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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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  • the-gate-films


    I have a eCommerce site and the site structure is domain/product-name rather than domain/product-category/product-name Do you think this will have a negative impact SEO Wise? I have seen that some of my individual product pages do get better rankings than my categories.

    Technical SEO | | the-gate-films
    0
  • Sequelmed


    Hi There, I have my main site : example.com and a related blog https://blog.example.com/ My management does not believe frequent content posting on the example.com My Queries 1- Will it help boost ranking of **example.com **if we share frequent content on our blog https://blog.example.com/? How much impact it has? 2- Every body says content is the king, Ok fine, but when you are not allowed to share it on the main corporate site, then where to share it? Blog and social media sites? please help. 3- We are in a business where clients do not bother to go on sites and read, so in this scenario is it correct to say that you hav to create the content for search engine consumption even when your clients dont need it/or have not in the habit of reading it? Hope somebody will enligten me caught in catch 22. Regards Tanveer

    Content Development | | Sequelmed
    1
  • Netsociety


    I'm researching Schema opportunities for a bank, but besides the shema markup available today (like bankorcreditunion) and developments with FIBO, I can find no answer as to the effect of tagging interest rates and such in terms of SERP/CTR performance or visibility. Does anyone have a case study to share or some insight on the matter?

    Technical SEO | | Netsociety
    0
  • Sable_Group


    I am trying to discover what users are searching for and what keywords drive traffic to our site.

    Keyword Research | | Sable_Group
    0
  • ben_dpp


    I've just been running a report on a site and noticed that while they have a .co.uk domain it is hosted on a server in the United States and just wondered if anyone was aware, if the physical location of a server mattered to search engines for ranking purposes especially with local search?

    Local SEO | | ben_dpp
    0
  • Brian_Dowd


    Just a question (or questions) I have wondered about. What's the difference, besides the actual encoding, between the three? Why have three? Why not just the one? Seems to me that Microdata is the easiest, but maybe I am wrong. Is there a reason to use one versus another? I have not found anything explaining this on schema.org - I suppose this is just a discussion versus getting one right or wrong answer. I am just curious of the opinions of people in the SEO MOZ community. Unless of course there is one answer. I'll take that too.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brian_Dowd
    1
  • Mike.Bean


    Say your on a e-commerce category page "Shirts" every lower level category has "shirts" in it such as: T-shirt, long sleeve shirt, sweat shirt, v-neck shirt, and so on. Is this page going to be penalized in google for the keyword "shirts" just because it is in the title and on the page a thousand times because i'm targetting words like "long sleeve shirt? and if it is, will the "long sleeve shirt" keyword be negatively affected as well? Answer much appreciated,
    Thanks in advance.

    On-Page Optimization | | Mike.Bean
    0
  • MarketingChimp10


    Hello Moz World, I was researching different ways to expand a client's SEO beyond his brick and mortar location. I listen to a webinar by Brightlocal on tactics I could use to help improve rankings. (Great Webinar, nothing really relevant till after the 30 minute mark). One of the host recommended an app called Nearby Now which will help a local service provider rank in multiple towns by allowing clients to provide a testimonial in realtime in the city that the service was provided and link it back to the website. I sat down with a customer service rep, and it sounds like its a great low cost solution for service providers to rank outside of their brick and mortar location. My question, Has anyone used it? Have you had a good experience? Can anyone recommend a better app? As always, thank you for your feedback and time. Best Regards, Will H.

    Reviews and Ratings | | MarketingChimp10
    0
  • ZeroGravityMarketing


    The keyword rankings bar graph is a great visual representation to provide clients, but most clients like to see the past 13 months (vs. 12 months) so they can compare the current month to last year. It'd be great if the latest [monthly] keyword rankings showed all the way back to the same month last year (Ex. If I was looking at the keyword rankings for December 2015, all the way back to December 2014 would be graphed out.)

