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  • plumrocket1


    I have a very strange feeling that someone bad is trying to hurt our company, but maybe I am wrong. Let me explain. In the last two month, we have seen a very significant drop in sales on our website, but we couldn't figure out why. We have looked at different metrics (Google Search Console, Moz, Google Analytics), but everything looked alright. We had 10% loss in traffic, but we didnt believe at the time that it could be the main issue. Just yesterday we've discovered the following (please see attached screenshot😞 On August 18, 2018 Google launched Search Update On the same date, we had a jump in Organic Search Impressions for one particular keyword, which we never tracked before: "free facebook login". Majority of all impressions (233,000 out of 258,000) were from Philippines. Very low total number of clicks (50 clicks) led to 0% Average CTR for this keyword. Which in return, also lowered our global CTR by 1%. One month later we had 1000's of spam emails sent to our Helpdesk from two IP addresses, also from Philippines. We blocked them of course. It could be all coincidence. I dont know. But do you think that someone can use this fraudulent tactic to lower our CTR and drop our ranking and traffic? Can this influence our SEO in any way? It's also possible that someone is attacking Facebook and we just happen to be there, on the first page, for the same keyword. Should we try to eliminate our page for this keyword and see what happens? I've checked this article from Rand Fishkin - https://moz.com/blog/impact-of-queries-and-clicks-on-googles-rankings-whiteboard-friday and it seems that CTR is an important factor. However the article is from 2015 and maybe it's no longer relevant. What should we do? Thanks! G86Nge4

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | plumrocket1
    1
  • CalebWardSoM


    Hello, My company uses a tracking system that allows our employees to apply a short code snippet to the end of our URLs for marketing attribution. An example of such a code would be: https://www.schoolofmotion.com/?ref_id=moz-test However, in Google Analytics we are seeing duplicates of our content, where the pages with the individual tracking codes are counted separately from the pages without. From a reporting perspective, this is annoying and definitely worth a fix. However, I'm curious if this problem is affecting our search potential as well. Could this tracking system be splitting traffic in Google's eyes? From an SEO perspective, how should we approach this? Would canonical tags fix this duplication issue in Google Analytics? Is there something else that we should use? Thanks in advance. The Moz community is incredible.

    Reporting & Analytics | | CalebWardSoM
    1
  • Madstrategist


    I've been seeing great results with my efforts in the last few months. But I think my workflow is a mess is non-existent! Does anyone have a specific workflow that I could use as a base?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Madstrategist
    1
  • Isildur


    I've used PIA and expressvpn before without any problems. Today I got nordvpn and when I try to access my campaigns and link explorer but the connection is being refused while I can access billing and the forum section. I don't have this problem anywhere else atm so I think this might not be a problem from my side but rather from these specific sections. Edit: Any idea what's going on?

    Product Support | | Isildur
    0
  • Rutts


    My site prettycool.co.uk and primary we sell fascinators, the problem is I can't get the word fascinators to be listed by Google. We are on the 1st page for most colours ie. pink fascinators, blue fascinators etc. but for the term fascinators even if we fetch we are listed for a couple of hours and then disappear. I've checked for keyword stuffing but our site sell fascinators and we need to have this word in our site and other sites have a lot more references to the term and are listed on the 1st or 2nd pages. We used to be listed on page 1 for many years but the last 2 or 3 years dropped back to page 4 but now nothing.  Any help or suggestions would be fantastic!

    Technical SEO | | Rutts
    0
  • Mat_C


    Hi, I am doing the SEO for a webshop, which has a lot of linking and related websites on the same root domain. So the structure is for example: Root domain: example.com
    Shop: shop.example.com
    Linking websites to shop: courses.example.com, software.example.com,... Do I have to check which keywords these linking websites are already ranking for and choose other keywords for my category and product pages on the webshop? The problem with this could be that the main keywords for the category pages on the webshop are mainly the same as for the other subdomains. The intention is that some people immediately come to the webshop instead of going first to the linking websites and then to the webshop. Thanks.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C
    0
  • globalrose.com


    Hello, I'm doing this google search "Peruvian Lilies Delivery To Athens, Alabama globalrose", in the hopes of this page appearing. It does not! Does anyone know why this page (or most pages in out local.globalrose.com subdomain) aren't appearing on Google search results?

