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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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  • DigitalAnarchy


    There seems to be quite a few articles out there that say iframes cause problems with organic search and that the various bots can't/won't crawl them. Most of the articles are a few years old (including Moz's video sitemap article). I'm wondering if this is still the case with YouTube/Vimeo/etc videos, all of which only offer iFrames as an embed option. I have a hard time believing that a Google property (YT) would offer an embed option that it's own bot couldn't crawl. However, let me know if that is in fact the case. Thanks! Jim

    Technical SEO | | DigitalAnarchy
    0
  • KBC


    Using moz quite some time, but I don't have any crawl data anymore. What happened? (www.kbc.be)
    http://analytics.moz.com/settings/campaign/517920.1128516

    Product Support | | KBC
    0
  • lssi_admin


    I was reading the FAQ on Moz Local and would like clarification about this question/answer: What happens to my listings on the sites in your network if I cancel my Moz Local subscription? Moz Local will simply report to the sites in our network that the listing is no longer under management by one of our customers. In this event, Acxiom and Neustar Localeze will revert your listings to their status prior to your Moz Local subscription. In some cases, your other listings will lose enhanced content like website URL, secondary category information, logos, and other images. Moz Local will not actively remove your listing from our network of sites. You will always have the ability to reclaim your listings manually on each site if you decide to cancel your Moz Local subscription. So let's say my business moved to another location. Then I signed up for a Moz Local subscription, updated my business address, and then did not renew. After I cancel the Moz Local subscription, will my business address in the Acxiom and Localeze listings revert to what it was before I changed it through Moz Local? Please let me know. Thanks!

    Moz Local | | lssi_admin
    0
  • David-Kley


    Confusing title I know, but let me explain. We are in the middle of programming a lot of SEO "action" tools for our site. These will be available for users to help better optimize their sites in SERPs. We were thinking about adding a "Ping" tool based in PHP so users can ping their domain and hopefully get some extra attention/speed up indexing of updates. This would be hosted on a subdomain of our site. My question is: If we get enough users using the product, could that potentially get us blacklisted with Google, Bing etc? Technically it needs to send out the Ping request, and that would be coming from the same IP address that our main site is hosted on. If we end up getting over a 1000 users all trying to send ping requests I don't want to potentially jeopardize our IP. Thoughts?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | David-Kley
    0
  • rich.owings


    I have a client who is going to split their retail and wholesale business and rebrand the retail biz. So let’s say they are going to move everything from currentdomain.com to either retaildomain.com or wholesaledomain.com. The most important business for them is the retail site, so they want to pass on as much ranking power as they can from currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com. I see two choices here: We can 301 redirect all of currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com, and then redirect any wholesale pages to wholesaledomain.com. The advantage is that we can use GSC’s change of address tool to report the change to Google. The downside is that there is a redirect chain (2 hops) to wholesaledomain.com. Would this confuse Google? Or we can 301 redirect page by page from currentdomain.com to the appropriate page on either new site. This means no redirect chains but it also means that we can’t use GSC’s change of address tool. Which would you do and why? And is there another option that I'm missing? I appreciate any insights you can share.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rich.owings
    1
  • WickVideo


    MailChimp, one of the biggest brands in online marketing doesn't use an SSL certificate on their homepage...Is there a simple reason for this? Wouldn't they get an SEO boost from having one?

    On-Page Optimization | | WickVideo
    1
  • AdamThompson


    In Moz's domain recommendations, they recommend subdirectories instead of subdomains (which agrees with my experience), but make an exception for language-specific websites: Since search engines keep different metrics for domains than they do subdomains, it is recommended that webmasters place link-worthy content like blogs in subfolders rather than subdomains. (i.e. www.example.com/blog/ rather than blog.example.com) The notable exceptions to this are language-specific websites. (i.e., en.example.com for the English version of the website). Why are language-specific websites excepted from this advice? Why are subdomains preferable for language-specific websites? Google's advice says subdirectories are fine for language-specific websites, and GSC allows geographic settings at the subdirectory level (which may or may not even be needed, since language-specific sites may not be geographic-specific), so I'm unsure why Moz would suggest using subdirectories in this case.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamThompson
    0
  • dsumter


    We have received a lot of backlinks over the years by users putting links on their websites to their home pages on our site, eg: our.domain/user1 our.domain/user2 … our.domain/user100000 There are 10’s of thousands of these backlinks, all natural, but many of them come from blogs that are completely outside of our niche. Only a small percentage of our backlinks 1% to 5% could actually be coming from pages related to our niche, the other 95%+ could be users just linking to their home pages. Could this really hurt us..? We have 1000’s of backlinks related to our niche, yet we’ve noticed that some competitors with less than 50 backlinks can outrank us for certain keywords.. Also related, we’ve noticed these user links popping up on a lot of spammy sites, directories, etc. We didn’t create them but we’re disavowing them now to be safe. So this could also be hitting our rankings.

