Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Latest Questions

Have an SEO question? Search our Q&A forum for an answer; if not found, use your Moz Pro subscription to ask our incredible community of SEOs for help!


  • Hello Moz community, As a means of a portfolio, we upload these PowerPoint exports – which are converted into HTML5 to maintain interactivity and animations. Works pretty nicely! We link to these exported files from our products pages. (We are a presentation design company, so they're pretty relevant). For example: https://www.bentopresentaties.nl/wp-content/portfolio/ecar/index.html However, they keep coming up in the Crawl warnings, as the exported HTML-file doesn't contain text (just code), so we get errors in: thin content no H1 missing meta description missing canonical tag I could manually add the last two, but the first warnings are just unsolvable. Therefore I figured we probably better noindex all these files… They appear to don't contain any searchable content and even then; the content of our clients work is not relevant for our search terms etc. They're mere examples, just in the form of HTML files. Am I missing something or should I better noindex these/such files? (And if so: is there a way to include a whole directory to noindex automatically, so I don't have to manually 'fix' all the HTML exports with a noindex tag in the future? I read that using disallow in robots.txt wouldn't work, as we will still link to these files as portfolio examples).

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BentoPres
    0

  • I see in a forum posting from 2016 that Squarespace had issues with adding custom code via body tags, and am trying to troubleshoot some schema I've added via GTM using JSON-LD and Yoast's converter tool to a Squarespace website. Is the general consensus to still add JSON-LD script directly into the head? And if so, where?

    Technical SEO | | ogiovetti
    1

  • Hello, I am building a new website with a new web address for subpages. The domain name stays the same. I am wondering if I should do redirect to the few pages  that have an outside link going to them. I noticed all my subpage that don't have any external link have an authority of 18. I only have 1 subpage that has 2 external links and 1 of them has a spam score of 32 and then other one of 1. My website is about a 100 pages. What should I do for my subpages redirect , not redirect, redirect only the ones that have external links ? Thank you,

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
    0

  • I have a large international website. The content is subdivided in 80 countries, with largely the same content all in English. The URL structure is: https://www.baumewatches.com/XX/page  (where XX is the country code)
    Language annotations hreflang seem to be set up properly In the Google Search Console I registered: https://www.baumewatches.com the 80 instances of https://www.baumewatches.com/XX in order to geo target the directories for each country I have declared a single global sitemap for https://www.baumewatches.com (https://www.baumewatches.com/sitemap_index.xml structured in a hierarchical way) The problem is that the site has been online already for more than 8 months and only 15% of the sitemap URLs have been indexed, with no signs of new indexations in the last 3 months. I cannot think about a solution for this.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lvet
    0

  • So the company I am working with has purchased backlinks from Hoth and Fiverr.  We have noticed that a lot of links seem to be from very low level DA's as well as wix,wordpress blogs that seem like they are the bottom of the barrel as far as links are concerned. Is there any value to even having these. Is there a way we can quantify the value that these links provide. It is relatively expensive to purchase these packages, if the company can ensure DA50 posts is it worth doing that sort of this? Is it better to have a lot of a little or a little of a lot.

    Link Building | | HashtagHustler
    0

  • Hi, Community! Had a client for many years, MN Plumbing & Appliance Installation: mnplumbingandappliance.com We're re-branding as MN Plumbing & Home Services. We're wanting to change the domain to:mnplumbingandhomeservices.com Problem is, we have some 20+ great backlinks, a DA of 46 (pretty good for us), and a domain age of over 10 years! Will switching this domain cause SEO suicide?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Quistdesigns
    0

  • Hi All, I've got an issue with multi-region contact pages. For example, Google favors the UAE other region contact pages for French region searches, when I only want /fr/contact. I've used a Rel-con and set up the website to be pointing to the correct regions.

