wondering if I could ask is perhaps someone could give me some clarification as to how the amount we bid on Google Product Ads reflects the product positioning on Google Shopping? We have a Google Product Data Feed which is then linked up to our Adwords account so that we can determine a PPC bid amount. In instances like this it doesn't seem to make sense that one person may be paying 10ppc and another 20ppc when the buyers criteria for sorting merchants was purely down to the price. Since the buyer has the option to sort their products in price from minimum to maximum the sort order cannot be manipulated by Google based on the amount the merchant was paying. As such, how is determining a cost per click figure relevant when the customer is searching by base price low > high on Google Shopping? Surely I should just set the limit to £0.01 and rely on the customer determining the sort order (which ultimately will lead to a higher conversion rate) than allowing Google to skew the results based on bidding 20-30 times this amount? I should state that I'm in the UK. I do realise that a high PPC amount will increase our chance of exposure on standard search pages but my question does relate solely to results listed on Google Shopping. Thanks for your help! Chris0 -
Phone number for SEO
We have had an interesting question from a client. They have asked if removing their phone number from their website would have an affect on their rankings. Our immediate answer was 'No' but it may affect the Brand, Usability and Customer experience by restricting the methods of contact. This then made us think that perhaps then it could have an effect in the long term. This situation is also complicated by the fact that they do not have a Google Local Plus account for operational, sensitivity reasons (they don't want to openly publicise their address) We believe that there shouldn't be any negative affect but thought we would open a discussion. Thanks in advance for any comments/ideas.
On-Page Optimization | | vital_hike0 -
How to Configure Custom Alerts for Real Time Traffic etc from Google Analytic API?
Hi All, I know how to set alert from google analytic but i want alerts for real time visitors so i think it is possible via Google Analytic API, so can anyone share with me the process or relevant blog post? Regards, Mit
Reporting & Analytics | | mit0 -
Posted by Link on Moz - Broken
I wasn't sure which category to place this in as Support doesnt feature Q&A or the Moz site in general so I dropped it under other research tools to which the Q&A kind of is 🙂 Now I am not sure if it is just me and that you have rectified the issue, but when ever I click on the "posted by" links to the user. I am getting a page not found error. The links in question can be seen in my two grabs and effect all posted by links on the Q&A section of Moz. A simply trailing slash after .com "/" will do the trick 🙂 https://moz.comusers/view/636129 - BROKEN
Feature Requests | | TimHolmes
https://moz.com/users/view/636129 - FIXED Aj5S2Pj,YfSQEmZ#0 Aj5S2Pj,YfSQEmZ#10 -
Product meta tags are not updating in my Magneto website!
I need some help! For some reason, each time I update the product meta tags in my Magento website, it doesn't change on the current website? Could someone help me understand why that is?
Technical SEO | | One2OneDigital0 -
Cross domain tracking Google Analytics
Hi there, Got a question on cross domain tracking: We have a couple of TLD's to serve localized content to our visitors, next to our main .com TLD where our app is running as well in a subdomain. Situation is this: Local sites:
Reporting & Analytics | | jorisbrabants
marketingsite.be
marketingsite.com.br
marketingsite.fr Main site: marketingsite.com
app.marketingsite.com Conversion gets triggered when somebody ends up in app.marketingsite.com/firstuse for example. People can sign up at the local site filling in their email but they end up in app.marketingsite.com/firstuse Reading this article on cross domain tracking I'm getting a bit confused on the setup of the tracking code itself. The sample code provided shows these two lines: ga('require', 'linker'); ga('linker:autoLink', ['maindomain.com','targetdomain.com']); Now the question 🙂 Is it correct when I think that maindomain should be replaced with our local TLD's on every one of those, and that targetdomain is where the conversion happens? In this case the .com site?0 -
How to Configure Google Analytic API?
Hello All, I want to implement google analytic api can any one show me the whole process? Regards, Mit
Reporting & Analytics | | mit0 -
To consolidate or not to consolidate?
First off, thank you for any help or advice. I appreciate it. I own a large tour company that operates tours in Savannah Georgia and New Orleans Louisiana. Savannah is where we started and I purchased the domain ghosttoursinsavannah.com when I started. It ranks very well for all relevant search terms my customers are searching for. Very often either #1 or #2. In New Orleans, I have ghosttoursinneworleans.com. Since it is a relatively new website, around 10 months old, it doesn't rank as well, but we are in the top 7 results for many search terms that are relevant. Now, my company is called Ghost City Tours and I also have a website at www.GhostCityTours.com. For almost a year now I have been thinking about consolidating all of my websites under my brand website, www.GhostCityTours.com. So, the homepage for www.ghosttoursinsavannah.com would be copied over and 301'd to my Savannah subpage at www.GhostCityTours.com. All blog posts would be redirected, etc. Same for New Orleans. Understandably, I am nervous to do this as my 'city' websites rank very well. I know how I would do it, consolidating them, but I am curious on everyone's thoughts. For example, I am assuming I would see a traffic drop and probably a drop in the serps too. Best guess, how long would the recovery take, so I could regain my search positions? Any tips or pointers would be greatly appreciated. OR, should I even consolidate (I really want to).
Local SEO | | ghostcitytours0 -
How to defer an exit survey?
This is not really an SEO related question but because we are all marketers here I'm hoping someone will have the answer I'm looking for. I want users to be able to defer answering an exit survey until they are finished their visit to our website. We will invite them on entry, but give them a check box that says "Ask me when I'm finished this visit" or similar. We currently launch using "exit intent" detection, but users keep complaining that we're asking them too early (before they've had a chance to do anything). And this with 30 second delay and minimum two page visit. The question I have is, how do we get a deferred survey back in their face at the end of the visit? Back in the days before tabbed browsers, we'd have pre-loaded the survey in a "pop under" window and it would have been there when ever they finally closed the browser window. With tabbed browsers, this doesn't really work any more. We can open the survey in a new tab but leave focus on the active tab, but will the user ever really go to the new tab? Is there a way to force focus to the new tab with the survey in it when the user leaves the website or closes the active tab? We don't want to change survey platforms (we've just done that), we need a solution that will allow us to deliver the survey within our own platform even if the browser handling happens somewhere else. Anyone been able to do something like this? Does your solution also work for mobile devices?
Branding | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
Amount of Internal Links?
Does anyone know how much internal linking is helpful in ranking? And, what is the recommended amount of internal links in a page of the website? I have seen some websites adding so much internal links ranking good but not sure about the recommended amount.
Local SEO | | BrianBotts.0 -
Sudden drop in index, is this a bug?
We haven't made any sort of changes to the website recently and we had a 10% drop in indexed pages. I know there is rumors of a bug, has this happened to anyone else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.