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!


  • We have problems with the google cache version of different domains.
    For the “.nl” domain we have an “.be” cache..
    Enter “cache:www.dmlights.nl” in your browser to see this result. Following points are already adapted: Sitemap contains hreflang tag Sitemap is moved to the location www.dmlights.nl/sitemap.xml We checked the DNS configuration Changed the Content language in de response header to : Content-Language: nl-NL Removed the cache with webmastertools Resolved serverrequest errors. Can anyone provide a solution to fix this problem? Thanks, Pieter

    International SEO | | Humix
    0

  • I have an automotive rental blog with articles that explain the pros of renting a specific model. So in this articles the advantages of rental versus the buying of a new model. This advantages are a list with bullets like this:
    Rental | Buy new car
    Rental:
    Free car insurance
    Free assistance
    etc.
    Buy new car
    You have to pay insurance
    You have to pay assistance
    etc. etc. I want to do this because i want to make all articles like landing pages...
    This "advantages box" have 100 characters. The general length of articles on my blog is 500/600 characters. So i have an average of 15/20% internal duplicated content on all my articles. Is this bad for seo? Any alternatives?

    Technical SEO | | markovald
    0

  • My Squarespace site www.thephysiocompany.com has seen a sudden jump in 302 redirects in the past 30 days. Gone from 0-302 (ironically). They are not detectable using generic link redirect testing sites and Squarespace have not explanation. Any help would be appreciated.

    Technical SEO | | Jcoley
    0

  • HI,
    Can you please tell me what is remarketing and how effective is it for a local brick and mortar busienss that has a site?

    Local Listings | | corn2015
    0

  • Hi everybody, I noticed that a lot of websites prefer their meta description would be the first words of the content inside.
    I on the other hand thought that google will prefer the meta description to be like a peek to what going to be inside.
    anyone can explain me, what is better? Thanks 🙂

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roeesa
    0

  • My website have company and events profile from 200 countries. So it does have lots of URL. Earlier in August 2014, Google used to crawl 90% of URLs we submit. Thing goes wrong when we shifted from http to https. We lost traffic. But we are gaining it slowly. Main concern is that, It still does not indexed all submitted URLs. It have crawled merely 8% of all URLs submitted. site address is businessvibes.com Any help would be appreciated.

    Reporting & Analytics | | irteam
    0

  • Our site uses Wordpress. The code is somewhat heavy. The text to code ratio for the home page is only 16%. Our developer suggests that we modify the code so that the important text appears at the top of the page (without changing the design) so that Google can index it more easily. My developer feels this would be more beneficial for SEO. He believes that reducing the code would create HTML errors. The home page is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com Is this approach sound? My developer describes it in the following manner: | Let me say that I don’t believe the text to code ratio has a significant impact on SEO per se but of course that reducing code, it will reduce page weight therefore it may help to improve ranking. See Homepage for example, this is the top landing page of your site, therefore it is very relevant to optimize. You can see the first block, from attached it has very little content and too many code. There is almost nothing to do about it, visually that is a very good block, in terms of SEO it isn't. I do not recommend to take it off just for SEO, that will make all pages with lot of text, lack of images and people may go away. On the other hand, most of the cases we want to improve text code ratio, there is an impact on unexpected BUGs because the code is being changed and this may affect functionality. I would suggest to spend time on improve the sort-order of the important content inside the code, so we may have similar text code ratio at the end but the important code we need Google to index will be at the very top in the source code, in terms of a very technical approach Google will find the key content faster and that should help to improve the crawling process as search engines read HTML code linearly. This change do not necessarily will affect the HTML, we can achieve it by using style sheet (CSS code) instead, reducing the chance of major BUGs. Either is our choice, we need to evaluate potential problems, code issues and content impact and also we need to apply changes and wait at least 3-4 weeks to start seeing results. It is a long task. Let me know your thought about this, we will estimate a task to improve code without affect web design |

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
    0

  • HI.
    Can you please tell me some great blogs/sites to read daily about local seo? I'm really wanting to beef up my knowledge in this area to assist local businesses. Corn

