Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

  1. Home
  2. Latest Questions

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.

Log in to post

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!

  • TapGoods


    Which is better for SEO: blog.site.com or site.com/blog.  In other words, is it better to have the blog running in a subdomain or as a director within the main site?  Right now we are running as a subdomain, but want to be sure Google isn't considering that a separate site.  The blog shows up separately on Google Analytics, which makes me think site.com/blog is better if for no other reason, it would give our domain greater traffic. Not sure if this matters, but some site info: our site is a sharing economy tool for renting your stuff we are running the blog on Wordpress blog traffic is about 5% of total traffic

    Content Development | | TapGoods
    0
  • E_F


    I use the search volume found in keyword planner to score and weight my keywords in a similar way as Rand showed us in this WBF. This week I've found that in many cases suddenly the singular and plural version of the keyword have the same search volume. This seems crazy to me as singular and plural is not the same, the intent is different but more importantly they behave very differently from each other when looking at their track record in Adwords (impressions, clicks, conversions, CTR, CVR etc...all different). For example, here's a screenshot of 4 keywords (singular and plural versions of 2 phrases) with search volume captured a couple of months ago. Now here's another screenshot of the same keywords taken from Keyword planner today. Any ideas why this would be happening? Does it makes sense to you? It just seems buggy to me. Thanks!

    Keyword Research | | E_F
    0
  • OhYeahSteve


    Does anyone know the allocation, percentage-wise, of clicks that go to Adwords vs Local 3 Pack vs Organic on Google Search (average)?

    Local Listings | | OhYeahSteve
    0
  • kirin44355


    Hello, Mozzers I have a question regarding placement of heading tags. I have seen this asked a few times on the forum but some are from a couple years ago so wanted to get a more up to date answer regarding this. We want to add H2 tags across our site but our two options are to wrap images we are using as navigation on the top of the page, these are directly below our pages H1 tag and actually make sense. Example H1 title: Vehicles Images are specific brand logo with H2 being wrapped to pull the img alt: "Ford Vehicles" "Checvy vehicles" etc. The wrap would look something like this: I appreciate your time, Chris

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
    0
  • Andy.Drinkwater


    Morning all! I am doing some research at the moment and am trying to find out, just roughly, how long you have ever had to wait to have a page re-indexed by Google. For this purpose, say you had blocked a page via meta noindex or disallowed access by robots.txt, and then opened it back up. No right or wrong answers, just after a few numbers 🙂 Cheers, -Andy

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy.Drinkwater
    0
  • Francis.Magos


    Why does my Google Webcache appears in a short period of time and then automatically redirects to my homepage? Is there something wrong with my robots.txt? The only files that I have blocked is below: User-agent: * Disallow: /bin/ Disallow: /common/ Disallow: /css/ Disallow: /download/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /medias/ Disallow: /ClientInfo.aspx Disallow: /*affiliateId* Disallow: /*referral*

    Technical SEO | | Francis.Magos
    0
  • adhunna

    This question is deleted!

    Algorithm Updates | | adhunna
    0
  • dasickle


    During SEO audit for a client I noticed that they had over a dozen duplicate websites that are carbon copies of the main website. This was done via CMS platform and DNS. One of the mirror sites has about 400 indexed pages and has Moz DA of 42 and 137k External Equity-Passing Links. Full metrics comparison is attached. I originally planned on doing rel="canonical" on the mirror site but the CMS vendor never even heard of it and is refusing to implement it in the header. My only other option is doing one to one 301 redirects. Since the mirror site ranks well, even competes with main domain for some positions on the 1st page of SERP, what will be the impact after the redirects? Is doing 301's still the best option? Thanks! PrUpN3q

