Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

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!


  • I am in the middle of changing a website from targeting just a single keyword on all pages to instead having each page target its own keyword/phrase. However, I'm a little conflicted on whether or not plural forms and other suffix (-ing) variations are different enough to get their own pages. SERP show different results for each keyword searched. Also, relevancy reports for the keywords score some differently and some the same. Is it best to instead use these as secondary and third level keywords on the same page as the main keyword for a page? See example below: OPTION A (Use each for different pages): Page 1 - Construction Fence Page 2 - Construction Fences Page 3 - Construction Fencing Page 4 - Construction Site Fence Page 5 - Construction Site Fences Page 6 - Construction Site Fencing ... OPTION B (Use as variations on same page): Page 1 - Construction Fence, Construction Fences, Construction Fencing Page 2 - Construction Site Fence, Construction Site Fences, Site Construction Fencing ... Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

    Algorithm Updates | | pac-cooper
    0

  • When analyzing backlinks and trying to get the same one for another site there are a ton of backlinks to go through. I know that if the DA of the link is then pages on the site might be a good choice like adding an article or something of the sort to the site but as far a the same page goes you can typically only do this with a comment on the page. My question is, given a huge list of backlinks from multiple sites, is there an easy way to analyze the links and determine which ones I can copy without manually checking hundreds of links?

    Link Building | | spyke01
    0

  • Website errors remittent of Chernobyl. First of all, I ask a lot of questions of the community and I don't do a lot of answering. For that, I am sorry! I own a small SEO company and the majority of my clients are upstarts just like myself. We try to do the best we can on a very limited budget.
    With that said, the client website in question, http://bestdefensega.com has been a struggle to rank in the metro atlanta lawyer market.
    Here's the story. My client is a new solo attorney that practices criminal law and personal injury law. We launched bestdensega.com to focus on criminal defense and my client has also paid AVVO for a website as well. We recently decided to make a monster website that would have 50+ pages and be representative of all that he practices.
    I recently put a temporary redirect on bestdefensega.com and pointed it to the avvo website while I was rebuilding the website. I did this using a plugin.
    This morning I decided that I wanted to remove the redirect, so I deactivated and deleted the plugin. The redirect is still in effect. I suspect that this may be a cacheing scenario.
    How do I undo a redirect?
    Also, I noticed that the AVVO site has all of a sudden shot up to the top of the search results and bestdefnesega.com has dropped past the 3rd page for our keywords. Have I lost all of bestdefensega.com's link juice? Also, bestdefensega.com has a spam score of 7. Why? There are no shady links and everything I do is on the up and up. Also Open Site Explorer says that bestdefensega.com doesn't have any inbound links.
    Google WebMaster Tools says that the site has of 500 inbound links.. Frustrated, Thanks

    Moz Pro | | underdogmike
    0

  • I have a verified local Google+ Page all set up for my local business and linked to my website.. it shows up nicely in local results for my city. Being ambitious I am expanding my presence into another city and would like my website to start showing up in local search for that area as well. What is the protocol for best results ? Start a new Google+ page or somehow add the branch onto the existing page (although there does not seem to be anywhere for this as the page is a local business and seems to lock it in with only a single address)..

    Local Listings | | wicko
    1

  • I have an e-commerce client that is migrating platforms. The current structure of their existing website has led to what I would believe to be mass duplicate content. They have something north of 150,000 indexed URLs. However, 143,000+ of these have query strings and the content is identical to pages without any query string. Even so, the site does pretty well from an organic stand point compared to many of its direct competitors. Here is my question: (1) I am assuming that I should go into WMT (Google/Bing) and tell both search engines to ignore query strings. (2) In a review of back links, it does appear that there is a mish mash of good incoming links both to the clean and the dirty URLs. Should I add a rel=canonical via a script to all the pages with query strings before we make our migration and allow the search engines some time to process? (3) I'm assuming I can continue to watch the indexation of the URLs, but should I also tell search engines to remove the URLs of the dirty URLs? (4) Should I do Fetch in WMT? And if so, what sequence should I do for 1-4. How long should I wait between doing the above and undertaking the migration?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ExploreConsulting
    0

  • I have a big site, there are a way to know what page are not indexed? I know that you can use site: but with a big site is a mess to check page by page. This is a tool or a system to check a entire site and automatically find non-indexed pages?

