Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Latest Questions

Have an SEO question? Search our Q&A forum for an answer; if not found, use your Moz Pro subscription to ask our incredible community of SEOs for help!


  • We currently have a global site that is set up this way: Subfolders to designate countries. Content in same language is re-published on other country websites. Since we are re-launching at the end of the year, we are doing away with re-publishing content on different country sites and will just maintain a single copy of our content (to be populated on different pages using content tags). We are planning on doing this so that there is no need to apply href-lang tags on our content. My questions: Is maintaining just a single instance of an article good for a global website? What are the possible complications that may come up from this approach? Since there is only one version of the article that is being indexed, is a rel-canonical tag even needed? Should href-lang tag still be applied to high level pages (homepage, etc) to ensure that the correct homepage shows up in the appropriate geography? This question is quite long,  so any feedback will be helpful. Thanks!

    International SEO | | marshdigitalmarketing
    0

  • On this link you can see the sitemap: http://bit.ly/2XC9J5G.
    I don't understand what the error is.
    From the search console I have the following indication: "The XML Sitemap cannot be analyzed because it contains one or more prefixes of the unassociated namespace. For example, the error is generated when xhtml:linknot preceded by xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" is detected in a Sitemap.
    Will you help me, please solve?
    Thank you very much.</xhtml:link> Massimiliano

    International SEO | | vanGoGh-creative
    0

  • Hi there, We are now in the process of implementing a JSON-LD mark-up solution and are building cruises as an event.  Will this work and can we get away with this without penalty? Previously they have been marking their cruises as events using the data highlighter and this has displayed correctly in the SERP. The ideal schema would be Trip but this is not supported by Google Rich Results yet, hopefully they will support this in the future. Another alternative would be product but this does not display rich-results as we would like. Event has the best result in terms of how the information is displayed. For example someone might search "Cruises to Spain" and the landing page would display the next 3 cruises that go to Spain, with dates & prices. The event location would be the cruise terminal, the offer would be the starting price and the start & end date would be the cruise duration, these are fixed dates. I am interested to hear the communities opinion and experience with this problem.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoWayAsh
    1

  • How to Boost Your Domain Authority? How Do I Improve My Domain Authority (DA)? Please answer me.....
    Email: jackhanson1122@gmail.com
    Email: onlinesharings@gmail.com
    Email: officialazeems@gmail.com
    Email: officialzeem1007@gmail.com Any more have Guest Posting Websites Contact me.

    Local Website Optimization | | Jackson_william
    0

  • How To Increase Your Domain Authority?
    How To Increase Your Page Authority?
    Why increase the spam score?
    How to increase more traffic on this website: www.onlinesharings.com

    Social Media | | Jackson_william
    2

  • How do I delete, duplicate comments in The Moz Q&A Forum?

    Product Support | | jasongmcmahon
    1

  • Greetings, I have a couple of questions about domain authority. 1 - The backlinks that come from different subdomains count several times or only once coming from the same domain? 2 - The nofollow backlinks are used to calculate the domain authority? Thank you.

    Link Explorer | | Rosa_M
    0

  • Hi Guys, Would you mind helping me with the below please? I would like to get your view on it and why Google ranks a really new domain name #1 with super low domain authority? Or is Domain Authority useless now in Google? It seems like from the last update that John Mueller said that they do not use Domain Authority so is Moz Domain Authority tool not to take seriously or am I missing something? There is a new rehab in Thailand called https://thebeachrehab.com/ (Domain authority 13)It's ranked #1 in Google.co.th for these phrases: drug rehab thailand but also for addiction rehab thailand. So when checking the backlink profile it got merely 21 backlinks from really low DA sites (and some of those are really spammy or not related). Now there are lots of sites in this industry here which have a lot higher domain authority and have been around for years. The beach rehab is maybe only like 6 months old.  Here are three domains which have been around for many years and have much higher DA and also more relevant content. These are just 3 samples of many others... <cite class="iUh30">https://www.thecabinchiangmai.com (Domain Authority 52)</cite>https://www.hope-rehab-center-thailand.com/ (Domain Authority 40)https://www.dararehab.com (Domain Authority 32) These three sites got lots of high DA backlinks (DA 90++)  from strong media links like time.com, theguardian.com, telegraph.co.uk etc. (especially thecabinchiangmai.com) but the other 2 got lots of solid backlinks from really high DA sites. So when looking at the content, thebeachrehab.com has less content as well. Can anyone have a look and let me know your thoughts why Google picks a brand new site, with DA 13 and little content in the top compared to competition?  I do not see the logic in this? Cheers
    John