    Local Listings | | globalrose.com
    0
  • AshShep1


    Hi our site is set up typically for a key product (money page) with 6 to 12 cluster pages, with a few more associated blog pages. If for example the key product was "funeral plans" what percentage of the internal anchor text links should be an exact match? Will the prominence of those links eg higher up the page have an impact on the amount of juice flowing? And do links in buttons count in the same way as on page anchor text eg "compare funeral plans"? Many thanks
    Ash

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep1
    1
  • KellyDSD86


    HI we have a wordpress website with a chain of redirected urls? one is with www. the other without? How do I found out where this is? or what could be causing it? Any help much appreciated 🙂

    On-Page Optimization | | KellyDSD86
    1
  • KellyDSD86


    hi all - question we seem to see people ranking better naturally when they have the seo term in their title. Say we were optimising for "red buses". Our company was called Diamond we are using Diamond.co and have a DA of 32 (Page Title Diamond Red Buses | Bla) Should we buy diamondredbuses.co.uk ? Is it best to continue on our domain and redirect? Or move domains? How much would it affect?

    On-Page Optimization | | KellyDSD86
    0
  • KellyDSD86


    HI all - hope you can help We seem to be dropping back and fourth completely on one of our key terms and I really don't get it. The home page seems to now be ranking for another but I have made a page purely for this main term and whilst it was starting to rank well , we have now dropped off for it. Anyone able to lend some advice?

    On-Page Optimization | | KellyDSD86
    0
  • ButtaC


    I've been trying to find out the underlying reason why so many websites are ranked higher than mine despite seemingly having far worse links. I've spent a lot of time researching and have read through all the general advice about what could possibly be hurting my site's SEO, from page speed to h1 tags to broken links, and all the various on-page SEO optimization stuff....so the issue here isn't very obvious. From viewing all of my competitors, they seem to have a much higher number of web pages on their sites than mine does. My site currently has 20 pages or so and most of my competitors are well in the hundreds, so I'm wondering if this could potentially be part of the issue here. I know Google has never officially said that page number matters, but does anyone suspect that perhaps page count matters towards SEO and that competing sites with more total pages than you might have an advantage SEOwise?

    Algorithm Updates | | ButtaC
    1
  • newbiebird


    I have a client with a site with a m-dot mobile version. They will move it to a responsive site sometime next year but in meanwhile I have a massive doubt. This m-dot site has some 30k indexed pages in Google. Each of this page is bidirectionally linked to the www. version (rel="alternate on the www, rel canonical on the m-dot) There is no noindex on the m-dot site, so I understand that Google might decide to index the m-dot pages regardless of the canonical to the www site. But my doubts stays: is it a bad thing that both the version are indexed? Is this having a negative impact on the crawling budget? Or risking some other bad consequence? and how is the mobile-first going to impact on this? Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | newbiebird
    0
  • Lucidica


    Hi, Our company has changed their domain almost a year ago and after the migration, they created a new Google Analytics account rather than changing the address on the existing GA account. Now I can still see that Google indexing the old domain. Just wanted to ask if we can still tell Google that we've changed the domain on the old one? Or, should we just go ahead and use the new one and delete the old one? Very confusing, but our traffic is constantly dropping although we rank for on the first page for tracked keywords, just want to understand if there is a connection between the organic traffic droppings and not telling Google we've changed the domain. Thanks! NJt7vbJ

    Reporting & Analytics | | Lucidica
    0
  • BlakeSmith3


    Good morning! I have a quick question about international keyword research. So, I created a keyword list full of terms that we want to analyze in Latin America. My question is around search results. For example, if the keyword I am analyzing in English is "apples" and I choose the region as Mexico, should I submit the keyword to be analyzed as "apples" or the Spanish translation "manzanas"? I am confused as to whether the results account for the translation of someone searching "manzanas" in Mexico to the English term "apples" and how that whole process works. Let me know if I need to elaborate because I understand that the whole question is super confusing haha. Thanks for any help you can give! 🙂

    Keyword Research | | BlakeSmith3
    1
  • vtmoz


    Hi, We have recently received the "deceptive content" warning from Google about some of our website pages. We couldn't able to find the exact reason behind this. However, we placed some script outside the HTML tag in some pages (Not in the same pages with the above warning). We wonder whether this caused an issue to Google to flag our pages. Please help. Thanks

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz
    0
  • sonic22


    I have a website that gets 200,000 visitors a month. It is a very popular financial tool. I have another website that sells widgets, but honestly, not really related to the financial tool. I would like to help out the unpopular website by giving it a link. What's the professional opinion?

