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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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  • Malika1


    Hi MOZers, This probably is a dumb question but I have a case where the robots.tags has an image url blocked but this image is used on a page (lets call it Page A) which can be indexed. If the image on Page A has an Alt tags, then how is this information digested by crawlers? A) would Google totally ignore the image and the ALT tags information? OR B) Google would consider the ALT tags information? I am asking this because all the images on the website are blocked by robots.txt at the moment but I would really like website crawlers to crawl the alt tags information. Chances are that I will ask the webmaster to allow indexing of images too but I would like to understand what's happening currently. Looking forward to all your responses 🙂 Malika

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika1
    1
  • Virginia-Girtz


    Hi everyone, I've been researching for the past hour and I cannot find a definitive answer anywhere! Can someone tell me if page anchors affect SEO at all? I have a client that has 9 page anchors on one landing page on their website - which means if you were to scroll through their website, the page is really really long! I always thought that by using page anchors instead of sending users through to a dedicated landing page, ranking for those keywords makes it harder because a search spider will read all the content on that landing page and not know how to rank for individual keywords? Am I wrong? The client in particular sells furniture, so on their landing page they have page anchors that jump the user down to "tables" or "chairs" or "lighting" for example. You can then click on one of the product images listed in that section of the page anchor and go through to an individual product page. Can anyone shed any light on this? Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz
    1
  • wearehappymedia


    Hello, Moz is showing that a site has duplicate content - which appears to be because of tags and categories. It is a relatively new site, with only a few blog publications so far. This means that the same articles are displayed under a number of different tags and categories... Is this something I should worry about, or just wait until I have more content? The 'tag' and 'category' pages are not really pages I would expect or aim for anyone to find in google results anyway. Would be glad to here any advice / opinions on this Thanks!

    On-Page Optimization | | wearehappymedia
    1
  • SylviaH


    Hi, I'm trying to setup hreflang for 2 domains.  One is purely a US site and the other domain has the language-country as subdomains. For example: http://www.websiteUSA.com (Targets English - USA) https://www.websiteINT.com/en-CA (Targets English - Canada) https://www.websiteINT.com/fr-CA (Targets French - Canada) https://www.websiteINT/es (Targets Spanish) ..and so on and so forth for about 12 of these international URLs. I created an XML sitemap that looks something like this: <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><url><loc>http://www.websiteUSA.com</loc></url></urlset> <url><loc>https://www.websiteINT.com/en-CA</loc></url> <url><loc>https://www.websiteINT.com/fr-CA</loc></url> Question 1:  Is this correct?  In my actual file, I have all the countries listed and self-referencing. Question 2:  I'm hosting this file at https://www.websiteINT.com/hreflang.xml AND at http://www.websiteUSA.com/hreflang.xml.  Is this correct? Question 3:  Will this help the SERPs direct english speakers from the US to http://www.websiteUSA.com while show SERPs for say English Speakers in Canada to https://www.websiteINT.com/en-CA? Question 4:  For some reason, when I put up the xml site, it only listed each URL once instead of the full XML file.  Should I have uploaded a text file instead?  It doesn't seem to render correctly. Thank you!

    International SEO | | SylviaH
    0
  • ReSEOlve


    Hi I am getting these show up in WMT crawl error any help would be very much appreciated | ?escaped_fragment=Meditation-find-peace-within/csso/55991bd90cf2efdf74ec3f60 | 404 | 12/5/15 |
    | | 2 | mobile/?escaped_fragment= | 404 | 10/26/15 |
    | | 3 | ?escaped_fragment=Tips-for-a-balanced-lifestyle/csso/1 | 404 | 12/1/15 |
    | | 4 | ?escaped_fragment=My-favorite-yoga-spot/csso/5598e2130cf2585ebcde3b9a | 404 | 12/1/15 |
    | | 5 | ?escaped_fragment=blog/c19s6 | 404 | 11/29/15 |
    | | 6 | ?escaped_fragment=blog/c19s6/Tag/yoga | 404 | 11/30/15 |
    | | 7 | ?escaped_fragment=Inhale-exhale-and-once-again/csso/2 | 404 | 11/27/15 |
    | | 8 | ?escaped_fragment=classes/covl | 404 | 10/29/15 |
    | | 9 | m/?escaped_fragment= | 404 | 10/26/15 |
    | | 10 | ?escaped_fragment=blog/c19s6/Page/1 | 404 | 11/30/15 | |   |

    Technical SEO | | ReSEOlve
    0
  • LittleDog


    Hi my name is Gina and I wanted to ask for some advice. I'm thinking opening a diff location and was thinking if its a good idea to open up a new domain and new website? And why that may be a good idea and why or a bad idea and why?