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | igniterman75
    0

  • Hi mozzers, If you are rental company, is it useful to add both the product and auto rental schemas or auto rental schema on its own should just be enough? Finally, on the auto rental schema, you have to add an address. Could we just add a city instead of an entire address and avoid receiving a warning message on the strutured data testing tool? Thank you.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty1986
    0

  • Hello So our site was hacked which created a few thousand spam URLs on our domain. We fixed the issue and changed all the spam urls now return 404. Google index shows a couple of thousand bad URLs. My question is- What's the fastest way to remove the URLs from google index. I created a site map with sof the bad urls and submitted to Google. I am hoping google will index them as they are in the sitemap and remove from the index, as they return 404. Any tools to get a full list of google index? ( search console downloads are limited to 1000 urls). A Moz site crawl gives larger list which includes URLs not in Google index too. Looking for a tool that can download results from a site: search. Any way to remove the URLs from the index in bulk? Removing them one by one will take forever. Any help or insight would be very appreciated.

    Technical SEO | | ajiabs
    1

  • Hello there,  our site is on a Flatsome Wordpress theme (which is responsive and does not support AMP), and we are currently using the AMP for Wordpress plugin on our blog and other content rich pages. My question is - is a plugin sufficient to make our pages AMP friendly? Or should we consider switching to a theme that is AMP enabled already? Thanks!
    Katie

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tnixis
    0

  • I would like to track how keywords rank across blog.website.com and www.website.com without setting up separate campaigns for each. We don't care if the blog, or the main site rank, we just want something to rank and therefore want to track both sites  in 1 campaign. Is there a way to do this without setting up a separate campaign for the subdomain and the main site?

    Getting Started | | AmyLB
    1

  • I have a site, natvest.com, with which I sell real estate in Alabama and Georgia. I need to show up in an "Alabama Land for Sale" search.  Same thing for Georgia. If I re-index my site, I show up for roughly one day, before disappearing again.  Happens every time I re-index. Ideas?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | natvest
    0

  • Hi folks, I'm looking for an SEO extension for Magento 2 that enables me to add Custom Canonical URLs on any page (especially on category pages). Any advice would be appreciated greatly!

    Technical SEO | | bbop33
    1

  • Hi Team I build my website domain authority from 15 to 26 points in the last 2 months. We getting links from high DA traffic websites all across the globe through guest posting. We grow from 34 linking domains to 155 in this duration(45days) and still, we are working on getting quality links through authority websites. My DA stops on 26 which is not growing for last 2 weeks. Please share your views on it. Thanks in advance

    Link Explorer | | AtulSharan
    1

  • I have a client who is closing down his local business because he'smoving to another state. When he gets there he will launch a new website.On his current website, he put in a lot of work and has a ton of good copy, including blog posts that have helped gain him excellent rankings.He's asking me if he can use that copy on his new site and get original author credit for that, like he did on his current site.Can he use the same copy from his current website on his new websitewithout any problems — and get original author credit for it?Would it be best to shut down the old site or to 301 all of the pages beingmoved to the new corresponding pages?If 301's are the way to go, how long should he leave those in place?Thanks!Kirk

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kbates
    1

  • I have a page showing up on the insights report as being a redirect chain. This page however does not exist as far as I can tell. It is not on my dashboard anywhere and pointing a browser to it produces a messy page with Wordpress theme error code spit out.  How do I track this down to clean it up if the page does not exist within my Wordpress installation? The page for reference is https://butlermobility.com/dealers/downloads. As it stands today the dealers and downloads pages are separate. There is no downloads sub page within the dealers section.