    Moz Pro | | dasickle
    0
  • Roxana_Nelson


    Hello! I wanted to give you all a heads up about some changes we will be making to the MozBar very soon. We will be making an update to the MozBar that will require you to log in with either a free Community account or with your Moz subscription to access link metrics. Don’t worry! We will never charge you for link metrics in the MozBar. Why are we making this change?
    The MozBar has historically made use of a free endpoint in our Mozscape API. Unfortunately, over time, we have been experiencing increasing levels of abuse on this endpoint. For a long time, we were able to manage this mis-use but recently we have reached a tipping point whereby this malicious traffic is starting to degrade other legitimate API traffic and cause performance issues within our products. By asking you to log in to the MozBar with either a free Community account or a Moz subscription, we can ensure only authenticated users are able to use the MozBar. Also, if you don’t need link metrics, you can still use the MozBar. Logged out users will still be able to access on-page information. A note to Firefox users
    With this change, we will temporarily disable the Firefox version of the MozBar. You may have noticed that the Firefox and Chrome versions of the MozBar are not the same. This is due to Mozilla’s review process, and us being unable to get new versions approved despite multiple attempts. Good news on the horizon! Firefox will start accepting Chrome-based extensions with the release of Firefox v48, which means soon there will be one version of the MozBar. When v48 is released, we will re-enable the MozBar in Firefox. In the meantime you can use the free Google Chrome version. Thank you for your understanding while we make these changes in the MozBar! Please feel free to let us know what you think, or ask questions, in the comments below. Thanks!
    Roxana

    Moz News | | Roxana_Nelson
    11
  • Caro-O


    A client's home page, which has always done very well, has just dropped out of Google's index overnight!
    Webmaster tools does not show any problem. The page doesn't even show up if we Google the company name. The Robot.txt contains: Default Flywheel robots file User-agent: * Disallow: /calendar/action:posterboard/
    Disallow: /events/action~posterboard/ The only unusual thing I'm aware of is some A/B testing of the page done with 'Optimizely' - it redirects visitors to a test page, but it's not a 'real' redirect in that redirect checker tools still see the page as a 200. Also, other pages that are being tested this way are not having the same problem. Other recent activity over the last few weeks/months includes linking to the page from some of our blog posts using the page topic as anchor text. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
    Caro

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caro-O
    0
  • ChrisKing


    Does anyone know if it is possible/recommended/not recommended to use href lang in image or video XML sitemaps? This had not crossed my mind until recently, but a client asked me this question and I couldn't find any information on this topic.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisKing
    0
  • _nitman


    Trying to upload multiple keywords at a time with their different Tags. But here i can upload the keyword one by one also i am not able to associate tags with the keyword.

    Moz Bar | | _nitman
    2
  • isle_surf


    I am doing some house cleaning on the site and made some minor updates to product titles and a rule was written in and it auto updated the URL to what the product title was with a redirect put in place from the old URL. If this a bad thing and should i leave the URL alone and just update the product title? Then for the ones i did change the Product title and the URL was updated is this a bad thing and should i have just left the URL alone? These are all high ranking popular products so dont want to mess with any rankings going into busy season?

    Technical SEO | | isle_surf
    0
  • Brian_Dowd


    Hi Moz and Moz fans, We are looking to add a client portal to the website. Basically, I haven't found too much on this with regard to SEO. The idea would be that certain parts of the website would be hidden under a pay wall and for subscribers, they would be able to see all content. I am wondering if anyone has any experience with that and what SEO considerations to take into account. One thing we are particularly concerned about is how Google will index the portions of the website behind the pay wall, if at all. Obviously, we would rather that they don't index it, so that people can't find a way to get to the info without paying. I would imagine it would have to do with the type of coding, however, I am not a coding guru, so I am not 100% on that. Anyway, anyone that has any experience in this kind of thing and can comment on this at all, any comment is welcome. Also, any documentation that could be helpful would be welcome too. Thanks

    Web Design | | Brian_Dowd
    0
  • MichaelGregory


    One of Wordpress sites was hacked (for about 10 hours), and Google picked up 4000+ urls in the index. The site is fixed, but I'm stuck with all those urls in the index. All the urls of of the form: walkerorthodontics.com/index.php?online-payday-cash-loan.htmloncewe The only bulk removal option I could find was to remove an entire folder, but I can't do that, as it would only leave the homepage and kill off everything else. For some crazy reason, the removal tools doesn't support wildcards, so that obvious solution is right out. So, how do it get rid of 4000 results? And no, waiting around for them to 404 out of the index isn't an option.

