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
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Using geolocation for dynamic content - what's the best practice for SEO?
Hello We sell a product globally but I want to use different keywords to describe the product based on location. For this example let’s say in USA the product is a "bathrobe" and in Canada it’s a "housecoat" (same product, just different name). What this means… I want to show "bathrobe" content in USA (lots of global searches) and "housecoat" in Canada (less searches). I know I can show the content using a geolocation plugin (also found a caching plugin which will get around the issue of people seeing cached versions), using JavaScript or html5. I want a solution which enables someone in Canada searching for "bathrobe" to be able to find our site through Google search though too. I want to rank for "bathrobe" in BOTH USA and Canada. I have read articles which say Google can read the dynamic content in JavaScript, as well as the geolocation plugin. However the plugins suggest Google crawls the content based on location too. I don’t know about JavaScript. Another option is having two separate pages (one for “bathrobe” and one for “housecoat”) and using geolocation for the main menu (if they find the other page i.e. bathrobe page through a Canadian search, they will still see it though). This may have an SEO impact splitting the traffic though. Any suggestions or recommendations on what to do?? What do other websites do? I’m a bit stuck. Thank you so much! Laura Ps. I don’t think we have enough traffic to add subdomains or subdirectories.
Local Website Optimization | | LauraFalls0 -
Splitting One Site Into Two Sites Best Practices Needed
Okay, working with a large site that, for business reasons beyond organic search, wants to split an existing site in two. So, the old domain name stays and a new one is born with some of the content from the old site, along with some new content of its own. The general idea, for more than just search reasons, is that it makes both the old site and new sites more purely about their respective subject matter. The existing content on the old site that is becoming part of the new site will be 301'd to the new site's domain. So, the old site will have a lot of 301s and links to the new site. No links coming back from the new site to the old site anticipated at this time. Would like any and all insights into any potential pitfalls and best practices for this to come off as well as it can under the circumstances. For instance, should all those links from the old site to the new site be nofollowed, kind of like a non-editorial link to an affiliate or advertiser? Is there weirdness for Google in 301ing to a new domain from some, but not all, content of the old site. Would you individually submit requests to remove from index for the hundreds and hundreds of old site pages moving to the new site or just figure that the 301 will eventually take care of that? Is there substantial organic search risk of any kind to the old site, beyond the obvious of just not having those pages to produce any more? Anything else? Any ideas about how long the new site can expect to wander the wilderness of no organic search traffic? The old site has a 45 domain authority. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Moz Pro, our web crawler, and sites that use SNI (804 HTTPS SSL) error
TL;DR Many sites and CDN’s across the internet use SNI to help keep pages and resources secure Right now, Moz Pro is unable to crawl sites that use SNI, affecting these customers (you will see an 804 HTTPS SSL error if you are affected) This is being fixed, and we are almost ready to provide beta access to SNI customers If you have an SNI site, are a Moz Pro customer, and wish to be a part of this beta - sign up here http://goo.gl/forms/LCvL9Ix8JDHfbAvr1 Detail SNI (Server Name Identification) is an extension to the TLS security protocol that allows for multiple HTTPS websites to be served from the same IP address without requiring them all to use the same certificate. This was always possible using wildcard certificates, but these are often impractical, since they are restrictive, and require a webmaster to know all of the hostnames to be served at the time of requesting the certificate. With SNI, a webmaster can issue a single certificate and support multiple (and changing) hostnames. SNI has become increasingly popular over the last couple of years thanks to: Increase in mainstream browser support Its flexibility for usage in CDNs, like Cloudflare Unfortunately the Moz Pro web crawler has not kept up to date with this trend, and is at present unable to crawl sites that use SNI (the symptom is an 804 HTTPS SSL error). This affects customers with SNI hosted sites, who miss out on the value of Moz Pro’s Site Crawl tools. Whilst it might seem a simple fix to support SNI, our crawler software uses libraries that are unable to support the technology without a significant re-write. However, I am happy to say that this re-write is in process, and almost ready for testing. Behind the scenes we have been working on a major overhaul of our crawl technology which you are going to start to see across many of our products. In fact, Moz Content adopted the new crawler this week, resulting in much faster crawls and support for SNI. Moz Pro is not ready for full implementation yet. That said, we are pretty close to being able to beta test with customers. For that reason we would like to invite any customers with SNI sites into our closed Beta that will likely start some time in August. Some notes about the beta: Initially, it will be a little behind where the current crawl tools are in terms of features and configuration. That said, we will be iterating fast and beta customers will get automatic access to all new features As with any beta there will be bugs and potential data outages - I want to be transparent about this up-front We will be looking for feedback throughout the beta, and we would love to have our customers help shape the future of our software You must be a paid Moz Pro subscriber (or in a free trial) If you are interested please sign up here - http://goo.gl/forms/LCvL9Ix8JDHfbAvr1. Questions and comments welcome below!