    Link Building | | dsumter
    0
  • seosogood


    Hi there! I've been checking rankings in UK and Ireland for the last months and I found something really interesting... "Belfast + keyword" - UK = 2º position / Ireland = 1º position "keyword + Belfast" - UK = 14º position / Ireland = 1º position *(same keyword) I don't understand how it is possible... Website is not geo-targeted so Google has no preference for any of these countries... Any ideas about why does it happen?

    Search Behavior | | seosogood
    1
  • Taiger


    duplicate content issue: staging url has been indexed by google ( many pages) and need to know how to remove them from the serps. Bing sees the staging url as moved permanently Google sees the staging urls (240 results) and redirects to the correct url Should I be concerned about duplicate content and request Google to remove the staging url removed Thanks Guys

    Technical SEO | | Taiger
    0
  • neilhenderson


    Hi, I'm developing an accommodation site with a limited number of properties in 8 categories.  I had been looking at making the properties blog posts and then using category function to show lists but its going to require a lot of customisation and I have seo concerns about the dynamic content as the category page is crucial. As I don't have a lot to add and listings will remain the same my latest thought was to create all as pages.  However if I create a page with a list of 12 properties on a category page is there anyway of adding some sorting criteria to that page (would be 7 options - swimming pool, near beach, on site creche, budget, mid-range, luxury) Thanks for any tips Neil

    Technical SEO | | neilhenderson
    0
  • neilhenderson


    i notice increasing cases of portfolio style boxes on site designs (especially wordpress templates) where you have an image and text appears after hover over (sorry for my basic terminology).  does this text which appears after hover over have much search engine value or as it doesnt immediately appear on pageload does it carry slightly less weight like tabbed content?   any advice appreciated thanks neil

    On-Page Optimization | | neilhenderson
    0
  • neilhenderson


    hi i am creating a new accommodation site and will have some great videos on it (fly bys of local beaches and virtual tours of hotels etc). from an seo perspective i have two questions: 1. should i host on my own site or youtube/vimeo  - its a new site but in the long run i want my site to get the credit 2. i will be giving the hotels the chance to embed and video content i have on their own sites.  does this help my own seo juice and if so is there a particular way it should be done.  there will be around 90 well established local hotels in total so figured it should add up.

    Link Building | | neilhenderson
    0
  • 1akal


    I have a website from Canada based, and need only Canadian traffic. But i am getting traffic from USA more than Canada. I have submitted site on Canada based business listing, Classified and rest of sites. But still getting traffic from USA. Please suggest me what should I do?

    Local Website Optimization | | 1akal
    4
  • Jo_Da


    Hey guys, we run a local gym in Germany located in Nuremberg called: "STUDIO N°1 - natürlich fit". Our domain is: www.studio-no1.de We are currently working on a new website since our current Website isn't really SEO optimized. Until then I would like to start optimizing some off-page attributes. As far as I know one of the main points in Local SEO is that your firm is registered at important directories. In our case we are already registred in most of the important german directories. The problem is that our oficicial company name has a special charakter included. This means that in some cases we have "N°1" and in some others "No1! Our Google Business name for example has "N°1", facbook not (no special charakter allowed). Germanys most important site for listings: Gelbeseiten, doesn't even allow special charakters in brand names.... On which name should I focus to get all the business listings to have identical NAP informations? Does it even matter? Schould I focus on "STUDIO No1 - natürlich fit" or "STUDIO N°1 - natürlich fit"? I hope you could understand my problem. Big Thanks Jonas

