Moz Q&A is closed.
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.
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 trying to generate GEO meta tag for my website where on one page there are multiple locations My question is, Can I add GEO tagging for every address?
Am I restricted to 1 geo tag per page or can i add multiple geo tags ?
Technical SEO | | lina_digital0 -
How to deal with auto generated pages on our site that are considered thin content
Hi there, Wondering how to deal w/ about 300+ pages on our site that are autogenerated & considered thin content. Here is an example of those pages: https://app.cobalt.io/ninp0 The pages are auto generated when a new security researcher joins our team & then filled by each researcher with specifics about their personal experience. Additionally, there is a fair amount of dynamic content on these pages that updates with certain activities. These pages are also getting marked as not having a canonical tag on them, however, they are technically different pages just w/ very similar elements. I'm not sure I would want to put a canonical tag on them as some of them have a decent page authority & I think could be contributing to our overall SEO health. Any ideas on how I should deal w/ this group of similar but not identical pages?
Moz Pro | | ChrissyOck0 -
Moz can't crawl my site.
Moz cannot carry out the site crawl on my online shop. Not really sure what the issue is, it has no problem getting onto my site when you use www. before the address, but it needs to be able to access bluerinsevintage.co.uk Stuck as what to do, we are a shopify store. Anyone else had this problem, or know what i need to change so they can crawl the site? thjis is the page they are getting when trying to get on bluerinsevintage.co.uk but if they use www.bluerinsevintage.co.uk the site comes up.
Getting Started | | bluerinsevintageAdam
0 -
Sitelinks are wrong
When I search my website on Google, the sitelinks that I have appear to be wrong. How can I fix this? I have all of my pages optimized.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | litesourceinc0 -
Redirect and ranking issue
Hi there - was wondering whether someone might be able to help. For a period of a day and a half, all the traffic to our website's blog articles were mistakenly being redirected to our homepage. A number of these articles ranked in the top 5 in Google worldwide for their targeted keywords, so this was a considerable amount of organic traffic that was instantly being redirected. It was a strange site glitch and our web team rectified the error, but now all these articles have disappeared from Google rankings (not visible anywhere in the first five pages). I'm presuming this must be linked to this redirect issue - we've been advised to wait and see whether Google restores these rankings, but I'm still concerned as to whether this represents a more serious problem? We have re-indexed the pages we are most concerned about, but am not sure whether there is anything else obvious we should think to do. If anyone has any thoughts, I'd be happy to hear them!
Technical SEO | | rwat0 -
Service Area Location Pages vs. User Experience
I'm familiar with the SAB best practices outlined here. Here's my issue: Doing local landing pages as described here might not be ideal from a user experience point of view. Having a "Cities We Serve" or "Service Areas" link in the main navigation isn't necessarily valuable to the user when the city-specific landing pages are all places within a 15-mile radius of the SAB's headquarters. It would just look like the company did it for SEO. It wouldn't look natural. Seriously, it feels like best practices are totally at odds with user experience here. If I absolutely must create location pages for 10 or so municipalities within my client's service area, I'd rather NOT put the service areas as a primary navigation item. It is not useful to the user. Anyone who sees that the company provides services in the [name of city] metropolitan area will already understand that the company can service their town that is 5 miles away. It is self-evident. For example**, who would wonder whether a plumbing company with a Los Angeles address also services Beverly Hills?** It's just... silly. But the Moz guide says I've got to do those location pages! And that I've got to put them high up in the navigation! This is a problem because we've got to do local SEO, but we also have to provide an ideal experience. Thoughts?
Local Website Optimization | | Greenery1 -
Why my Domain Authority (DA) is Decreased
Hello, I would like to know how the changes in domain authority is considered by MOZ? Domain Authority for my this domain https://factohr.com was 14 and it is decreased to 13 in this week. Though i have a very decent and good links going over to all my pages howcome my DA is affected and decreased. As its regularly being updated and has a high quality traffic! i would like to know the reason behind decrement in DA and is there any connection with redirection of .com domain? How can i increase DA for my website?
