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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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Latest Questions

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  • seoman10


    Is it advisable to use only one H2 tag? The template designs for some reason is ended up with multiple H2 tags, I realise if any think it's that each one is that are important and it is all relative. Just trying to assess if it's worth the time and effort to rehash the template. Has anyone done any testing or got any experience? Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman10
    1
  • MissThumann


    I've paid a company to add Schema to my website, but they just told me they can't add it to my homepage? Is this correct??

    Reviews and Ratings | | MissThumann
    0
  • MissThumann


    I use Moz's title tag tool, as I've compared it against titles on Googles and it always correct. But I haven't found a good one for the description. I've tried the two below, but on occasions, they've gotten it wrong. Can anyone suggest a better one?? https://www.portent.com/serp-preview-tool http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html Thanks:)

    Other SEO Tools | | MissThumann
    0
  • maghanlinchpinsales


    I have a client whose site was built when they only served one market, and they now have that city in the majority of their URLs. I'm suggesting we redo the URL structure to remove this location from the main URLs (think homepage, about, etc.) since they have now expanded to three markets. They are seeing a lot of great organic traffic in that original market but are struggling in the new ones they've added so I'm helping to optimize their site. How critical do you think that removing that location from the URL is? I know we would need to implement 301 redirects, but wanted to get thoughts on this.

    On-Page Optimization | | maghanlinchpinsales
    0
  • StantonOptical


    Hi, The company I work for has many store locations across the country. Getting good/quality interior pictures has become very difficult for us. We recently good a Virtual Tour from Google for one of the locations, and they took some really pictures. According to Google, the "Photos should represent the actual business" and "Represent the real-world business location". My question is: since our stores are VERY similar in the interior, can we use the same pictures for them while we get more pictures? Would Google penalize this? Thanks!

    Local Listings | | StantonOptical
    0
  • BrianAlpert78


    If I have a page* in WordPress that is set as private and is no-indexed with Yoast, will that negatively affect the visibility of other pages that are set as children of that first page? *The context is that I want to organize some of the pages on a business's WordPress site into silos/directories. For example, if the business was a home remodeling company, it'd be convenient to keep all the pages about bathrooms, kitchens, additions, basements, etc. bundled together under a "services" parent page (/services/kitchens/, /services/bathrooms/, etc.). The thing is that the child pages will all be directly accessible from the menus, so there doesn't need to be anything on the parent /services/ page itself. Another such parent page/directory/category might be used to keep different photo gallery pages together (/galleries/kitchen-photos/, /galleries/bathroom-photos/, etc.). So again, would it be safe for pages like /services/kitchens/ and /galleries/addition-photos/ if the /services/ and /galleries/ pages (but not /galleries/* or anything like that) are no-indexed? Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | BrianAlpert78
    1
  • znotes


    I recently filtered query information by week and day. The impression and click totals were different depending on whether I looked at totals by a full weeks or by day. So for example, the impression and click totals when I choose a date range of  monday-sunday are different when I look at impressions and clicks that same week by day and then add up the click and impression numbers to get a weekly total. At first i was expecting a slight difference since I know the data is heavily sampled but the totals were very different. Any explanations for this? Thanks

    Reporting & Analytics | | znotes
    0
  • AliMac26


    We have full navigational breadcrumbs on our site for the menu and the brand menu. i.e. Home > Clothing > Jackets Brand > Brand Name > Brand Jackets There's been talk of removing this and having it like Chico's does, where on item pages they just have a link at the top to previous category (i.e. you're on a shirt product page and at the top it says "Back to Tops" instead of listing Home > Clothing > Tops) Is doing something like this detrimental to SEO? From what I've read Breadcrumbs are for user experience but I just want to be sure.

    Technical SEO | | AliMac26
    0
  • McTaggart


    Hello Mozzers - Just wondering what this robots.txt instruction means: Disallow: /french-wines/?* Does it stop Googlebot crawling and indexing URLs in that "French Wines" folder - specifically the URLs that include a question mark? Would it stop the crawling of deeper folders - e.g. /french-wines/rhone-region/ that include a question mark in their URL? I think this has been done to block URLs containing query strings. Thanks, Luke

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
    0
  • vtmoz


    Hi Moz community, We can see in many of the page titles; "brand & keyword" go after every topic like..... "best tiles for kitchen | vertigo tiles". Do Google count this suffix as any other word in page title or give low preference just because it has been repeated across every single page? What if the "keyword" is repeated with topic and brand name as well. I mean which one of the below 2 page titles gonna workout better in correlation with keyword and website authority ? best tiles for kitchen | vertigo tiles best tiles for kitchen | vertigo Thanks

