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  • JustinBSLW


    Hello, I have questions regarding content length and links within descriptions.  With our ecommerce site, we have thousands of products, each with a unique description. In the product description, I have links to the parent category and grandparent category (if it has one) in the main product text which is generally about 175 words. Then I have a last paragraph that's about 75 words that includes links to our main homepage and our main product catalogue page. Is the content length long enough? I used to use text that was 500 words, and shortening it I still rank when launching new products, so I don't think an increase in text length will have any additional benefit. I do see conflicting information when I do searches, with some people recommending a minimum of 300 words and some saying to try and go a 1000 for category pages. In regards to the links, I noticed a competitor has stopped following this format, so I'm unsure if I should keep going too. Is it too many links to have each of the products link back to the main catalogue and homepage? Is it good to have links with anchor text to the categories a product is in? There are breadcrumbs on the page with these links already. There are already have heaps of links on our pages (footer, and a right sidebar with image links to relevant categories), so my pages do get flagged for too many links. Thanks!

    On-Page Optimization | | JustinBSLW
    0
  • ThomasHarvey


    We're looking at expanding our robots.txt, we currently don't have the ability to noindex/nofollow. We're thinking about adding the following: Checkout Basket Then possibly: Price Theme Sortby other misc filters. What do you include?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey
    0
  • nasi_bg


    Hi guys, I hope to find some good answers to my questions, because here are some of the best SEO's in the world. I'm doing SEO as a hobby for a few years and had some very good results before the latest Google updates. Now I'm not able to rank any website for competitive keywords. The last project I started is this website (man and van hire company targeting London market).
    The problem is that I can't rank even in Top 100 in Google UK for the main keywords like: "man and van london" , "man and van service london" ,"london man & van"...
    The site has over 1k good backlinks (according to Ahrefs), unique content, titles and descriptions but still can't rank well. Am i missing something? Few years back that was more than enough to rank well in Google.
    I will be very grateful to hear your suggestions and opinions.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nasi_bg
    0
  • manasag


    Hi to all the SEO experts here, I am working on SEO of my 4 months old website. For example, its 'abz.com'. We like the brand name 'abz' for the business and we are able to SEO well for keyword 'abz'. However, we would also like to target for the keyword 'abc'. There are 2 reasons for that: 'abc' is an actual word. So there is a possibility that our users may type 'abc' instead of 'abz' to reach us. For 'abc', the top result is 'abct.us', which is a site of adult in nature. Also our website doesn't feature at all in the results. This is hitting us hard in terms of or brand visibility. So the questions are: How to feature in results of keyword search of 'abc'? Will the following approach work: Buying an available domain 'abc.co.in', and use it to feature in 'abc' results and 301 redirect to 'abz.com' Having 'abc' in the page meta (title and description). This is hard for us, since we need to rethink our taglines and copyrights. 2. If we search for 'abz', Google says "Do you mean abc". Is there a way to not have this suggestion? It would helpful to have some more ideas for this problem.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | manasag
    0
  • Sam.at.Moz


    I've used: "opacity:0;" to hide sections of my content, which are triggered to show (using Javascript) once the user scrolls over these sections. I remember reading a while back that Google essentially ignores content which is hidden from your page (it mentioned they don't index it, so it's close to impossible to rank for it). Is this still the case? Thanks, Sam

    Web Design | | Sam.at.Moz
    0
  • Matthew_smart


    I have been looking into SEO for a few weeks now trying to perfect a homepage. Going through various sources on MOZ, and other examples out there on the internet, I keep seeing that you should have your keyword in the URL of the page. The homepage is the page most people want to rank the highest in google searches, however, you cannot put the keyword in the URL as most home page URLs are simply /. Should I actually make the home like this: www.example.com/key-word-example? I would imagine this would not be the normal for many users and would seem like it's not the home page.

    On-Page Optimization | | Matthew_smart
    0
  • Tormar


    Hi all, what experience do you have with Bit.ly links? Can I use it for backlinking management?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tormar
    3
  • Rhythm_Agency


    My domain is currently targeting the US, but I'm building out sub-folders that will need to geo-target France, England, and Spain. Each country will have it's own sub-folder, and professionally translated (domain.com/france). Other than the hreflang tags, what are other best practices I can implement? Can Google Webmaster tools geo-target by subfolder? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks Justin

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rhythm_Agency
    0
  • KristyKK


    Hi Guys, We are having some major problems with our Google Analytics and MOz account. Due to the large number of ghost/referral spam and crawler bots we have added some heavy filtering to GA. This seems to be working protecting the data from all these problems but also filtering out much needed data that is not coming through. In example, we used to get a hundred visitors a day at the least and now we are down to under ten. ANYBODY PLEASE HELP. HAVE READ THROUGH MANY ARTICLES WITH NO FIND TO PERMANENT SOLID SOLUTION (even willing to go with paid service instead of GA) Thank You so Much, S.M.