    Link Building | | sonic22
    0
  • TAT100


    Dear Moz community, I am looking into two websites for a friend and we want to understand the following: What is the site structure as per the sub domains? e.g currently it is .com/en/ or .com/ru/ or .com/zh/ Using the crawl report, each page has a en or other language version. I take it this means that we have to create copy,  meta titles and descriptions for each of the languages even if the page is the same but in a different language? To avoid duplication of content would you suggest canonical tags to be put in place? To check hreflang mark up, I couldn't find anything in the code which makes me thing a script is automatically translating this? This is the first time I have started to look at international SEO and want to understand what to look for in an audit of exisiting sites. Thank you,

    Local Website Optimization | | TAT100
    0
  • whiteboardwiz


    Hi Guys, Please only reply of you have real experience.... So as the title implies does building backlinks work in improving the rankings in Google? I know they are not on the same level as some are spammy, in blog networks etc but how about other backlinks that are of higher quality? If yes, what sorts of backlinks work nowadays in boosting rankings but not risking getting penalized? So should you build backlinks ongoing? If so how many per month? I have a real struggle trying to get backlinks on really high quality sites. Any advice? Cheers John

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | whiteboardwiz
    1
  • whiteboardwiz


    Hi Guys Let's say you have a website and you got some questionable back links or lower quality ones. Does anyone have proof that after disavowing back links helped in the rankings or had some positive effects? I am concerned that Google will place our website on their radar and instead possibly demote it or smth. Lastly, if disavowing is the way to go what criteria do you use to disavow backlinks? So if you get questionable back links over time, should you disavow ongoing as well? If so how often? Cheers John

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | whiteboardwiz
    0
  • Cnvrt


    In regards to this article, https://moz.com/blog/how-to-get-search-console-data-api-python I've gotten all the way to the part where I need to authenticate the script to run. I give access to GSC and the local host code comes up. In the article, it says to grab the portion between = and #, but that doesnt seem to be the case anymore. This is what comes up in the browser http://localhost/?code=4/igAqIfNQFWkpKyK6c0im0Eop9soZiztnftEcorzcr3vOnad6iyhdo3DnDT1-3YFtvoG3BgHko4n1adndpLqjXEE&scope=https://www.googleapis.com/auth/webmasters.readonly When I put portions of it in, it always comes back with an error. Help!

    Technical SEO | | Cnvrt
    0
  • TaylorRHawkins


    Good afternoon, Moz. My team and I are a bit stumped. We are getting ready to send out reporting and discovered that we are getting hits on a few very odd landing pages. We build our websites and we never made this URL: https://eaglehearing.com/Home/gclid/ EAIaIQobChMIo_K0t8T_3QIVg81kCh1NQAKIEAEYASAAEgJajfD_BwE There are around 7-10 variations on these weird URLs pulling up in our reports for two different clients now. Do you think we got hacked?

    Industry News | | TaylorRHawkins
    1
  • BandG


    Hi all, I have been looking into this for about a month and haven't been able to figure out what is going on with this situation. We recently did a website re-design and moved from a separate mobile site to responsive. After the launch, I immediately noticed a decline in pages crawled per day and KB downloaded per day in the crawl stats. I expected the opposite to happen as I figured Google would be crawling more pages for a while to figure out the new site. There was also an increase in time spent downloading a page. This has went back down but the pages crawled has never went back up. Some notes about the re-design: URLs did not change Mobile URLs were redirected Images were moved from a subdomain (images.sitename.com) to Amazon S3 Had an immediate decline in both organic and paid traffic (roughly 20-30% for each channel) I have not been able to find any glaring issues in search console as indexation looks good, no spike in 404s, or mobile usability issues. Just wondering if anyone has an idea or insight into what caused the drop in pages crawled? Here is the robots.txt and attaching a photo of the crawl stats. User-agent: ShopWiki Disallow: / User-agent: deepcrawl Disallow: / User-agent: Speedy Disallow: / User-agent: SLI_Systems_Indexer Disallow: / User-agent: Yandex Disallow: / User-agent: MJ12bot Disallow: / User-agent: BrightEdge Crawler/1.0 (crawler@brightedge.com) Disallow: / User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 5 Disallow: /cart/ Disallow: /compare/ ```[fSAOL0](https://ibb.co/fSAOL0)