Algorithm Updates | | MyMoz710 -
How to Have Multiple Listings appear on Google maps
Hi my client has two locations for his restaurants: Me Gusta Tacos He wants to have both his locations show up in the map pack, which they currently do when you type in Restaurants, Dinner, food near me etc... However, when you google Me Gusta Tacos the Google listing shows up on the right for one of his locations, but there isn't a Map Pack for his two locations. I wasn't sure if a map pack only shows up when there are 3 or more locations, for instance, a chipotle which I added an image below to compare too. HGOgln5 Jgdoi4Y
Local Listings | | Sociable_Bistro0 -
Primary versus secondary keyword
Hello, Can someone give a example of what primary and secondary keywords are and how to implement that in a sentence ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics2 -
Ranking penalty for "accordion" content -- hidden prior to user interaction
Will content inside an "accordion" module be ranked as non-hidden content? Is there an official guide by google and other search engines addressing this? Example of accordion element: https://v4-alpha.getbootstrap.com/components/collapse/#accordion-example Will all elements in the example above be seen + treated equally by search engines?
Technical SEO | | houlihanlokey1 -
Is Local Search Data Included in Google Search Console?
Is local search data Included in Google Search Console? Or is it only in Google My Business? I'm having a hard time distinguishing what exactly is included in Google Search Console's reporting.
Local Listings | | DigitalMarketingSEO1 -
How to find all broken images?
Are there any free tools that will crawl a full website and report back on any broken tags? My site recently added several thousand previously archived posts, many of which contain old tags that no longer exist. ScreamingFrog's crawl is too limited to reach most of these posts, and I haven't been able to find another free tool to get the job done. If there's no free tool, does anyone know of an affordable paid alternative?
On-Page Optimization | | WebElaine0 -
More pages on website better for SEO?
Hi all, Is creating more pages better for SEO? Of course the pages being valuable content. Is this because you want the user to spend as much time as possible on your site. A lot of my competitors websites seem to have more pages than mine and their domain authorities are higher, for example the services we provide are all on one page and for my competitors each services as its own page. Kind Regards, Aqib
Local Website Optimization | | SMCCoachHire0 -
Any risks involved in removing a sub-domain from search index or completely taking down? Ranking impact?
Hi all, One of our sub-domains has thousands of indexed pages but traffic is very less and irrelevant. There are links between this sub-domain to other sub domains of ours. We are planning to take this subdomain completely. What happens if so? Google responds for this with a ranking change? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Google My Business pages for New Construction Communities
I have a number of builders of new homes as clients. Typically, they build out a whole neighborhood at once and give the neighborhood a fancy name. We were planning to create Google My Business pages for these communities but then ran into some potential challenges. As new communities, they are sometimes not on Google's radar yet Some of them have model homes where you might take a tour with a realtor that serves the community exclusively but many don't. So here come the questions... Is there a way to make Google speed up its process of recognizing new addresses? I have to choose an address to associate with the GMB page, probably the address of model home. Is this going to create annoying problems for a buyer who someday buys that model home? Since some communities don't have a model home, I could arbitrarily assign an address of one of the neighborhood homes to the GMB page, but this leads to the same question about creating a GMB page that will exist after the builder has sold all the houses in the community. Will it be weird to have the GMB referring to someone's private residence down the road? My assumption is that claiming a GMB page would help with local ranking if someone searches for something like "new homes" in addition to providing easy driving directions to someone who has done a bit of research and Googles the name of the new home community while out driving and searching for homes. These seem to be the main benefits, but are the challenges associated with questions 1-3 even worth the trouble of trying to claim listings for these communities?
Local Listings | | TheKatzMeow0 -
Attributing Lead Source/Medium on Squarespace forms
Hi Mozzers Happy new year! We've recently picked up a client for some PPC and SEO work and their website is built using Squarespace. It's a B2B business, so enquiries don't always get sent straight from a landing page. Often a user hits our desired landing pages then checks out a few other pages before sending an enquiry. The problem we have is with attaching the source/medium of a lead to the enquiry that we receive. For example if Joe Bloggs completes a form, what we'd like to receive is:
Paid Search Marketing | | ZestUK
Name: Joe Bloggs
Email: joe.bloggs@email.com
Phone: 123456
Source: Google
Medium: CPC With the latter as hidden fields. We've tried the hidden field feature built into the form builder, but this only works if the user completes the form on the landing page they arrived on without leaving the page. We've tried to used event tracking but this only gives us accuracy on the number of enquiries from that channel, not who the user was that enquired, so we can't consolidate with our order and revenue report to work out ROI from each activity. Has anybody in the community ever solved this issue on Squarespace? Thanks
Mark0 -
Are core pages considered "cornerstones"?