    Moz Pro | | KristyKK
    0
  • brantmk


    My organization has several international sites 4 of them of which have translated URLs in either Japanese, Traditional Chinese, German & Canadian French. The hreflang tags we have set up on our United States look something like this: But when you actually go to http://www.domain.co.jp/it-security/ you are 301 redirected to the translated URL version: www.domain.co.jp/it-セキュリティ/
    My question is, will Google still understand that the translated URL is the Alternate URL, or will this present errors? The hreflang tags are automated for each of our pages and would technically be hard to populate the hreflang with the translated URL version. However we could potentially make the hreflang something customized on a page level basis.

    Algorithm Updates | | brantmk
    0
  • DanielKiely6


    Hi guys, I'm having a bit of an issue on a client site that I'm hoping someone can help me with. Basically, the client has two domains, one serving users in the Republic of Ireland (http://www.americanholidays.com), showing Euro prices, and the other serving users in Northern Ireland (http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/) showing £ prices. The issue I'm having is that the URL for the Northern Ireland page has a 302 on it and goes through another 2/3 301 redirects until it resolves as http://www.americanholidays.com, however it does then show the £ prices. You can see the redirect chain here: http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/?page=single&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanholidays.com%2Fgb_en%2F&useragent=1&typeProtocol=11 The homepage is using the Hreflang tag, and pointing search engines to serve the http://www.americanholidays.com/gb_en/ page to users using EN-GB as their language. The page is also using a self-referencing canonical, which I believe may negate the whole Hreflang tag anyway? My main question is - is the fact that the Hreflang for the gb_en page is pointing to a chain of redirects negatively affecting it? (I understand too many redirects are never good). Also, is the canonical negating the Hreflang? Any help/info would be great as I just can't get my head around it! Thanks guys Daniel

    Technical SEO | | DanielKiely6
    0
  • mundsack


    I have a customer, www.xxx.com.  This site has good traffic, low bounce rate (28%), 2:00 min avg time on site, and 45% return visitor rating.  No spam rankings, etc.  Good load time. Another site, www.yyy.com, has sent out a request for them to add them as a new link in www.xxx.com's primary navigation - using a title such as "abc" (not the name of the company or site of yyy.com).   This second site, www.yyy.com, has a bounce rate of 98%, avg time on site is :30, and 10.2% return visitor rate.  No spam flags noted in Open Site explorer.  Plus they are asking other sites similar to www.xxx.com to do the same thing. Questions/Concerns and Feedback appreciated: Will yyy.com's analytics and quality pass back to xxx.com and cause Google or algorithms to flag or penalize xxx.com?  (It ranks #1 for quite a few things.)  The relevancy between the sites is good -same industry, same business objectives. From a usability standpoint, isn't it more appropriate to place a link to another website in a different way? e.g. a promotional graphic wit a link or anchor text links? Isn't it more appropriate to ask another business for links - not using the primary nav of a site?  (It seems yyy.com is essentially asking other sites for 'free advertising/promotion.' Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | mundsack
    0
  • shoesonline


    I’m an SEO for an ecommerce site that sells shoes I have duplicate pages for different colors of the same product (unique URL for each color), Conventionally I have added canonical tags for each page, which direct to a specific product URL My question is what happens when a product which the googlbot is direct to, is out of stock but is still listed in the canonical tag ?

    Technical SEO | | shoesonline
    0
  • Deacyde


    Hello, 1st off, let me explain my client in this case uses BigCommerce, and I don't have access to the backend like most other situations. So I have to rely on BG to handle certain issues. I'm curious if there is much of a difference using domain.com/ as the canonical url while BG currently is redirecting our domain to domain.com. I've been using domain.com/ consistently for the last 6 months, and since we switches stores on Friday, this issue has popped up and has me a bit worried that we'll loose somehow via link juice or overall indexing since this could confuse crawlers. Now some say that the domain url is fine using / or not, as per - https://moz.com/community/q/trailing-slash-and-rel-canonical But I also wanted to see what you all felt about this. What says you?