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BandG
    0
  • Shop-Sq


    Hello Moz Community :)**Back Story:**For the past 8 years, we have been running our main e-commerce site on Magento 1For the past year, we have been building out a new far superior version on Magento 2The new Magento 2 site is essentially done we have a couple little last tiny tweaks/improvements to complete. All signs point to it being 100% done by January 31 - 2019. The new site is currently totally functional and fully operational you could complete a checkout no problem. We currently have the site blocked from being crawled. Although we have rewritten all the site content & taken all new photos we've been concerned with duplicate content issues.
    I have attached an image that is a very good representation of our average sales pattern in a typical year. We are a seasonal business so there are big highs and lows. **Concerns:**My hopes were to launch the site around March - 1 2019. I have to 301s meticulously prepared in a spreadsheet and ready to go. My concern though is making this change right before busy season is about to hit. On the other hand though there really never is an ideal time to make the change as cash flow is equally important if not more important during the slow season.Ideally, I would allow the site to be crawled and run them both in tandem for a while but I'm concerned about potential duplicate content issues even though the content has been significantly altered.**Main Question:**What's my best bet?1) Do the 301 in March and hope for the best2) Allow the site to be indexed - risk duplicate content problems and run them both in tandem for a while.Final thoughts.The old site is really starting to fall apart. Every day I keep it open and running we steal resources from moving forward with the new site.-Any thoughts, direction, suggestions or input would be greatly appreciated9wDl7lD

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shop-Sq
    0
  • Unbranded_Lee


    I have a dilemma, we're merging 2 websites, one an Australian branch and one a UK one. We've decided to have a UK page and a AUS page so agency.site/uk/ agency.site/aus/ but what is the best tactic for the service pages? ideally, we'd like a web-design service page to rank in Australia and the UK but not sure if this is actually possible, or whether to duplicate the pages and localise them i.e. /web-design-leeds/ and /web-design-melbourne/  What's everyone's thoughts on this? localised landing pages with some duplicate content or one master page with both locations mentioned? Thanks!

    Local SEO | | Unbranded_Lee
    1
  • Kdruckenbrod


    Quick question. As an example, a client has a site named  site.com and then changed their business name and business url to site2.com I was informed that the site.com has a manual action (Pages affected by manual actions can see reduced display features, lower ranking, or even removal from Google Search results.) The page obviously is not active as it 301's to site2.com. Site.com has a 301 to site2.com. My questions? Does 301 transfer link power? So if a site is penalized, will the links that 301 cause problems to the new site2.com? I've requested them to remove the 301. Will, that fix it? Do we need to request a review? Thank you

    Technical SEO | | Kdruckenbrod
    0
  • landport


    Hi, would you guys recommend using a backlink service like this? https://www.peopleperhour.com/hourlie/gain-30-links-from-30-top-newspaper-sites-in-the-uk/396519Or is this the kind of thing that leads to being penalised?Over the years, I've always been told this is black hat and dodgy. Is that always the case?

    Link Building | | landport
    0
  • AnkitaDwivedi


    The template provided in https://moz.com/blog/competitor-analysis-for-seo is missing the 'Audit Data' Tab. Can you please update it or share the Original Template

    Competitive Research | | AnkitaDwivedi
    3
  • bgvsiteadmin


    Hi everyone, I am trying to add span tags in H1, break tag on 2 lines and style each line of H1 differently: Example: Line 1Line 2 I might add a smaller font for line 2 as well... Is this SEO friendly? Will crawlers read entire text or can interfere and block it. Thank you!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin
    0
  • Mack_


    If Google and Bing show an older version of a site's Yelp rating in the search results, what options are there to help ensure Google and Bing recrawl the Yelp page? Additionally, it appears third-party sites such as MapQuest show Yelp ratings and appear in Google search results; is it possible to request MapQuest to recrawl Yelp and then ask Google to recrawl MapQuest? Any advice would be much appreciated!

