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!


  • Hello, I have a few pages that appear in SERPs with the page copy as opposed to the meta descriptions I wrote, is there any way to try & force the meta descriptions to be displayed? Its a WordPress site using Yoast

    On-Page Optimization | | jasongmcmahon
    0

  • Hey Guys, My name is Niraj Jaiswal from India! My website is that Rakhi Bazaar and my lots of keywords like send rakhi to the USA, send Rakhi to Canada, send Rakhi to the UK, send Rakhi to Dubai my previous ranking is better than now ranking. I do not understand what's going wrong. My domain name is "https://www.rakhibazaar.com/". What I do??

    Link Building | | Packersmove
    1

  • Hi there, /collections/living-room-furniture/black
    /collections/living-room-furniture/fabric Is that ok to make all the above filter pages canonicalised with their main category /collections/living-room-furniture Also, does it needs to be noindex, follow as well? Note - already removed the content from filter pages, updated meta tags as well. Please advice, thank you

    On-Page Optimization | | williamhuynh
    1

  • Hi there, /collections/living-room-furniture?page=2
    /collections/living-room-furniture?page=3
    /collections/living-room-furniture?page=4 Is that ok to make all the above paginated URLs canonicalised with their main category /collections/living-room-furniture Also, does it needs to be noindex, follow as well? Please advice, thank you!

    On-Page Optimization | | williamhuynh
    1

  • Hi, 
    Our domain's DA (www.tricorglobal.com) has dropped drastically from 52 to 17 on Mar 2019. And has only gone up to 21 now. Is there a reason why this happened. On the other hand, our competitor's score has increased. Is there a valid reason for this? How can I find out what is hurting our DA and how can I fix this?

    Link Explorer | | JudyLam
    1

  • I recently began using another third-party tool that requires a list of keywords and the URLs I want those keywords to rank on (for example, "vegetarian recipes" on www.123.com/vegetarian-recipes). Is this a better strategy than using the Moz ranking tool to see which pages on my domain my target keywords are already ranking for? I can see how the former might mean we miss opportunities but the latter doesn't necessarily show how my priority pages are doing for specific keywords.

    Moz Pro | | RikkiAyers
    1

  • So I have a weird situation, and I was hoping someone could help. This is for an ecommerce site. 1. Parameters are used to tie Product Detail Pages (PDP) to individual categories. This is represented in the breadcrumbs for the page and the use of a categoryid. One product can thus be included in multiple categories. 2. All of these PDPs have a canonical that does not include the parameter / categoryid. 3. With very few exceptions, the canonical URL for the PDPs are not linked to. Instead, the parameter URL is to tie it to a specific category.  This is done primarily for the sake of breadcrumbs it seems. One of the big issues we've been having is the canonical URLs not being indexed for a lot of the products. In some instances, the canonicals _are _indexed alongside parameters, or just parameter URLs are indexed. It's all very...mixed up, I suppose. My theory is that the majority of canonical URLs not being linked to anywhere on the site is forcing Google to put preference on the internal link instead. My problem? **I have no idea what to recommend to the client (who will not change the parameter setup). ** One of our Technical SEOs recommended we "Use cookies instead of parameters to assign breadcrumbs based on how the PDP is accessed." I have no experience this. So....yeah. Any thoughts? Suggestions? Thanks in advance.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alces
    0

  • Hello, How can I avoid duplicate brand name in the title serp? For example:
    In this page: https://www.latam.com/es_cl/ The title setted is: <title>LATAM Airlines en Chile | Sitio Oficial</title>
    But in the SERP show: LATAM Airlines en Chile | Sitio Oficial - LATAM.com Can I avoid LATAM.COM at the end of the title? Regards 8J3jEAX

    Technical SEO | | jh0sz
    1

  • Following Google Core update in June, I noticed that some websites has seen small improvements or stayed on same positions in SERPs, but our website received nearly 60% visibility drop. Now, after two weeks, some keywords shows "slight" improvement, while majority of keywords still sits on quite low places in searches. Even others big brands got hit after update, but some competitors didn't and overtook our positions. Anyone else noticed any patterns after update and can share some thoughts? Thank you.

