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After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

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  • VERBInteractive


    Although we always recommend against onload pop-ups for clients, (we feel the effect the user experience) we do have a few clients that insist on them. I was reading this article the other day https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/05/17/how-do-i-make-sure-my-site-is-mobile-friendly/ which lead me to https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6101188 and I'm happy to see that Google is going to consider these types of content a downgrade when it comes to rank. My question is 2 fold: Has anyone experienced a drop in organic traffic on mobile due to this update? and do you think this will include user triggered content like photo galleries, bookings, email sign ups? We haven't noticed any drops yet but it is something we will be keeping a close eye on in the next little while. Let's hear what the community has to say 🙂

    Algorithm Updates | | VERBInteractive
    1
  • AngelosS

    This question is deleted!

    Technical SEO | | AngelosS
    0
  • MissThumann


    I understand you 'Pro's' may fins this a silly question. But I'm a visual learner and I can't seem to grasp this. I've read the pages MOZ has provided on anchor text and external links and my question is, how are they different? And which one is more important to seo?  Can someone who has a great ability to simplify things, please help me understand this. They seem very similar to me but, I know there has to be more to it. External links: External Links are hyperlinks that point at (target) any domain other than the domain the link exists on (source) **Anchor Text: **Anchor text is the visible characters and words that hyperlinks display when linking to another document or location on the web. Thanks is advance, Lauren.

    Link Building | | MissThumann
    0
  • Sundance_Kidd


    I was on a site today and as i scrolled down and viewed the other posts that were below the top one i read, i noticed that each post below the top one had its own unique URL. I have not seen this and was curious if this method of infinite scrolling is SEO friendly. Will Google's spiders scroll down and index these posts below the top one and index them? The URLs of these lower posts by the way were the same URLs that would be seen if i clicked on each of these posts. Looking at Google's preferred method for Infinite scrolling they recommend something different - https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html . Welcome all insight. Thanks! Christian

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sundance_Kidd
    0
  • mike878


    We’ve got a clients site which doesn't have the contact details on every page, all the contact details are  on the /contact page which is using the schema.org local business markup Some sites that our outranking us locally have their contact details on all pages, where as others only have it on the contact page also. Is having your contact details on every page a ranking factor for local search ?

    Local Listings | | mike878
    0
  • mike878


    I was using the moz local check listing feature to check one of our clients whos addresses is “XXX Close” When i check listing in moz local i get 2 options of the site : with address “XXX Close” with address “XXX Cl” If i click on the “XXX Close” version it shows me listing where the address is written as “XXX Cl” as being inconsistent and visa versa if i click on the “XXX Cl” version. (this happens as some sites reformat the text, ive submitted them all as “XXX Close”) Is the something to be concerned about ? eg. could it effect rankings or does google understand that they are the same ?

    Moz Local | | mike878
    0
  • A_Q


    Hi Mozzers, What does Google think about a press release, appearing on lots of websites (relevant websites) as part of a link building campaign. Does the fact that this press release content is duplicated across lots of sites have a negative impact? Thanks in advance

    Link Building | | A_Q
    0
  • ViviCa1


    My company is planning to migrate an existing (ecommerce) micro site - which sits on its own domain - into their main ecommerce site. This means that the content will be moved from www.microdomain.co.uk to www.maindomain.com/category. Some products already exist on the main domain. The micro site is fairly small with just over 400 pages - I am planning to map each URL to the new URL (exact corresponding page) and create 301 redirects for each. Where any additional content does not exist yet on the existing main domain, we will create it and 301 redirect to it. The micro site currently ranks fairly well for some keywords - being such a specialised micro site, (some of) the keywords also form part of the domain name, however, they won't on the main page although they may form part of the URL (category). As an example (using a made up URL), our micro site www.bread-sticks.co.uk ranks on page 1 for the keyword bread sticks - we don't just sell bread sticks on www.bread-sticks.co.uk but also rolls and bread though, bread sticks is one category of very closely related categories. Say our main domain is www.supermarket.co.uk (selling a wide range of food / drink products. The micro site will be moving to www.supermarket.co.uk/baked-products/ - which is a category. Within that category, there are sub categories, i.e. bread sticks, rolls and bread which will sit under www.supermarket.co.uk/bread-sticks/ etc. What would be the best way for ensuring that our main domain would take over the rankings from our micro site, given that it will be sitting on our main domain as a category (one of many)? Can we expect www.supermarket.co.uk/baked-products/ or www.supermarket.co.uk/bread-sticks/ to replace www.bread-sticks.co.uk in the rankings simply by 301 redirecting? Thanks for your help!

    Technical SEO | | ViviCa1
    0
  • ThomasHarvey


    We're looking at potentially creating a robots.txt with 1450 lines in it. This will remove 100k+ pages from the crawl that are all old pages (I know, the ideal would be to delete/noindex but not viable unfortunately) Now the issue i'm thinking is that a large robots.txt will either stop the robots.txt from being followed or will slow our crawl rate down. Does anybody have any experience with a robots.txt of that size?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey
    0
  • AliMac26


    If your title tag is over 55 characters, is it generally OK or good practice to abbreviate your brand name (at the end of the title tag) for the sake of the other keywords in the tag?