    Local Listings | | Jo_Da
    0
  • AU-SEO


    Hi MozCommunity, I have been tearing my hair out trying to figure out why BING wont index a test site we're running. We're in the midst of upgrading one of our sites from archaic technology and infrastructure to a fully responsive version.
    This new site is a fully AngularJS driven site. There's currently over 2 million pages and as we're developing the new site in the backend, we would like to test out the tech with Google and Bing. We're looking at a pre-render option to be able to create static HTML snapshots of the pages that we care about the most and will be available on the sitemap.xml.gz However, with 3 completely static HTML control pages established, where we had a page with no robots metatag on the page, one with the robots NOINDEX metatag in the head section and one with a dynamic header (X-ROBOTS meta) on a third page with the NOINDEX directive as well. We expected the one without the meta tag to at least get indexed along with the homepage of the test site. In addition to those 3 control pages, we had 3 pages where we had an internal search results page with the dynamic NOINDEX header. A listing page with no such header and the homepage with no such header. With Google, the correct indexation occured with only 3 pages being indexed, being the homepage, the listing page and the control page without the metatag. However, with BING, there's nothing. No page indexed at all. Not even the flat static HTML page without any robots directive. I have a valid sitemap.xml file and a robots.txt directive open to all engines across all pages yet, nothing. I used the fetch as Bingbot tool, the SEO analyzer Tool and the Preview Page Tool within Bing Webmaster Tools, and they all show a preview of the requested pages. Including the ones with the dynamic header asking it not to index those pages. I'm stumped. I don't know what to do next to understand if BING can accurately process dynamic headers or AngularJS content. Upon checking BWT, there's definitely been crawl activity since it marked against the XML sitemap as successful and put a 4 next to the number of crawled pages. Still no result when running a site: command though. Google responded perfectly and understood exactly which pages to index and crawl. Anyone else used dynamic headers or AngularJS that might be able to chime in perhaps with running similar tests? Thanks in advance for your assistance....

    Web Design | | AU-SEO
    0
  • Lauren_E


    I have a client who offers multiple services, the current website is already huge because they have added on so many new offerings in the last year and want everything above the fold. As I am building out the sitemap for a re-design, they continue to add more services. (HVAC, Plumbing, Solar, Windows, Electrical) I am working on a sitemap for a re-build, but I am still well over 100 pages deep with huge menu's. **My question is what are the SEO pros/cons of breaking the site up into multiple websites? **

    Local Website Optimization | | Lauren_E
    2
  • patilhimanshu


    We use og (open graph) titles in lieu of meta titles. Is there any downside to using just one. Should we be using both og and meta titles on our page. Appreciate any insight. Himanshu

    Technical SEO | | patilhimanshu
    0
  • 94501


    In marking paid ads as "advertisement" for the sake of Google organic, if you have a block of small ads, do you have to mark each and every one as an advertisement? For instance, let's say you have a block of small ads in the right column... mark each one or just at the top or what? Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 94501
    0
  • Happy-SEO


    Hi Guys, I have a case which seems to occur more often for our customers. The websites of our customers seem to receive tons of backlinks from websites all over the world (China, Russia, Ukrain, etc). It’s spam we never asked for, we didn’t buy any dodgy linkbuilding packages or anything. Do any of you guys have experience with this matter? We try to disavow the links but it takes too much time and we will never manage to disavow 100% of all links. Examples are www.keukensduitsland.nl and www.m2beveiliging.nl Hope anyone has experience and maybe even solutions for this matter. Thanks!

    Link Building | | Happy-SEO
    1
  • Cocoonfxmedia


    Hi I have 100's of URL's appearing in Search Console for example: ?p=1_1 These go to on to 5_200 etc.. I have tried to do htaccess and the mod rewrite is on as I can redirect directories to the root i.e RewriteRule ^web_example(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,N,L] However I have tried all kinds of variations to redirect ?p= and either it doesn't work at all or it crashes the website. Can anyone point me in the right direction to fix this.

    Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia
    0
  • 4RS_John


    We're a directory of industry-specific services, so a lot of people find their way to our site by searching something like "tire repair near me." For every keyword we rank for, ("tire repair"), we also rank for the "near me" version, ("tire repair near me"). I'm looking for opinions on if is worth spending ~50% of the keywords included in my plan to track these "near me" keywords, or if we would be better off tracking some of the most important "near me" keywords, and some of those same base keywords on a local basis for major population centres, (for example "tire repair nyc"). What does the forum think?

