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!
-
Referral Spam (trafficmonetize.org, 4webmasters.org, etc)
So, we've been plagued with pretty much ALL of our clients from traffic from spammy websites, and even a porn site or two. Here are a few examples: 4webmasters Floatingsharebuttons Trafficmonetize.org 100dollarseo We are seeing our websites negatively impacted by this. How could this be happening?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digalign0 -
What is the best way to correct 403 access denied errors?
One of the domains I manage is seeing a growing number of 403 errors. For SEO purposes would it be ideal to just 301 redirect them? I am plenty familiar with 404 error issues, but not 403s.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Local Citations Name
Hi Everyone, I am creating local citations for a company, let's call it "Gray Marketing". That is their legal business name and has been this way for about 23 years. Recently (over the past year) they have been going by the name "Gray Marketing and SEO". They had a new logo made that appears on their companies website and location. When creating local citations. The four primary aggregators (Axicom, Localeze, Infogroup, Factual) have the legal business name. My question is, should I change it to the new name or leave it as the legal business name? Side note: I am not able to change the legal business name on Axicom. Any advise would be awesome, thanks. -Michael
Local Listings | | Mike.NW0 -
Puzzled by high ranking page (#2 in SERPs) with zero/low page or domain authority
So, I get the smoothie that is page authority and domain authority and the link metrics that Moz uses to predict how well a page will rank for a certain keyword. I can look at a specific search term where we are on say, page 2 or 3, with a page authority of 1 and domain authority of 26, I get why competitors rank above us. But then I look at a keyword that is much more competitive, where we rank #2, which is awesome, where the landing page is also showing a page authority of 1, and domain authority of 26. How can we rank higher than competitors with a page authority of 56 and domain authority of 65? Their onpage optimization for the keyword is no worse, and sometimes better that ours but we maintain this ranking. By the way the competition also have hundreds if not thousands more linking root domains than our page. Any ideas why one keyword is a rockstar and one is a dud, with the same poor PA and DA?
Link Building | | seo-lab1 -
Two web sites with the same contact info is this a problem ?
I have two web sites and a physical shop. I run the web sites from the the same post address as the shop. I am concerned that if I add the actual address to both web sites which also has the same telephone number that google might see this as suspicious activity. The reason is I bought a competitor out and now run two sites.
Reviews and Ratings | | weddingshoesandaccessories1 -
Gathering links
There are numerous "Ultimate Guides" to linkbuilding, outreach, etc., and they are all written to teach you the art of linkbuilding. The only thing these guides don't tell you is that following them takes a massive amount of time and doesn't guarantee to get good links at all. We're all in online marketing, and maybe we online marketeers are familiar with linking to other websites, posts that we like, etc. and maybe that's why we can write these guides but in other niches it really doesn't work that way 🙂 I'm wondering what techniques/tactics/strategies you guys are using in less straightforward niches to get quality links to your blogposts. To give you an idea, we launched an article a couple of weeks ago targeting a very competitive keyword. The article got shared over 100 times on LinkedIn/Twitter/etc. and already ranking pretty good, but REAL backlinks are still missing. How to get people to link to that article?
Link Building | | jorisbrabants0 -
2 Domains
Hi, one of my clients owns a dental practice. The business is split into 2 parts. One is general dentistry and the other in cosmetic dentistry. They are both aimed at different markets. The question is, should we have 1 website with all the details for the business under, or could we have two domains and promote both sites differently. Does anyone see any issues with the address being the same etc? Thanks Ade
Local Listings | | popcreativeltd0 -
User Agent -teracent-feed-processing
Does anyone knows some info about "teracent-feed-processing" user agent? IP's from which user agent reside: 74.125.113.145, 74.125.113.148, 74.125.187.84 .... In our logs, 2 out of 3 requests are made by it, causing server crash.
Technical SEO | | propertyshark0 -
Spammy nofollow links
Hello, One of our clients - a cleaning business - has a heck of a lot of spammy nofollow links pointing to their site. The majority of the links are from comments or 'pingbacks', most with the anchor text 'cheap nfl jerseys' or 'cyber monday ugg boots'. After researching the subject of spammy nofollow links, it seems there is a lot of uncertainty regarding the negative affect these could have on your SEO efforts. So I guess my question to the community is: if your site was suddenly hit by a plethora of spammy nofollow links, what would you do and why? Cheers, Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Keywords in site maps. Can there be too many? Can they be considered to be stuffed?