To check that I understand the terminology, "cornerstone articles" are posts (or pages) that have some extensive, detailed, important information about a subject that other blog posts and articles can link to in reference, right? For example, a website for an auto repair shop might have a blog post about what cold weather does to a car's transmission and that post could link to a cornerstone "explainer" article that goes into more detail explaining to car-dummies like me what a transmission even DOES. But are core pages also in this category of cornerstone content? Or are they something entirely different and should be constructed accordingly? By "core pages", I mean the base-level pages about what your business is and does. For the repair shop example, I mean things like an "About Us" page or a "Services" page*. *or broken up into individual pages listing the services related to brakes, engine, wheels, etc. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | BrianAlpert780 -
Default Wordpress 301 Redirects of JS and CSS files. Bad for SEO & How to Fix?
Hi there: We are developers with some digital marketing expertise, but a current issue has us perplexed. An outside SEO firm has asked us to clean up a large number of 301 redirects. Most of these are 'default' Wordpress behavior that relate to calling the latest version of a JS or CSS file. For instance, a JS file is called with this: https://websitexyz.com/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js?ver=4.9.1 but ultimately redirects to this: https://websitexyz.com/wp-includes/js/wp-embed.min.js. We are being asked to prevent the redirect from happening by, presumably, calling the ultimate file to begin with. The issue is that, as far as we know, there's no easy way to alter WP behavior to call the ultimate file to begin with. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Probably basic, but how to use image Title and Alt Text - and confusing advice from Moz!
I've been doing SEO on my business's site for years and have got good results. I've always used image Titles and Alt Text text. Our blog posts are image-intensive, often with 100-200 pictures (not surprising since we're photographers). For any given blog post, I've tended to have a uniform image Title for each image and then a more specialised Alt Text tag giving a description. A typical image on one of our blog posts would be like this: Image filename: wedding-photography-at-so-and-so-venue-001.jpg .... 002, 003 etc Image Title Attribute: Wedding Photography at So-And-So-Venue by Our-Company-Name - this would be the same for every image in the blog post. Alternative Text: Bride and groom exchanging vows during wedding ceremony at so-and-so-venue - this would be tailed for each image. So my question is - is this right? The Moz help page for image SEO is actually incorrect in one aspect: https://moz.com/ugc/10-tips-for-optimizing-your-images-for-search "Alt text (short for “alternative text”) is used to highlight the identity of an image when you hover over it with your mouse cursor. It also shows as text to all users when there are problems rendering the image." This is not the case. Hovering over the image in Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Opera ALL display the Image Title, NOT Alt Text. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robandsarahgillespie0 -
Htaccess - Redirecting TAG or Category pages
Hello Fellow Moz's, We have an issue redirecting some /TAG and /Category pages to inner pages. As an example we use: RedirectMatch 301 /category/Sample-Category(.*) https://OurDomain.com.au/New-Page//$1 That works well. The issue is we have other categories and tags that are named similar to /Sample-Category As an example, if we try to redirect /Sample-Category-1 to /New-Page-1 - it will not work, and redirects to /New-Page I assume this is because /Sample-Category is already being redirected, so anything after /Sample-Category like -1 or -2 or -3 etc, will not be recognized. Anyone know of a workaround?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jes-Extender-Australia0 -
Tool to Check Bing Index?
Anyone know of a tool to automate checking the Bing index? To check Google's index, I use URL Profiler but there is no option to check Bing.
Other SEO Tools | | Choice0 -
Site crawl only shows homepage
Hi everyone, A client of us has a quite new website with a lot of URLs. (Google Search Console indicates around 5300.) However, when I execute a site crawl with screaming frog, or a crawl test in MOZ, it only shows me one URL, the homepage. Does somebody have an idea why the other pages of the website are not showing up? Thanks,
Moz Bar | | WeAreDigital_BE
Jens0 -
H1 and Schema Codes Set Up Correctly?