    Technical SEO | | WattbikeSEO
    0

  • Advise needed please We have rankings coming along nicely with a website that uses page content but we now need to start online shopping with woo commerce The url structure has always been a bit of a mess, but its quite in depth We are looking to move small paragraphs about each product cat (formerly put on Pages) information into the Product Category and then the Product information into the product page and redirect the old urls to the new urls. It would mean updating the permalinks also - My concern if there is less leverage with product categories - do these rank just as well as pages, are we going to see our rankings change dramatically in doing so? Added to that - is it best doing this change gradually or all at once (like staging site to get the set up ready) and then pushing live

    On-Page Optimization | | KellyDSD86
    0

  • So, i am a webmaster / specialist in the adult business for over almost 9 years. Very succesfully and with a broad selection of over 70 clients / businesses all over holland, belgium, germany, UK and even the USA. Lately i've created one page purely based on what my website is about. Google took it like sweet butter and immidiatly ranked that up to the top 3 of premium keywords. Imagine others have to build a wide variety of links to even get close to that and i am there with just one link from another domain. I believe that DA and relevancy is a very important role in this factor, otherwise google woud'nt do it that easy. So i recreated this thing again, and extened that one page to now 40+ pages. Everything is going great, all those pages are ranking within the top 10 by now. All unique content and vice versa. Very good! But; when i created some more pages, with all again, unique content, i started to see a small drop here and there, on which i believe is that Google gives me a X percentage of the pie, and once used, the rest slowly starts to suffer such as the pages i created. The pages are very wide and purely focussed on that keyword i am targetting that for alone. Pages which tend to rank 'bad' or are after position 10 i sometimes give an update with another block of text well written and this seems to work. But now i think i am running against some limit on which google allows me to rank, and i believe it has todo something with DA. It's becoming too low for the goal i am trying to archieve. Now i have build 2600 websites or so and since the last 3+ years i've made all the links back to my domain as nofollow. I figured out to create a better DA was the following: purely make the INDEX link from one of those websites i build for client(s), a FOLLOW and the rest of the page(s) as a nofollow. This would be the strongest form of backlinking since the index is the most important one. Would this work? I am not trying to bypass pagerank or anything, just taking credit for the work i've done for alot of clients and only with the intention to improve my DA. I've checked my website nummerous times and adjusted everything according to MOZ insights; all pages are unique and there's no such thing as duplicate content or whatever. Just having all pages which i've created with no backlinks being crammed up to the top 10 is a sign google trusts my domain enough.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jvanderlinde
    0

  • Hi, how would google+ disappearing after this year would affect the rel=publisher markup? Is it still relevant? Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rascordido
    0

  • I am working on a site that has just gone through a migration to Shopify at the very same time as Google did an update in October.  So problems from day 1. All main menu categories have subsequently over the past 6 weeks fallen off a cliff.  All aspects of the site have been reviewed in terms of technical, link profile and on-page, with the site in better shape than several ranking competitors. One issue that i'd like some feedback on is the main menu which has 4 iterations in the source. desktop desktop (sticky) mobile mobile (sticky - appears as a second desktop sticky but I assume for mobile) These items that are "duplicated" menus are the top level menu items only.  The rest of the nested menu items are included within the last mobile menu option. So desktop menu in source doesn't include any of the sub-menu items, the mobile version carries all these there are 4 versions of the top level main menu items in source Should I be concerned?  Considering we have significant issues should this be cleaned up?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards
    0

  • I crawled my website by Moz and found many metadata issues (Short meta description, Too long title, Too long URL). I fixed all of the issues. But when I recrawled my site it showed me all issues are fixed except Meta description. I thought maybe my changes are not being saved and I checked again but It seemed okay! All the changes I made it is applied. So, my meta description is okay now but Moz is appearing old meta description what was too short and detecting as an issue. I recrawled my site 4 times. Please help me with that issue. Thanks, Robin