    Technical SEO | | Deacyde
    0
  • mchoi


    Hi All, I need a little bit of help. We need to optimize our blog's articles Meta titles for SEO which all exceed 100 characters. I was told that if we change the titles, google analytics would split the tracking pages and count the data as 2 pages (old title and new title). Has any of you have this experience before and if so, is there a way to avoid google analytics counting this as two pages? Thanks in advance! Viviana http://analyteguru.com/ http://analyteguru.com/ http://analyteguru.com/

    Reporting & Analytics | | mchoi
    0
  • Ria_


    When an ecommerce site has 200 product pages, this is fine. It's time consuming, but I can write 200 unique paragraphs describing the product and it's not an insane amount of work for one person. But when there are 10,000+ product pages... what is the best way for one person to go about this? Risk the page being thin and just bullet point a couple of "need-to-know" info bits, or take the time to prioritise what products could benefit the most from the unique content and get cracking with a paragraph for each? Or do you just forego having truly unique copy on each product page and just aim to optimise the category pages for the longtail? Just wondering how you guys deal with thousands of product pages really. Starting to feel as if I should re-evaluate my strategy and wanted to get some idea on what others are doing... Notes: Product pages already have reviews, helps with adding more unique user-generated content to each page. There's dynamic content e.g. "You may be interested in...", "Related products", etc.

    On-Page Optimization | | Ria_
    3
  • BeckyKey


    Hey, Does anyone have any advice on how to approach outreach for an ecommerce site? We're in the process of doing user guides, for niche products. I wondered if this was a good angle to approach relevant communities/sites. Or is this too time consuming for little value at the end? Is it PR outreach we should look to focus on? Thank you 🙂

    Branding | | BeckyKey
    0
  • MarketingChimp10


    Hello Moz World, I wanted to get some perspective on this. How many directories are too many directories to list a website. And what is a good Page Rank for submission. Thanks ahead of time for all of the awesome responses. B/R Will H.

    Local Listings | | MarketingChimp10
    1
  • Zuken


    Example: I want to block this URL (which shows up in Webmaster Tools as an error): http://www.siteurl.com/news/events-calendar/usa But not this: http://www.siteurl.com/news/events-calendar/usa/event-name

    Web Design | | Zuken
    0
  • RoxBrock


    I loved the presentation Phil Sharp did about A/B testing using User Testing. I would love to use his company UserTesting.com, but their minimum package is for $7500! I'm a small business and certainly cannot afford that. Is there another option for the small business owner?

    Search Behavior | | RoxBrock
    1
  • Luciana_BAH


    I submitted a sitemap to on Search Console - but noticed that there are duplicate URLs, is that a problem for Google?

    On-Page Optimization | | Luciana_BAH
    0
  • Bob_van_Biezen


    Hi Guys, I'm working on a project (premium-hookahs.nl) where I stumble upon a situation I can’t address. Attached is a screenshot of the crawled pages in Search Console. History: Doing to technical difficulties this webshop didn’t always no index filterpages resulting in thousands of duplicated pages. In reality this webshops has less than 1000 individual pages. At this point we took the following steps to result this: Noindex filterpages. Exclude those filterspages in Search Console and robots.txt. Canonical the filterpages to the relevant categoriepages. This however didn’t result in Google crawling less pages. Although the implementation wasn’t always sound (technical problems during updates) I’m sure this setup has been the same for the last two weeks. Personally I expected a drop of crawled pages but they are still sky high. Can’t imagine Google visits this site 40 times a day. To complicate the situation: We’re running an experiment to gain positions on around 250 long term searches. A few filters will be indexed (size, color, number of hoses and flavors) and three of them can be combined. This results in around 250 extra pages. Meta titles, descriptions, h1 and texts are unique as well. Questions: -          Excluding in robots.txt should result in Google not crawling those pages right? -          Is this number of crawled pages normal for a website with around 1000 unique pages? -          What am I missing? BxlESTT

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bob_van_Biezen
    0
  • Kilgray


    We currently have a a series of help pages that we would like to disallow from our robots txt. The thing is that these help pages are located in our old website, which now has a 301 redirect to current site. Which is the proper way to go around? 1- Add the pages we want to disallow to the robots.txt of the new website? 2- Break the redirect momentarily and add the pages to the robots.txt of the old one? Thanks

    Technical SEO | | Kilgray
    0

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