Greetings: It was pointed out to me that the h1 tags on my website (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) all had exactly the same text and that duplication may be contributing to the very low page authority for most URLs. The duplicate h1 appears in line 54-54 (see below) of the home page: www.nyc-officespace-leader.com: itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness" style="position:absolute;top:-9999em;"> <span<br>itemprop="name">Metro Manhattan Office Space</span<br> <img< p="">But the above refers to schema" so is this really duplicate H1 or is there an exception if the H1 is within a schema? Also, I was told that the company street address and city and state were set up incorrectly as part of an alt tag. However these items also appear as schema in lines 49-68 shown below: Dangerous for me to perform surgery on the code without being certain about these key items!! Could ask my developer, however they may be uncomfortable considering that they set this up in the 1st place. So the view of neutral professionals would be highly welcome! itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress">
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
<span<br>itemprop="streetAddress">347 5th Ave #1008
<span<br>itemprop="addressLocality">New York
<span<br>itemprop="addressRegion">NY
<span<br>itemprop="postalCode">10016<div<br>itemprop="brand" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">
---------------------------------------------------------------------------</div<br></span<br></span<br></span<br></span<br></img<>0 -
Homepage appearing instead of subpage
Hi, I have my homepage which has links saying "bike tours and bike tours in France" because in the past I was only doing bike tours in France. I now do tours all over Europe and I have a page about "bike tours in Franc" only. The issue I have is that my page about "bike tours in France" never appears in the search ranking it is always my homepage that does for tjhe keyword "bike tours in France". My guess is that it is due to the links that my homepage has ? How could I make sure my France page appears instead of my homepage ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Any tool to get all the old or archived links of a website?
Hi all, We can see the old pages/links of a website using web.archive.org. But we need to manually check all the cached versions to know those. Is there anyway to get all those links/pages? Thanks
Other SEO Tools | | vtmoz0 -
CSS user select and any potential affect on SEO
Hi everyone and thank you in advance for your helpful comments. We have a client who is concerned about copying of content from their site because it has happened a few times in the last few years. We have explained that the content is essentially publicly available and that using the CSS selector user-select to prevent selection of text will really only prevent the technically limited users from working out how to get the text. He is happy that it will at least stop some people. So the question is would there be any way that this would have an affect on SEO? We would make an assumption that it doesnt but putting it out there for some feedback. Cheers Eddie
Technical SEO | | vital_hike0 -
FAQ page structure
I have read in other discussions that having all questions on an FAQ page is the way to go and then if the question has an answer worthy of its own page, you should abbreviate the answer and link to the page with more content. My question is when using some templates in WP, they have a little + button you can click and it reveal the answer to the question. Does this hurt SEO versus having all text visible and then using headers/subheaders? An example of the + button https://fyrfyret.dk/faq/
On-Page Optimization | | OrlandSEO1 -
How is DA and PA calculated?
I'm interested to know how DA and PA is calculated. Is it calculated exponentially? i.e. increases out of proportion compare to the power and quantity. So assuming all things are equal... One link of DA40 would be much more powerful than two DA20's?
Link Explorer | | seoman100 -
Will changing the property from http to https in Google Analytics affect main unfiltered view?
I set my client up with an unfiltered view in Google Analytics. This is the one with historical data going back for years, so I don't want to do anything that will affect this view. Recently, the website moved from HTTP to HTTPS. There's a setting for the property that will allow me to change the property name to https://EXAMPLE.com and change the default URL to https://EXAMPLE.com. Questions: 1. If I change the property name and the default URL, will this somehow affect my unfiltered view in a way that I'll lose historical data or data moving forward? 2. I have heard that changing the default URL to HTTPS will help me avoid a common problem others have experienced (where they lose the referrer in Google Analytics and a bunch of their sessions go to direct / other). Is this true?
Reporting & Analytics | | Kevin_P3 -
US and UK Websites of Same Business with Same Content
Hello Community, I need your help to understand, whether I can use the US website's content on my UK website or not? US Website's domain: https://www.fortresssecuritystore.com UK Website's domain: https://www.fortresssecuritystore.co.uk Both websites are having same content on all the pages, including testimonials/reviews. I am trying to gain business from Adwords and Organic SEO marketing. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit1 -
Website domain authority dropped from 55 to 1 in two months
Hi all! Our website DA dropped from 55 to 1 in a matter of two months. Last time I checked, it was two months ago and the website DA was 55. When I checked today, it is 1. Needless to day, I am shocked. The website has been around since 1995 and has always had pretty decent DA and PA. We made a couple of important changes during past 3-4 months. One is to support HTTPS and another is to implement the responsive web design to support browsing by mobile devices. What could be the reason for such a dramatic drop of DA in a short period of time? Where would you suggest me to look for it? How can we get the problem fixed? Here is the website URL: www.infohub.com Thank you!