    Technical SEO | | NiteSkirm
    0

  • Hello, When I want to "Explore by site" and make a "Site overview", I have only 4 choices for the region : USA United Kingdom Canada Australia But the location of my business is in Chile.
    Does this have any repercussion or negative impact in the analytics ? Thank you.

    Reporting & Analytics | | Sodimaccl
    0

  • Cannot currently download notifications at present.

    Product Support | | GrouchyKids
    0

  • We are translating content into Russian and Chinese on our website, the number of errors are increasing mainly around URL too long, each time we create  a page with a Chinese or Russian url. If you click on the link below for a Chinese content page: https://www.westbourneschool.com/zh-hans/%E5%AE%BF%E8%88%8D%E5%8F%8A%E5%AF%84%E5%AE%BF%E5%AE%B6%E5%BA%AD/%E5%AE%BF%E8%88%8D%E7%94%9F%E6%B4%BB You will notice the url displayed by the browser is actually not very long, is there a way for MOZ not to see it as it appears above? Below is a page in Russian https://www.westbourneschool.com/ru/%D0%A8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B0%20%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B6%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5 Any help will be much appreciated.

    Product Support | | mariedetitomount
    0

  • As marketing agency we have for each client a Google My Business account. This means that we have more than 100 Google My Business accounts. We know that GA has a limit of 100 analytics accounts (free version),  but is there a limit in Google My Business too? For now, we have created multiple accounts that own different Google My Business accounts of our clients. Can I just change all the different e-mail accounts of  our marketing agency and change it to one? So we can manage all the Google My Business accounts of our clients in one e-mail account?

    Image & Video Optimization | | conversal
    0

  • My client is a SaaS developer and I would like to begin some review acquisition activity. Just wondering if there is any knowledge out there with regards to what review sites google scrapes or uses as an indicator for such products (Yelp and Yellow pages not too helpful in this scenario). I have narrowed down Capterra, G2 Crowd and GetApp as having a good following - but any insights would be much appreciated.

    Branding | | P.Myers
    0

  • Hi, I have a big problem, somehow someone has built THOUSANDS of SPAMMY links to my site's search result pages with keywords that does not even make sense or inline with the site. Links are dofollow and goes to /?s=TERM see the for yourself https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/inbound-links?site=https%3A%2F%2Fhealthtian.com See image https://imgur.com/a/fahetyZ Please is there a way to BLOCK all at once? i feel these links are impacting on my site. Thanks

    Link Building | | Lordcharsty
    1

  • Hi there I am trying to optimise my site to the best that it can be. Since the most recent Google updates, everything that I reading is saying cornerstone content with lots of valuable content is a really good strategy as it tells Google what is the most important content on your site. Writing articles that are well structured and have give the user a detailed overview of that subject. Lots of top SEO's are saying 3000 words plus on these pages. My question is, how do I go about this with and eCommerce site? Obviously that majority of the keywords that I want to target are product related and these are the pages that I want to come up in the search. How do I go about creating cornerstone content for these pages? I am thinking that one of my cornerstone pieces of content would be "The Ultimate Guide to [my main product category]". But that product has numerous products related to it, all of which have their own keywords, so how would this help the products to rank? The site had two main product categories, with numerous products under each of those categories. The two main categories are targeting my best performing keywords, but currently the landing page for these is the main product category pages. I am really struggling to work out the best strategy here. The content that I have on my actual products pages is comprehensive and covers a lot of detail about that particular product and has started to rank for product keywords, but I am guessing Google wouldn't consider that to be cornerstone content. I hope this make sense. Any advice anyone can give would be really useful. Many thanks in advance

    On-Page Optimization | | Clojobobo
    1

  • What's the best practice these days for handling indexing of WooCommerce product subcategories? Example: in the sitemap we have:
    /product-category-a/
    /product-category-a/subcategory-1/
    /product-category-a/subcategory-2/
    etc. Should the /subcategory-*/ be noindexed, canonical to parent, or stay as indexed? Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | btetrault
    2

  • I have a foundation repair client that is down in leads for the structural repair portion of their business. They have not lost any major rankings, but leads are down compared to last year. They asked if people are searching for this type of work less this year compared to last. I checked Google Trends and Keyword Planner data but found very different results. Is either of these tools accurate, or is there a better tool to use?

