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After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

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Latest Questions

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  • JimJ


    We are an e-commerce marketplace at for alternative fashion and home decor. We have over 1000+ stores on the marketplace.  Early this year, we switched the website from HTTP to HTTPS in March 2018 and also added noindex and nofollow tags to the store about page and store policies (mostly boilerplate content) Our traffic dropped by 45% and we have since not recovered. We have done I am wondering could these tags be affecting our rankings?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimJ
    1
  • RistoM


    Hi, I am doing link cleaning, and still a bit new to this, and would appreciate the community's help 🙂 So, I have a site which has quite a lot of low DA (or no DA) follow backlinks. BUT, the links are from my niche the sites are not spammy the anchors are okay and they are from good Geo location for me The only negative thing is that these sites are a bit "dead" meaning that there is no new content, and thus there is no traffic or clicks coming from them. Should I keep those links or disavow them? To me these links are natural, but do they help me at all.... FYI I have plenty of good DA links. But what do you guys think, if I disavow all these low DA backlinks, does Google think that I am trying to manipulate my backlink structure to look better than it naturally is? Cheers guys and girls! 🙂

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RistoM
    0
  • GhillC


    Hello, Several tools I'm using are returning errors due to "broken canonical links". However, I'm not too sure why is that. Eg.
    Page URL: domain.com/page.html?xxxx
    Canonical link URL: domain.com/page.html
    Returns an error. Any idea why? Am I doing it wrong? Thanks,
    G

    Technical SEO | | GhillC
    1
  • Ryan_Marshall


    I have a company that rents, repairs, and sells product both new and used. They also have 3 locations in 3 states and service multiple cities out of the locations (ie... los angeles and orange county). Having a hard time redesigning the website so that it fits for customers to look around and for the best of Organic SEO. The issue seems to be fitting the locations in the mix in order to get the customer to the right area without being too confusing. In the end, I'm thinking well maybe the homepage should just be some content to get them to choose the location first then they can go into silos where they pretty much remain in the location for rentals, repairs, and sales but I'm not sure how having the locations on the home page would affect the site. Obviously, we would be trying to rank the silo locations more but they would be 2-3 pages in on clicks to get to the right section 'if' they started from the home page. We need to do this right from the beginning though because we are working on expanding nationwide one day. Thanks for any help on this manner. (PS> Thought about doing subdomains like locations.example.com or state.example.com and rentals.example.some and shop.example.com but I think that will dilute the rankings)

    Local SEO | | Ryan_Marshall
    1
  • Cassie_Ransom


    Since most UTM codes/URLs are longer than 70ish characters, is this hurting my SEO? If it is, how can I solve the problem while still using a UTM code? Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | Cassie_Ransom
    0
  • ds9.tech


    Hi, One of our clients have a website specific to a place, for eg. California Tourism in which they publish local information related to tourism, blogs & other useful content. I want to understand how useful is to publish Organization Schema on such website mentioning the actual Organization, which in this case is a Travel Agency? Or any other schema would fit in for such websites?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ds9.tech
    0
  • ResmanMarketing


    I have device optimized images for desktop, tablet, and mobile.  Should I put the same description, caption and alt tag for each?  Not sure if this will hurt me or help?

    Image & Video Optimization | | ResmanMarketing
    0
  • Extima-Christian


    Hey guys, I'm getting this weird error when I submit my sitemap to Google. It says I'm getting a 409 error in my post-sitemap.xml file (https://cleargear.com/post-sitemap.xml). But when I check it, it looks totally fine. I am using YoastSEO to generate the sitemap.xml file. Has anyone else experienced this? Is this a big deal? If so, Does anyone know how to fix? Thanks EwTswL4

    Technical SEO | | Extima-Christian
    0
  • WeAreDigital_BE


    Hi Everyone, A crawler from our SEO tool detects a 403 error from a link from our main domain to a a couple of subdomains. However, these subdomains are perfect accessibly. What could be the problem? Is this error caused by the server, the crawlbot or something else? I would love to hear your thoughts.
    Jens

    Technical SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE
    0
  • ds9.tech


    I understand the concept of locations in Moz Pro Campaigns. What does National exactly means? Is it like globally for a United States Google Search Rank or what? Please explain.