Moz News | | jon.white4 -
How unique should a meta description be?
I'm working on a large website (circa 25k pages) that presently just replicates each page title as a meta description. I'm thinking of doing a 'find and replace' in the database so I change: to where the preceeding and following text would be the same in each case eg Is this unique enough? Obviously the individual keyword would make it technically unique each time....and manually changing them would take the rest of my life 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | abisti21 -
Is it ok to have two blogs for my website?
Hi Pep's The blog for my website is integrated, but does not have a URL that matches the text. The company I use for my site say that it can't be changed. Basically it displays numbers instead of text in the url. So I thought, what about starting another blog as well as the original. Would this have any effects on my SEO, negative or positive? Any advice greatly appreciated! 🙂
Content Development | | MissThumann1 -
What is the IP address of the MOZ crawlbot?
Our preproduction site is restricted to a specific IP range. Prelaunch I'd like to use MOZ to check the site but this obviously isn't currently possible. Is there an IP range I can whitelist ?
Getting Started | | mrphome0 -
Removing site subdomains from Google search
Hi everyone, I hope you are having a good week? My website has several subdomains that I had shut down some time back and pages on these subdomains are still appearing in the Google search result pages. I want all the URLs from these subdomains to stop appearing in the Google search result pages and I was hoping to see if anyone can help me with this. The subdomains are no longer under my control as I don't have web hosting for these sites (so these subdomain sites just show a default hosting server page). Because of this, I cannot verify these in search console and submit a url/site removal request to Google. In total, there are about 70 pages from these subdomains showing up in Google at the moment and I'm concerned in case these pages have any negative impacts on my SEO. Thanks for taking the time to read my post.
Technical SEO | | QuantumWeb620 -
Site Not Rankings After a Few Months
I have a client site that I am beating my head against the wall for right now. Three months into a 100% white hat campaign, we can't get him ranking in the top 150. Here's the cliffsnotes: Built a new wordpress website All on page SEO has been done and score an A+ for his primary kws Robots.txt is setup correctly .htaccess is setup correctly new domain multiple 95 DA, 50 PA links from reputable, national sites. Yext Local listings SSL, CDN, Speed optimized Has 19 pages indexed by Google Posting one blog a week for him Granted his primary keyword is a hyper competitive kw, but still, I've been doing this for 8 years and never seen a guy be stuck on the 16th page for so long for the sort of links we are building him. I'm genuinely stumped here and could use some help.
Local Website Optimization | | BrianJGomez0 -
Add trailing slash after removing .html extention
My website is non www ,it has wordpress in subdirectory and some static webpages in the root and other subdirectory 1. i want to remove .html extention from the webpages in the root and
Technical SEO | | Uber_
the others static webpages in subdirectory.
2. add slash at the end.
3. 301 redirect from non slash to url with slash. so it should be http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles.html to http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles/ and http://ghadaalsaman.com/en/poem-list.html to http://ghadaalsaman.com/en/poem-list/ the below code 1. working with non slash at the end **2. **redirect 301 url with slash to non here's my .htaccess <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /</ifmodule> #removing trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1 [R=301,L] #www to non
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(([a-z0-9_]+.)?domain.com)$ [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] #html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L] #index redirect
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://ghadaalsaman.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .html
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /$1 [R=301,L] PS everything is ok with the wordpress , the problems with static pages only. Thanks in advanced0 -
Having 2 brands with the same content - will this work from an SEO perspective
Hi All, I would love if someone could help and provide some insights on this. We're a financial institution and have a set of products that we offer. We have recently joined with another brand and will now be offering all our products to their customers. What we are looking to do is have 1 site that masks the content for both sites so it appears as there are 2 seperate brands with different content - in fact we have a main site and then a sister brand that offers the same products. Is there anyway to do this so when someone searches for Credit Card from Brand A it is indexed under Brand A and same when someone searched for Credit Card from Brand B it is indexed under Brand B. The one thing is we would not want to rel:can the pages nor be penalised by googles latest PR algorithm. Hope someone can help! Thanks Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFCU1 -
Dodgy backlinks pointing to my website - someone trying to ruin my SEO rankings?