    Technical SEO | | MichaelGregory
    0
  • sageb


    Ok lets say i am doing local seo in atlanta georgia usa for the keyword "wholesale atlanta ga"  When you search "wholesale atlanta ga" the 1st result is hallsatlanta.com under geo search citations, which has 5 backlinks from 2 referring domains with the highest pa of 26 1. then www.bufordwholesale.com/ 1st on organic search with 7 dofollow backlinks with highest pa 43 and from 1 domain 2. http://www.yelp.com/biz/e-mart-wholesale-atlanta2nd I am assuming i just need to get my site submitted to yelp for this backlink, perhaps more citations to outrank. 3. www.wlexperts.com/ 3rd on serps with 3 dofollow links, highest pa 31, coming from 2 domains So to sum it up, if i wanted to outrank a new website for keyword "wholesale atlanta ga" technically all i would need is 8 dofollows backlinks, pa 44+, 3 referring domains, 2 local citations ? And of course repeat this same process for all of my keywords?, my on-page seo is already optimized

    Reviews and Ratings | | sageb
    1
  • Siggi13


    I just figured out that the MOZ On-Page-Grader can’t render soft hyphen in H1. As an example, if I have an H1 word like “some­time” the On Page Grader don’t find it as a keyword “sometime” in the H1. So my question, is it just a limitation on MOZ or a rule for On Page SEO to avoid soft hyphens in H1? Siggi

    Moz Bar | | Siggi13
    0
  • rubennunez


    My site was hacked some time ago. I've since then redesigned it and obviously removed all the injection spam. Now I see in search console that I'm getting hundreds of url errors (from the spam links that no longer work). How do I remove them from the search console. The only option I see is "mark as fixed", but obviously they are not "fixed", rather removed. I've already uploaded a new sitemap and fetched the site, as well as submitted a reconsideration request that has been approved.

    Algorithm Updates | | rubennunez
    0
  • mirabile


    Our number of followers on Twitter has suddenly dropped (yet not dropped) in a really weird way. Twitter Analytics shows follower counts in two places: Monthly increases in followers, and then also in the Audience Insights tab, where you can see three months of follower counts mapped in a chart. Month-to-month, the total number of followers continues to rise. What’s inconsistent, however, is the total number of aggregate followers shown in the cart. Twitter just dropped our to total count of followers by about 600. But it’s not like we just suddenly lost 600 followers last month (in fact we gained far more than that), but rather that Twitter seems to have adjusted the aggregate numbers across the board retroactively for all months. So while month-to-month continues to show gains, overall, we still went down. The only way we would have even noticed this, by the way, is because we have a record of the OLD total follower count that Twitter had previously displayed as recently as last month. So confusing. We’re trying to figure out what happened, and the only thing that seems to make sense is that Twitter may have done a huge spam account purge, and instead of making it look like we suddenly lost a lot of followers, they just updated the aggregate total # of followers across all time……? [For the record, we do not buy followers, but we don’t always do the best job at blocking spam followers when the do follow us either.] Any advice would be appreciated, thanks. 🙂

    Social Media | | mirabile
    0
  • geoff8151


    We have a blog internally at kay-grant.com/blog and also created an external blog at ActiveRain.com Is it okay to post the same blog posts to both sites or should I have different content for each blog?

    Link Building | | geoff8151
    0
  • nowmedia1


    Hello! I have two telephone numbers listed on a website - one is the "actual" business number and is utilizing proper schema, while the other is a call tracking number featured more prominently on the site (both in the header and above the "actual" business number in the footer). The code looks like this: New Patients: 999-555-5555 Current Patients: 555-555-5555 Does Google prioritize the "actual" business number because it has the proper schema on it? Or would the call tracking number still be counted and affect NAP consistency for Local SEO? Thanks!

    Local Listings | | nowmedia1
    1
  • JonathanLeplang


    Hi Mozzers, I have a question: which top 5 questions to ask for a first meeting with a "future" customer to avoid bad surprises? Thank you for your help. Regards,
    Jonathan

    Industry News | | JonathanLeplang
    0
  • hakhan201


    Hello, I heard RSS Feed helps in ranking. However, I am not sure if I should enable RSS Feed or not. Whenever I publish an article on my site , I see that many other websites have leeched my Feed and get's the same article I written published with a nofollow backlink to my website article. The worst part is that my article doesn't appear in Google search, but the website which copied my article gets ranked in Google. Although the article gets index on google (checked by using site:website.com). Although some articles show up after 24 hours by ranking higher from the sites which copied my article. Any idea what should I do? Thank you

    On-Page Optimization | | hakhan201
    0
  • mattdinbrooklyn


    Thought I'd ask this question to confirm what I already think. I'm curious that if we're publishing something in two language and both are verified by the publishing center if the group would recommend publishing two separate Google News Sitemaps (one in each language) or publishing one in each language.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mattdinbrooklyn
    0
  • chiplab