    Local Website Optimization | | LittleDog
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, How would you recommend marketing this site? We write all sorts of intelligent articles, healing articles, have a Shaman who sells healing services, are on the forefront of product development in our field, sell products, and will eventually make money through ads as well. We are about to add a few products such as orgonite, see here, t-shirts, and we want to promote the services of this person whose writings are on this page. We're adding a thorough local and distance healing page (soon to come) for that person (Earth Thunder). Our donate page is here. We give away 30% of our products as gifts. Our Facebook page is here. We are barely getting started. How would you recommend doing on-site SEO, marketing, and content for this site? Any other suggestions you have would be very welcome. I'm finding it challenging since we're so unique. Thanks.

    Social Media | | BobGW
    0
  • Gavin.Atkinson


    I am trying to diagnose a massive drop in Google rankings for my website and noticed that the date of the ranking and traffic drop coincides with Google suddenly only indexing about 10% of my images, whereas previously it was indexing about 95% of them. Wondering if addition of lazy load script to images (so they don't load from the server until visible in the browser) could cause this index blocking?

    On-Page Optimization | | Gavin.Atkinson
    1
  • juicyresults


    So I'm competing for a very competitive keyword, and I've been on the bottom of page 2 for a while now, ranking for my homepage, which is very content rich and has GREAT links pointing to it. Out of nowhere, last week I dropped completely out of the top 100 or so, yet one of my article posts now ranks on page 6 or so for the same keyword. I have great authoritative links, my on-page is spot on, all of my articles are super super high quality, I don't understand how my homepage, which has ranked for the main keyword for months on page 2, can just completely drop out of the top 100 or so.... Can anyone help provide some insight?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | juicyresults
    0
  • empireelec


    I know this has been asked and answered but my situation is a little different. I am a local electrical contractor.  I specialize in a service and not a product.  Competition is high in the local market due to the other electrical contractors that have well seasoned sites with very good DA/PA.  Although new to the web I am not new to the trade.  Throughout years almost back to the AOL dialup days I have been collecting domain names for this particular purpose.  Now I want to put them to good use. Being an electrical contractor, there are many different facets of work and services we provide. My primary site is empireelec.com A second site I threw online overnight with minimal content is jacksonvillelightingrepair.com.  Although it is a fresh site, there is minimal content and I have put almost zero effort in to it.  It appears to be ranking for keywords a lot quicker. That leads me to believe I should utilize my other domain jacksonvillefloridaelectrician.com and target just the keyword Jacksonville Florida Electrician. It leads me to believe I should use jacksonvillebeachelectrician.com for targeting electricians in jacksonville beach. And again with jacksonvilleelectricianservice.com I can provide a unique phone number for each site. Am I going about this all wrong?  Everything I read says no,no,no but I feel my situation is a little more unique.

    Local Website Optimization | | empireelec
    1
  • ruggero


    Hi there, I have a question that I wasn't able to give it a reasonable answer yet, so I'm going to trust on all of you. Basically a site has all its pages indexed by Google (I verified with site:sitename.com) and it also has great and unique content. All on-page grades are A with absolutely no negative factors at all. However its pages do not get impressions almost at all. Of course I didn't expect it to be on page 1 since it has been launched on Dec, 1st, but it looks like Google is ignoring (or giving it bad scores) for some reason. Only things that can contribute to that could be: domain privacy on the domain, redirect from the www to the subdomain we use (we did this because it will be a multi-language site, so we'll assign to each country a subdomain), recency (it has been put online on Dec 1st and the domain is just a couple of months old). Or maybe because we blocked crawlers for a few days before the launch? Exactly a few days before Dec 1st. What do you think? What could be the reason for that? Thanks guys!

    Technical SEO | | ruggero
    0
  • BrianBotts.


    Hello, I have All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets plugin installed on my WP websites for the star snippets to show up in google search results. I used the Item Review property in this plugin for the homepage and under Reviewer’s Name (added name of author), Item to be reviewed (added brand/business name) and Your Rating (of course 5 :)). Now, the problem occurring is that instead of stars showing up in search results, the date when the respective page was published is showing up in search results. This is happening with all the websites I added plugin in. Am I doing something wrong or what is happening. Please help as i want those stars to show up on the websites. Please help me with any plugin or useful info that can help me with this. Thanks!