    Algorithm Updates | | DigitalDivision
    1

  • Hello, In my weekly rank tracker report, I have a non owned URL showing up with GA UTM params in  there. How is this possible and how is it possibly ranking under a different domain?

    Link Explorer | | dlarusso.teguar
    1

  • I am the owner of the Moz account, but want to give a colleague the rights to add and delete users. How can I do this?

    Product Support | | remkostrik
    1

  • As marketing agency we have for each client an analytics account. This means that we have more than 100 analytics accounts. Because there is a limit of 100 analytics accounts (free version), we have created multiple accounts that own different analytics accounts of our clients. Is it possible to use x@conversal.be and add it to each of our multiple analytics accounts as manager or is there a limit too? In other words, how many accounts can you manage as 'manager'?

    Reporting & Analytics | | conversal
    1

  • Hello, I am wondering if to write and rank I should slipt my expression. Example : "Alsace bike tour ", should I write a paragraph with keywords that match "Alsace" and then a paragraph with keywords related to "bike tours" or should I write something with keywords related to "alsace bike tour" I imagine that when it is something that exist I don't need to split it for example " la loire velo" because it is a network of bike path in the Loire valley but for other things like above I do need to split it ? An input on that would be great. Thank you,

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
    1

  • Hey, something I've been thinking about lately is "where is the point of diminishing returns for keyword research detail?" I get that keyword research is important for finding out stuff like "people generally search for 'doctor' way more often than they search for 'licensed medical professional'", but what about after that? Is there much useful information to be found by sifting through spreadsheets of stats about "doctor" vs "dr" vs "doctors" vs "physician" vs "physicians" etc? Especially when Google seems to treat a lot of those as interchangable? Or another example: If a remodeling company did basements, do you think there's much to be gleaned from AdWords data comparing "basement remodeler", "basement remodelers", basement remodeling", "basement remodeling contractor", "basement remodeling contractors", "basement renovation", "basement renovations", "basement renovators", "finished basements", "basement finishers", "basement finishing", etc.? Should those variations be analyzed and each targeted by their own sets of pages and pieces of content (e.g. a blog post that specifically targets "basement remodeler" and a blog post that targets "basement finisher" and a third blog post that specifically targets "renovated basement") Or should the takeaway be "there aren't any combinations that people overwhelmingly prefer to use, so let's just make content about basements and topics relevant to basements. Keyword research complete."

    Keyword Research | | BrianAlpert78
    2

  • After the June Core Algorithim Update, the site suffered a loss of about 30-35% of traffic. My suggestions to try to get traffic back up have been to add metadata (since the majority of our content is lacking it), as well ask linking if possible, adding keywords to alt images, expanding and adding content as it's thin content wise. I know that from a technical standpoint there are a lot of fixes we can implement, but I do not want to suggest anything as we are onboarding an SEO agency soon. Last week, I saw that traffic for the site went back to "normal" for one day and then saw a dip of 30% the next day. Despite my efforts, traffic has been up and down, but the majority of organic traffic has dipped overall this month. I have been told by my company that I am not doing a good job of getting numbers back up, and have been given a warning stating that I need to increase traffic by 25% by the end of the month and keep it steady,  or else. Does anyone have any suggestions? Is it realistic and/or possible to reach that goal?