Hi everyone,
On-Page Optimization | | TheJewelleryEd
I'd appreciate some insight on a keyword stuffed site map I've seen on a site similar to ours (we don't have this kind of menu ourselves).
https://www.1stdibs.com/sitemap/jewelry/stone/pink-diamond/
This is accessed from a site map. Do you think it's too blatant / keyword stuffed? I haven't done this with our site, but am interested to see a big reputable site doing something so clearly just for SEO.
Would it work? Or would search engines dislike it? I'd really appreciate your thoughts.
Thank you.0 -
Changes to 'links to your site' in WebMaster Tools?
We're writing more out of curiosity... Clicking on "Download latest links" within 'Links to your site' in Google's WebMaster Tools would usually bring back links discovered recently. However, the last few times (for numerous accounts) it has brought back a lot of legacy links - some from 2011 - and includes nothing recent. We would usually expect to see a dozen at least each month. ...Has anyone else noticed this? Or, do you have any advice? Thanks in advance, Ant!
Technical SEO | | AbsoluteDesign0 -
Not able to see star ratings Rich Snippet in Google SERP with use of keyword search
Hello, I am webmaster of http://www.bannerbuzz.com and i have applied google rich snippet http://schema.org/aggregateRating for review star ratings in google SERP. I have checked my link in rich snippet tool, i have attached screenshot, you can see it in screenshot no 1 So according to this result i have implemented code properly. When i have checked site:www.bannerbuzz.com in google, then i can see star rating in some of my website's categories, but when i check some of those keywords in google SERP, then i can not see star rating in those keywords.i have attached screenshot below. with search terms : site:www.bannerbuzz.com you can see it in screenshot no 2 with search terms : vinyl banners you can see it in screenshot no 3 So anyone check the same things and let us know the solution if it possible to see star ratings in specific keywords. Thanks eqdGY3g.png?1 1HD61KN.png NRlmv6D.png
Reviews and Ratings | | CommercePundit0 -
Google Webmaster Tools -> Sitemap suddent "indexed" drop
Hello MOZ, We had an massive SEO drop in June due to unknown reasons and we have been trying to recover since then. I've just noticed this yesterday and I'm worried. See: http://imgur.com/xv2QgCQ Could anyone help by explaining what would cause this sudden drop and what does this drop translates to exactly? What is strange is that our index status is still strong at 310 pages, no drop there: http://imgur.com/a1sRAKo And when I do search on google site:globecar.com everything seems normal see: http://imgur.com/O7vPkqu Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GlobeCar0 -
Baidu spider anyone know much about this?
Hi Guys, It seems I get a lot of visits from Baidu spider does anyone know much about this? I notice they visit every single page at least 5 times a day, just wondering if anyone knows anything about this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Why am I not ranking although my domain authority is higher than competitors with same relevancy?
So I am trying to rank the domain http://jamesriver.org for the term "Churches in Springfield, MO" Not sure why we are not ranking as well as we ought to rank. I have a few assumptions, but wanted to see what other have to say to get better input. Below are some details about the us: We have done a brand name change in the past 2 years - James River Assembly to James River Church We have two locations: Ozark, MO - which has been there for a very long time and Springfield, MO which is a newer campus We have higher domain authority than others that rank higher for the term We have a new website that was launch about 3 months ago We have a location page for each of the 2 campuses I am wondering what factors might be at play in our lesser rankings even though we are relevant to the term and have higher authority than those that are ranking much higher than us. Thanks for any help you can provide.
Local Website Optimization | | chris.oursbourn0 -
Video SERP Help
Hello Friends,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KINQDOM
I try to appear on search results of property related search terms with my property videos. Here is a sample property video
http://www.antalyahomes.com/videositemap.asp May you please check it and tell me what I do wrong? Thanks in advance for your time.0 -
What are the search pros and cons of a transcript of a video in scroll box
This is being considered for fairly templated pages as a means of adding unique text to the page, without giving up a ton of real estate. The text is all visible in view source, but only the first few lines in the scroll box. The box itself is just above the fold. How, do you think this would affect search? Any other ideas for handling this. I'm limited by what the client will accept. Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
SEMRush's Site Audit Tool "SEO Ideas"
Recently SEMRush added a feature to its site audit tool called "SEO Ideas." In the case of specific the site I'm looking at it with, it's ideas consist mostly of suggesting words to add to the page for the page/my phrase(s) to perform better. It suggests this even when the term(s) or phrases(s) it's looking at are #1. Has anybody used this tool for this or something similar and found it to be valuable and if so how valuable? The reason I ask is that it would be a fair amount of work to go through these pages and find ways to add the select words and phrases and, frankly, it feels kind of 2005 to me. Your thoughts? Thanks... Darcy
Technical SEO | | 945010 -
Connecting long tail keywords to pages
New to Moz and this forum, so be gentle. 🙂 I’m in the process of overhauling a generally neglected website and have just finished some research on long tail keywords. My question is, how do I implement these? For example, I’ve got a product “Acme Widget” which has its own page on the site (and ranking well for the product name itself). I have lots of long tail keyword sets which describe key benefits of the products – some of which appear in the product copy, others which don’t (perhaps because the thing that a user may search for is ugly/bad-English in copy). For the sake of argument, let’s say I have the following long tail keywords for my Acme Widgets. cheap red widget los angleles widget strong green widgets florida What is the best way to implement these? Do I need to simply incorporate the text into my main Acme Widgets page, or do I need to have separate pages which are highly targeted to each long tail keyword? The problem with the former is unnatural/ugly copy. The problem with the latter is that coming up with enough content to justify (and rank) a page on each keyword set would be quite a challenge. Regards,
Technical SEO | | Warren_Vick
Warren0 -
Large natural products website owns education website. Should relationship be disclosed?