    Local Website Optimization | | corn2015
    1

  • I have been using the moz open site explorer tool and glancing at my competition. I noticed most sites if not all in the linking domains section have a link to there own site. How do i do this? On my site i have no established links and my score is only 1/1. Even with lower ranking sites that have there own site linking to there self have a 16/16. Any help would be appreciated I am pretty new to all of this. thanks

    Link Building | | unlimitedairbrush
    0

  • I have an acquaintance/customer, who is a politician in Italy, he had a website under his name as domain firstnamelastname.it (where firstname and lastname are the firstname and lastname of the guy). He used it during his campaign, then he forgot about the existance and didn't pay the bill to the isp. I don't know what happen exactly, I assume someone registered it after it expired and started using it for some fraudulent purpose, because checking the backlink profile I can see the first backlinks from 2013 are legit and coming from relevant sources (local newspapers), but all the following 300+ links are spam, using keywords like "louis vuitton", "ralph lauren", and so on... Right now the domain is in status "deleted", so I could just register it again, disavow the spammy links and had recycle it. But I am scared as hell. I never had to disavow a single link in all my life, and I don't know if it is going to really clean up the domain from any possible google penalization. Is it?

    Link Building | | max.favilli
    0

  • I sat on a .com domain,  which name become increasing popular  (xyzselfie) for 2 years ... 4 months ago I hired a VA to do a task. A miscommunication made this person submit my domain to the spammiest directories the internet has to offer. Also because of the domain name and the .com a lot of asian or weird sites/things posted links to my site. I have worked on my site for the last 4 months trying to lower my spam score from a 9. I have:
    -Disavowed all the sites that pointed to my site.
    -Made more internal links
    -Tried to make my content thicker 
    -Included my email and social profiles to the site In the process my competitors site with exact domain name but .net and more authority came on auction, I bought it and I pointed it with a permanent redirect to my site (hoping my site would in time lose its spam score). This site will generate and income by appearing in search and adsense ads. After months of work I'm at a loss what to do. Does the spam score generally take long to drop? Should i try and stop the permanent redirect and direct my .com to the .net domain? Are there experts who can lower my score? Should I look for non spammy directories in its niche and submit my site to them to increase link authority and nofollow links ? Any feedback or insight would be highly appreciated. fFtTOFk

    Moz Bar | | onlinegusto
    0

  • Hi all! In the past months I see more and more website that doing 'auto loading articles in scrolling' - can you tell me if it's okay for SEO and what are the best practices for this? Thanks!

    On-Page Optimization | | JohnPalmer
    1

  • Hi, I have a big problem. For the past month, my company website has been scrape by hackers. This is how they do it: 1. Hack un-monitored and/or sites that are still using old version of wordpress or other out of the box CMS. 2. Created Spam pages with links to my pages plus plant trojan horse and script to automatically grab resources from my server. Some sites where directly uploaded with pages from my sites. 3. Pages created with title, keywords and description which consists of my company brand name. 4. Using http-referrer to redirect google search results to competitor sites. What I have done currently: 1. Block identified site's IP in my WAF. This prevented those hacked sites to grab resources from my site via scripts. 2.  Reach out to webmasters and hosting companies to remove those affected sites. Currently it's not quite effective as many of the sites has no webmaster. Only a few hosting company respond promptly. Some don't even reply after a week. Problem now is: When I realized about this issue, there were already hundreds if not thousands of sites which has been used by the hacker. Literally tens of thousands of sites has been crawled by google and the hacked or scripted pages with my company brand title, keywords, description has already being index by google. Routinely everyday I am removing and disavowing. But it's just so much of them now indexed by Google. Question: 1. What is the best way now moving forward for me to resolve this? 2. Disavow links and domain. Does disavowing a domain = all the links from the same domain are disavow? 3. Can anyone recommend me SEO company which dealt with such issue before and successfully rectified similar issues? Note: SEAGM is company branded keyword 5CGkSYM.png