    Moz Bar | | Lobin
    0

  • Hi everyone, I have a question about embedding videos on a website: if you optimize the title and description for the video in Youtube, will these be taken into account for the ranking of the page where the video is embedded? Or will only the Youtube link for the video show in SERP's, instead of the page itself? I've read in a post of Phil Nottingham that it's usually not a good idea to embed a Youtube video on your own site, but use Wistia instead, exactly to avoid cannibalisation of your own rankings. Is this correct? Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C
    0

  • Hey, The pages on one of our sites has a lot of links on it, which I have read a couple of times can be bad for SEO, although many say don't worry too much about it. However, I was thinking to reduce links and also reduce code size combining adjacent image and text links. For example they current look like this:
    "
    Products page" I am thinking maybe I should change to the following:
    "Products page" However, is this bad code and therefore could be bad for SEO? I have tried Googling this but couldn't seem to find anything on it.

    On-Page Optimization | | mdeluk
    0

  • Does anyone have any experience or know anyone with experience getting google reviews restored? We have no technical issues with our Google business pages/locations, but for some reason, they deleted some of our recent reviews. These reviews were not at our location or review station or anything like that. A couple of the profiles were very new accounts, and a couple of the users posted reviews for a few locations, however, they were legitimate reviews that they did on their own. I was hoping someone had an idea of what to do to appeal to Google or if there was a form to fill out to get our reviews restored. Thanks, Ruben

    Reviews and Ratings | | KempRugeLawGroup
    1

  • Hi All, The site I am working on is built on Wordpress. The plugin Revolution Slider was downloaded. While no longer utilized, it still remained on the site for some time. This plugin began creating hundreds of URLs containing nothing but code on the page. I noticed these URLs were being indexed by Google. The URLs follow the structure: www.mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/revslider/templates/this-part-changes/ I have done the following to prevent these URLs from being created & indexed: 1. Added a directive in my Htaccess to 404 all of these URLs 2. Blocked /wp-content/uploads/revslider/ in my robots.txt 3. Manually de-inedex each URL using the GSC tool 4. Deleted the plugin However, new URLs still appear in Google's index, despite being blocked by robots.txt and resolving to a 404. Can anyone suggest any next steps? I Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | Tom3_15
    0

  • Hey everyone! Quick question; there have been problems in the past with some of our accounts' Search Console integration becoming unlinked from Google Analytics without us knowing about it. I did some digging into Google Analytics to see if there was a way to create an alert for search queries dropping off, but there doesn't seem to be any options for Search Console alerts like there are for other integrations like Google Ads. Has anyone discovered a way to have an alert or some type of notification set up for when a Search Console integration is unlinked in Google Analytics or if search queries drop off significantly? I'd appreciate the help!

    Reporting & Analytics | | ReunionMarketing
    0

  • I deleted my business from Google my business (GMB) but it's still showing on Google Local Listing. Kindly, tell me how can I removed completely. I need help?

    Local Listings | | Sabar-din
    1

  • Hi Guys I was just wondering what will be the best way to hide a rel=canonical on the server side, my sites rankings got switched exactly with my competitor and the problem is we use the same web designer/marketing people. so they have full access to both websites  just found it weird for the rankings to switch so quickly.

    Industry News | | johan8
    0

  • Hi, i want to redirect from this old link http://www.g-store.gr/product_info.php?products_id=1735/ to this one https://www.g-store.gr/golf-toualetas.html I have done several attempts but with no result. I anyone can help i will appreciate. My website runs in an Apache server with cpanel. Thank you

    Technical SEO | | alstam
    0

  • Hi, We have experienced a shift in SERP from internal pages ranking over website homepage for more than a year. Previously website homepages used to rank for the primary keyword like moz.com for "SEO". Now we can see that internal pages like moz.com/learn/seo/what-is-seo been ranking for the primary keyword "SEO". Google is picking up these "what is ABC" pages than the homepage. All our competitor sites are ranking with these internal pages which are about "what is (primary keyword)". We do have the same internal pages "what is....", but this pages is not ranking; only our homepage is ranking. Moreover we dropped more than 15 positions after this shift in SERP. How to diagnose this? Thanks

    Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz
    0

  • We are writing a series of relevant and informative "power pages" on our site. In the past these have been 2,000 to 3,000 words and our audience has shown to be highly engaged with these pages and they converted well. We have decided to expand our new pages to capture more relevant keywords/topics and the result is they are a bit over 5,000 words. Is there a point where long content, even if highly relevant and engaging, is too long to benefit SEO? Is there any reason we would limit ourselves to 2,000-ish word long form content? I ask because I have read multiple blog posts that suggest that long form content that has ranked well in Google ranges between 2,000 and 3,000 words.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cutopia
    0

  • About 65% of our visitors are male. Consultant "A" produced design "A" (see attached). This design incorporates large white areas so there there is sufficient space for male visitors with larger fingers. Consultant "A" also was of the opinion that the menu "hamburger" bar should have the word "menu" under it and that displaying it would increase conversions. Consultant "B" is of the opinion that displaying  as much content above the fold is key to maximizing conversions. They believe that we don't have to use so much space between elements and that the word "Menu" is not necessary to display beneath the hamburger.  I have enclosed design "B" from consultant "B". Personally I prefer the 2nd design, however I understand that conversion is down to a science and there are certain accepted protocols and standards that serve to increase conversions. Does anyone have opinion as to which of the 2 attached designs would work best for conversions? Thanks, 
    Alan UOf1rKo eQRWToZ

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | Kingalan1
    0

  • I received an unsolicited SEO report for one of my sites. My site was faulted for not having IP canonicalization set up. I reviewed this carefully. My site runs on Apache, is https and is on a dedicated IP. The mod rewrite rules for Apache all deal with the http version of the site. When I type my site's IP into a browser, I get the the https version, but with a unsecure cert warning as the certificate does not include the IP. Should I implement the http IP canonicalization rule. Another rewrite rule would then redirect the request to the https version?

    On-Page Optimization | | FatRodent2013
    0

  • Hi I write a json+ld script for star snippet in my website but not work in my first page. you can see it in this URL https://liliome.ir when I googled my keyword"عطر"my competitor show with star snippet in SERP but my site doesn't show.

    On-Page Optimization | | renorenotoodanes333
    0

  • I have a client who sell retirement homes. Their current schema for each property is LocalBusiness - should this in fact be Product schema?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Adido-105399
    0

  • Our (small) company is a little late to the party on this, and we've only just realised that we're better off with an SSL certificate for our website. (Yes I know, I know, but we dropped SEO some time ago after getting severely bitten by a certain Penguin, and are only just making tentative step back to it after those intervening years, so we're running to get back up to date with these things.) This has now been implemented, but our web guy has dropped the 'www' element during the process. Our http://domain.com address has always historically been redicrected to our main http://www.domain.com address. Now our web guy has implemented the SSL cert, our website URL is appearing as https://domain.com, and he has redirected the http://www.domain.com to that new URL. Obviously all our historic (and more recent) link building has been to the http://www.domain.com address. Is this an issue, should the new Https URL keep the 'www', or does it make no difference what so ever? Conversely could it actually be of benefit dropping the 'www.' because our keyword specific product URL's are now 4 characters closer to the http and 4 digits shorter? Finally, on the links we have control of (professional trade associations etc) do we need to ask them to change the links to the new Https address, or does the transition from Http to Https make no difference?