    Reviews and Ratings | | BrianBotts.
    0
  • micvitale


    I recently upgraded to https. Of course most internal links of my old posts are still http. So I set up a 301 redirect in order to make the old link works. In terms od SEO this is good or it is better to update all the internal links to https, manually? In that case can I do it in batch with a search/replace command in the phmyadmin database? any other suggested method? thank you

    On-Page Optimization | | micvitale
    0
  • NachoRetta


    Hi.This may be a google technical question, but I've searched a lot and I couldn't find any certain information about that.The problem appears when you look at two stats in Search Console ( WebMasters Tools, some months ago), particulary in the Search Analysis.1- Total clicks2- Sum of clicks at every search query.I attached an image to make me clear.8IZsxs6.png

    Reporting & Analytics | | NachoRetta
    2
  • andrewmeyer


    Hey Moz Community! I've been digging into the differences between server-side testing and client-side testing and had a generic question. Is it safe to run server-side A/B testing? For example, if I want to Split Test the home page of a site and show 50% of my traffic one home page, and show 50% of my traffic a completely different (read: new template, new content, new CTAs, etc) home page, are there any implications to SEO and organic search? I've spent about five hour researching and from what I can find A/B testing is acceptable as long as you don't show Googlebot different content or run A/B tests on Googlebot. Matt Cutts, head of Webspam at Google, has stated that A/B testing does not impact search rankings. "A/B or split testing or other forms of testing web sites is okay by Google as long as you don't test GoogleBot or don't treat GoogleBot differently." The biggest concerns for SEO cloaking, so from my understanding, for server-side testing, you'd need to do user-agent based redirection so that Googlebot (or any search bot) gets the normal version of the home page. The bots shouldn't be part of the test. Technically that is cloaking, but intention-wise, we're not trying to be sneaky. I've also read through this article about experimentation from Google developers here. Am I missing anything here or is there a definitive answer? If we serve a “B” as a different site for user testing, just exclude google bot by user-agent and we’re good? THANKS!

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | andrewmeyer
    0
  • Inevo


    Hi ! In Moz' Whiteboard friday video Headline Writing and Title Tag SEO in a Clickbait World, Rand is talking about (among other things) best practices related to linking between search, clickbait and conversion pages. For a client of ours, a cosmetics and make-up retailer, we are planning to build content pages around related keywords, for example video, pictures and text about make-up and fashion in order to best target and capture search traffic related to make-up that is prevalent earlier in the costumer journey. Among other things, we plan to use these content pages to link directly to some of the products. For example a content piece about how to achieve full lashes will to link to particular mascaras and/or the mascara category) Things is, in the Whiteboard video Rand Says:
    _"..So your click-bait piece, a lot of times with click-bait pieces they're going to perform worse if you go over and try and link directly to your conversion page, because it looks like you're trying to sell people something. That's not what plays on Facebook, on Twitter, on social media in general. What plays is, "Hey, this is just entertainment, and I can just visit this piece and it's fun and funny and interesting." _ Does this mean linking directly to products pages (or category pages) from content pages is bad? Will Google think that, since we are also trying to sell something with the same piece of content, we do not deserve to rank that well on the content, and won't be considered that relevant for a search query where people are looking for make-up tips and make-up guides? Also.. is there any difference between linking from content to categories vs. products? ..I mean, a category page is not a conversion page the same way a products page is. Looking forward to your answers 🙂  

    Algorithm Updates | | Inevo
    0
  • LauraFalls


    Hello We have a free eBook - its a great resource and great piece of content. It is available to download on our website here - http://re-timer.com/the-product/how-to-sleep-better/ The book is available as a whole or as individual chapters (i.e. http://re-timer.com/app/uploads/2015/07/Chapter8.pdf?b0df38). The PDF chapters appear to be doing well in Google search for certain keywords. I can't measure this in GA though. I would like the eBook to assist the SEO of my website overall. If I create a web page and 'embedded' the PDF into it will Google still crawl this page? At the moment we are also using this to collect email addresses, this is a nice to have and it is OK if people get the eBook without doing this (if they find a chapter in Google they currently don't have to enter their email address). I'm sure lots of people have eBooks now. What is best practice and the best way to use this as a tool to maximise SEO for the whole website (http://re-timer.com)? Thank you! Laura

    Web Design | | LauraFalls
    1
  • kirmeliux


    Hi, Google has indexed a few .CSS and .JS files that belong to our WordPress plugins and themes. I had them blocked via robots, but realized this doesn't prevent indexation (and can likely hurt us since Google wants to access these files). I've since removed the robots instructions, submitted a removal request via Search Console, but want to make sure they don't come back. Is there a way to put a noindex tag within .CSS and .JS files? Or should I do something with .htaccess instead?

    Technical SEO | | kirmeliux
    1
  • recbrands


    Does anyone know of a 3rd party sitemap generator that will only include the canonical url's?  Creating a sitemap with geo and sorting based parameters isn't the most ideal way to generate sitemaps.  Please let me know if anyone has any ideas.  Mind you we have hundreds of thousands of indexed url's and this can't be done with a simple text editor.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | recbrands
    0
  • StatybosMarketingas