    Technical SEO | | markovald
    0

  • Its been a long time since I've used Moz and things have changed considerably from them so I want to make sure I'm on the right track here. I typically only work on the on-page SEO and then comparing backlinks vs competitors. I typically have someone else handle new backlinks as they seem to be almost impossible to get these days. Typically I go with this Workflow (simplified version): Research - KeywordPlanner tool, keywordtool, ubersuggest, etc then trim the list and use Rank Tracker to look at actual keyword difficulty of top 10 listings or a manual check if its a small list. On Site Analysis - Use Website Auditor to get full view of on-site issues and then solve them by starting with broken links then HTML, then meta, etc. On Page Analysis - Looking at the Page Audit from Website Auditor to see areas where a client is failing to optimize the page for a specific keyword and then fix it. Gather Backlinks - Use SEO Spyglass to gather the links of competitors, analyze them, then check each one manually to determine if I can get the same link if its a high quality one. With Moz, would this look something like this: Research - KeywordPlanner tool, keywordtool, ubersuggest, etc then trim the list and use Keyword Difficulty to look at actual keyword difficulty of top 10 listings or a manual check if its a small list. On Site Analysis - Use Moz Analytics Campaigns to get full view of on-site issues and then solve them by starting with broken links then HTML, then meta, etc. On Page Analysis - Looking at On-Page Grader to see areas where a client is failing to optimize the page for a specific keyword and then fix it. Gather Backlinks - Use Open Site Explorer to gather the links of competitors, analyze them, then check each one manually to determine if I can get the same link if its a high quality one. If so then on #1 should I be doing the basic or a full each time? Is there something I am missing on this list?

    Getting Started | | spyke01
    0

  • United Kingdom We have a client who works from home and wants a virtual office so his clients do not know where he lives. Can a virtual office address be used on his business website pages & contact pages, in title tags and descriptions as well as Google places. The virtual office is manned at all times and phone calls will be directed to the client, the virtual office company say effectively it is a registered business address. Look forward to any helpful responses.

    Local Website Optimization | | ChristinaRadisic
    0

  • I have noticed on both OSE and also on the Crawl Test that our site www.advantageservices.net is showing only 1 internal link.  I tried looking around as what might cause this but haven't been able to figure it out.

    Link Explorer | | Kristine-ASNET
    0

  • Do you have any dashboard or suggestion to measure Seo Roi with GA? I want to create a report that makes visible these fields: Monthly increase in visits from Google Time spend on site Number of conversions Other things that can i add?

    Reporting & Analytics | | markovald
    0

  • I have the need to find the best solution to move my viverezen.org blog on new domain naturazen.org because somebody stolen my brand. Now I registererd brand NaturaZen and I am going to use this website as main and have the old viverezen just to point in the new website I dont want lose autority and more important I dont want lose the 500 visits I have everyday. Both domain are under same hosting company What is best SEO solution you can give me to help? I thought to point the hosting on new domain naturazen and put all link with redirect 301 on viverezen but probably I am wrong stuck_out_tongue thanks for your help

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VivereZen
    0

  • Hi, I'm working on a site that was last optimized some years ago. It has a fair number of pages that the url, h1, title tag and image alt exact match. Although this comes back as A+ in Moz's on page grader,  it seems a bit much. What do you think, is all this too heavy an SEO fingerprint for Google?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 94501
    0

  • I help run an ecommerce business that mainly runs on Google organic search (yes, I realize this is not a good place to be). Last April, we saw around 25-30% of our organic search cut. I’m pretty sure it was due to the mobile update but we had some changes in the past month or two before that. I’m looking for someone to review my analytics account and see what happened. Possibly this is called an audit? Also, we’re looking to ask some questions about long term strategy as we are thinking about a redesign and switching to a new platform. Maybe more content? Maybe more social?