    Feature Requests | | ZeroGravityMarketing
    0
  • Ria_


    Seems like a stupid question, but one that I never really gave much thought about before. How exactly does Google treat special characters in titles? Do they all get seen as spaces? e.g. Does Awesome Product - OptionA/OptionB/OptionC available get seen the same way as **Awesome Product - OptionA, OptionB, **OptionC available ? Or even **Awesome Product - OptionA OptionB **OptionC available ? Or will Google see the first title as **OptionA/OptionB/OptionC **being a whole "keyword" due to there being no space between them? Like I've always just assumed that with apostrophised words will be seen as keyword s. And when using commas, there's always a space after the comma anyway. Are all "special characters" treated the same?

    Keyword Research | | Ria_
    0
  • TheaterMania


    Hi there, a disgruntled ex-employee requested that my company (a large publisher) unpublish a large number of at this point fairly dated articles. We're going to honor his request. The traffic numbers to these articles aren't significant, but I wanted to understand the SEO ramifications. Two questions: 1. These articles in sum account for 0.51% of site traffic. Will removing them outright cut off just that chunk of traffic? Or will it also affect search rankings for all of our remaining articles? 2. How should we handle unpublished URLs? Is it better to redirect the user to our homepage or a friendly, recirculation-oriented 404?

    Branding | | TheaterMania
    0
  • ClaudioHeilborn


    Hi MOZ users and friends. I have a website that have a php template developed by ourselves, and a wordpress blog in /blog/ subdirectory. Actually we have a sitemap.xml file in the root domain where are all the subsections and blog's posts. We upgrade manually the sitemap, once a month, adding the new posts created in the blog. I want to automate this process , so i created a sitemap index with two sitemaps inside it. One is the old sitemap without the blog's posts and a new one created with "Google XML Sitemap" wordpress plugin, inside the /blog/ subdirectory. That is, in the sitemap_index.xml file i have: Domain.com/sitemap.xml (old sitemap after remove blog posts urls) Domain.com/blog/sitemap.xml (auto-updatable sitemap create with Google XML plugin) Now i have to submit this sitemap index to Google Search Console, but i want to be completely sure about how to do this. I think that the only that i have to do is delete the old sitemap on Search Console and upload the new sitemap index, is it ok ?

    Technical SEO | | ClaudioHeilborn
    0
  • RosemaryB


    Recently one of my clients was hesitant to move their new store locator pages to a subdomain.  They have some SEO knowledge and cited the whiteboard Friday article at https://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical-vs-301-how-to-structure-links-optimally-for-seo-whiteboard-friday. While it is very possible that Rand Fiskin has a valid point I felt hesitant to let this be the final verdict.  John Mueller from Google Webmaster Central claims that Google is indifferent towards subdomains vs subfolders. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h1t5fs5VcI#t=50 Also this SEO disagreed with Rand Fiskin’s post about using sub folders instead of sub domains.  He claims that Rand Fiskin ran only 3 experiments over 2 years, while he has tested multiple subdomain vs subfolder experiments over 10 years and observed no difference. http://www.seo-theory.com/2015/02/06/subdomains-vs-subfolders-what-are-the-facts-on-rankings/ Here is another post from the Website Magazine.  They too believe that there is no SEO benefits of a subdomain vs subfolder infrastructure.  Proper SEO and infrastructure is what is most important. http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2015/03/10/seo-inquiry-subdomains-subdirectories.aspx Again Rand might be right, but I rather provide a recommendation to my client based on an authoritative source such as a Google engineer like John Mueller. Does anybody else have any thoughts and/or insight about this?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
    3
  • MNKid15


    We are a US based company that ships only to US and Canada. We've had two issues arise recently from foreign countries (Russia namely) that caused us to block access to our site from anyone attempting to interact with our store from outside of the US and Canada. 1. The first issue we encountered were fraudulent orders originating from Russia (using stolen card data) and then shipping to a US based International shipping aggregator. 2. The second issue was a consistent flow of Russian based "new customer" entries. My question to the MOZ community is this: are their any unintended consequences, from an SEO perspective, to blocking the viewing of our store from certain countries.