    Technical SEO | | ahming777
    0

  • Hi I've been studying about seo for quite a good time. I have learned about linking building, on page optimization, and so on but I in the real word all these fundamentals seems not be followed but google's algorithm and here is an example. On google.com.br (brazilian google) I'm trying to rank for the main keyword "airsoft" and its variation for the website www.qgairsoft.com.br. But the the top 1 os SERP is: http://lojaairsoft.com.br/index.php But this website doesn't follow almost any seo advice: 1. It has almost no backlinks at all 2. It has no good content (both on pages and doesn't have a blog) 3. url's are not user friendly 4. It doesn't have a mobile website 5. It has almost no presence on social media, with almost no interaction 6. It doesn't have H1 7. I doesnt have any "canonical" set 8. It has a lower DA 9. It has a lower PA 10. Moz metrics are lower 11. It is not as old as my target website... 12. .. I think you got the point. And dispite all that the website do better than my website and also better then other websites with theoretically better 'seo'. What is wrong? What I am missing? Does all these principals really matter for ranking?

    Link Building | | qgairsoft
    0

  • When I'm in WMT/Search Console - I start a process of looking at all of the data initially unfiltered Then I select a query. Let's say its a top query for starters and I filter my results by that top query (exactly) With the filter on, I flip over to Pages and I get about a dozen results. When I look at this list, I get the normal variety of output: impressions, clicks, CTR, avg. position One thing that seems a bit odd to me is that most of the average positions for each of the URLs displayed is about the same.  Say they range from 1.0 to 1.3. Does this mean that Google is displaying the dozen or so URLs to different people and generally in the 1st or 2nd position. Does this mean that my dozen or so pages are all competing with each other for the same query? On one hand, if all of my dozen pages displayed most of the time in the SERP all at the same time, I would see this as a good thing in that I would be 'owning' the SERP for my particular query.  On the other hand, I'm concerned that the keyword I'm trying to optimize a particular page for is being partially distributed to less optimized pages.  The main target page is shown the most (good) and it has about a 15x better CTR (also good). But all together, the other 11 pages are taking in around 40% of impressions and get a far lower CTR (bad). Am I interpreting this data correctly? Is WMT showing me what pages a particular query sends traffic to? Is there any way to extract the keywords that a particular page receives? When I reset my query and then start by selecting a specific page (exact match) and then select queries - is this showing my the search queries that drove traffic to that page? Is there a 'best practices' process to try to target a keyword to a specific page so that it gets more than the 60% of impressions I'm seeing now? Obviously I don't want to do a canonical because each keyword goes to many different pages and each page receives a different mix of keywords. I would think there would be a different technique when your page has an average position off of page 1.

    On-Page Optimization | | ExploreConsulting
    0

  • Hi Mozers I have 3 top level domains co.nz com.au and com each meta tag for the home page is unique for each country and I have tried to figure this out for the last 3 months, but unfortunately I can't seem to pin point why all 3 meta tags are showing up exactly the same.  It seems all meta tags are showing up for the co.nz domain. In the attachments you can see all urls are showing up correctly for each country specific domain, however the meta tag description defaults to the NZ Any help around this would be much appreciated! Thanks all

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may
    0

  • Hello, I have quite specific long term keyword (4 part keyword) for which I would like to rank as high as possible and other keywords would come automatically, I know there's lot to it how to do it properly, but is there any good tips you could help me out with? I have 4-5 different pages with the keyword related product, would it be smart to optimize them all for the one keyword or optimize just one of those pages and leave others with other information, this I believe would be important subject to decide? I know I could add the exact long term keyword since it's related to content to titles, h1 headers, alt tags , file names and url, but would it be smart to use the optimization for that exact long term keyword on all those pages or just one? This is very important subject for my business and any advice will be most highly valued. Many thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bidilover
    0

  • Hi ! I want to improve the ranking of Home on my site. Now I did some on-page SEO on Home itself for the keyword "Webdesign Freiburg". How much does it make sense to put this keyword also into inner sites - although I primarily want to rank Home for this keyword? Does Home profit from putting the keyword into subpages? Cheers and thanks Marc