    Algorithm Updates | | Optimal_Strategies
    1

  • We had multilingual website on .co.uk domain and somewhere in April, we've done 301 redirection from domain1.co.uk pages which were in Polish language to domain2.com/pl domain and now for some Polish keywords Google SERP sometimes shows English pages (.com) and sometimes polish pages (.com/pl). Previously co.uk/en had English content and that got redirected to .com. What could be the reason? Thank you for all responses.

    On-Page Optimization | | Optimal_Strategies
    0

  • Hope someone can shed some light on this: We moved our smaller site  (into the main site (  different domains) . The smaller site that was moved ( https://www.bluegreenrentals.com)
    Directory  where the site was moved  (https://www.bluegreenvacations.com/rentals) Each page from the old site was 301 redirected to the appropriate page under .com/rentals. But we are seeing a significant drop in rankings and traffic., as I am unable to request a change of address in Google search console (a separate issue that I can elaborate on). Lots of (301 redirect) new destination pages are not indexed. When Inspected, I got a message  : Indexing allowed? No: 'index' detected in 'robots' meta tagAll pages are set as Index/follow and there are no restrictions in robots.txtHere is an example URL :https://www.bluegreenvacations.com/rentals/resorts/colorado/innsbruck-aspen/Can someone take a look and share an opinion on this issue?Thank you!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin
    0

  • Is it okay to leave HTML entity characters, such as " in meta descriptions? Will search engines translate these appropriately?

    Technical SEO | | ellenu
    0

  • In German we have declination, i.e. we have the keyword "sicherheitskritische Systeme" which can get "sicherheitskritischer Systeme" when declinated. How does Google handle this? Do I have to rewrite all texts, so that the keywords are not declinated? (At least MozPro's ranking algorithm is sensitive and did not accept  sicherheitskritischer" for the keyword sicherheitskritische"...) Rewriting might lead to quite awful sentences! Thnaks a lot Andy

    Technical SEO | | a2stucki
    0

  • Hi, May I know for the keyword  "engagement rings" which domain is the best in term of SEO perspective? www.engagement-rings.com www.engagementrings.com 3)www.engagement_rings.com Thank you

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KINSHUN
    1

  • Hi, Currently we have the following url structure for all pages, regardless of the hierarchy: domain.co.uk/page, such as domain/blog name. Can you, please confirm the following: 1. What is the benefit of organising the pages as a hierarchy, i.e. domain/features/feature-name or domain/industries/industry-name or domain/blog/blog name etc. 2. This will create too many 301s - what is Google's tolerance of redirects? Is it worth for us changing the url structure or would you only recommend to add breadcrumbs? Many thanks Katarina

    Technical SEO | | Katarina-Borovska
    1

  • As we are growing fast, more and more websites go online. When they do, we always put a link in the footer which says: ‘Webdesign by Conversal’. But this is creating a substantial amount of backlinks to our root domain with the same anchors. Recently, we’ve moved our websites to different servers to spread the risk of a server crashing. I think Google now sees the backlinks through different IP’s as artificial, not natural, while Semrush and Moz are giving us a toxic score. What is your advice on this? Will we need a ‘no-follow’ attribute to each link on every website? Or could we better write a small case article for each client, where we can link to in the footer?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversal
    0

  • Hi, I m the new guy at the Neighborhood Can you help please with the question... how long does it take, So i can see results of Kewords Ranking search on moz? This is the popup note Message: Moz collects and updates campaign data weekly. Not collected means we have not yet updated data for this keyword. TNX