    Technical SEO | | MNKid15
    0
  • Lobtec


    Hi, I just recently started getting errors when using the API. The request back contains zeros for all the keys except PDA which is a new to me. Haven't changed anything in the code and the authorization seems to work fine. Is this something on my end? However, I don't get for all the requests, perhaps half of the time. Example of the return: {"fmrp":0,"fmrr":0,"pda":27.7812456171725224,"ueid":0,"uid":0,"uipl":0,"umrp":0,"umrr":0,"upa":1} Thanks in advance! /Mathias

    API | | Lobtec
    0
  • VicMarcusNWI


    Here's a scenario for you: The site is running WordPress and the images are uploaded to the media section. You can set image attributes there such as the Description & Alt Tag. Let's say you'd like to reuse the same image in two different blog posts. The image keeps the same Description & Alt Tag associated with it in the media section. Would this be considered duplicate content? What would be the best practice in this case to reuse the same image in multiple posts?

    Content Development | | VicMarcusNWI
    0
  • Rich_Coffman


    My client owns a brand and came to me with two ecommerce websites. One website sells his specific brand product and the other sells general products in his niche (including his branded product). Question is my client wants to rank each website for basically the same set of keywords. We have two choices I'd like feedback on- Choice 1 is to rank both websites for same keyword groupings so even if they are both on page 1 of the serps then they take up more real estate and share of voice. are there any negative possibilities here? Choice 2 is to recommend a shift in the position of the general industry website to bring it further away from the industry niche by focusing on different keywords so they don't compete with each other in the serps. I'm for choice 1, what about you?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman
    0
  • the-gate-films


    Does anyone know of any changes SEOwise when running an adult toy site versus a normal eCommerce site? Is there any tips or suggestions that are worth knowing to achieve rankings faster? Thanks,

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-gate-films
    0
  • SEOguy1