Hello All - I'm working on a content strategy for a large natural products company. In general it's difficult for articles about the natural products industry written written on commercial company sites to show up in the SERP. Most of the results come from large educational sites and blogs with no obvious affiliation (or products for sale). This company also owns an educational site - one that would be much easier to get content on the first page of the SERP for. The 2 sites are hosted on the same server. My question is - does this website relationship look fishy? Is it a grey area to create content for the educational site - content where the purpose is #1 education, but #2 - to promote products from the main site and send traffic to the main site. I do think it's important to note that the main company site does not actual sell any products there (products are sold on Amazon and on shelves in stores). I appreciate your thoughts!
Link Building | | JBMediaGroup0 -
Cities in Footer
Good afternoon! For SEO I put all of the cities and states my customer serves ( over 40) in the footer. Will this help or hurt seo. Also if it does hurt is it better to create a page of cities we serve and write some content around the different communities? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | EmSt0 -
Ecommerce site product reviews, canonicals – which option to choose?
Recently, I discovered that only the first 4 reviews on our product pages are crawled and indexed. Example: http://www.improvementscatalog.com/eucalyptus-deep-seat-furniture-group/253432 I'm assuming it's due to the canonical that's on the product page http://www.improvementscatalog.com/eucalyptus-deep-seat-furniture-group/253432" />. When you click on page 2 of the reviews, the url does not change, but the next batch of reviews appears on the product page. Same with page 3, etc… The problem is the additional pages are not being crawled and indexed. We have to have the canonical on the product page because our platform creates multiple urls for each product page by including each category where the product resides, related link parameters, etc in the product url (example: http://www.improvementscatalog.com/eucalyptus-deep-seat-furniture-group/patio-furniture/outdoor-furniture/253432) – trust me, it gets ugly! I've researched other Moz answers and I've found that there appears to be a couple of ways to fix the issue. Any ideas/help/guidance/examples on the below options is greatly appreciated!!!! Show only 4 reviews on the first page and place the remaining reviews on a new page by themselves (similar to how Amazon does it). However, I would rather keep all of the reviews on the product page if possible. Add page 2, page 3, etc parameters to the url to display the remaining reviews and adding rel=prev/next. If we chose option 2, would each product page have a different canonical? If so, would it create a duplicate content issue since the above-the-fold content, title tag and meta descriptions would all be the same? Also, would you include each additional page in the sitemap? We had a similar issue with our category pages and we implemented the "viewall" in the canonical. Would that work for our reviews? Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | Improvements0 -
Backlink management: 301 redirect unsuccessful.
I am managing my company's spammy backlinks using Open Site Explorer. Our company owns a few URLs that are related to our company or are iterations of our main URL. All of these additional URLs have 301 redirects to our main domain. Open Site Explorer has identified one of these URLs as having a spam score of 8 indicating a 56% chance of Google crawler penalization. Obviously, this is a red flag. Instead of being redirected to our main domain upon visiting the URL, I was directed to what seems to be an automatically generated, generic webpage with links that seem to have been generated by keywords from our main domain. I have seen this type of webpage before when incorrectly typing in URLs from other pages. They tend to look the same. They have a black background with the URL written in grey at the top and a rectangular related links bar. Is anyone familiar with my problem and could you offer any advice? Thanks, Ben
Technical SEO | | SOLVISTA0 -
Which trumps: spam ranking or domain authority?