    Getting Started | | YarivHPAZ
    1

  • I have a webpage about bike tours in France with a list of bike tours in France. I imagaine people don't want a big paragraph about what a bike tour in France is because this is a transactional query and not an informational query. How do I go about ranking this page ? Would a good title tag and good description  be enough to rank that page ? Thank you,

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
    0

  • We are removing a large number of URLs permanently. We care about rankings for search engines other than Google such as Yahoo-Bing, who don't even list https status 410 code option: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bingmaps/spatial-data-services/status-codes-and-error-handling Does anyone know how search engines other than Google handle 410 vs 404 status? For pages permanently being removed John Mueller at Google has stated "From our point of view, in the mid term/long term, a 404 is the same as a 410 for us. So in both of these cases, we drop those URLs from our index. We generally reduce crawling a little bit of those URLs so that we don’t spend too much time crawling things that we know don’t exist. The subtle difference here is that a 410 will sometimes fall out a little bit faster than a 404. But usually, we’re talking on the order of a couple days or so. So if you’re just removing content naturally, then that’s perfectly fine to use either one." Any information or thoughts? Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sb1030
    0

  • Hi guys, I am the webmaster of the following two websites: www.gpblog.com/nl
    www.gpblog.com/en The first URL is the Dutch version of GPBlog, the second URL is the UK version of GPblog. Whenever a person visits www.gpblog.com he gets redirected to either the Dutch version or the UK version based on his location. My question is: is it harmful to have 1. your homepage on a subfolder and 2. is it harmful to run two different languages on one domain using this technique? Thank you in advance!

    Technical SEO | | NielsDE
    1

  • Hello everyone, I am facing an issue with the sitemap submission feature in Bing Webmaster Tools for a Japanese language subdirectory domain project. Just to outline the key points: The website is based on a subdirectory URL ( example.com/ja/ ) The Japanese URLs (when pages are published in WordPress) are not being encoded. They are entered in pure Kanji. Google Webmaster Tools, for instance, has no issues reading and indexing the page's URLs in its sitemap submission area (all pages are being indexed). When it comes to Bing Webmaster Tools it's a different story, though. Basically, after the sitemap has been submitted ( example.com/ja/sitemap.xml ), it does report an error that it failed to download this part of the sitemap: "page-sitemap.xml" (basically the sitemap featuring all the sites pages). That means that no URLs have been submitted to Bing either. My apprehension is that Bing Webmaster Tools does not understand the Japanese URLs (or the Kanji for that matter). Therefore, I generally wonder what the correct way is to go on about this. When viewing the sitemap ( example.com/ja/page-sitemap.xml ) in a web browser, though, the Japanese URL's characters are already displayed as encoded. I am not sure if submitting the Kanji style URLs separately is a solution. In Bing Webmaster Tools this can only be done on the root domain level ( example.com ). However, surely there must be a way to make Bing's sitemap submission understand Japanese style sitemaps? Many thanks everyone for any advice!

    Technical SEO | | Hermski
    0

  • Hi everyone just a quick question is it working if i rank a korean keyword in google search engine?Any tip and advice on how gain more keyword for this.

    Local Website Optimization | | invechseo
    0

  • We are targeting a bunch of services for our local business that works in and around their location.  I'm concerned about over optimization and need some guidance on whether these points should be resolved. The company is based in a city and works mostly in the city but also in the surrounding areas.  Currently, the site has 6 services pages (accessible via main nav) targeting the same location i.e. “Made Up Service London”, “Imaginary Service London” (with URLs and H1 tags etc. in place containing this location).  However this is soon going to become 9 services pages, I am concerned that the repetition of this one location is starting to look spammy, especially as its where the company is based. Initially, I also wanted pages targeting the same services in other nearby areas.  For example “Made Up Service Surrey”, “Imaginary Service Essex”. This has not happened as the info available has been too sporadic.  I was going to add links to relevant case studies into these pages to beef up the content and add interest. To that end, we came up with case studies, but after a while, I noticed that these are also largely focused on the primary location.   So out of 32 case studies, we have 19 focused on the primary location again with URL’s and H1 tags etc containing the location keyword.  So in total, we have 25 pages optimized for the location (soon to be 28 and more if further case studies are added). My initial feeling was that the inclusion of pages targeting services in other locations would legitimize what we have done with the main pages.  But obviously we have not got these pages in place and I question whether we ever will. What is my best course of action moving forward?