    Good morning, This is my first post.  I found many Q&As here that mostly answer my question, but just to be sure we do this right I'm hoping the community can take a peak at my thinking below: Problem: We are relevant rank #1 for "custom poker chips" for example. We have this development website on a subdomain (http://dev.chiplab.com).  On Saturday our live 'chiplab.com' main domain was replaced by 'dev.chiplab.com' in the SERP. Expected Cause: We did not add NOFOLLOW to the header tag. We also did not DISALLOW the subdomain in the robots.txt. We could have also put the 'dev.chiplab.com' subdomain behind a password wall. Solution: Add NOFOLLOW header, update robots.txt on subdomain and disallow crawl/index. Question: If we remove the subdomain from Google using WMT, will this drop us completely from the SERP? In other words, we would ideally like our root chiplab.com domain to replace  the subdomain to get us back to where we were before Saturday.  If the removal tool in WMT just removes the link completely, then is the only solution to wait until the site is recrawled and reindexed and hope the root chiplab.com domain ranks in place of the subdomain again? Thank you for your time, Chase

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chiplab
    0
  • sfrediktru8


    Hi everyone, This might be quite a long post so please bear with me. I am currently rebuilding my website.  My previous website was built by a web designer and was very basic.  5 page html site consisting of home, services, gallery, testimonials, contact pages.  None of them were great - thin content, not optimised as well as could be - no h1's etc. To be fair I knew nothing about websites and didn't bother much with the site.  As a new business I used it simply as a place for people to visit for more information after receiving a leaflet and never bothered much about driving traffic to the site. A few years down the line and I have realised I need the website to be working for me as opposed to alongside me.  I am building it myself via wordpress as web designer didn't want to work in wordpress.  I have done my keyword research and I'm working on pages as we speak. Previously my homepage - around 80% of visitors landed here for my main keyword (driveway cleaning glasgow) as it was number 6 in the organic listing.  With my services page appearing directly underneath in 7 for the same keyword. I have starting building a new page for that keyword which contains (driveway-cleaning-glasgow) in the url. I have 301'd my previous services page to this url. Now for my questions...
    My 2nd keyword based on volume is driveway cleaning.  How do I optimise for this or will the (driveway-cleaning-glasgow) page rank for this also as the words are contained within this page? I plan on having the same structure for the remaining services - pressure-washing-glasgow, monoblock-cleaning-glasgow etc, etc.   As I am building new pages for each service with location built in, where does this leave my homepage?  Should I be targeting keywords for this page?  It is still my strongest page and apart from the (driveway-cleaning-glasgow) page which will get some help from the 301 these are all new pages so I would expect perhaps initially to lose some traffic.  But as I am not ranking well for anything other than the main 2 keywords mentioned above it can only be beneficial long term when google recognises the specific pages for each service.  And when I start using Adwords I will have a specific landing page for each service. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks

    Local SEO | | sfrediktru8
    0
  • Ullamalm


    I thought it was generally said that Google will favour 1 page per domain for a particular SERP, but I have seen examples where that is not the case (i.e. Same domain is ranking 2 different pages on the 1st page of the SERPs...) Are there any "tricks" to taking up 2 first page SERP positions, or am I mistaken that this doesn't always happen?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ullamalm
    0
  • rubennunez


    I launched my redesigned website 4 days ago. I submitted a new site map, as well as submitted it to index in search console (google webmasters). I see that when I google my site, My new open graph settings are coming up correct. Still, a lot of my old site pages are definitely still indexed within google. How long will it take for google to drop off or "de-index" my old pages? Due to the way I restructured my website, a lot of the items are no longer available on my site. This is on purpose. I'm a graphic designer, and with the new change, I removed many old portfolio items, as well as any references to web design since I will no longer offering that service. My site is the following:
    http://studio35design.com

    Algorithm Updates | | rubennunez
    0
  • StillLearning


    My old website was dated, ugly, impossible to update and a mess between hard-coded pages and WP, but we were ranking #1 in the organic searches for our key words. I just redesigned my website using Squarespace.  I kept most of the same text on the pages (for key words) and kept the same Meta-Tags and Title Tags for each page as much as possible. Once I was satisfied that I had done as much on-page optimization as I could, I changed the IP in our Domain Name Registry so that it would point to our new website on the Squarespace host.  And our new website was live! ...Then I watched in dismay as our ranking fell into oblivion. I think this might have something to do with not doing any 301 redirects from the old website and losing all of my link juice. Is this the case?  And, if so, how do I fix it? Our website url is www.kanataskinclinic.ca Thanks

    Web Design | | StillLearning
    1

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


Browse Questions

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