    Hello everybody, this is my first but foremost headache causing question that i can't seem to find answear to for a month already. I live in Lithuania - small eastern European country and my native language has all "fancy" things that one could probably immagine (tenses, cases, compound forms, foreign letters: ąčęėį..., genders, declensions etc.) The problem is: how to formulate keywords correctly for my SEO to get the best results? I'll try to explain my problem in detail by using few different cases on the same aspect: 1. If i'm using keyword in nominative case which is "atvirkštinis stogas" (reverse roof eng.) - i usually can't follow all of the recommendations for SEO: add keyword in topic, follow the keyword rate in text, because the same keyword will be repeated for numerous times but in many different forms because of the nature of language itself i.e. genitive case - "atvirkštiniam stogui", locative - "atvirkštiniame stoge". Even MOZ page analysis doesn't recognize these cases as the same keyword. How about Google? Searching for keywords in different cases also gives slightly different results - some websites drop by 5 - 7 places on google searchpage No.1. Possible solutions: a) Formulate all keywords in text by using only nominative case which would totaly limit writer to a first-former kid writting capabilities and result in nobody reading the text at all. b) Formulate keywords according to mostly used keyword in text, which would affect organic search because everybody is searching for keywords in nominative case. Note that everybody here in Lithuania usually use the nominative case in search window on google. 2. The use of foreign letters (ąčęėįšųž). If we use the same keyword "atvirkštinis stogas", we have only one letter "š" that is causing a problem.
    In normal texts we use all of these letters, HOWEVER, nobody is ever writting these letters while searching for keyword in google, so normally they would search for "atvirkstinis stogas" with "s" instead of "š". If you search for these two keywords "atvirkštinis stogas" and "atvirkstinis stogas" you also get slightly different results. Possible solutions: 1. Use keyword with foreign letters and have perversed search results, because everybody will still search for keywords without them. 2. Use keyword without foreign letters which will affect SEO and tell me that I don't have any of my keywords in text, topic, url, etc. Any ideas on how to solve these puzzles? 🙂

    Algorithm Updates | | StatybosMarketingas
    0
  • Allie_Williams


    Is the priority value (scale of 0-1) used for each URL in an XML sitemap still a valid way of communicating to search engines which content you (the webmaster) believe is more important relative to other content on your site? I recall hearing that this was no longer used, but can't find a source. If it is no longer used, what are the easiest ways to communicate our preferences to search engines? Specifically, I'm looking to preference the most version version of a product's documentation (version 9) over the previous version (version 8). Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Allie_Williams
    0
  • jtaylormoon


    We're managing a website for a client and decided to use Yext to build citations. We've gone through and manually verified that they are live. Moz Local cannot find this website or the citations, nor could Ahrefs, or Majestic. Google has indexed 154 pages of the website, Bing has indexed 10. This dealer has two websites (I know that's a faux pas, it's by client request), so that they can "test" our website before giving up their old one. They're tied to the same NAP, but have different web addresses. We got permission to claim the listings for the website we sent live and put them up about two months ago. I can't figure out for the life of me why none of my tools will verify the existence of this website and the citations. I checked for a no index and no follow command in the HTML (which shouldn't be a problem because Google has indexed the site) and it was clean. The only thing I can think of is that the old site is getting credit for the citations even though we've listed a different website address. Can anyone verify this?

    Local Listings | | jtaylormoon
    0
  • KatherineWatierOng


    I have a client that set a change of address in Google Search Console where they informed Google that their preferred domain was a subdomain, and now they want Google to also consider their base domain (without the change of address). How do I get the change of address in Google search console removed?

    Technical SEO | | KatherineWatierOng
    0
  • jayoliverwright


    Hi guys, Looking for tools which can scan content and identify keyword opportunities. I know you can use Google Keyword Planner or tools like Semrush. But was wondering what else there is on the market? Specifically looking for tools which can pull relevant keywords by scanning the content, exactly the same as Google Keyword Planner. Cheers.

    Keyword Research | | jayoliverwright
    0
  • wearehappymedia


    Hello I have a campaign in Moz that shows a new site as having no domain authority and no links. The site does have links to it, but they don't show up on OSE. Does Moz count links in the comments section of blogs (or is this counted as social, when the commenting system is one that requires facebook login?) I know blog comments are not great for SEO, I just use them when the post/link is 100% genuinely relevant. The site does have actual links on websites not just comment links, so it isn't showing any type of link. What is the best way to see the links the site has? Thanks!

    Link Explorer | | wearehappymedia
    1
  • seogirl22


    We are currently using vanity URLs to track offline marketing, the vanity URL is structured as www.clientdomain.com/publication, this URL then is 302 redirected to the actual URL on the website not a custom landing page. The resulting redirected URL looks like:  www.clientdomain.com/xyzpage?utm_source=print&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=printcampaign. We have started to notice that some of the vanity URLs are being indexed in Google search. To prevent this from happening should we be using a 301 redirect instead of a 302 and will the Google index ignore the utm parameters in the URL that is being 301 redirect to?  If not, any suggestions on how to handle? Thanks,

    Technical SEO | | seogirl22
    1

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