    Local Website Optimization | | GrouchyKids
    1

  • Debt Collectors – Debt Collection Agency Melbourne Hi Moz Community One of our client website JMA Credit (https://www.jmacreditcontrol.com.au/ ) We have installed Business Review Bundle Wordpress plugin to display our Google Reviews on our website. https://richplugins.com/business-reviews-bundle-wordpress-plugin Enabled Rich snippet option – to display aggregate rating Schema code available on the source Also, tested on structured data testing tool – it shows everything is fine https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool#url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jmacreditcontrol.com.au But, Aggregate rating (star) not displayed on the SERP Page Waiting for valuable response to get this issue fixed

    Reviews and Ratings | | Bhisshaun
    0

  • We spent the last 12 months targeting a particular search term (mortgage broker) and have been ranking well for it consistently for about 6 months now. We have decided to change the target search term to something else (insurance broker) but noticed that our traffic has started to decline since we started doing this. We are still ranking well for the initial search term, and our ranking is slowly improving for the new targeted search term in SERPs but traffic is down about 60% from January. Is it normal/expected for this to happen?

    Keyword Research | | monique-plaw
    1

  • Hey guys and gals, I'm having a frustrating time with an issue. Our site has around 10 pages that are coming up as duplicate content/ duplicate title. I'm not sure what I can do to fix this. I was going to attempt to 301 direct the upper case to lower but I'm worried how this will affect our SEO. can anyone offer some insight on what I should be doing? Update:  What I'm trying to figure out is what I should do for our URL's. For example, when I run an audit I'm getting two different pages: aaa.com/BusinessAgreement.com and also aaa.com/businessagreement.com. We don't have two pages but for some reason, Google thinks we do.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidmac
    1

  • Hello sir i noticed that my DA is Dropped From 27 to 26 Of this website https://www.mytechtalk.org/. What is the reason I don't i try a lot to find a solution but not get . But I notice that in google webmaster tool the domain linking increased every time but on the Moz.com, not domain added even my DA Dropped. Even When i checked my site on  https://ahrefs.com/   he shows approx 350 domain with high da and pa. help me i am getting frustrated. Is that Moz is crawling All domain Fairly or not ??

    Link Building | | rishu578
    14

  • Hi guys. So I have a few sentences (about 50 words) of duplicate content across all pages of my website (this is a repeatable text in sidebar). Each page of my website contains about 1300 words (unique content) in total, and 50 words of duplicate content in sidebar. Does having a duplicate content of this length in sidebar affect the rankings of my website in any way? Thank you so much for your replies.

    On-Page Optimization | | AslanBarselinov
    1

  • Hi Everyone, I am in the middle of an SEO contract with a site that is partially HTML pages and the rest are PHP and part of an ecommerce system for digital delivery of college classes. I am working with a web developer that has worked with this site for many years. In the php pages, there are also 6 different parameters that are currently filtered by Google URL parameters in the old Google Search Console. When I came on board, part of the site was https and the remainder was not. Our first project was to move completely to https and it went well. 301 redirects were already in place from a few legacy sites they owned so the developer expanded the 301 redirects to move everything to https. Among those legacy sites is an old site that we don't want visible, but it is extensively linked to the new site and some of our top keywords are branded keywords that originated with that site. Developer says old site can go away, but people searching for it are still prevalent in search. Biggest part of this project is now to rewrite the dynamic urls of the product pages and the entry pages to the class pages.  We attempted to use 301 redirects to redirect to the new url and prevent the draining of link juice. In the end, according to the developer, it just isn't going to be possible without losing all the existing link juice. So its lose all the link juice at once (a scary thought) or try canonicals. I am told canonicals would work - and we can switch to that. My questions are the following: 1.  Does anyone know of a way that might make the 301's work with the URL rewrite? 2.  With canonicals and Google parameters, are we safe to delete the parameters after we have ensures everything has a canonical url (parameter pages included)? 3.  If we continue forward with 301's and lose all the existing links, since this only half of the pages in the site (if you don't count the parameter pages) and there are only a few links per page if that, how much of an impact would it have on the site and how can I avoid that impact? 4.  Canonicals seem to be recommended heavily these days, would the canonical urls be a better way to go than sticking with 301's. Thank you all in advance for helping! I sincerely appreciate any insight you might have. Sue (aka Trudy)