    Algorithm Updates | | NBJ_SM
    2

  • Hi, folks! So, our company publishes 50+ active, disease-specific news and perspectives websites -- mostly for rare diseases. We are also tenacious content creators: between news, columns, resource pages, and other content, we produce 1K+ pieces of original content across our network. Authors are either PhD scientists or patients/caregivers. All of our sites use the same design. We were big winners with the August Medic update in 2018 and subsequent update in September/October. However, the Medic update in March and de-indexing bug in April were huge losers for us across our monetized sites (about 10 in total). We've seen some recovery with this early June update, but also some further losses. It's a mixed bag. Take a look at this attached MOZ chart, which shows the jumps and falls around the various Medic updates. The pattern is very similar on many of our sites. As per JT Williamson's stellar article on EAT, I feel like we've done a good job in meeting those criteria, which has left we wondering what isn't jiving with the new core updates. I have two theories I wanted to run past you all: 1. Are user comments on YMYL sites problematic for Google now? I was thinking that maybe user comments underneath health news and perspectives articles might be concerning on YMYL sites now. On one hand, a healthy commenting community indicates an engaged user base and speaks to the trust and authority of the content. On the other hand, while the AUTHOR of the article might be a PhD researcher or a patient advocate, the people commenting -- how qualified are they? What if they are spouting off crazy ideas?  Could Google's new update see user comments such as these as degrading the trust/authority/expertise of the page? The examples I linked to above have a good number of user comments. Could these now be problematic? 2. Is Google "Author Rank" finally happening, sort of? From what I've read about EAT -- particularly for YMYL sites -- it's important that authors have “formal expertise” and, according to Williamson, "an expert in the field or topic." He continues that the author's expertise and authority, "is informed by relevant credentials, reviews, testimonials, etc. " Well -- how is Google substantiating this? We no longer have the authorship markup, but is the algorithm doing its due diligence on authors in some more sophisticated way? It makes me wonder if we're doing enough to present our author's credentials on our articles, for example. Take a look -- Magdalena is a PhD researcher, but her user profile doesn't appear at the bottom of the article, and if you click on her name, it just takes you to her author category page (how WordPress'ish). Even worse -- our resource pages don't even list the author. Anyhow, I'd love to get some feedback from the community on these ideas. I know that Google has said there's nothing to do to "fix" these downturns, but it'd sure be nice to get some of this traffic back! Thanks! 243rn10.png

    Algorithm Updates | | Michael_Nace
    1

  • Hi, I've an ecommerce website with more than 50k urls and only 10% or so are getting crawled regularly by Google.
    Product listing pages represent roughly 80% of these 50k pages. Trying to improve this, I was thinking to remove altogether all (most?) of my product listing from search (via Robot.txt) to keep only the product pages themselves and the product categories. My organic situation since Jan 2019:
    Users: 2,300,000 (of which 9% are visiting product listing pages)
    Page views:  8,000,000 (of which 5% are product listing pages). Am I about to unleash armageddon (or more like harakiri) on my website by doing so or actually get Google to crawl much more relevant resources (product pages, product categories, blog content and so on)? Thanks,
    G

    Technical SEO | | GhillC
    0

  • Is it true that if you want to rank for a chosen keyword, you have to mention that keyword 3%-5% of the whole content (in a guest blog)?

    Link Building | | FilkaCer
    2

  • Hi guys. I’m not sure if this is a relevant place to post such question, but I’m really desperate. The TTFB on my website is ridiculously slow no matter what I do. I’m using Apache and the latest version of WordPress on a VPS (NameCheap). 2 CPU Cores 2 GB RAM 40 GB SSD RAID 10 1000 GB/mo Bandwidth GZIP compression is enabled, images are optimized, CSS, JS, HTML optimized, caching enabled (WordPress plugin), CDN is enabled (Cloudflare), PHP updated to the latest version. As I said, no matter what I do, TTFB remains very slow (most of the time the TTFB of my website is between 1.5 - 3 seconds). Google Page-speed Insights score is 86 for mobile and 95 for desktop (with 1.5s TTFB). What do I do about it? Will it affect the rankings of my website? Thank you so much.

    Technical SEO | | AslanBarselinov
    0

  • I'm working with the City of Lakewood, WA, on an image campaign that overlaps a bit with some SEO goals. If you Google "Lakewood, WA", in the knowledge panel to the right of the search results is an image of building on fire. I'm not sure where this image comes from or why it has been selected as the image to represent the City of Lakewood but its been there for a while. If this was a small business, I would simply claim their Google My Business page and feed some good images into it. Problem solved. But Google doesn't offer an option to "Claim this City". LOL. Can you create a GMB page for a municipality? Does anyone know the right thing to do here to make this picture go away and give the city more control over its own image?

