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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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  • EricFish


    Hi Mozers, How come Moz reports just six 404 errors, whereas Google Search Console reports 250 and Screaming Frog only reports a dozen? It seems to me that these results are all over the place. Shouldn't these reports be more consistent? I do understand that Search Console includes historical data and that URLs or issues need to be "marked as fixed" in order for them to go away, however, even if I do this, Google ends up reporting far more errors than anything else. Do 404s reported by Moz and Screaming Frog NOT include external links? It seems to me that this could be partially responsible for the issue. Also, is there a way to efficiently track the source of the 404s besides clicking on "Linked From" within Search Console 250 times? I was looking for something like this is Moz or SF but no luck. Any help is appreciated. Thanksabunch!

    Moz Pro | | EricFish
    0
  • genevieveagar


    My designer and I have been having an argument: we have a blog with short, 400 words posts. They have an H1 with nice keywords and a catchy title, and then a few subheadings. I don't like making the subheadings H2, because the font looks way too large in Wordpress, so my designer wants to make them all H4s, so the font looks to be a nicer size. Here's my problem with that and why I usually just bold the subheadings: Is it really bad to put a bunch of H4s right under an H1, with not H2's or 3's to separate? I'm reading different arguments on the internet about this and gladly welcome more debate and/or case studies. Thank you!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | genevieveagar
    0
  • kirin44355


    Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
    https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
    https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
    https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
    https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
    https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
    https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this? 
    Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend. 
    Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
    Chris Gorski

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
    0
  • adi2305


    Hi everyone! I have a website (ponturipariuri.pro), few years old. The PA and DA used to be around 25-35 but now it shows me 1 for both PA and DA. I just discovered it and I do not understand why. Take a look at the image I attached here. There was no spam on my website. Google still shows my website on the first page for many keywords. 3ojp7qt.png

    Link Explorer | | adi2305
    0
  • seoman10


    Interested to know if anybody still uses the strategy of pinging links to make sure they get indexed, there are a number of sites out there which offer it.  Is it considered dangerous/spamy?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seoman10
    0
  • Cart_generation


    MOZ is telling me the URLs are too long. I did a little research and I found out that the length of the URLs is not really a serious problem. In fact, others recommend ignoring the situation. Even on their blog I found this explanation: "Shorter URLs are generally preferable. You do not need to take this to the extreme, and if your URL is already less than 50-60 characters, do not worry about it at all. But if you have URLs pushing 100+ characters, there's probably an opportunity to rewrite them and gain value. This is not a direct problem with Google or Bing - the search engines can process long URLs without much trouble. The issue, instead, lies with usability and user experience. Shorter URLs are easier to parse, copy and paste, share on social media, and embed, and while these may all add up to a fractional improvement in sharing or amplification, every tweet, like, share, pin, email, and link matters (either directly or, often, indirectly)." And yet, I have these questions: In this case, why do I get this error telling me that the urls are too long, and what are the best practices to get this out? Thank You

    Moz Pro | | Cart_generation
    1
  • seoanalytics


    search intent

    Hello, Is there a tool that can tell me what the user intent of my keyword is and how I should present my page (the type of content users want to see it, what questions they want answered ? Thank you,

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi Moz community, We need to check our website/pages rankings for random keywords at random timings in different countries. Beside checking in search console, we would like to check in browser. But Google now is not allowing us to browse the results of other country. I would like to use best proxy service to browse Google from different location to check how our pages are ranking & fluctuating. Please suggest on this. Thanks

    SERP Trends | | vtmoz
    0
  • cathywix


    Hi we recently did a migration and a lot of content changed locations see: https://d.pr/i/RvqI81 Basically, the 301 goes to the correct location but its a relative URL (as you can see from the screenshot) rather than absolute URL. Do you think this is a high priority issue from an SEO standpoint, should we get the developer to change the redirects to absolute? Cheers.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cathywix
    0
  • JannetteP


    I'm feeling like I'm basing all my research time on tools that I cannot necessarily trust. Between Google keyword planner, Keywords everywhere chrome extension, and Moz keyword explorer, I'm getting wildly different results on 2 simple keywords related to colleges with baking & pastry arts degrees. "baking college", "baking colleges" So Keyword planner won't give me any search volume for those 2 words, I don't even see them in the results. Instead, it decides I really meant "baker college" which has 33,100 global searches. I tried telling it use only closely related terms, but it keeps giving me "baker college" and refuses to show me the terms I asked for. Stubbornly useless. Keywords everywhere says both of these keywords bring in 33,100 searches. It does not tell me those searches were for "baker college." Totally misleading. Moz keyword explorer says baking college as 0-10 volume, baking colleges has 101-200 volume. So at least it's not trying to give me "baker college" numbers. Perhaps I can trust this, but it's not convenient to upload hundreds of various keywords at a time to pull the volume numbers like I do with the other tools. With Keyword planner making assumptions and grouping unrelated terms together, and Keywords everywhere using those numbers without pointing out the assumptions, I feel like I can't trust anything without taking time to dig into the discrepancies, which is impossible with hundreds of keywords. Do you know of any good search volume tools that don't force or hide assumptions? Thanks.