API | | jimz80701 -
I want to use some content that I sent out in a newsletter and post as a blog, but will this count as duplicate content?
I want to use some content that I sent out in a newsletter a while ago - adding it as a blog to my website. The newsletter exists on a http://myemail.constantcontact.com URL and is being indexed by Google. Will this count as duplicate content?
Content Development | | Wagada0 -
International Versus Local Backlinks?
I'm running a dentist's website and I've been wondering if there is any additional benefit to achieving local backlinks from other medical sites versus larger international ones? For example, if I had a blog article that I wanted another site to link to, would you choose the local medical website within the same city or the international one that has more viewers?
Local SEO | | Undergrnd0 -
Google Indexing Of Pages As HTTPS vs HTTP
We recently updated our site to be mobile optimized. As part of the update, we had also planned on adding SSL security to the site. However, we use an iframe on a lot of our site pages from a third party vendor for real estate listings and that iframe was not SSL friendly and the vendor does not have that solution yet. So, those iframes weren't displaying the content. As a result, we had to shift gears and go back to just being http and not the new https that we were hoping for. However, google seems to have indexed a lot of our pages as https and gives a security error to any visitors. The new site was launched about a week ago and there was code in the htaccess file that was pushing to www and https. I have fixed the htaccess file to no longer have https. My questions is will google "reindex" the site once it recognizes the new htaccess commands in the next couple weeks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vikasnwu1 -
Increase in Rankings, but search visibility is decreasing
I just started updating my site with the very basics, focus keyword, meta description, and page titles. I see that I am going up in my targeted keywords, however my search visibility has dropped from 3.34% to 2.78%. My assumption is that my keyword choice is a little off, however I see that I have increased in keyword rankings and dropped very little in what I was ranking for previously, plus the keyword volume seems relatively the same. In fact I've added far more keywords than I have dropped. Curious why my search visibility has dropped, however my keyword rankings only seem to increase.
Moz Pro | | kthomasd0 -
Should the Product Name/Keyword be first in meta description?
I'm writing my meta descriptions for my products. Right now I have it as <product name="">at <company name="">and a brief description.</company></product> However, I was wondering if I put a word in front of the <product name="">such as "Wholesale". So for example</product> Wholesale <product name="">at <company name="">.......</company></product> Is that advisable? Or should the product name always be the first word?
Keyword Research | | IcarusSEO0 -
Is domain redirection a good method for SEO?
I have a question and need suggestion from you guys. I’ve searched for my question on Google but don’t get exact information what I need. Maybe I can’t search perfectly.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kamishah
Let me explain my confusion:
I’ve checked backlink profile of a website. He is not using his main domain while doing comment backlink. He put his another domain while doing comment backlink. The another domain redirect to the main domain. Why he use another domain while doing comment backlink?
Is it helpful to get better rank on Google? For example: My Main Domain = solutionfall.com
Another Domain= xyz.com (It redirect to solutionfall.com)
He just uses xyz.com while doing comment backlink. Thank You so much1 -
Best Practices for Title Tags for Product Listing Page
My industry is commercial real estate in New York City. Our site has 300 real estate listings. The format we have been using for Title Tags are below. This probably disastrous from an SEO perspective. Using number is a total waste space. A few questions:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-Should we set listing not no index if they are not content rich?
-If we do choose to index them, should we avoid titles listing Square Footage and dollar amounts?
-Since local SEO is critical, should the titles always list New York, NY or Manhattan, NY?
-I have red that titles should contain some form of branding. But our company name is Metro Manhattan Office Space. That would take up way too much space. Even "Metro Manhattan" is long. DO we need to use the title tag for branding or can we just focus on a brief description of page content incorporating one important phrase? Our site is: w w w . m e t r o - m a n h a t t a n . c o m <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Turnkey Flatiron Tech Space | 2,850 SF $10,687/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Gallery, Office Rental | Midtown, W. 57 St | 4441SF $24055/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Open Plan Loft |Flatiron, Chelsea | 2414SF $12,874/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Tribeca Corner Loft | Varick Street | 2267SF $11,712/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| 275 Madison, LAW, P7, 3,252SF, $65 - Manhattan, New York |0
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.