    On-Page Optimization | | RWW
    0

  • Hi I have recently noticed my site works with / and the end of a URL and without. I wanted to know if there is any SEO impact on this? Will it be seen as 2 different pages? if so what is the best option to go for www.mydomain.com/page/ or www.mydomain.com/page Thanks E

    Technical SEO | | Direct_Ram
    0

  • I have law clients in the atlanta ga area. I have worked with one client http://bestdefensega.com for the past 4 months trying to get him to the top. We blog 3 times a week, have manually built citations and legal directory profiles. My client doesn't have a large budget to purchase profiles on some of the larger legal directories like findlaw, lexus nexus etc.. With that said,
    Using Open Site Explorer I have discovered that his competition all have multiple business websites pointed back to their main websites.. So each law office has several really generic websites in addition to their main site. Other's appear to be receiving links from some type of link farm and really generic directory sites. 
    The domains of these guy's are older and more established. Where as, my client has a new practice and a new domain. How do I compete in the local market without a budget for the premium legal directories? So after 4 months my client appears in the local pack search results for only select keywords. Criminal defense attorney woodstock ga. His competition appears in the results for all variations, where my client only shows for this one term. How do I get me client in the local pack for all variations of Criminal Defense in my area? According to Moz, my site has a couple spam score issues and the explanations are not clear enough for me to make some types of changes.
    **How do I make these changes to reduce the spam score? My site has more back links than Moz is reporting why?** All of the other sites that I manage perform well and my clients are realizing their ROI with relative ease. But criminal defense is a different beaat and it is starting to frustrate me. RAR! Thanks in advance!

    Local Listings | | underdogmike
    0

  • Hello, I have sometimes articles written about my product online, is there anything else I can do except make a good file name for it, perhaps I can ask the site owner to modify in the article to make it rank higher? Also on some small websites I can see that images rank very high for the specific search term that is difficult to rank for in images, if I were to contact the site with a sponsored post request, what I should make sure the site adds except filename to that sponsored post... I think there are also some other methods such as reddit to make images rank high on third party page, just need to find out how... thanks a lot

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bidilover
    0

  • Hi Guys Can anyone recommend any good Pay Per Click Networks other than Google and Bing where you can target customers via keywords and in the same manner as Google ?? Google is becoming way to expensive for us and so we need help looking at other pay per per click networks Thank you for any help Gareth

    Affiliate Marketing | | GAZ09
    0

  • Which theme is more SEO friendly and Fast loading? Both on desktop and Mobile http://demo.mythemeshop.com/blogging/2014/03/26/age-steel/ Or http://demo.tagdiv.com/newsmag/td-post-cruise-2015-swim-trend-blurred-lines/

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hall.Michael
    0

  • I have a backlink that I found from http://onucdm.onu.edu/mt/hmlref/2010/10/see_below.html . . . it is a nofollow, so it doesn't seem to be doing much harm. But this is obviously spam. It is from a .edu, so I'm not sure what I should do. Think it's harming my site at all? In general, how do you determine what to disavow?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KevinViner
    0

  • I am tracking my domain e.g www.xyz.com to an existing google analytics account . I want to track www.xyz.com/blog separately in the google analytics account. How can I do that?

    Reporting & Analytics | | Windlass
    0

  • So the general idea for domain names is around to keep it around 15 characters, but I'm considering getting a mycitywebdesign.com type domain specific to my location and it's 23 characters. No hyphens. The original site hasn't had any seo work on it, so the original won't lose any progress. What suggestions/experience do you have with this type of situation? Thanks in advance!