    Moz Bar | | JannetteP
    1
  • Nadav_W


    getting the following error when trying to use google mobile friendly tool: "page cannot be reached. This could be because the page is unavailable or blocked by robots.txt" I don't have anything blocked by robots.txt or robots tag. i also manage to render my pages on google search console's fetch and render....so what can be the reason that the tool can't access my website? Also...the mobile usability report on the search console works but reports very little, and the google speed test also doesnt work... Any ideas to what is the reason and how to fix this? LEARN MOREDetailsUser agentGooglebot smartphone

    Technical SEO | | Nadav_W
    0
  • AliMac26


    Hi everyone, My coworker recently stumbled across this article that instructs you to not to alt text for "decorative images" as you might get penalized you for over optimization https://www.shopify.com/blog/7412852-10-must-know-image-optimization-tips Has anyone heard of this or have any thoughts?

    Image & Video Optimization | | AliMac26
    0
  • Shorefield_Holidays


    Hi All, Simple question, but I'm struggling to find the answer, so I hope someone is able to help. The business I run is Oakdene Forest Park; Google Maps URL: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Oakdene™+Forest+Park/@50.8114372,-1.8598721,18z/data=!4m12!1m6!3m5!1s0x4873980ce90e4ef7:0x755579d631c25b33!2sOakdene™+Forest+Park!8m2!3d50.8114796!4d-1.8582842!3m4!1s0x4873980ce90e4ef7:0x755579d631c25b33!8m2!3d50.8114796!4d-1.8582842?hl=en Under the business name, it has a small description and for the life of me I don't know where Google is getting it from because a part of it is wrong. It looks like this: Oakdene™ Forest Park Rural Resort with Entertainment & a Spa I would like to remove the term 'Rural Resort' but where do I find it?? Thanks in advance for your help.

    Local Listings | | Shorefield_Holidays
    0
  • BeckyKey


    Hi SEMRush is flagging these pages as having duplicate content, but we have rel = next etc implemented: https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott?page=2 Or is it being flagged as they're just really similar pages?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey
    0
  • D.J.Hanchett


    On or about 12/1/17 a massive amount of my site's pages were deindexed. I have done the following: Ensured all pages are "index,follow" Ensured there are no manual penalites Ensured the sitemap correlates to all the pages Resubmitted to Google ALL pages are gone from Bing as well In the new SC interface, there are 661 pages that are Excluded with 252 being "Crawled - currently not indexed: The page was crawled by Google, but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling." What in the world does this mean and how the heck do I fix this. This is CRITICAL. Please help! The url is https://www.hkqpc.com

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | D.J.Hanchett
    0
  • Extima-Christian


    Google Search console is telling me "Sitemap contains URLs which are blocked by robots.txt." I don't understand why my sitemap is being blocked? My robots.txt look like this: User-Agent: *
    Disallow: Sitemap: http://www.website.com/sitemap_index.xml It's a WordPress site, with Yoast SEO installed. Is anyone else having this issue with Google Search console? Does anyone know how I can fix this issue?

    Technical SEO | | Extima-Christian
    1
  • Maggiathor


    Hey guys, I've been working with some hotels and I feel like there are some specific issues which need special solutions. 
    Maybe some of you also work for hotels and face similar problems. Question 1: Google "forces" 3-packs impressions to OTAs like booking.com via Hotel Ads. You basically have a big blue "book now" button and a small little website button. This ends up basically leading to CTRs below 1% despite a 1-3 Position. Is there any way to improve the organic CTR? Of course we use hotel ads, but they offer bad analytics AND we basically pay for our SEO-Performance. Question 2: Search console doesn't specify wether or not a impression comes from 3-Pack or the rest of the organic results, which basically leads to a  average position which says nothing. It's hard to evaluate the performance of meta-titles and texts, because the ctr is also mixed. What would be a better way to get this data or do you think google will change this in some time (new search console doesn't offer this). Question 3: Hotel Rankings are dominated by OTAs, Meta-Searchers and BIg Chains. Has anyone experience in SEO for smaller, family owned Hotels? Any tricks how to get a steady traffic source outside of brand results? Hope there are some travel experts in here 🙂