    Getting Started | | ds9.tech
    1
  • plumrocket1


    I have a very strange feeling that someone bad is trying to hurt our company, but maybe I am wrong. Let me explain. In the last two month, we have seen a very significant drop in sales on our website, but we couldn't figure out why. We have looked at different metrics (Google Search Console, Moz, Google Analytics), but everything looked alright. We had 10% loss in traffic, but we didnt believe at the time that it could be the main issue. Just yesterday we've discovered the following (please see attached screenshot😞 On August 18, 2018 Google launched Search Update On the same date, we had a jump in Organic Search Impressions for one particular keyword, which we never tracked before: "free facebook login". Majority of all impressions (233,000 out of 258,000) were from Philippines. Very low total number of clicks (50 clicks) led to 0% Average CTR for this keyword. Which in return, also lowered our global CTR by 1%. One month later we had 1000's of spam emails sent to our Helpdesk from two IP addresses, also from Philippines. We blocked them of course. It could be all coincidence. I dont know. But do you think that someone can use this fraudulent tactic to lower our CTR and drop our ranking and traffic? Can this influence our SEO in any way? It's also possible that someone is attacking Facebook and we just happen to be there, on the first page, for the same keyword. Should we try to eliminate our page for this keyword and see what happens? I've checked this article from Rand Fishkin - https://moz.com/blog/impact-of-queries-and-clicks-on-googles-rankings-whiteboard-friday and it seems that CTR is an important factor. However the article is from 2015 and maybe it's no longer relevant. What should we do? Thanks! G86Nge4

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | plumrocket1
    1
  • Mat_C


    Hi, I am doing the SEO for a webshop, which has a lot of linking and related websites on the same root domain. So the structure is for example: Root domain: example.com
    Shop: shop.example.com
    Linking websites to shop: courses.example.com, software.example.com,... Do I have to check which keywords these linking websites are already ranking for and choose other keywords for my category and product pages on the webshop? The problem with this could be that the main keywords for the category pages on the webshop are mainly the same as for the other subdomains. The intention is that some people immediately come to the webshop instead of going first to the linking websites and then to the webshop. Thanks.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C
    0
  • BandG


    Hi all, I have been looking into this for about a month and haven't been able to figure out what is going on with this situation. We recently did a website re-design and moved from a separate mobile site to responsive. After the launch, I immediately noticed a decline in pages crawled per day and KB downloaded per day in the crawl stats. I expected the opposite to happen as I figured Google would be crawling more pages for a while to figure out the new site. There was also an increase in time spent downloading a page. This has went back down but the pages crawled has never went back up. Some notes about the re-design: URLs did not change Mobile URLs were redirected Images were moved from a subdomain (images.sitename.com) to Amazon S3 Had an immediate decline in both organic and paid traffic (roughly 20-30% for each channel) I have not been able to find any glaring issues in search console as indexation looks good, no spike in 404s, or mobile usability issues. Just wondering if anyone has an idea or insight into what caused the drop in pages crawled? Here is the robots.txt and attaching a photo of the crawl stats. User-agent: ShopWiki Disallow: / User-agent: deepcrawl Disallow: / User-agent: Speedy Disallow: / User-agent: SLI_Systems_Indexer Disallow: / User-agent: Yandex Disallow: / User-agent: MJ12bot Disallow: / User-agent: BrightEdge Crawler/1.0 (crawler@brightedge.com) Disallow: / User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 5 Disallow: /cart/ Disallow: /compare/ ```[fSAOL0](https://ibb.co/fSAOL0)

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BandG
    0
  • landport


    Hi, would you guys recommend using a backlink service like this? https://www.peopleperhour.com/hourlie/gain-30-links-from-30-top-newspaper-sites-in-the-uk/396519Or is this the kind of thing that leads to being penalised?Over the years, I've always been told this is black hat and dodgy. Is that always the case?