    Local SEO | | blakewenloe
    0

  • Hi everyone, I have, what I think, is kind of a specific question, but hoping you guys can help me figure out what to do. I have a client that recently changed their entire website (I started working with them after it happened, so I can't comment on what the site was like as far as content was before).  I know they were using a service that I see a lot of in the service industry that aim to capitalize on local business (i.e. "leads nearby" or "nearby now") by creating pages for each targeted city and I believe collecting reviews for each city directly on the website. When they redesigned their website, they dropped that service and now all those pages that were ranking in SERPs are coming back as 404s because they are not included in the new site (I apologize if this is getting confusing!) The site that they moved to is a template site that they purchased the rights to from an already successful company in their same industry, so I do think the link structure probably changed, especially with all of the local pages that are no longer available on the site.  Note: I want to use discretion in using company names, but happy to share more info in a private message if you'd like to see the sites I am talking about as I have a feeling that this is getting confusing 🙂 Has anyone had experience with something like this?  I am concerned because even though I am targeting the keywords being used previously to direct content to the local pages to new existing pages, traffic to the website has dropped by nearly 60% and I know my clients are going to want answers-- and right now, I only have guesses. I am really looking forward to and so greatly appreciate any advice you might be able to share, I'm at a bit of a loss right now.

    Local Website Optimization | | KaitlinNS
    0

  • How to setup multiple pages in Google Search? I have seen sites that are arranged in google like : Website in Google
                   About us.        Contact us
                   Services.         Etc.. Kindly review screenshot. Is this can achieved by Yoast Plugin? X9vMMTw.png

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hall.Michael
    0

  • Hi guys.  Sorry it's an essay...BUT, i think a lot of you will find this an interesting question. This question is in 2 (related) parts, and I imagine it would be an 'advanced' SEO question.  Hoping you guys can help bring some real insight 🙂  Always amazed at the quality for this forum/ community. **Context...  ** We had a duplicate content issue caused by this page and it's product permutations, so we placed canonical tags on all the product permutations to solve it.  Worked a treat. However, we now have more **product ranges.  **We now sell Diaries, Notebooks & Music books, which are clearly different from one another.  So...we've placed canonical tags on all the product permutations leading back to the 'parent' theme. In other words, all the diary permutations 'lead back' to the diary page.  All the notebooks permutations 'lead back' to the main notebook page.  So on and so forth. Make sense so far? Context end..... Issue. Amazingly our Diary page outranks our notebook pagefor the search term 'Design your own Notebook'.  The notebook page is well optimised for this search term, and the diary page avoids the word 'notebook' altogether (so no keyword cannibalisation going on). Possible reason? Our Diary page has a vast amount of internal links to it throughout our site.  The notebook page has only a few. Could this be the issue?  If so, what reading/ blogs/ content/ tools would you recommend to help understand and solve this problem?  i.e) Better understanding internal link structure for SEO. 2nd part of the question (in the context of internal linking for SEO). When there are internal links to a page with a conical tag does that 'count' towards the 'parent page', or simply towards that specific page? I really hope that makes sense.  If it's clear as mud just shout. Isaac. EDIT:  All pages in question have been indexed since we added these changes to the site.

    On-Page Optimization | | isaac663
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, I feel I am facing a double edge sword situation. I am in the process of migrating 4 domains into one. I am in the process of creating URL redirect mapping The pages I am having the most issues are the event pages that are past due but carry some value as they generally have one external followed link. www.example.com/event-2008 301 redirect to www.newdomain.com/event-2016 www.example.com/event-2007 301 redirect to www.newdomain.com/event-2016 www.example.com/event-2006 301 redirect to www.newdomain.com/event-2016 Again these old events aren't necessarily important in terms of link equity but do carry some and at the same time keep adding multiple 301s  pointing to the same page may not be a good ideas as it will increase the page speed load time which will affect the new site's performance. If i add a 404 I will lose the bit of equity in those. No index,follow may work since it won't index the old domain nor the page itself but still not 100% sure about it. I am not sure how a canonical would work since it would keep the old domain live. At this point I am not sure which direction I should follow? Thanks for your answers!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art
    0

  • Hello Group! I have been tossing the idea in my head of using sub domains for the geo pages for each of my clients. For example: one of my clients is a lawyer in a very competitive Atlanta market http://bestdefensega.com. Can I set his geo page to woodstock.bestdefensega.com? Is this a viable option? Will I get penalized? Thoughts or suggestions always appreciated! Thanks in Advance

    Local Website Optimization | | underdogmike
    0

  • I updated my Google My Business page weeks ago and the name of my business still has not changed in Moz Local.  Of course it won't allow me to change the name.  Please help.