I just saw in 'Just discovered' section of MOZ that 2 new backlinks have appeared back to my website - www.isacleanse.com.au from spammy websites which look like they might be associated with inappropriate content. 1. http://laweba.net/opinion-y-tecnologia/css-naked-day/comment-page-53/ peepshow says: (peepshow links off to my site)07/17/2016 at 8:55 pm2. http://omfglol.org/archives/9/comment-page-196 voyeur says: (voyeur linking off to my site)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IsaCleanse
July 17, 2016 at 7:58 pm Any ideas if this is someone trying to send me negative SEO and best way to deal with it?0 -
Too many on page links
Hi I know previously it was recommended to stick to under 100 links on the page, but I've run a crawl and mine are over this now with 130+ How important is this now? I've read a few articles to say it's not as crucial as before. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
If I nofollow outbound external links to minimize link juice loss > is it a good/bad thing?
OK, imagine you have a blog, and you want to make each blog post authoritative so you link out to authority relevant websites for reference. In this case it is two external links per blog post, one to an authority website for reference and one to flickr for photo credit. And one internal link to another part of the website like the buy-now page or a related internal blog post. Now tell me if this is a good or bad idea. What if you nofollow the external links and leave the internal link untouched so all internal links are dofollow. The thinking is this minimizes loss of link juice from external links and keeps it flowing through internal links to pages within the website. Would it be a good idea to lay off the nofollow tag and leave all as do follow? or would this be a good way to link out to authority sites but keep the link juice internal? Your thoughts are welcome. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Google My Business for 2 Websites With the Same Location
Hi,
Local Listings | | alihus
My client has two separate websites with different business names but under one location and phone number. The websites are for two separate services that he offers.
My question is that if creating two Google+ for business pages for the two businesses bad for their SEO or local ranks?
And what about creating local listings for both?(This does not seem logical to me personally!!)
Thank you for the kind answers in advance.0 -
URL Masking or Cloaking?
Hi Guy's, On our webshop we link from our menu to categories were we want to rank on in Google. Because the menu is sitewide i guess Google finds the categories in the menu important and meaby let them score better (onside links) The problem that i'm facing with is that we make difference in Gender. In the menu we have: Man and Woman. Links from the menu go to: /categorie?gender=1/ and /category?gender=2/. But we don't want to score on gender but on the default URL. For example: Focus keyword = Shoes Menu Man link: /shoes?gender=1 Menu Woman link: /shoes?gender=2 But we only want to rank on /shoes/. But that URL is not placed in the menu. Every URL with: "?" has a follow noindex. So i was thinking to make a link in the menu, on man and woman: /shoes/, but on mouse down (program it that way) ?=gender. Is this cloaking for Google? What we also could do is make a canonical to the /shoes/ page. But i don't know if we get intern linking value on ?gender pages that have a canonical. Hope it makes senses 🙂 Advises are also welcome, such as: Place al the default URL's in the footer.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Happy-SEO0 -
Using Hashtag for Google My Business
I was told by a Google My Business representative to include #{keywords} in my description. I was told this would boost my rankings. Has anyone else heard of this?
Local Listings | | Smart_Start0 -
Should Google Trends Match Organic Traffic to My Site?
When looking at Google Trends and my Organic Traffic (using GA) as percentages of their total yearly values I have a correlation of .47. This correlation doesn't seem right when you consider that Google Trends (which is showing relative search traffic data) should match up pretty strongly to your Organic Traffic. Any thoughts on what might be going on? Why isn't Google Trends correlating with Organic Traffic? Shouldn't they be pulling from the same data set? Thanks, Jacob
Reporting & Analytics | | jacob.young.cricut0 -
422 vs 404 Status Codes
We work with an automotive industry platform provider and whenever a vehicle is removed from inventory, a 404 error is returned. Being that inventory moves so quickly, we have a host of 404 errors in search console. The fix that the platform provider proposed was to return a 422 status code vs a 404. I'm not familiar with how a 422 may impact our optimization efforts. Is this a good approach, since there is no scalable way to 301 redirect all of those dead inventory pages.
Technical SEO | | AfroSEO0 -
How to find a list of pages with missing H1 tags
An external SEO/PPC agency did an audit of our site a little while back and said that over 10% of our pages were missing an H1 tag. I am trying to find a way to gather a full list of these in order for our web company to fix. I downloaded the Crawl Test report thinking it would include info on tags in there but it doesn't seem to. Is there a different tool I can use that will get me this information?