    Local SEO | | 4RS_John
    0
  • netzkern_AG


    Hi, Back in September, I added a function that sets an anchor on each subheading (h[2-6]) and creates a Table of content that links to each of those anchors. These anchors did show up in the SERPs as JumpTo Links. Fine. Back then I also changed the canonicals to a slightly different structur and meanwhile there was some massive increase in the number of indexed pages - WAY over the top - which has since been fixed by removing (410) a complete section of the site. However ... there are still ~34.000 pages indexed to what really are more like 4.000 plus (all properly canonicalised). Naturally I am wondering, what google thinks it is indexing. The number is just way of and quite inexplainable. So I was wondering: Does Google save JumpTo links as unique pages? Also, does anybody know any method of actually getting all the pages in the google index? (Not actually existing sites via Screaming Frog etc, but actual pages in the index - all methods I found sadly do not work.) Finally: Does somebody have any other explanation for the incongruency in indexed vs. actual pages? Thanks for your replies! Nico

    Technical SEO | | netzkern_AG
    0
  • RoxBrock


    I am currently using BufferApp to schedule my social media posts. My scheduling gets messed up at least once per month, where I lose posts or days are skipped, etc. without any changes (and even when I can see the expected schedule). I have used Hootesuite in the past and I like it, but I prefer Buffer when it works. Is there something else that works as good as Buffer used to? Thank you.

    Social Media | | RoxBrock
    0
  • ZaddleMarketing


    I have just come across a few blogs on a website that have outbound links that open in the browser window (and therefore direct people off site to these links) (there are also other outbound links that open in a new window)- is there a quick and easy way to check which outbounds links open in a new window and which open in the browser window? Much obliged Liam

    Content Development | | ZaddleMarketing
    0
  • charlie007


    Hi there, I've spent hours reading posts on duplicate content and googling this but I'm still not sure what to do. We created a site that has two WP installs for a company with two different locations - the landing page is website.com and links to WP install 1 (website.com/city1),  and WP install 2 (website.com/city2). They specifically wanted two different sites so they could be managed by staff at either location. However some of the pages have the same content - ie. services, policies, etc. so all of those are showing errors for duplicate content. All pages have different city-specific URL's and meta-descriptions but that clearly doesn't help. We can't redirect the "duplicate" pages because then it would take the user to the other city's specific site. Is there anything we can do?? Is this going to significantly damage rankings? Thanks kindly for any help you can provide.

    Moz Bar | | charlie007
    1
  • Online-Marketing-Guy


    Hey there, 
    certain pages of our website have mobile versions like m.mysite.com/content-xyz. On the desktop pages (i.e. mysite.com/content-xyz) we have "rich snippets for ratings" marked up and displayed in SERPs. However the ratings also appear in mobile search results when SERPS reference the mobile version of the page (m.mysite.com/content-xyz) which doesn't have any ratings or markup? I am trying to figure out how Google treats mobile versions of a page in relation to the desktop version in relation to structured data (breadcrumbs etc.)? Would you always mark up both versions to be the same? Any ideas and thoughts on this are greatly appreciated. Cheers, Jochen rich Snippets for Ratings

    On-Page Optimization | | Online-Marketing-Guy
    1
  • Terakeet


    Occasionally some of our clients receive editorial mentions and links in which the author adds utm parameters to the outbound links on their blog. The links are always natural, never compensated, and followed.  However, they are sometimes listed as utm_source=affiliate even thought we have no existing affiliate relationship with the author.  My practice has been to ask the author to add a rel="norewrite" attribute to the link to remove any trace of the word affiliate. I have read that utm parameters do not affect link juice transfer, however, given the inaccurate "affiliate" source, I wouldn't want Google to misunderstand and think that we are compensating people for followed editorial links. Should I continue following this practice, or is it fine to leave these links as they are? Thanks!

    Industry News | | Terakeet
    0
  • BeckyKey


    Hi I work on an ecommerce site and wondered if anyone had tested grid view vs. list view on product listing pages? We use list view, but I think grid view might work better. Thanks

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | BeckyKey
    0
  • SatishSEOSiren


    Hello Every one, I have a Wordpress website in which i installed All in SEO plugin and wrote meta titles and descriptions for each and every page and posts and submitted website to index. But after Google crawl the Meta Titles and Descriptions shown by Google are something different that are not found in Content. Even i verified the Cached version of the website and gone through Source code that crawled at that moment. the meta title which i have written is present there. Apart from this, the same URL's are displaying perfect meta titles and descriptions which i wrote in Yahoo and Bing Search Engines. Can anyone explain me how to resolve this issue. Website URL: thenewyou (dot) in Regards,

    Technical SEO | | SatishSEOSiren
    0

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