    Hi this is my first question in here I truly hope someone will be able to help. It's quite a detailed problem and I'd love to be able to fix it through your kind help. It regards htaccess files and robot.txt files and 902 errors. In October I created a WordPress website from what was previously a non-WordPress site it was quite dated. I had built the new site on a sub-domain I created on the existing site so that the live site could remain live whilst I created on the subdomain.  The site I built on the subdomain is now live but I am concerned about the existence of the old htaccess files and robots txt files and wonder if I should just delete the old ones to leave the just the new on the new site. I created new htaccess and robots.txt files on the new site and have left the old htaccess files there. Just to mention that all the old content files are still sat on the server under a folder called 'old files' so I am assuming that these aren't affecting matters. I access the htaccess and robots.txt files by clicking on 'public html' via ftp I did a Moz crawl and was astonished to 902 network error saying that it wasn't possible to crawl the site, but then I was alerted by Moz later on to say that the report was ready..I see 641 crawl errors ( 449 medium priority | 192 high priority | Zero low priority ).  Please see attached image. Each of the errors seems to have status code 200; this seems to be applying to mainly the images on each of the pages: eg domain.com/imagename . The new website is built around the 907 Theme which has some page sections on the home page, and parallax sections on the home page and throughout the site. To my knowledge the content and the images on the pages are not duplicated because I have made each page as unique and original as possible.  The report says 190 pages have been duplicated so I have no clue how this can be or how to approach fixing this. Since October when the new site was launched, approx 50% of incoming traffic has dropped off at the home page and that is still the case, but the site still continues to get new traffic according to Google Analytics statistics. However Bing Yahoo and Google show a low level of Indexing and exposure which may be indicative of the search engines having difficulty crawling the site.  In Google Analytics in Webmaster Tools, the screen text reports no crawl errors. W3TC is a WordPress caching plugin which I installed just a few days ago to speed up page speed, so I am not querying anything here about W3TC unless someone spots that this might be a problem, but like I said there have been problems re traffic dropping off when visitors arrive on the home page. The Yoast SEO plugin is being used. I have included information about the htaccess and robots.txt files below. The pages on the subdomain are pointing to the live domain as has been explained to me by the person who did the site migration. I'd like the site to be free from pages and files that shouldn't be there and I feel that the site needs a clean up as well as knowing if the robots.txt and htaccess files that are included in the old site should actually be there or if they should be deleted... ok here goes with the information in the files. Site 1) refers to the current website. Site 2) refers to the subdomain. Site 3 refers to the folder that contains all the old files from the old non-WordPress file structure. **************** 1) htaccess on the current site: ********************* BEGIN W3TC Browser Cache <ifmodule mod_deflate.c=""><ifmodule mod_headers.c="">Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary</ifmodule>
    <ifmodule mod_filter.c="">AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css text/x-component application/x-javascript application/javascript text/javascript text/x-js text/html text/richtext image/svg+xml text/plain text/xsd text/xsl text/xml image/x-icon application/json
    <ifmodule mod_mime.c=""># DEFLATE by extension
    AddOutputFilter DEFLATE js css htm html xml</ifmodule></ifmodule></ifmodule> END W3TC Browser Cache BEGIN W3TC CDN <filesmatch ".(ttf|ttc|otf|eot|woff|font.css)$"=""><ifmodule mod_headers.c="">Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"</ifmodule></filesmatch> END W3TC CDN BEGIN W3TC Page Cache core <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} gzip
    RewriteRule .* - [E=W3TC_ENC:_gzip]
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} w3tc_preview [NC]
    RewriteRule .* - [E=W3TC_PREVIEW:_preview]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
    RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} =""
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /$
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !(comment_author|wp-postpass|w3tc_logged_out|wordpress_logged_in|wptouch_switch_toggle) [NC]
    RewriteCond "%{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/wp-content/cache/page_enhanced/%{HTTP_HOST}/%{REQUEST_URI}/_index%{ENV:W3TC_PREVIEW}.html%{ENV:W3TC_ENC}" -f
    RewriteRule .* "/wp-content/cache/page_enhanced/%{HTTP_HOST}/%{REQUEST_URI}/_index%{ENV:W3TC_PREVIEW}.html%{ENV:W3TC_ENC}" [L]</ifmodule> END W3TC Page Cache core BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress ....(((I have 7 301 redirects in place for old page url's to link to new page url's))).... #Force non-www:
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.co.uk [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301] **************** 1) robots.txt on the current site: ********************* User-agent: *
    Disallow:
    Sitemap: http://domain.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml **************** 2) htaccess in the subdomain folder: ********************* Switch rewrite engine off in case this was installed under HostPay. RewriteEngine Off SetEnv DEFAULT_PHP_VERSION 53 DirectoryIndex index.cgi index.php BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /WPnewsiteDee/
    RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule . /subdomain/index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress **************** 2) robots.txt in the subdomain folder: ********************* this robots.txt file is empty **************** 3) htaccess in the Old Site folder: ********************* Deny from all *************** 3) robots.txt in the Old Site folder: ********************* User-agent: *
    Disallow: / I have tried to be thorough so please excuse the length of my message here. I really hope one of you great people in the Moz community can help me with a solution. I have SEO knowledge I love SEO but I have not come across this before and I really don't know where to start with this one. Best Regards to you all and thank you for reading this. moz-site-crawl-report-image_zpsirfaelgm.jpg

    Moz Pro | | SEOguy1
    0
  • xeonet32


    Hello, How can I see which videos from Youtube that has my domain inserted in their description url drive traffic to my domain? I can see in GA how many visitors are coming from Youtube to my domain, but I can't see what Youtube video pages has driven traffic. Any help?