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz
    0
  • McTaggart


    Hello Mozzers Would you use rel=canonical, robots.txt, or Google Webmaster Tools to stop the search engines indexing URLs that include query strings/parameters. Or perhaps a combination? I guess it would be a good idea to stop the search engines crawling these URLs because the content they display will tend to be duplicate content  and of low value to users. I would be tempted to use a combination of canonicalization and robots.txt for every page I do not want crawled or indexed, yet perhaps Google Webmaster Tools is the best way to go / just as effective??? And I suppose some use meta robots tags too. Does Google take a position on being blocked from web pages. Thanks in advance, Luke

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
    0
  • EdLongley


    On 5 pages on our site we've got an Error Code 803: Incomplete HTTP Response Received. We checked the network interface within the browser inspector, which did not return any errors, this would mean than there were no issues with retrieving resources from the server. In the console log there are no errors also. We also inspected the URL bar settings and can see each page is loaded under a secure connection with no errors. When using http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php there was a "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" issue. A little in the dark on what to do next. Any help would be amazing!

    Moz Bar | | EdLongley
    0
  • M-J-Smith


    HI, I'm an SEO novice - company owner with no money so doing it all myself with help from my web designer using wordpress.  Ive just completed some seo and done the moz page scoring analysis for optimisation and gained 92% - however - there is one outstanding issue on canonical url tags - i.e. recommened fix = The canonical URL tag is intended to refer duplicate pages to a single canonical URL. To ensure the search engines properly parse the canonical source, your page should use only one version of this tag in the header. See Canonical URL Tag - the Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps Ive gone through the page code and can see I have 2 rel=canonical references - am I able to simply delete one - how do I do this if its been created by the yoast/wordpress plug-in? Many thanks in advance for any help!

    Moz Bar | | M-J-Smith
    0
  • MissThumann


    Hello, Moz's I'm thinking about added scheme markup to show my google reviews. I have a 4.8 rating and 25 reviews. I'm thinking about added scheme markup to show my google reviews. I have a 4.8 rating and 25 reviews. My first question is: when people see that and then visit my site, would it be good to have the Google reviews on the home page? My second questions is: Is there any reason why I wouldn't want to add this to my site? None of my competition has done this, so I'm a little apprehensive? Thanks in advance 🙂

    Reviews and Ratings | | MissThumann
    0
  • vtmoz


    Do we have anything like header tags ratio as of now in favour to search engines? Of course no multiple H1 tags. What if h2 or h3 tags are more than each others? We have top navigation links and one more navigation links which are h2 tags across all pages of website. Does this hurt?

    Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz
    0
  • emilydavidson


    When creating a redirect map for a site re-build or domain change, it is necessary to include .PDFs or any other non-HTML URLs? Do PDFs even carry "seo juice" over? When switching CMS, does it even matter to include them? Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emilydavidson
    0
  • clifra


    This has been asked many times but I cannot find an answer. On Open Site Explorer, most URLs I enter show as "No title" which means you have to hover over the URL to see which page is being referred to. I know you'd want an example, so here's your own site Moz.com 🙂 CWrkxZQ

    Link Explorer | | clifra
    0
  • NHARRIS1


    Hi all, I have seen a few discussions / advice pieces around this, but wondered what the current view is on the fastest way to get new backlinks recognised by Moz? I have seen people say that the content needs to be shared (e.g. on Twitter), and advice around creating Bitly links.  I am not convinced that these techniques are working. On a related note, my website is very large.  I have around 2.5m pages.  Most of these pages are 3-4 clicks from the home page, but I have a small amount of important content much higher up in the site (1-2 clicks from the home page).  Does Moz crawl pages nearer the home page more frequently, or does it make a pass of all pages on the site before it starts at the beginning again?  If it makes a complete pass of all pages, then presumably making my site smaller will help to get Moz to see new content more quickly?  Is there any other value to be gained in making a large site smaller? Many thanks in advance, Neil.

    Link Explorer | | NHARRIS1
    0
  • Manny32


    How Do I Increase my Trust Score?

    Technical SEO | | Manny32
    1
  • viatrading1


    Hi, We are developing new Products Pages with faceted filters. You can see it here: https://www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/ We have a feature allowing to Order By and Group By, which alters the order of all products. There will also be the option to view Products as a table, which will contain same products but with different design and maybe slightly different content of each product. All this will happen without changing the URL, https://www.viatrading.com/all/ Is this the best practice? Thanks,

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
    0
  • Zoope


    Hi Mozzers, I'm thinking republishing content from my own website's blog on platforms like LinkedIn and Medium. These sites are able to reach a far bigger (relevant) audience than I can through my own website, so there's strategic reasoning for doing this. However, with SEO being a key activity on my own website, I don't want to be at risk of any penalties for duplicate content. However, I've just read this on Search Engine Journal: "there is confirmation from Google... Gary Illyes has stated that republishing articles won’t cause a penalty, and that it’s simply a filter they use when evaluating sites. Most sites are only penalized for duplicate content if the site is 100% copied content." So, what do people think - is republishing blog content, on LinkedIn and Medium safe? And is it a sound tactic to increase reach?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zoope
    0
  • vtmoz


    It's a common understanding that Google treats sub-domains as different websites. Does that mean visits of sub-domain do not impact website in-terms of ranking or visibility or reputation at Google?

    Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz
    0
  • Alick300


    Hi All, Is there any way to track apple pay conversion or paypal express conversion in Google Analytics? Thanks

    Reporting & Analytics | | Alick300
    0
  • theoHP


    I'm managing a design blog hosted on WordPress. Each "design project" article includes a slideshow with additional images (and captions) for the project - these are images and text not found in the article itself. Every slide has the same page path as the article, but a different query param at the end. So if the article is /article the first slide would be /article?slide=1 for example. I'm having two issues: The slideshow images don't seem to be getting indexed. Screaming Frog reports duplicate meta descriptions and title tags for each slideshow page (same meta as article). I want to do what's best overall from an SEO perspective. Having the slideshow images show in Google image search is a must. And having the captions indexed might help too? But I want the Google image results linking to the article and not the individual slideshow pages. And I don't want duplicate meta issues. What's the best thing to do? Submit a sitemap that lists both article and slideshow images? "Rel canonical" the param'd slideshow urls to the base article url (not sure this makes total sense, since slide content is different from the article)? Get rid of slideshow altogether and put images in body? Some combo of these? Hopefully this makes sense. Any thoughts appreciated!

    Image & Video Optimization | | theoHP
    0
  • randfish


    Howdy gang, This is my last discussion post in the series on keyword metrics in KW Explorer & Moz Pro (previously on Keyword Difficulty, Opportunity, & Volume). In this one, let's chat about the "Priority Score," a feature you'll find in Keyword Explorer on any lists you build. Priority was conceived to help aggregate all the other metrics - Difficulty, Opportunity, Volume, and (if you choose to use it) Importance. We wanted to create an easy way to sort keywords so the cream would rise to the top -- cream in this case being keywords with low difficulty, high opportunity, strong volume, and high importance (again, if you choose to use it). Thus, when it comes to Priority Score, there's no particular number you should necessarily seek out, but higher is better. When you get into the ranges of 80+ (which is quite rare, Single Malt Scotch is one of the few examples I could find, and only because it's volume is so high and there's only a couple SERP features), you're generally talking about keywords with high demand (lots of monthly searches), the difficulty isn't too crazy (a website in the 55-80 DA range might have a shot), and the CTR Opportunity is decently strong (usually not too many SERP features that take clicks and attention away from the organic web results). Below that score range, you're usually finding keywords where one or more of those isn't true -- there's either lower volume, heavier competition, or lots of SERP features with the accompanying lower estimated CTR. When you're building KW lists, my view is that there's no "good" or "bad" Priority scores, only relative scores. Priority should be used to help you determine which terms and phrases to target first -- it's like a cheat code to unlock the low hanging fruit. If you build large lists of 50-100 or more keywords, Priority is a powerful and easy way to sort. It becomes even more useful if you use the Importance score to help add an estimation of value to you/your business/your client in to the mix. In that case, Importance can cut Priority by up to 2/3rds (if you set it at 1) or raise it by a little more than 3X (if you set it at 10). This is hyper-useful to nudge keywords with middling scores up if they're super-important to your marketing efforts. Look forward to your feedback, and thanks for checking these out!

    Moz Bar | | randfish
    8
  • paulz999


    We've read a lot about the power of updating old content (making it more relevant for today, finding other ways to add value to it) and republishing (Here I mean changing the publish date from the original publish date to today's date - not publishing on other sites). I'm wondering if there is any danger of doing this at scale (designating a few months out of the year where we don't publish brand-new content but instead focus on taking our old blog posts, updating them, and changing the publish date - ~15 posts/month). We have a huge archive of old posts we believe we can add value to and publish anew to benefit our community/organic traffic visitors. It seems like we could add a lot of value to readers by doing this, but I'm a little worried this might somehow be seen by Google as manipulative/spammy/something that could otherwise get us in trouble. Does anyone have experience doing this or have thoughts on whether this might somehow be dangerous to do? Thanks Moz community!