    Local Listings | | TheKatzMeow
    2

  • How do you find phrases that co-occur together and go in the same cluster. I know that I can do keyword research via the keyword tool as well as other tools and even google related searches but I have the feeling it is very limited. Does anyone have any other advice or tools  ? Once you figure our the correct words / expression is there a way to write your sentences, does syntax have an impact ?

    Keyword Research | | seoanalytics
    1

  • My client has a subdomain from their main site where their online waiver tool lives. Currently, all the waivers generated by users are creating indexed pages, I feel they should deindex that subdomain entirely. However, a lot of their backlinks are from their clients linking to their waivers. If they end up deindexing their subdomain, will they lose the SEO benefit of backlinks pointing to that subdomain? Thanks! Jay

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MCC_DSM
    0

  • Hi all, I am the webmaster of www.chepicap.com/en (Cryptocurrency news), and since the 3rd of june (Google core algorithm update) we got the hammer from Google. Organic traffic dropped with 90%+ overnight. We are still in the dark whether we can do to improve the current situation. Does someone have suggestions regarding this issue?

    Algorithm Updates | | NielsDE
    0

  • Hi. So I recently launched a website on WordPress (1 main page and 5 internal pages). The main page got indexed right off the bat, while other pages seem to be blocked by robots.txt. Would you please look at my robots file and tell me what‘s wrong? I wanted to block the contact page, plugin elements, users’ comments (I got a discussion space on every page of my website) and website search section (to prevent duplicate pages from appearing in google search results). Looks like one of the lines is blocking every page after ”/“ from indexing, even though everything seems right. Thank you so much. FzSQkqB.jpg

    On-Page Optimization | | AslanBarselinov
    1

  • Before Moz 2.0 we know that every month DA will be updated but now we don't know. Recently my site DA has 14 after few days working on it Then I check my DA is 17 So now I'm confused that the DA update runs again or Now it working on dynamically. I shall be very thankful to you if you clear this issue.

    Link Explorer | | mark7422
    0

  • I have my regular site blog at www.Guideyourhealth.org and a blog on www.medium.com, should I try to get back links for my medium articles as well that are on topics not competing with my site?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BuyKratomPowderInfo
    0

  • Hi all! Does anyone have advice for getting a software product to appear in the card results at the top of SERPs? Example https://www.google.com/search?q=budgeting+software&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS784US784&oq=budgeting+software&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2194j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 dzTpe2B

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SimpleSearch
    0

  • Hi all, Most of the URLs that are created by using the internal search function of a website/web shop shouldn't be indexed since they create duplicate content or waste crawl budget. The standard way to go is to 'noindex, follow' these pages or sometimes to use robots.txt to disallow crawling of these pages. The first question I have is how these pages actually would get indexed in the first place if you wouldn't use one of the options above. Crawlers follow links to index a website's pages. If a random visitor comes to your site and uses the search function, this creates a URL. There are no links leading to this URL, it is not in a sitemap, it can't be found through navigating on the website,... so how can search engines index these URLs that were generated by using an internal search function? Second question: let's say somebody embeds a link on his website pointing to a URL from your website that was created by an internal search. Now let's assume you used robots.txt to make sure these URLs weren't indexed. This means Google won't even crawl those pages. Is it possible then that the link that was used on another website will show an empty page after a while, since Google doesn't even crawl this page? Thanks for your thoughts guys.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C
    0

  • We have recently moved from Wordpress to BigCommerce and have noticed a decline in our Search Visibility score on MOZ. Following the recommendations of IT consultants, we were under the impression that moving to BigCommerce would significantly improve our Search Visibility. We were wondering if there is anyone out there who is currently using or have used BigCommerce and had similar issues? Any personal reviews/recommendations would be much appreciated! 🙂 Thanks!

    Moz Pro | | lisakay
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.