    Reporting & Analytics | | kirbyf
    0

  • Hi Moz community, I have a website that has a large database with 800+ important pages, and want Google to know when people visit and stay on these pages.  However, these pages are only accessible to people once they create an account with a password, and sign in. I know that since these pages are password protected, Google doesn't index them, but when our visitors stay for a while on our site browsing through our database, does this data get included in our CTR and Bounce Rate by Google?  This is really important for Google to know about our database (that people are staying on our site for a while) for SEO purposes, so I wanted to know that if the CTR gets measured even though these pages aren't crawled. Thanks for the help!!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danstern
    0

  • Hi guys, wondering if anyone could shed any light: just taken on a client who wants to rank for 'Dentist Edinburgh' - using opensightexplorer it looks as if the website has a decent amount of links and authority but it is languishing on page 5 for the above term. If you compare link metrics with some competitors which rank higher Barnton's number seem to be stronger. The site ranks well for less competitive key terms such as '6 month smiles Edinburgh' and 'teeth straightening Ediniburgh'  but we are struggling with the main keyword 'dentist Edinburgh' I've checked webmaster tools and there are no manual actions, so i'm thinking its an algorithmic penalty - any help would be much appreciated. Marcus

    Local Website Optimization | | dentaldesign
    0

  • Hi Moz Community! I've been working with a client’s website and found it has 2 analytics code with same ID. I need to understand which one is correct before removing anyone of them, below are the both scripts. First one Second one Any help would be appreciated! Regards, S

    Reporting & Analytics | | ShaunPhilips
    0

  • We have noticed that our competitors have links with equality from sites like this: http://www.groupon.com.au/ Scoopon type sites like this can be an effective way to generate sales for a business, I'm just wondering if these types of sites also have added value for SEO as sites like these do have a strong Domain Authority? Any thoughts on this subject would be most appreciated. Thanks!

    Link Building | | Gavo
    0
  • This question is deleted!

    0

  • Hi Guys, A client of mine took over an competitors site 12 months ago. They sell almost the same products and both websites now list the same address on their contact page. Local search isn’t really important to them (webshops). They aren’t really active with Google plus reviews.  but I’m still wondering. Could this cause any ranking problems? A lot of online citations still mention the old competitors address and two almost identical company’s with the same address sounds like an bad idea. Any suggestions about this topic? Just as a side note: the competitors site lost a lot of traffic, which is caused by a lot of different problems (double site migration were they didn’t think about SEO). So I would love the hear your thoughts about this specific ranking problem. Thanks a lot!

    Local Listings | | Bob_van_Biezen
    0

  • Hi there, My client has a product URL: www.company.com/product. They are only serving one state in the US. The existing URL is ranking in a position between 8-15 at the moment for local searches. Would it be interesting to add the location to the URL in order to get a higher position or is it dangerous as we have our rankings at the moment. Is it really giving you an advantage that is worth the risk? Thank you for your opinions!
    Sander

    Local Website Optimization | | WeAreDigital_BE
    0

  • Hi Everyone! My website is not being crawled regularly by Google - there are weeks when it's regular but for the past month or so it does not get crawled for seven to eight days. There are some specific pages, that I want to get ranked but they of late are not being crawled AT ALL unless I use the 'Fetch As Google' tool! That's not normal, right? I have checked and re-checked the on-page metrics for these pages (and the website as a whole, backlinking is a regular and ongoing process as well! Sitemap is in place too! Resubmitted it once too! This issue is detrimental to website traffic and rankings! Would really appreciate insights from you guys! Thanks a lot!

    Technical SEO | | farhanm
    1

  • Hi guys. I've got an e-commerce site which we have very little control over. As such, we've created a subdomain and are hosting a WordPress install there, instead. This means that all the great content we're putting out (via bespoke pages on the subdomain) are less effective than if they were on the main domain. I've looked at proxy forwarding, but unfortunately it isn't possible through our servers, leaving the only option I can see being permenant redirects... What would be the best solution given the limitations of the root site? I'm thinking of wildcard rewrite rules (eg. link site.com/blog/articleTitle to blog.site.com/articleTitle) but I'm wondering if there's much of an SEO benefit in doing this? Thanks in advance for everyone's help 🙂

    Technical SEO | | JAR897
    0

  • I am planning to allow Guest posts on my website blog where authors or writers can post articles to my blog. All content will be manually approved by me. But i would like to know if guest posts will cause any harm to my site or is it good way to generate content. Another thing as guest posts will be having do-follow links & author section too will be up. So firstly i would like to know whether its a good step or not? Would even like to know what checks should i do before approving a guest posts?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure
    0

  • Hi guys, My website exists on a subdomain (i.e. https://website.subdomain.com) and is being indexed correctly on all search engines except Bing and Duck Duck Go, which list 'https://www.website.subdomain.com'. Unfortunately my subdomain isn't configured for www (the domain is out of my control), so searchers are seeing a server error when clicking on my homepage in the SERPs. I have verified the site successfully in Bing Webmaster Tools, but it still shows up incorrectly. Does anyone have any advice on how I could fix this issue? Thank you!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cos2030
    0