    Link Building | | landport
    0
  • bgvsiteadmin


    Hi everyone, I am trying to add span tags in H1, break tag on 2 lines and style each line of H1 differently: Example: Line 1Line 2 I might add a smaller font for line 2 as well... Is this SEO friendly? Will crawlers read entire text or can interfere and block it. Thank you!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin
    0
  • Mack_


    If Google and Bing show an older version of a site's Yelp rating in the search results, what options are there to help ensure Google and Bing recrawl the Yelp page? Additionally, it appears third-party sites such as MapQuest show Yelp ratings and appear in Google search results; is it possible to request MapQuest to recrawl Yelp and then ask Google to recrawl MapQuest? Any advice would be much appreciated!

    Industry News | | Mack_
    1
  • angelamaemae


    Hello! I did something dumb back in the beginning of September. I updated Yoast and somehow noindexed a whole set of custom taxonomy on my site. I fixed this and then asked Google to validate the fixes on September 20. Since then they have gotten through only 5 of the 64 URLS.....is this normal? Just want to make sure I'm not missing something that I should be doing. Thank you! ^_^

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | angelamaemae
    0
  • Popidev


    Hello, I am currently working with a dev team to develop a new site. We have designed the title tags to sit below a banner image on each page but the technical team are insisting the h1 title tags must come above the banner for maximum SEO impact. I am sceptical about this, can anybody please shed some light and/or share any up to date resource on this? I have attached a side by side wireframe to illustrate the pages with the h1 tags in both positions. Thank you! HnWcLTx

    On-Page Optimization | | Popidev
    0
  • CyberAlien7


    I have a website that I'm considering selling. It gives no profit, but I think it has decent SEO value. Link explorer report: domain authority = 69, linking domains: 9.8k, inbound links: 44.2m, ranking keywords: 294. Is that any good? Website is about web design, so keywords are also related to it. Would it be useful for SEO links building for other people? I did sell similar website once, but it was about 7-8 years ago and I've sold it for very high 5 digit amount. However things have changed since then in SEO world, so I don't know if today similar website would be worth much. There is so much information out there that contradicts each other, so I think I'd rather ask professionals here.

    Paid Search Marketing | | CyberAlien7
    0
  • WhoseNo


    On 26 of October 2018 My website have around 1 million pages indexed on google. but after hour when I checked my website was banned from google and all pages were removed. I checked my GWT and I did not receive any message. Can any one tell me what are the possible reasons and how can I recover my website? My website link is https://www.whoseno.com

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhoseNo
    0
  • sam_legmark


    Just looking for thoughts and opinions on the best way to set up the main nav on a news website that covers a specific professional services sector. There are news items, archived news, blog, events, but also main menu links to the numerous news categories that go to a page listing the news articles under that category (as created in Wordpress when publishing the article). I'm thinking that having these off the main nav is diluting the juice to the more important pages including the events and the news page? Just thinking about how to rearrange and consolidate.  Any thoughts on how people would structure something like this?

    On-Page Optimization | | sam_legmark
    0
  • Lvet


    I am creating an SEO Dashboard in Google Data Studio.
    While it's easy to import data from Google Search Console, I have troubles in importing data from Mozzarellas tools. I thought about uploading a CSV file with the ranking to a Google Sheet Document, but I cannot find a way to do this at regular intervals with manual intervention.

    Moz Bar | | Lvet
    0
  • marktheshark10


    Hi guys, Just a quick question here - will google penalize a website for having both Canadian and American spelling on a webpage or negatively impact rankings? Appreciate your help with this. Mark

    Content Development | | marktheshark10
    0
  • Miniorek


    I have been experimenting a little bit with desc lengths and keyword density. Sometimes MOZ says keyword stuffing and google ranks higher the page with higher density. Obviously, it can't be artificially packed with keywords but putting more than GWT/SEO suggestions sometimes comes with a good result. What is your Experience? if you decide to extend the description to 5000+ characters would you hide this to Javascript or kept it all on the page? Bottom or Top. Does it really matter? (We are talking about e-commerce category page)

    Content Development | | Miniorek
    0
  • Fubra


    Basically we get a lot of users uploading photos as part of their review, but many photos aren't moderated into our pages and therefore are never displayed. Things like selfies rather than photos of the product or just random google images that are completely unrelated to our products or services. Is there any benefit in cleaning up the gallery since some images we don't use are just sat there in admin?
    when a page loads, would it be quicker if we had less content in the gallery? With our SEO hat on.
    or does it not matter since it's not loading that content (photos) anyway?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra
    0
  • Fubra


    What should and what shouldn't go in the sitemap? In particular, pages like subscribe to our newsletter/ unsubscribe to our newsletter? Is there really any benefit in highlighting those pages to the SEs? Thanks for any advice/ anecdotes 🙂

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra
    0
  • Lei_Zhang


    Does Bing have paid/organic report same as Google Adwords?