Moz Bar | | Lepra0 -
Do review sites like consumer affairs negatively affect SERPs?
Hey all, So when googling the name of our site we see consumer affairs pop up around 5th with a 1 star rating. These negative reviews are mostly spammy (competitors, etc.) since we have an awesome support team that deals with all unhappy members very effectively. We reached out to CA and they came back asking for $10k+ (highway robbery) to "help us improve our rating." My question is: do poor ratings on review sites like these negatively affect your SERPs? And if so, how can we work to combat their effect? Thanks in advance, Roman
Branding | | Dynata_panel_marketing1 -
Ways to fetch search analytics - historical search query data from Google Search Console
Is there any way to fetch all historical search query data from Google Search Console ? Google allows us to view only 90 days report at the maximum. Does integrating google search console with google analytics tool solve this problem ?
SERP Trends | | NortonSupportSEO0 -
Suburb Pages
Hey Mozers, This is an old and often criticized method of SERP however we have a client who has requested we create suburb specific pages for their site. PLASTIC PLANTS "SUBURB" NEED PLASTIC PLANTS IN "SUBURB" They have shown us a competitor who is ranking for hundreds maybe thousands of suburbs in Australia using this method. Any thoughts or experience in this area would be appreciated.
Local Website Optimization | | wearehappymedia0 -
Auto - update of h1 to h2
Hi, I have recently inherited an ecommerce website and been tasked with improving SEO. I noticed a lot of pages were using several h1 tags and, with the help of my developer, used the css to overwrite the secondary headings as h2 tags. However, since doing so many of the pages have fallen 15-40 places in the SERPS. The h1 / h2 switch was the only update. Can anyone suggest why the pages would have fallen like this, and if it is a temporary measure likely to recover in time? Thanks to anyone in advance for your help...
Web Design | | DavidIainJeffrey0 -
Best Tool for Retrieving Multiple URL Word Counts in Bulk?
I am doing some content analysis with over 200 URLs to go through! Does anybody know of, or can recommend any bulk on-page word count checkers which would help with the heavy lifting? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | NickG-1230 -
403s: Are There Instances Where 403's Are Common & Acceptable?
Hey All, Both MOZ & Webmaster tools have identified 403 errors on an editorial site I work with (using Drupal CMS). I looked into the errors and the pages triggering the 403 are all articles in draft status that are not being indexed. If I am not logged into our drupal and I try to access an article in draft status I get the 403 forbidden error. Are these 403's typical for an editorial site where editors may be trying to access an article in draft status while they are not logged in? Webmaster tools is showing roughly 350 pages with the 'Access Denied' 403 status. Are these harmful to rank? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | JJLWeber1 -
Help article / Knowledge base SEO consideration
Hi everyone, I am in the process of building the knowledge base for our SaaS product and I am afraid it could impact us negatively on the SEO side because of: Thin content on pages containing short answers to specific questions Keyword cannibalisation between some of our blog articles and the knowledge base articles I didn't find much on the impact of knowledge bases on SEO when I searched on Google. So I'm hoping we can use this thread to share a few thoughts and best practices on this topic. Below is a bit more details on the issues I face, any tips on how to address them would be most welcome. 1. Thin content: Some articles will have thin content by design: the H1 will be a specific question and there will be only 2 or 3 lines of text answering it in the article. I think creating a dedicated article per question is better than grouping 20 questions on one article from a UX point of view, because this will enable us to direct users more quickly to the answer when they use the live search function inside the software (help widget) or on the knowledge base (saves them the need to scrolling a long article to find the answer). Now the issue is that this will result in lots of pages with thin content. A workaround could be to have both a detailed FAQ style page with all the questions and answers, and individual articles for each question on top of that. The FAQ style page could be indexed in Google while the individual articles would have either a noIndex directive or a rel canonical to the FAQ style page. Have any of you faced similar issues when setting-up your knowledge base? Which approach would you recommend? 2.Keyword cannibalisation: There will be, to some extend, a level of keyword cannibalisation between our blog articles (which rank well) and some of the knowledge base articles. While we want both types of articles to appear in search, we don't want the "How to do XYZ" blog article containing practical tips to compete with the "How to do XYZ in the software" knowledge base article. Do you have any advice on how to achieve that? Having a specific Schema.org (or equivalent) type of markup to differentiate between the 2 types of articles would have been ideal but I couldn't find anything relating to help articles specifically when I searched.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tbps0 -
Do You Like Live Chat Pop-Ups... Please comment!