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TStorm
    1

  • Is it possible to figure out the specific search volume of a keyword in a particular state ?

    Moz Local | | Colemckeon
    2

  • If I have 2 pages that are identical but on different domains that our team manages, if we place a rel=canonical tag on the page we prefer/should display, will the page that doesn't have the canonical tag still be indexed and show on SERPs?

    Technical SEO | | kroe1
    0

  • Has anyone ever used anchor links as a drop-down in a sub-collection from the main navigation and does it have any negative impact on link equity? My client has large product collections and sub-collections, these are then separated into further subsections which are open within the same page (see attached). What I want to do ideally is in the main navigation feature 'Mad Hatter Costumes and Accessories'. This will obviously have a # in the URL though and I am was wondering if this might hurt the chance of the page ranking? If anyone has any experience in this it would be really helpful!! Thanks in advance 🙂 m5Qd5VO

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | BAO.Agency
    0

  • What happens in a site move from a subdomain to a new domain and how does that effect the root domain of the subdomain and whether or not the subdomain SEO would be transferred to the new domain?

    Web Design | | Jjjay
    1

  • Hi all, How bad is it to have a link in the breadcrumb that 301 redirects? We had to create some hidden category pages in our ecommerce platform bigcommerce to create a display on our category pages in a certain format. Though whilst the category page was set to not visable in bigcommerce admin the URL still showed in the live site bread crumb. SO, we set a 301 redirect on it so it didnt produce a 404. However we have lost a lot of SEO ground the past few months.  could this be why? is it bad to have a 301 redirect in the breadrcrumb.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oceanstorm
    0

  • Hi all, Scenario: Ecommerce website selling a food product has their store on a subdomain (store.website.com). A GOOD chunk of the URLs - primarily parameters - are blocked in Robots.txt. When I search for the products, the main domain ranks almost exclusively, while the store only ranks on deeper SERPs (several pages deep). In the end, only one variation of the product is listed on the main domain (ex: Original Flavor 1oz 24 count), while the store itself obviously has all of them (most of which are blocked by Robots.txt). Can anyone shed a little bit of insight into best practices here? The platform for the store is Shopify if that helps. My suggestion at this point is to recommend they all crawling in the subdomain Robots.txt and canonicalize the parameter pages. As for keywords, my main concern is cannibalization, or rather forcing visitors to take extra steps to get to the store on the subdomain because hardly any of the subdomain pages rank. In a perfect world, they'd have everything on their main domain and no silly subdomain. Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alces
    0

  • Hello Everyone, We are Looking for a Tool to Find Referring Pages of Specific URLs. Please let me know if you know of a Moz tool or another tool for this need. Thanks.