    On-Page Optimization | | AliMac26
    1
  • O2C


    Hi All, I have the following code in one of our Htaccess files and I'm not entirely sure what its doing. Could anyone shed some light and maybe explain the process its going through? I know its something to do with redirecting the urls dependant on the browser language. RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(En|Es)$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(En|Es)/(.*)$ $2?lang=$1 [L,R=301] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.[a-zA-Z0-9]{1,5}|/)$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1/ [L,R=301] Thanks

    International SEO | | O2C
    0
  • CosiCrawley


    HI there, Is there much point conducting an SEO site audit on a site that has not yet launched and is protected behind a login? Presumably none of the usual SEO tools (Moz, Screaming Frog etc) can crawl this site becuase it is all locked behind a login. Would it be better to launch it and then do a site audit? Thanks

    On-Page Optimization | | CosiCrawley
    0
  • RosemaryB


    Recently I have been promoting custom long form content development for major brand clients.  For UX reasons we collapse the content so only 2-3 sentences of the first paragraph are visible.  However there is a "read more" link that expands the entire content piece.
    I have believed that the searchbots would have no problem crawling, indexing and applying a positive SEO signal for this content.  However I'm starting to wonder.  Is there any evidence that the Google search algorithm could possible discount or even ignore collapsed content?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
    1
  • zspace


    Hello! We have a Zendesk support site at support.zspace.com - our Moz crawl report is saying that there is 85 temporary redirect issues, mostly coming from our support site. My question is, does the Moz crawler use robots.txt? We have currently Disallow: /search in our robots.txt, but not /search/* Most of the temporary redirect URL's in the crawl error report look like this... https://support.zspace.com/hc/en-us/search/click?data=BAh7CjoHaWRp So would we need to add "Disallow: /hc/en-us/search/*" to get Moz crawler to ignore these?

    Moz Bar | | zspace
    0
  • VDigitalServices


    Hi everyone, Below is an example of some JSON product schema markup I'd like to integrate into my site. My question is, what do I need to do to incorporate the individual reviews on a product page as well? I've tried a few different things but I can't get it to validate.

    Technical SEO | | VDigitalServices
    0
  • Jane.com


    We have 250+ products dynamically inserted and sorted on our site daily (more specifically our homepage... yes, it's a long page). Our dev team would like to explore rendering the page server-side using ReactJS. We currently use a CDN to cache all the content, which of course we would like to continue using. SO... will Google be able to crawl that content? We've read some articles with different ideas (including prerendering): http://andrewhfarmer.com/react-seo/
    http://www.seoskeptic.com/json-ld-big-day-at-google/ If we were to only load the schema important to the page  (like product title, image, price, description, etc.) from the server and then let the client render the remaining content (comments, suggested products, etc.), would that go against best practices? It seems like that might be seen as showing the googlebot 1 version and showing the site visitor a different (more complete) version.

    Technical SEO | | Jane.com
    0
  • tslb


    Hello! I'm looking at picking up the Yoast News SEO plugin extension to add to our company's wordpress site. We're a UK manufacturer but have lots of regular news stories (new products, industry info, new projects etc.) that is relevant to our niche market. We'd love to get these stories featured into the Google News feed and this may be a route. Anyone using the plugin? Any thoughts? Thanks

    Content Development | | tslb
    0
  • davidwaring


    I've been considering blocking third party crawlers for a while – specifically those crawling my website for the sake of competitive analysis, such as SEMrush and Ahrefs. I'm familiar with how to do so, but when researching the question I found practically no one asking the same question. The guides I've found on what to put in your robots.txt make no mention of whether to block competitive analysis crawlers. Which makes me wonder whether this is a good idea after all. My chief concern here is rival sites going after the same search terms we target – one of our competitors in particular has an uncanny way of going after the same searches we are. I know blocking crawlers won't prevent competitors from watching our content, but it will make it slightly harder for them. Is there any major drawback I'm missing? Any big reason not to go ahead and block SEO analysis crawlers?

    Competitive Research | | davidwaring
    0
  • Tormar


    Hi, I have a lot of product in my GA ecommerce. Does anyone how I can split my product by product categories in Analytics? E.g. Category: Blue cars, category: Yellow cars ...

    SERP Trends | | Tormar
    0
  • usDragons


    My client had an old site hacked (let's call it "myolddomain.com") and the hackers created many links in other hacked sites with links such as http://myolddomain.com/styless.asp?jordan-12-taxi-kids-cheap-T8927.html The old myolddomain.com site was redirected to a different new site since then, but we still see over a thousand spam links showing up in the new site's Search Console 404 crawl errors report. Also, using the links: operator in google search, we see many results of spam links. Should we be worried about these bad links pointing to our old site and redirecting to 404s on the new site? What is the best recommendation to clean them up? Ignore? 410s? Other? I'm seeing conflicting advice out there. The old site is hosted by the client's previous web developer who doesn't want to clean anything up on their end without an ongoing hosting contract. So beyond turning redirects on or off, the client doesn't want to pay for any additional hosting. So we don't have much control over anything related to "myolddomain.com". 😞 Thanks in advance for any assistance!