My client sells 4-wheelers, motorcycles, UTV's, Boats, Jet Skis, etc. They have a live chat box that pops up on average 1.66 times per session and is automatic (does not require the user to click any button) Based on our analytics I am recommending we disable this feature but I want to hear from other professional data-driven marketers. I'm just looking for professional opinions on this strategy. Here are your options: Love Live Chat Pop Ups Hate Live Chat Pop Ups Don't Care/Undecided Let the Data Decide Thank you in advance! mCjeiouqH1
Conversion Rate Optimization | | jws81180 -
Advice on applying Service Area Schema
So I have client that delivers goods to residential addresses and commercial businesses. They have 60+ distribution centers but want to target surrounding counties, cities and territories. Our development team was considering using virtual location pages (thousands) for these service areas. I have lobbied against this out of concern that Google would label these "doorway" pages. These pages would not have full addresses. I want to develop a strategy to gain coverage in these surrounding delivery areas. I was told that applying https://schema.org/serviceArea might help. However will this truly bring in the necessary visibility? Would having only a few key select virtual locations suffice (along with Service Area schema)? Any advice on applying https://schema.org/serviceArea attributes would be much appreciated.
Local Website Optimization | | RosemaryB
Thanks0 -
Why did my website DA fell down?
Hello, Could you please let me know why might my website's DA have fallen down in merely a week? What might be a reason? I also noticed traffic from google dropped down at the very same week. Will be very thankful for any advise!
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Keyword variations on a single page
I have done the research and have compiled a list of a little over 100 keywords that are highly connected to our industry. I have used the metrics to rank those keywords and have given the top 50 of them a ranking. My intention is to use them on my site and make sure that all of my pages have a keyword focus. In doing this, I am running into some challenges. Any insight would be helpful. 1. There are numerous keywords that have simple variations in them. I am trying to figure out if each variation needs it's own page. I have read articles (here on moz) that say that one page can rank for several keywords, and other articles that say that a simple variation can need it's own page. Not sure what to do here. Below is an example of what I mean. (examples: "my long tail keyword" , "my long tail" , "my long" , "long tail" , "long tail keyword" , "keyword long tail") 2. Will it help to create a page for each one of the 50 or even the full 100? I have the opportunity to use blogs and FAQ's to assist with content creation. 3. Since my brand ranks well and is obviously tied highly into my site, do I worry about including brand terms in my keyword focus or should I just focus on those search terms?
Technical SEO | | Smart_Start0 -
301 Redirect or landing page
Hi everyone. I'm currently doing some SEO for a client, at the moment he has some landing pages which are categorised, but the category is set as a 302 redirect. I have a dilemma whether to 301 redirect to the landing page or make a page for each category. The link structure is as follows - http://examplesite.co.uk/products/fire/company-1/product/ so currently this is set as a 302 redirect - http://examplesite.co.uk/products/fire/company-1/ Do I make this page a category page and link the page to the children with some on-page optimisation or 301 redirect it?
On-Page Optimization | | Unbranded_Lee0 -
Are Directories Dead?
(Sorry if this has been answered earlier.) I am thinking of buying a domain, (which is not cheap) and has the keywords of; myniche + directory.com.au in it. On the domain I plan to build out a directory, probably using a word-press theme and word-press directory plugin. It will be an industry specific directory (only for that profession) and will be hand edited by me. It will be exclusive, that is, all listings will be manually approved and no spammy links or bots allowed with the hope that it add value to the user experience. My plan for the directory site is long term as I am qualified in the profession and I like SEO. It will begin with free basic listings, also hand edited by me and I will at some stage allow paid listings for reasonable fee. Directories have a bad name currently in the SEO world, since Panda and Penguin and Poodle (only joking about last one) smashed many of them out of the park for good reason. That bad reputation may stop some in my profession from purchasing a listing or even wanting a free listing. But directories seem to have an influence on local search which could be the value that I add to the business that wants to list on the directory. e.g www.yellowpages.com.au has a PR of 7. I quite liked this article on directories which suggested they may not be dead. Do you agree with that? http://www.seopoint.com.au/blog/are-listings-in-directories-good-or-bad-for-seo/ My question is: Are directories dead? Are directories good or bad for SEO in 2016 and moving forward if they are not spammy? Do directories add value to a business? Therefore should I go ahead with my plan? Thanks in Advance :-).
Local SEO | | Timemerchant0
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