    Web Design | | Wookii
    0

  • Google Search Console is showing some pages up as "Submitted URL has crawl issue" but they look fine to me. I have set them as fixed but after a month they were finally re-crawled and google states the issue persists. Examples are: https://www.rscpp.co.uk/counselling/175809/psychology-alcester-lanes-end.html
    https://www.rscpp.co.uk/browse/location-index/889/index-of-therapy-in-hanger-lane.html
    https://www.rscpp.co.uk/counselling/274646/psychology-waltham-forest-sexual-problems.html There's also some "Submitted URL seems to be a Soft 404": https://www.rscpp.co.uk/counselling/112585/counselling-moseley-depression.html I also have more which are "pending", but again I couldn't see a problem with them in the first place. I'm at a bit of a loss as to what to do next. Any advice? Thanks in advance.  

    Technical SEO | | TommyNewmanCEO
    0

  • Hi, I need a tool to help me review sites that are plagiarising / directly copying content from my site.  But tools that I'm aware, such as Copyscape, appear to work with individual URLs and not a root domain.  That's great if you have a particular post or page you want to check.  But in this case, some sites are scraping 1000s of product pages.  So I need to submit the root domain rather than an individual URL. In some cases, other sites are being listed in SERPs above or even instead of our site for product search terms. But so far I have stumbled across this, rather than proactively researched offending sites. So I want to insert my root domain & then for the tool to review all my internal site pages before providing information on other domains where an individual page has a certain amount of duplicated copy.  Working in the same way as Moz crawls the site for internal duplicate pages - I need a list of duplicate content by domain & URL, externally that I can then contact the offending sites to request they remove the content and send to Google as evidence, if they don't. Any help would be gratefully appreciated. Terry

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MFCommunications
    0

  • We are an e-commerce marketplace at for alternative fashion and home decor. We have over 1000+ stores on the marketplace.  Early this year, we switched the website from HTTP to HTTPS in March 2018 and also added noindex and nofollow tags to the store about page and store policies (mostly boilerplate content) Our traffic dropped by 45% and we have since not recovered. We have done I am wondering could these tags be affecting our rankings?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimJ
    0

  • Hi community, Let's say there is a duplicate page (A) pointing to original page (B) using rel canonical tag. Pagerank will be passed from Page A to B as the content is very similar and Google honours it hopefully. I wonder how Google treats the direct traffic on the duplicate Page A. We know that direct traffic is also an important ranking factor (correct me if I'm wrong). If the direct traffic is high on the duplicate page A, then how Google considers it? Will there be any score given to original page B? Thanks

    Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz
    0

  • Hi, I’m looking at a site at the moment that has a lot of products. For some of their category pages they have a ‘View All’ feature available. The URL uses this structure: domain.com/category/sub-category/product domain.com/category/sub-category/view-all < currently noindex applied Should the view all page be available for indexing? The individual sub-categories and products are indexable My immediate reaction is no, so long as the individual sub-cats are?

    Technical SEO | | daniel-brooks
    0

  • My client, in a large industrial sector, is trying to find or purchase good data for their industry as far as benchmarks for social engagement.  While the DIY tools have social trackers, many require you to connect to the account you want to measure - so competitive research is a non-starter. What would you use to build a spreadsheet of social engagement metrics from a set of, say, 10 competitors in a niche vertical (e.g.  industrial robotics?)

    Social Media | | scottclark
    1

  • Hi, I am doing link cleaning, and still a bit new to this, and would appreciate the community's help 🙂 So, I have a site which has quite a lot of low DA (or no DA) follow backlinks. BUT, the links are from my niche the sites are not spammy the anchors are okay and they are from good Geo location for me The only negative thing is that these sites are a bit "dead" meaning that there is no new content, and thus there is no traffic or clicks coming from them. Should I keep those links or disavow them? To me these links are natural, but do they help me at all.... FYI I have plenty of good DA links. But what do you guys think, if I disavow all these low DA backlinks, does Google think that I am trying to manipulate my backlink structure to look better than it naturally is? Cheers guys and girls! 🙂

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RistoM
    0

  • I'm working with a medical practice that has 6 doctors in a single office location. We already have GMB pages for the practice as a whole as well as each practitioner. Should multi-practitioner businesses like medical practices build citations for each practitioner as well? For instance, should each doctor have a listing on YellowPages, Localeze, etc?