    Technical SEO | | usDragons
    0
  • Houses


    Hi, Can I add Twitter cards code using Google Tag Manager? Thanks

    Social Media | | Houses
    0
  • davedon


    Hi gang. Our site currently has a 302 redirect from the HTTP version of the homepage to the HTTPS version of the homepage. I understand this really should be changed to a 301 redirect but I'm having a little trouble figuring out exactly how this should be done. Some places on the internet are telling me I can edit our htaccess file to specify the type of redirect, however our htaccess file seems to be missing some of the information in theirs. Can anyone tell me what needs to be changed in the htaccess file - or if there's a simpler way to change the 302 to a 301? Many thanks 🙂 htaccess: BEGIN WordPress RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] END WordPress EXPIRES CACHING ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 6 months" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 6 months" ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 6 months" ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 6 months" ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 10 days" ExpiresByType application/pdf "access plus 10 days" ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 10 days" ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 6 months" ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 days" EXPIRES CACHING

    Technical SEO | | davedon
    0
  • Lions-Pro


    Any SEO thoughts on using rel="nofollow" when inserting a link to a phone number? To make a phone number click to call we use  (555) 555-1234 Wondering if search engines are trying to follow that link or if this is standard and not to worry. Any thoughts on if I should add rel="nofollow" to these or does it not matter? Thanks!

    On-Page Optimization | | Lions-Pro
    0
  • phogan


    Hello, we migrated a domain onto a new Wordpress site over a year ago.  We redirected (with plugin: simple 301 redirects) all the old urls (.asp) to the corresponding new wordpress urls (non-.asp).  The old pages are still indexed by Google, even though when you click on them you are redirected to the new page. Can someone tell me reasons they would still be indexed? Do you think it is hurting my rankings?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | phogan
    0
  • Gigito


    Hello, Moz community. I have a big problem, today by accident i suppose i was charged 149$ for the Moz Pro subscription plan, but i have already earlier today canceled my subscription plan. 
    Now Moz is a great seo based application, but i was only testing the field and do not need those kind of services and plus living in a third world country 149$ would literally mess my whole month. Is there anyway the payment to be reversed, the transfer is still in the waiting and the payment has not been completed. Waiting for response, 10x

    Product Support | | Gigito
    0
  • ThomasHarvey


    Hello, I've never had to deal with an international site before, let alone a site merge. These are two large sites, we've got a few smaller old sites that are currently redirecting to the main site (UK). We are looking at moving all the sites to the .com domain. We are also currently not using SSL (on the main pages, we are on the checkout). We also have a m.domain.com site. Are there any good guides on what needs to be done? My current strategy would be: Convert site to SSL. Mobile site and desktop site must be on the same domain. Start link building to the .com domain now (weaker link profile currently) What's the best way of handling the domains and languages? We're currently using a .tv site for the UK and .com for the US. I was thinking, and please correct me if i'm wrong, that we move the US site from domain.com to domain.com/us/ and the domain.tv to domain.com/en/ Would I then reference these by the following: What would we then do with the canonicals? Would they just reference their "local" version? Any advice or articles to read would really be appreciated.

    International SEO | | ThomasHarvey
    0
  • the-gate-films


    We all know that more and more people are increasing the amount of different categories that eCommerce sites have. Say for example, you have over 3,000 different products, all categories contain unique text at the top of each, all of the categories link to each other (so loads on internal linking) and no two categories contain the exact same products. My question is this, is there ever a stage that you could create too many categories? Alternatively, do you think you should just keep creating categories based on what our customers search for?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-gate-films
    1
  • Brian_Owens_1


    We recently launched a new site on https, and I'm seeing a few errors in the SERPS with our meta descriptions as our pages are starting to get indexed. We have the correct meta data in our code but it's being output in Google differently. Example: http://imgur.com/ybqxmqg Is this just a glitch on Google's side or is there an obvious issue anyone sees that I'm missing? Thanks guys!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brian_Owens_1
    0
  • kfallconnect


    Hi, I recently noticed an increase in duplicate content, but all of the pages are 404 error pages. For instance, Moz site crawl says this page: https://www.allconnect.com/sc-internet/internet.html has 43 duplicates and all the duplicates are also 404 pages (https://www.allconnect.com/Coxstatic.html for instance is a duplicate of this page). Looking for insight on how to fix this issue, do I add an rel=canonical tag to these 60 error pages that points to the original error page? Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | kfallconnect
    0
  • Rachel_J


    Hi, I recently took on a client for local SEO and i started improving his on page optimization etc and now I'm continuing with link building. It's hard since it's a boring industry (medical waste disposal), but I have gotten some links. When I check up his link profile in OSE, it's still giving me a spam score of 7!!! and not showing the links I have acquired. I already removed the link it's showing up by contacting the website and it's not there anymore. The site is a very clean nice site, why am I getting such a high spam score? Thanks for your help! Rachel

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rachel_J
    0

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