    On-Page Optimization | | paulz999
    0
  • randfish


    Hi All! Continuing my series of discussions about the various keyword scores we use here at Moz (previously: Keyword Difficulty & Keyword Opportunity)... Let's move on to Volume. Volume in Moz's tools is expressed in a range, e.g. Bartending Certification has volume of 201-500. These ranges correspond to data we have suggesting that in an average month, that keyword is searched for a minimum of X to a maximum of Y (where X-Y is the volume range). We use clickstream data as well as data from Google AdWords and then some PPC AdWords campaigns we run and have access to when we build the models for our volume data. As such, we've got very high confidence in these numbers -- 95%+ of the time, a given keyword's monthly search volume on Google will fall inside that range. If you want to see all the nitty gritty details, check out Russ Jones post on Moz's Keyword Volume and how we calculate it. As far as a "good" volume score -- higher is usually better, as it means more demand, but lots of keywords with low volume scores can also add up to strong traffic when combined, and they may be more relevant. Capturing exactly the audience you want that also wants you is what SEO is all about. p.s. When Keyword Explorer or Moz Pro gives you a "no data" or "unknown" volume number, it may just mean we haven't collected information from our clickstream providers or AdWords crawls, not that the keyword has no volume (though it sometimes means that, too, we just don't know yet). One way to verify - see if Google Suggest autofills it in when you type in the search box. If it does, that's usually a sign there's at least some volume (even if it's only a few searches a month).

    Moz Bar | | randfish
    11
  • ajranzato9


    It seems as though week to week ranking monitoring can be very volatile, and comparing over the course of a month only takes into account the absolute change and not whether the rank has been jumping up and down in the 3 weeks between. What is a good method (Moz tool or not) for tracking a true change in average rank?

    Moz Pro | | ajranzato9
    0
  • randfish


    Hi Folks! You might have seen my discussion on What Is a Good Keyword Difficulty Score, and this is a continuation of the same vein. Keyword Organic CTR is probably my favorite score we developed in Keyword Explorer and Moz Pro. It looks at the SERP features that appear in a set of results (e.g. an image block, AdWords ads, a featured snippet, or knowledge graph) and then calculates, using CTRs we built off our partnership with Jumpshot's clickstream data, what percent of searchers are likely to click on the organic, web results. For example, in a search query like Nuoc Cham Ingredients, you've got a featured snippet and then a "People Also Ask" feature above the web results, and thus, Keyword Explorer is giving me an Organic CTR Score of 64. This translates directly to an estimated 64% click-through rate to the web results. Compare that to a search query like Fabric Printed Off Grain, where there's a single SERP feature - just the "People Also Ask" box, and it's between the 6th and 7th result. In this case, Keyword Explorer shows an Organic CTR Score of 94, because we estimate that those PAAs are only taking 6% of the available clicks. There are two smart ways you should be using Organic CTR Score: As a way to modify the estimated volume and estimated value of ranking in the web results for a given keyword term/phrase (KW Explorer does this for you if you use the "Lists" and sort based on Potential, which factors in all the other scores, including volume, difficulty, and organic CTR) As a way to identify SEO opportunities outside the normal, organic web results in other SERP features (e.g. in the Nuoc Cham Ingredients SERPs, there's serious opportunity to take over that featured snippet and get some great traffic) OK, so all that said, what's actually a "good" Organic CTR score? Well... If you're doing classic, 10-blue-links style SEO only, 100 is what you want. But, if you're optimizing for SERP features, and you appear in a featured snippet or the image block or top stories or any of those others, you'd probably be very happy to find that CTR was going to those non-web-results sections, and scores in the 40s or 50s would be great (so long as you appear in the right features).

    Moz Bar | | randfish
    12
  • kcb8178


    I see that the gap uses gap.com, oldnavy.gap.com and bananarepublic.gap.com.  Wouldn't a better approach for SEO to have oldnavy.com, bananarepublic.com and gap.com all separate?  Is there any benefit to using the approach of store1.parentcompany.com, store2.parentcompany.com etc?  What are the pros and cons to each?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kcb8178
    0
  • Jacksons_Fencing


    Reading up it seems like there's complete free reign to enter what you want in the meta description and they are not considered a direct ranking signal However I have added contact numbers to the meta descriptions for around 20 reasonably high ranking pages for my company and it seems to have had a negative effect (taken screen grabs and previous rankings) More strangely when you 'inspect' the page the meta description features the desired number yet when you find the page in the serps the meta description just does not feature the number (page has been cached and the description does not carry on) I'm wondering whether such direct changes are seen as spam and therefore negative to the page?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jacksons_Fencing
    1
  • Fulanito


    I'm not sure but my website looks like is not getting it's juice as supposed to be. As we already know, google preferred https sites and this is what happened to mine, it was been crawling as https but when the time came to move my domain to new domain, I used 301 or domain forwarding service, unfortunately they didn't have a way to forward from https to new https, they only had regular http to https, when users clicked to my old domain from google search my site was returned to "site does not exist", I used hreflang at least that google would detect my new domain been forwarding and yes it worked but now I'm wondering, for how much time should I keep the forwarding the old domain to the new one, my site looks like is not going up, I have changed all the external links, any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fulanito
    1

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