    Paid Search Marketing | | Lei_Zhang
    0
  • MattBassos


    Hi All, I'm trying to find more information on what IP address Googlebot would use when arriving to crawl your site from an external backlink. I'm under the impression Googlebot uses international signals to determine the best IP address to use when crawling (US / non-US) and then carries on with that IP when it arrives to your website? E.g. - Googlebot finds www.example.co.uk. Due to the ccTLD, it decides to crawl the site with a UK IP address rather than a US one. As it crawls this UK site, it finds a subdirectory backlink to your website and continues to crawl your website with the aforementioned UK IP address. Is this a correct assumption, or does Googlebot look at altering the IP address as it enters a backlink / new domain? Also, are ccTLDs the main signals to determine the possibility of Google switching to an international IP address to crawl, rather than the standard US one? Am I right in saying that hreflang tags don't apply here at all, as their purpose is to be used in SERPS and helping Google to determine which page to serve to users based on their IP etc. If anyone has any insight this would be great.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattBassos
    0
  • semcheck1


    Hi, I was wondering if anyone has seen this behaviour before? I haven't! We have around 20 sites and each one has lost all of its rankings (not in index at all) since the medic update apart from specifying a location on the end of a keyword. I set to work trying to identify a common issue on each site, and began by improving speed issues in insights. On one site I realised that after I had improved the speed score and then clicked "fetch as google" the rankings for that site all returned within seconds. I did the same for a different site and exactly the same result. Cue me jumping around the office in delight! The pressure is off, people's jobs are safe, have a cup of tea and relax. Unfortunately this relief only lasted between 6-12 hours and then the rankings go again. To me it seems like what is happening is that the sites are all suffering from some kind of on page penalty which is lifted until the page can be assessed again and when it is the penalty is reapplied. Not one to give up I set about methodically making changes until I found the issue. So far I have completely rewritten a site, reduced over use of keywords, added over 2000 words to homepage. Clicked fetch as google and the site came back - for 6 hours..... So then I gave the site a completely fresh redesign and again clicked fetch as google, and same result. Since doing all that, I have swapped over to https, 301 redirected etc and now the site is completely gone and won't come back after fetching as google. Uh! So before I dig myself even deeper, has anyone any ideas? Thanks.

    Technical SEO | | semcheck1
    1
  • GhillC


    Hi, Dealing with both my duplicated titles and meta descriptions i'm wondering if there's a "quick" win I could potentially implement asap. A bit of background:
    Say I've 4 pages structured that way: domain.com/us/productA.html for the US domain.com/gb/productA.html the UK domain.com/fr/productA.html for France domain.com/de/productA.html For Germany At the moment, both my page titles and meta-descriptions are duplicated all over the place for product A.
    Title is reading "Product A - company name"
    MD is a bit better, being translated in all 3 languages (En, Fr, DE). Therefore being the same for the US and for the UK. Ideally, I would get unique page titles and MD all over the place. However, due to time and resource constraints, I can't make it happen overnight. So my questions are pretty simple:
    1. Can I create a rule for page titles to be "Product A - country - company name" or similar? Would that be enough to make the page titles unique? Is there any value doing so?
    2. Can I "localize" duplicate MD by simply naming the country? I assume it is not enough in this case as all the rest would be copy/pasted. Ideally speaking, both my page titles and MD would be completely unique but I can't afford doing so in the short term. Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | GhillC
    0
  • dhananjay.kumar1


    Hi, i have a website with http but now i moved to https. when i apply 301 redirection from http to https & check in semrush it shows unable to connect with https & similar other tool shows & when i remove redirection all other tools working fine but my https version doesn't get indexed in google. can anybosy help what could be the issue?

    Technical SEO | | dhananjay.kumar1
    0

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