  • Hi, I have a Google+ Page for my business that has 25 Google reviews written by customers, of which I am rather proud that it is an aggregate of 4.9 🙂 I would like to brag more about this on my website and also like it to show up as Structured Data in as many organic results as possible (it shows up on local searches, not a problem). However, I cannot find anything resembling a permanent link to the reviews (other than the about page) on Google... Any clues ? Also, I would like to start including the Google review stars within any other structured data markup that I add to the website (such as a BusinessEvent for example) - But the FAQ's on Google seem to imply that the reviews and aggregates must be on my website and nothing seems to say that I may use the Google reviews or aggregate in my markup. Can anyone point me in the right direction please ?

    Reviews and Ratings | | wicko
    0

  • Every two months or so, I like to download the OSE list of all the backlinks passing equity to my site. I do this so I can see which spammy links I need to try and remove. However, I see that OSE is still showing me links that I already removed...Either A) the page that is being linked to is 404-ed B) the spammy website that was linking doesn't exist anymore or C) the spammy site still exists, but the link is GONE. Why is OSE still spidering these sites and links? Does that mean Google is still spidering these links? Should I disavow them to be safe? Thank you! P.S We are not experiencing any drastic drops in traffic or penalties at the moment.

    Link Explorer | | TMI.com
    0

  • Hi guys, I'm having a problem to verify domain with https in webmaster tools. Does anybody know how to verify it? Thanks

    SEO Learn Center | | odmsoft
    0

  • Hello! I am in the process of building my second location, and will be moving to Nashville TN.  My first location is located in ohio, and I am changing my primary location to nashville, but still want to keep my clients in Ohio... At least for the first year. As for directory building, what is the best option?  1.) Should I create two separate directory listings for each location and then direct www.domain.com to Nashville directory, and then www.domain.com/ohio-wedding-photographer/ to the Ohio listing in the directory? Or do you create one directory and mention I have offices in both Ohio and nashville? Is it bad to have two listings for each location  if they have different addresses and phone numbers? Thank you!

    Local SEO | | jean7878
    0

  • Really confused about a site I'm getting going on SEO with... I'm new to SEO, but I've found that the organic search results for princessdesign.co.uk have dropped to zero dramatically. I'm concerned that I've missed something and hope that somebody out there might be able to help? Any input greatly appreciated 🙂

    Reporting & Analytics | | Gokart
    0

  • My SERP overlay in Firefox has stopped working, all other features of the Mozbar seem to be working fine, so wondering if I am missing something obvious?

    Moz Bar | | gamnaking1
    1

  • I have just had a conversation with a client... the gist was this... Is it more important to stay under the 55-60 characters OR go over a bit and have the page title make sense and include the clients company name. The same argument for meta description. I have a client insisting on 55-60 length but the keywords are long and if we use the primary keyword phrase the length is 44 if we use the keyword phrase and add the company name it becomes 64. This is with us trimming it a bit. Anyone else discussed this before?

    On-Page Optimization | | JohnW-UK
    1

  • If a business has an unlimited supply of product and an unlimited capacity to distribute that product why would they want to limit their Adwords campaign budget? If your Cost per Acquisition for a conversion is lower than the Customer Lifetime Value for any given keyword bid, why would you want to prevent your campaign from reaching as many people as possible? Thanks in advance Danny

    Paid Search Marketing | | richdan
    3

  • Hi I work for children's furniture business called Tidy Books. We are based in the UK. We have UK site www.tidy-books.co.uk. We also have a US site www.tidy-books.com which is registered in the US. We have fully dedicated and translated French, German and Italian site  (www.tidy-books.fr, www.tidy-books.de, www.tidy-books.it)  . These all fall under our UK registered address. What I would like, is to have a French, German and Italian  business address for these website. We just need an address only. This would mainly be used to for Google business listing and other business listings sites to help rank are sites correctly in their country domains. T Do you know of or recommend any companies that can do this? Is there any implications I need to be aware of, such as tax? Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tidybooks
    0

  • A client has a high-volume keyword that is rendering different results, whether it is on page one or page two of Google SERPs. If the keyword is on page one, ONLY the category page is ranking. When the keyword bumps off to page two, BOTH the category AND the homepage are ranking. This is happening on our IP and theirs, incognito and personalized searches. This has been happening since February. Any thought/insights would be greatly appreciated, thank you!!!!