I am trying to manage my backlinks by removing ones with high spam links, but I am having trouble drawling the line between helpful/harmful links. One link, for instance, has a span ranking of 7 indicating a 30% chance of penalization from Google crawlers. This same link, however, also boasts a domain authority of 67 which indicates it is also potentially helpful to my own Google crawler success. My question is, which of these scores (spam rank and domain authority) trumps the other? Should I try to get the site owner to remove it? Am I even thinking about this issue correctly? If so, how would you suggest I draw the line in the future? Ben
Link Explorer | | SOLVISTA0 -
Site migration 301's list on Apache server - when do I take the old migrated URLs off our 301 list?
Howdy! The site was migrated last year to a new platform, therefore the URLs were migrated over using 301 redirect rules. Since then, the server has a huuuuge list of rules for URLs and I wanted to know when can we start taking these off of the list? And, how can I test to see if they are still indexing, do I simply just add the url to the google search bar? Thanks Guys! Kay
SEO Learn Center | | eLab_London0 -
Is my competitor doing something blackhat? - Cannot only access pages via serps , not from website navigation /search
Hi Mozzers, One of my competitors uses a trick whereby they have a number of different sitemaps containing location specific urls for their most popular categories on their eCommerce store. It's quite obvious that they are trying to rank for keyword <location>and from what I am see, you cant to any of these pages from their website navigation or search , so it's like these pages are separated from the main site in terms of accessing them but you can access the main website pages/navigation the other way round (i.e if you select one of the pages from finding it in serps) </location> I know that google doesn't really like anything you can't access from the main website but would you class this as blackhat ? / cheating etc ... They do tend to rank quite well for these alot of the pages and it hasn't seem to have affected pages on their main website in terms of rankings. I am just wondering , if it's worth us doing similar as google hasn't penalised them by the looks of things.. thanks Pete
Local Website Optimization | | PeteC120 -
Why do my spammy backlinks still appear on my Open Site Explorer page after removal?
I used the organic spam backlink removal tactic of emailing owners of sites of spam rank 7 or higher on my page. It has been weeks since many of the harmful links were removed, yet they remain listed on my Open site Explorer page. My fear is that somehow simply getting these links removed doesn't exempt me from the potential to be penalized by Google crawlers. Does it take longer than a few weeks for these links to disappear from the Open Site Explorer, or is there something else I need to be doing? Any and all advice appreciated. Ben
Link Explorer | | SOLVISTA0 -
Setting up a website targeted for the US
Hi, As an English company we have a co.uk domain with .com domain pointing to this. We are now looking to launch a separate (new) website targeting the American market and I have been asked to do the following: If an American or Canadian IP address visits the .com website it automatically goes to our newly created website i.e. website 2. If a non-American or non-Canadian IP address goes to .com it automatically goes to the original website i.e. website 1. If a user is on website 1 and clicks an American flag it takes the website user to website 2. If a user is on website 2 and clicks on the UK flag it takes the website user to website 1. Can anyone advise the best way to go about doing this as I feel that this could effect our search rankings. I am concerned how the search engines will penalize website 2 (original site) which has good rankings. Thanks in advance.
International SEO | | Cybertill0 -
I set up a custom report to be sent to me daily about a week ago, but I haven't received any of them yet?
How long do they really take? I think I opted in to receive emails from MOZ but I didn't see that as an option on the email form. I need to be able to rely on the assumption that if I set up a custom email to send that it will in fact send.
Getting Started | | matthew.dimmett0 -
Not Adding Fresh Content Daily Did Got Me Penalized?
One of my website used to post like a 1000 words articles every 4-5 (say like 12 x 300 words articles each in a week) days in a week. The process went till 3 months. Then suddenly we stopped adding content to it for a flat 15 days due to unavailability of content writer. Suddenly a major drop took place. Now we have been adding the same amount of quality content but the ranking doesn't seem to be improving. Is it a penalty?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Checking Rankings Again & Again Can Drop Rankings
Is it possible that if i check my google rankings again & again it can drop ranking?Like checking where do my keywords rank every hours rank drop the rankings? Because this indirectly affects the CTR. Might be because of it? No one has faced such an weird thing before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Help with duplicate pages
Hi there, I have a client who's site I am currently reviewing prior to a SEO campaign. They still work with the development team who built the site (not my company). I have discovered 311 instances of duplicate content within the crawl report. The duplicate content appears to either be 1, 2, or 3 versions of the same pages but with differing URL's. Example: http://www.sitename.com http://sitename.com http://sitename.com/index.php And other pages follow a similar or same pattern. I suppose my question is mainly what could be causing this and how can I fix it? Or, is it something that will have to be fixed by the website developers? Thanks in advance Darren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODarren0 -
Queries vs. Organic Keywords in GA
Could someone explain how the following metrics in Google Analytics are being calculated: Search Engine Optimization (Acquisition): clicks on a certain query Campaigns (Acquisition): sessions on a certain keyword GA Help states that both 'queries' and 'organic keywords' refer to the actual string a user enters in Google Search. In that cases it seems that 'clicks' on a SERP result through a given query and 'sessions' through that very same query could not be miles apart. E.g.: Clicks through query X = 170 Sessions through organic keyword X = 8 Thank you for helping me out!