    Algorithm Updates | | Maggiathor
    0
  • bedynamic


    Hi, I am working on an ecommerce site and the main category - lets call them car widgets - is using a h1 at the top of the page which is great.  There are 4 sub categories on the page - lets call one of them red widget.  The only content on the page is the sub category name and an image.  Should the sub category red widget use a h2? Thanks S

    On-Page Optimization | | bedynamic
    0
  • TeamViviRealEstate


    For a bunch of my pages, the MOZ Crawl Report says "Title Too Long". Yoast on my site tells me that the titles are the correct length. How can these two things be at odds with each other? Which one is right?

    Moz Bar | | TeamViviRealEstate
    0
  • Kevin_P


    A large number of sessions in my client's Google Analytics account appear to come from medium: organic and source:Indeed. Since I'm focused on SEO for this project, I'd prefer that Indeed be treated as referral traffic. Any ideas for fixing this issue? Also, and I'm sure the answer is no, is there a way to fix the past data in Google Analytics that has already reported Indeed as an organic medium?

    Reporting & Analytics | | Kevin_P
    0
  • bill369


    I have an ecommerce website where some pages link to a product page with a different URL. EXAMPLE: 1: /category/product1.html (not indexed by Google) with canonical pointing to product1.html Other page link to the product like below. 2: product1.html (indexed by Google) Now the question is, does 1: pass any link juice to product1.html or not? Is it worth to change everything and link only to one URL? My site is running on Magento!

    Technical SEO | | bill369
    0
  • eddys_kap


    Hi, I have the following page where we've implemented a no index tag. But when we run this page in screaming frog or this tool here to verify the noidex is present and functioning, it shows that it's not. But if you view the source of the page, the code is present in the head tag. And unfortunately we've seen instances where Google is indexing pages we've noindexed. Any thoughts on the example above or why this is happening in Google? Eddy

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eddys_kap
    0
  • WizIQMarketing


    Hi, We are a SAAS platform offering cloud based solution for educators. We had a google business listing in India and recently added one for US as well. Our keywords rank significantly better in India than in US. Is it a good idea to remove these business listing? Also, what could be other factors that impact GEO SEO rankings for a online company like ours?

    Local Listings | | WizIQMarketing
    0
  • Leaf-a-mark


    Hi there, I have client who has multiple domains that already have some PA and DA. Problem is that most websites have the same content and rank better on different keywords.
    I want to redirect all the websites to 1 domain because it’s easier to manage and it removes any duplicate content. Question is if I redirect domain x to domain y do the rankings of domain x increase on domain y? Or is it better to keep domain x separately to generate more referral traffic to domain y? Thanks in advance! Cheers

    Technical SEO | | Leaf-a-mark
    0
  • m_van


    We recently launched our website that uses React.js and we haven't been able to get any of the pages indexed. Our previous site (which had a .ca domain) ranked #1 in the 4 cities we had pages and we redirected it to the .com domain a little over a month ago. We have recently started using prerender.io but still haven't seen any success. Has anyone dealt with a similar issue before?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | m_van
    0
  • InternetRep


    Hello, Just a quick, question! I was wanting to know if multiple page indexing (site overhaul) could cause a drop in organic traffic ranking or be penalized by Google for submitting multiple pages at one time. Thanks

    On-Page Optimization | | InternetRep
    0
  • TrulyTravel


    Hi, Currently my client displaying Ratings & Reviews from a third-party (TripAdvisor) service and only displaying 5 reviews but not showing "Read More Reviews" button to TripAdvisor page. Now I would like to use Rich Snippet schema markup code on these rating & reviews but below are my few concerns, could you please guide me: 1. Can I use Rich Snippet Schema markup code on widget of TripAdvisor Rating & Review. 2. If I apply schema markup code, Do I need to maintain TripAdvisor link for "Read More reviews". Below are the URLs which contains TripAdvisor rating & reviews after big image: https://goo.gl/DLpDXE https://goo.gl/EHVG7o https://goo.gl/ok6cYp Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks, Satla

    Reviews and Ratings | | TrulyTravel
    0
  • michaelpw


    Hi All, I am working on an international site and we have started running into issues with crawlers successfully crawling the site. GeoIPEnable On Redirect one country RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^US$
    RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Host} !.nexcesscdn.net$ [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.)$ https://us.website.com/ [R,L] The main reason for working on a hard GEOIP redirect would be that we are unable to show certain products in certain regions, the customer should not be given the option which is best practice. Can anyone advise? Thanking in advance.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | michaelpw
    0

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