    Moz Pro | | xeonet32
    0
  • agencepicnic


    Hi everyone, as a way to find new business leads I thought about targeting websites that have poor meta descriptions or where they are simply missing. A quick look at SERPs shows this is still a major issue for many businesses. Is there any way I can quickly find pages for which meta description is lacking? Thank you! Best regards, Florian

    Technical SEO | | agencepicnic
    0
  • AABMarketing_Frank


    Dear all, One of the sites I'm monitoring receives a lot of traffic from image searches or images that appear in universal search results. On Dec 12th, 2015, the bounce rate for these sessions went from around 30% the day before to around 87%. See screen shot below. Did anybody notice similar bounces in the bounce rate? Did Google change something in the way that image search is handled? Looking forward to your ideas! large?v=mpbl-1&px=999

    Reporting & Analytics | | AABMarketing_Frank
    0
  • rijwielcashencarry040


    Dear Communtiy, I am trying to improve the SEO ratings for my website www.rijwielcashencarry.nl (magento). My next step will be implementing robots txt to exclude some crawling pages.
    Does anybody have a good magento robots txt for me? And what need i copy exactly? Thanks everybody! Greetings, Bob

    Technical SEO | | rijwielcashencarry040
    0
  • Solid_Gold


    Context Our website has a large number of crawl issues stemming from duplicate page content (source: Moz). According to an SEO firm which recently audited our website, some amount of these crawl issues are due to URL parameter usage. They have recommended that we "make sure every page has a Rel Canonical tag that points to the non-parameter version of that URL…parameters should never appear in Canonical tags." Here's an example URL where we have parameters in our canonical tag... http://www.chasing-fireflies.com/costumes-dress-up/womens-costumes/ rel="canonical" href="http://www.chasing-fireflies.com/costumes-dress-up/womens-costumes/?pageSize=0&pageSizeBottom=0" /> Our website runs on IBM WebSphere v 7. Questions Why it is important that the rel canonical tag points to a non-parameter URL? What is the extent of the negative impact from having rel canonicals pointing to URLs including parameters? Any advice for correcting this? Thanks for any help!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Solid_Gold
    1
  • karl62


    Hi, I am currently working on a large car dealership website. I have just had a Moz crawl through and its flagging a lot of duplicate page content issues, these are mostly for used car pages. How can I get round this as the site stocks many of the same car, model, colour, age, millage etc. Only unique thing about them is the reg plate. How do I get past this duplicate issue if all the info is relatively the same? Anyone experienced this issue when working on a car dealership website? Thank you.

    Technical SEO | | karl62
    1
  • RosemaryB


    A client of our wants to manage business listings for three locations in China.   We wanted to submit to Baidu but from what I've learned this is highly regulated (you live in China, pay a fee and call them to confirm). This is the only article I could find about submitting to Baidu: http://www.nanjingmarketinggroup.com/blog/baidu/how-can-baidu-maps-help-my-business Are there any conduit or 3rd party services available that can handle this? Thanks

    Local Listings | | RosemaryB
    0
  • italiansoc


    Community, I would be interested to see if anyone has been seeing any experiments, experience documentation, or other data that would give context around the impact of pointing backlinks not just to your money page / home page but distribute it across pages. When doing competitive research I often run into competition which has lower domain strength and page rank but a link profile that is more spread out across their domain; these competitors often outrank my site despite their individual page properties being weaker. Any reference to existing documented experiments, personal experience or guidance is welcome.

    Link Building | | italiansoc
    0
  • lcourse


    How does decimal rounding of reviews  to stars work in ios appstore?
    Starting from which average review score to get full 5 star rating? Duolingo has a 5 star rating, but I doubt that they really have an all time  review average larger than 4,75. In the google playstore their average of the android version is 4,6. Does anybody know how apple calculates the star ratings or has an URL reference where this is explained?

    Reviews and Ratings | | lcourse
    0
  • Jubaer96


    If I get several backlinks from same web 2.0 (wordpress, tumblr or so on) will it be beneficial as 1 ? or each backlink will equal? if you say, "will count as 1 cause from same domain" then why don't google give you credit for getting link from 96 DA site? (wordpress)

    Local SEO | | Jubaer96
    1

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