    Local Listings | | formandfunctionagency
    1

  • Hi all, I'm running an international website across 5 regions using a correct hreflang setup. A problem I think I have is that my blog structure is not standardized and also uses hreflang tags for each blog article. This has naturally caused Google to index each of the pages across each region, meaning a massive amount of pages are being crawled. I know hreflang solves and issues with duplication penalties, but I have another question. If I have legacy blog articles that are considered low quality by Google, is that counting against my site once or multiple times for each time the blog is replicated across each region? I'm not sure if hreflang is something that would tell Google this. For example, if I have low quality blog posts: blog/en-us/low-quality-article-1 
    blog/en-gb/low-quality-article-1 
    blog/en-ca/low-quality-article-1 Do you think Google is counting this as 3 low quality articles or just 1 if hreflang is correctly implemented? Any insights would be great because I'm considering to cull the international setup of the blog articles and use just /blog across each region.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattBassos
    0

  • I'd like to use Moz Local for two of my clients who share a space. The first one is an independent tattoo artist, who operates inside a larger tattoo shop. Both the tattoo shop and this individual artist have websites, and they'd both like me to optimize for local search. Will this be a problem using Moz Local to add both businesses? I will buy two different Moz Local subscriptions for them, but I don't want one business to override the other since they're inside the same address. Thanks!

    Moz Local | | newwhy
    0

  • I don't like being restricted to tracking only three competitors' rankings so I'm wondering if I could just export the full SERPs like I can on Ahrefs and SEMrush.

    Moz Bar | | QLP2004
    0

  • Sometime between Nov 8th and Nov 11th are rankings on Google for images dropped substantially. Our web rankings are holding OK. any idea!

    Technical SEO | | OCFurniture
    0

  • Hello, Several tools I'm using are returning errors due to "broken canonical links". However, I'm not too sure why is that. Eg.
    Page URL: domain.com/page.html?xxxx
    Canonical link URL: domain.com/page.html
    Returns an error. Any idea why? Am I doing it wrong? Thanks,
    G

    Technical SEO | | GhillC
    1

  • Good day Every Body, I have a heart aching issue, my site (nightwatchng.com) amassed a number carnivorous backlinks, I have lost rankings, i studied my search traffic and discovered that I have been hit by Google Penguin Algorithm Penalty, I was forced to believe that those backlinks were built to my site on purpose just so my rankings will drop, I know the importance of link building and thats why i follow the white hat technique. Now the big question is, IF I DISAVOW THESE TERRIBLE LINKS FROM GOOGLE SEARCH, WILL MY MOZ DOMAIN AUTHORITY DROP FROM WHAT IT CURRENTLY HAS?? I also want to know if the Algorithm Penalty will affect the subdomain (news nightwatchng.com) of my site?

    Link Building | | Newswatchng
    0

  • I have a company that rents, repairs, and sells product both new and used. They also have 3 locations in 3 states and service multiple cities out of the locations (ie... los angeles and orange county). Having a hard time redesigning the website so that it fits for customers to look around and for the best of Organic SEO. The issue seems to be fitting the locations in the mix in order to get the customer to the right area without being too confusing. In the end, I'm thinking well maybe the homepage should just be some content to get them to choose the location first then they can go into silos where they pretty much remain in the location for rentals, repairs, and sales but I'm not sure how having the locations on the home page would affect the site. Obviously, we would be trying to rank the silo locations more but they would be 2-3 pages in on clicks to get to the right section 'if' they started from the home page. We need to do this right from the beginning though because we are working on expanding nationwide one day. Thanks for any help on this manner. (PS> Thought about doing subdomains like locations.example.com or state.example.com and rentals.example.some and shop.example.com but I think that will dilute the rankings)

    Local SEO | | Ryan_Marshall
    1

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.