    Algorithm Updates | | accpar
    0

  • I work at a .jsp site where we have vanity urls that 301 to the www,domainname.com/index.jsp?c_id. Now when I do a change of address in GWT it tells me that it can't fulfill the change of address cause the redirect goes to www.domainname.com/index.jsp instead of www.domainname.com. I could create a GWT account for www.domainname.com/index.jsp/ but that is a 404 (it needs the c_id). How would I do my change of address?

    Reporting & Analytics | | mattdinbrooklyn
    0

  • Hi, does anyone know or have a link for me, where I can find, what or how a Bounce is defined for mobile devices? If you are on safari mobile and click on the homebutton, is that a bounce?
    If you are surfing and you get a message alert on the top and you change application, is that a bounce? Any ideas are much appreciated. Thanks

    Reporting & Analytics | | ennovators
    1

  • Its been 2 weeks we had asked request of Google maps for business local search. Still not received the pin. When can we expect the pin.

    Local Listings | | ILDSEO
    0

  • Hi, I have a google+ page https://plus.google.com/+ILoveDiamondsdotcom which is verified and link to http://www.ilovediamonds.com with rel="publisher". Why my companies info is not shown in Google search?Its been nearly 3 months.

    Local Website Optimization | | ILDSEO
    0

  • Moz Local has launched in the UK and I am currently using it to update my citations on one of my sites. I tried to upload a CSV with the rest of my citations but it claims Moz Local is US only and does not accept my Country Codes of UK or not having a State. Has anyone else had a similar problem or knows a work around? Thanks

    Moz Local | | AlastairBall85
    0

  • Good Morning I put forward the following question in December 2014 https://moz.com/community/q/google-still-listing-old-domain as pages from our old domain www.fhr-net.co.uk were still indexed in Google. We have submitted two change request in WMT, the most recent was over 6 months ago yet the old pages are still being indexed and we can't see why that would be Any advice would be appreciated

    Technical SEO | | Ham1979
    0

  • I have a set of static pages which were created with the purpose of targeting long tail keywords. That has resulted in Domain Authority dilution to some extent. I am now in the process of creating one page which will serve the same results but only after user selects the fields in the drop-down. I am planning to use rel=cannonical on the multiple pages pointing back to the new page. Will it serve the purpose?

    Technical SEO | | glitterbug
    0

  • Hi there, We are going to switch our local domain oldsite.at to newsite.com in November. As our IT department wants to use the newsite.com already for email traffic till then, the domain newsite.com has to be accessible for public and currently shows the default Apache page without useful content. The old domain has quite some trust, the new domain is a first time registered domain (not known by search engines yet and no published anyhow). The domain was parked till now. I am aware of the steps to take for the switch itself, but: **what to do with the newsite.com domain until everything is prepared for the switch? **I suppose users or search engines find the domain and as there is no useful information available it harms us already. My idea was to 307 redirect newsite.com to the oldsite.at but the concern is that this causes problems as soon as we switch the domain and redirecting with 301 from oldsite.at to newsite.com? Do you have any objections or other recommendations? Thank you a lot in advance.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | comicron
    0

  • Hi, We have so many website being tracked in Google AU and we see too much ranking change ( both positive and negative )  but all inaccurate from MOZ. Our Manual Testing result matched correctly with Google where as moz results inaccurate. Is there anything happening . Our Website:  http://www.gardenshed.com.au/ E.g : Garden shed  - Moz Reported Rank #4 - Actual Rank : 11 Garden sheds  - Moz Reported Rank #7 - Actual Rank : 23 similarly for all other projects .

    Feature Requests | | emarketexperts
    0

  • Hi, "Null" is appearing as top keyword in Google search console > Google Index > Content Keywords for our site http://goo.gl/cKaQ4K . We do not use "null" as keyword on site. We are not able to find why Google is treating "null" as a keyword for our site. Is anyone facing such issue. Thanks & Regards

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore
    0

  • If favorited a tweet of someone I don't know very well and received a response within a few minutes of the tweet asking "where have you been and what are you up to".  Seems general enough to be automated and not specific enough for me to think it was personally sent by the user. Thank you.

    Social Media | | EmSt
    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


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