    Moz Local | | NicoleDeLeon
    0

  • We are moving from Bigcommerce to Woocommerce on WP. On Bigcommerce, due to some bizarre reasoning the previous developer had 3 separate URLS for the same product in different sizes - S, M and L. Now we plan to have one product page where the sizes can be selected and 301 redirect the 3 urls to the new one. Is this advisable? Or should we just have 3 separate pages. OR should we have one of the sizes pages as the new page and then redirect the other 2 to this one? I ask this because the site has a LOT of ranking power and we do not want to jeopardise that.

    On-Page Optimization | | MashBonigala
    0

  • Hello, I have 15 online shops owned by one company and the web developer put in the header of each website a link to the 15 other sites. It looks like a link farm but they are all for one company. And in some shops we have a huge number of products i.e. huge number of outgoing links to other shops, like a total of a million outgoing follow link to the other 15 online shops.Yes we have it almost 2 years ago and we didn't get penalized by Google and it seems that Google discovered that all are owned by one company.My questions are:1- Will we be penalized in future by Google if they think that they are a kind of spam links?2- What will happen if I changed these links to no follow links? Or if I removed them from the header?3- Do these outgoing links effect the ranking?4- Does PR is still a metric to Google since they calculate it depends on a formula based on the incoming and outgoing links?Thanks in AdvancedHousam Smadi

    Technical SEO | | anubis2
    0

  • Hello Friends I verified my site in Google News but all articles are not coming in Google News. When I type www.example.com in Google news then only few stories shows but not coming on daily basis. What to do my fellow members ?

    Branding | | sourabhrana
    0

  • Hi So Ive done a crawl of the site using screaming frog. There are a few old category and sub category pages which don't exist any more but somehow the crawler is finding them. An example is below: http://www.ebuyer.com/store/Home-Appliances/cat/Health-&-Beauty/subcat/Male-Grooming Just wondering if anybody had any ideas about how I could go and find these urls and remove them off the site. Any ideas would be really appreciated. Thanks Andy

    Technical SEO | | Andy-Halliday
    0

  • Hi Guys Looking for some advice - are there any good email marketing services companies in the US that can help us to sell our health and pet products and would operate on a CPA basis ?? Any help much appreciated - thank you Gareth

    Affiliate Marketing | | GAZ09
    0

  • Our site is hosted on a secure network (I.E. Our web address is - https://www.workbooks.com). Will a backlink pointing to: http://www.workbooks.com provide less value than a link pointing to: https://www.workbooks.com ? Many thanks, Sam

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam.at.Moz
    0

  • We have been paying for getting the content written from writers. Is it a good move to give authorship to writers for writing the articles in terms of SEO. Some writers now have started to demand for authorship from the articles they have written. Should I give them authorship credits from each & every blog post they have written or it will be just a bad move to do so?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure
    0

  • I have some variance in my company name (spacing/nospacing) and even my web address, www/non-www so I want to consolidate all of them. On top of that I need to build up my local citations so need to submit to more local directories. Will Moz local take away the job of local directory submission from me? I understand they use like 5 data aggregators, I understand they are the directories of directories, so does that mean these 4 will submit to local directories for me? How many local directories is moz local suppose to get you on? Also I understand it can take a month for your listing to show. In this case, would it not be better to just do it manually? I mean if I submit to yell.com now it's going to be there instantly, on top of that If I don't have the time I can outsource the work to India for very cheap and probably cost less than £84? Thanks

    Moz Local | | Marvellous
    2

  • Hello mozzers! So my company is about to launch a large scale content project with over 100 pieces of newly published content. I'm being asked what the date-stamp for each article should be. Two questions:
    1- Does it hurt article's SEO juice to have a lot of content with the same "published on" date?
    2- I have the ability to manually update each articles date stamp. Is there a recommended best practice? p.s. Google has not crawled any of these pages yet.

    Technical SEO | | Vacatia_SEO
    1

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.