Reporting & Analytics | | WeAreDigital_BE0 -
Scraped content ranking above the original source content in Google.
I need insights on how “scraped” content (exact copy-pasted version) rank above the original content in Google. 4 original, in-depth articles published by my client (an online publisher) are republished by another company (which happens to be briefly mentioned in all four of those articles). We reckon the articles were re-published at least a day or two after the original articles were published (exact gap is not known). We find that all four of the “copied” articles rank at the top of Google search results whereas the original content i.e. my client website does not show up in the even in the top 50 or 60 results. We have looked at numerous factors such as Domain authority, Page authority, in-bound links to both the original source as well as the URLs of the copied pages, social metrics etc. All of the metrics, as shown by tools like Moz, are better for the source website than for the re-publisher. We have also compared results in different geographies to see if any geographical bias was affecting results, reason being our client’s website is hosted in the UK and the ‘re-publisher’ is from another country--- but we found the same results. We are also not aware of any manual actions taken against our client website (at least based on messages on Search Console). Any other factors that can explain this serious anomaly--- which seems to be a disincentive for somebody creating highly relevant original content. We recognize that our client has the option to submit a ‘Scraper Content’ form to Google--- but we are less keen to go down that route and more keen to understand why this problem could arise in the first place. Please suggest.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ontarget-media0 -
We have set up our H1 to contain the product name - it used to be our Company name all the time - would this affect our sales
We noticed recently on our site - that our H1 tag was the Company Name - we changed this to be the product name - our products would be searched for by all or part of the description. Our sales have dropped of the days since we changed it, could it be a result of this change ? Is it best to have the H1 tag as the product name ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
Odd 404 pages
Evening all, I've performed a Screaming Frog technical crawl of a site, and it's returning links like this as 404s: http://clientsite.co.uk/accidents-caused-by-colleagues/js/modernizr-2.0.6.min.js Now, I recognise that Modernizr is used for detecting features in the user's browser - but why would it have created an indexed page that no longer exists? Would you leave them as is? 410 them? Or do something else entirely? Thanks for reading, I look forward to hearing your thoughts! Kind regards, John.
Technical SEO | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
Multiple Blog Postings
Hi! Will posting more than one blog a day help with SEO? For example: I’d like to post 3 times a day if it will help. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EmSt0 -
How to interlink 16 different language versions of site?
I remember that Matt Cutts recommended against interlinking many language versions of a site.
International SEO | | lcourse
Considering that google now also crawls javascript links, what is best way to implement interlinking? I still see otherwhise extremely well optimized large sites interlinking to more than 10 different language versions e.g. zalando.de, but also booking.com (even though here on same domain). Currently we have an expandable css dropdown in the footer interlinking 16 different language versions with different TLD. Would you be concerned? What would you suggest how to interlink domains (for user link would be useful)?0 -
Shall I change duplicated product descriptions if I am top ranking result and was first to publish it?
about 20% of total 500 products in our shop have a manufacturer product description, which appears repeatedly on maybe 10 other sites and also on ebay and amazon. Issue is just with our own brand. We have another brand website where we publish the same product descriptions as well (google knows that we own both sites). The product description was first published on shop website before anywhere else and we are ranking number one for the product despite quite strong competition and we outrank our brand website as well. Which of the following options would you opt for? keeping the description and just adding some unique content replacing the complete product description by a new one
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Mobile Googlebot vs Desktop Googlebot - GWT reports - Crawl errors
Hi Everyone, I have a very specific SEO question. I am doing a site audit and one of the crawl reports is showing tons of 404's for the "smartphone" bot and with very recent crawl dates. If our website is responsive, and we do not have a mobile version of the website I do not understand why the desktop report version has tons of 404's and yet the smartphone does not. I think I am not understanding something conceptually. I think it has something to do with this little message in the Mobile crawl report. "Errors that occurred only when your site was crawled by Googlebot (errors didn't appear for desktop)." If I understand correctly, the "smartphone" report will only show URL's that are not on the desktop report. Is this correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carla_Dawson0
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.