    Moz Bar | | Pushm
    4

  • Hi all, A fairly common problem in webshops is having the same subcategory in multiple main categories. Let's take the following example: example.com/legal/economic-law/company-law example.com/tax/companies/company-law I came across this interesting article on this topic:  https://moz.com/community/q/e-commerce-site-one-product-multiple-categories-best-practice Although I understand that the answer on the above question is the most thorough method, I don't see a problem with just using canonicals either. On the webshop we are restructuring, there are only a few of these subcategories that return in multiple main categories, so generating a path via user activity and storing it in a cookie doens't seem really necessary to me. Is it ok to just use canonicals or can this cause issues? Thanks.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C
    2

  • I have a client who is insisting that all of us in the office 'like' his positive reviews on Google. My boss & I are fine with doing this, but due to the industry the client works in, my staff is questioning doing this or not because they do not want to be associated with his company outside of work. Is there any SEO benefit to us liking his reviews or is this more for him to feel better that people are reading them? Does my staff have anything to worry about if they do 'like' his reviews?

    Reviews and Ratings | | Justine.Hedge
    3

  • Even canonical present in my web pages, still moz showing canonical issues.

    Moz Local | | prasad.nueve
    0

  • Hi, I am the editor at a travel website based in Singapore (www.tripzilla.com). In mid April, we suffered a drop out of the blue and in total, it was a 20% drop overall. We post about 2-3 new articles a day, and we do research our keywords. I have also been updating our older ranking articles but seems like it's not really working. In May, we only received a .50% growth 😞 I have to bring it back to speed, and I really dont understand  the decline, since the "formula" of our postings has been the same since I joined the company a year ago. Please help thank  you! onjn7UV

    Content Development | | mousepad88
    1

  • Hi all, After Google's confirmed core update in April 2018, we dropped globally and couldn't able to recover later. We found the update is about the content relevance as officially stated by Google later. We wonder how we are not related in-terms of content being ranking for same keywords over years. And we are expecting to find a solution to this. Are there any standard ways to measure the content relevancy?  Please suggest! Thank you

    Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz
    0

  • Hello, I have a page with a forum and at this moment the moz report says that have 15.1k of issues like url too long, meta noindex, title too long etc. But this page have a load time realy sloooow with 11 seconds. I know i need fix all that errors (i'm working on this) but... What is more important for SEO? The page load or that type of error like duplicate titles etc. Thank you!

    Moz Pro | | DanielExposito
    1

  • I am new to Moz Local, and I am working to update my business listing. I felt lost when there was a section asking for photos, but instead of uploading them, they are a URL. I do not understand how to add these photos. Can someone help?

    Moz Local | | kkristenfranca
    2

  • Hi all– I've legitimately never seen this before, in any circumstance. I just went to check the google webcache of a product page on our site (was just grabbing the last indexation date) and was immediately redirected away from google's cached version BACK to the site's standard product page. I ran a status check on the product page itself and it was 200, then ran a status check on the webcache version and sure enough, it registered as redirected. It looks like this is happening for ALL indexed product pages across the site (several thousand), and though organic traffic has not been affected it is starting to worry me a little bit. Has anyone ever encountered this situation before? Why would a google webcache possibly have any reason to redirect? Is there anything to be done on our side? Thanks as always for the help and opinions, y'all!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TukTown
    1

  • I have just migrated my website from HUGO to Wordpress and I want to submit the sitemap to Google Search Console (because I haven't done so in a couple years). It looks like there are many tools for getting a sitemap file built. But I think they probably vary in quality. Especially considering the size of my site.

    Technical SEO | | DanKellyCockroach
    2

  • Even canonical present in my web pages, still moz showing canonical issues. ex : rel="canonical" content="https://www.domain.com/page/">

    Feature Requests | | prasad.nueve
    1

  • Hey everybody,
    I'm confused about the Spammy Structured Markup Penalty: "This site may not perform as well in Google results because it appears to be in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines." Does this mean the rich elements are simply removed from the snippets? Or will there be an actual drop in rankings? Can someone here tell from experience? Thanks for your help!

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | klaver
    1

  • We are selling paint and have separate pages for different colour cans, each with their own unique description. We would like to include a few additional paragraphs of product information below each description, but this will be identical across all the products. Do you think this will be a problem being duplicate content?

    Technical SEO | | JWalmsVH
    2

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.