    Industry News | | Mack_
    1
  • angelamaemae


    Hello! I did something dumb back in the beginning of September. I updated Yoast and somehow noindexed a whole set of custom taxonomy on my site. I fixed this and then asked Google to validate the fixes on September 20. Since then they have gotten through only 5 of the 64 URLS.....is this normal? Just want to make sure I'm not missing something that I should be doing. Thank you! ^_^

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | angelamaemae
    0
  • BobGW


    Hi, I have launched a very new website and am tackling this term: nlp techniques (3K) with this page It's a 1 year target. I'm developing 100 new processes for the page. I've put up 11 so far. It looks like the top contenders have a lot to offer as far as number of techniques and quality of techniques. They are just honestly dumping their regular training material on as a big area of their website, what I'm doing is developing new innovative techniques from scratch that do the same thing and hopefully more. Let me know what you think I can do to move up the ranks. I can't do outreach for link building since this is a social community.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW
    0
  • angelamaemae


    Hello! I have created a directory website with a pretty active blog. I probably messed this up, but I pretty much have categories (for my blog) and custom taxonomy (for different categories of services) that are very similar. For example I have the blog category "anxiety therapists" and the custom taxonomy "anxiety". 1- is this a problem for google? Can it tell the difference between archive pages in these different categories even though the names are similar? 2- should I noindex my blog categories since the main purpose of my site is to help people find therapists ie my custom taxonomy?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | angelamaemae
    0
  • TimAkers


    Hey all, Working with gydeandseek.com and trying to get 5-star reviews to show up at a SERP Feature on some of their pages. Everything validates using the Structured Data Testing Tool, yet we are not seeing anything in search. We have had this SERP Feature show up in the past. Here is a sample page - https://gydeandseek.com/budapest/gabriella Hoping the greater consciousness (aka you) can help us figure out what we are doing wrong here. Or if it is just Google deciding not to display the aggregateRatings in search. Other clients who use this markup have it show up pretty quickly, trying to figure out why it isn't here and generally stumped. Thanks, Tim

    Reviews and Ratings | | TimAkers
    0
  • Libra_Photographic


    I have just discovered that the WordPress theme I have been using for some time has no follow internal links on the blog. Simply put each post has an image and text link plus a 'read more'. The Read more is a no-follow which is also on my homepage. The developer is saying duplicate follow links are worse than an internal no follow. What is your opinion on this? Should I spend time removing the no follow?

    Technical SEO | | Libra_Photographic
    0
  • Popidev


    Hello, I am currently working with a dev team to develop a new site. We have designed the title tags to sit below a banner image on each page but the technical team are insisting the h1 title tags must come above the banner for maximum SEO impact. I am sceptical about this, can anybody please shed some light and/or share any up to date resource on this? I have attached a side by side wireframe to illustrate the pages with the h1 tags in both positions. Thank you! HnWcLTx

    On-Page Optimization | | Popidev
    0
  • CyberAlien7


    I have a website that I'm considering selling. It gives no profit, but I think it has decent SEO value. Link explorer report: domain authority = 69, linking domains: 9.8k, inbound links: 44.2m, ranking keywords: 294. Is that any good? Website is about web design, so keywords are also related to it. Would it be useful for SEO links building for other people? I did sell similar website once, but it was about 7-8 years ago and I've sold it for very high 5 digit amount. However things have changed since then in SEO world, so I don't know if today similar website would be worth much. There is so much information out there that contradicts each other, so I think I'd rather ask professionals here.

    Paid Search Marketing | | CyberAlien7
    0
  • Trazo


    I have already added the .xml to Robots. But should I also add the html version?

    Technical SEO | | Trazo
    0
  • 94501


    We have about 600k downloads of our app and would like to know what cost effective analytics tool you use to gain insight into what your app users are doing? Thanks! Best... Mike

    Reporting & Analytics | | 94501
    1
  • BobGW


    Hello, If you look at the top keyword in one of our companies, and across the long tail, you'll see one thing. Not better companies for the industry. Not companies with better information. Just Trusted names. Trust Trust Trust. Big guys you can trust and little guys you can trust. So since everything's about branding trust in this niche, how do you revamp a website to instill new trust and thus increase in rank? Resources are always helpful, or direct answers are more than welcome. Thanks.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW
    1
  • vtmoz


    Hi, We have received "Social engineering content" warning from Google and one of our important page and it's internal pages have been flagged as "Deceptive site ahead". We wonder what's the reason behind this as Google didn't point exactly to the specific part of the page which made us look so to the Google. We don't employ any such content on the page and the content is same for many months. As our site is WP hosted, we used a WordPress plugin for this page's layout which injected 2 http (non-https) links in our page code. We suspect if this is the reason behind this? Any ideas? Thanks

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz
    1
  • vtmoz


    Hi all, We received a deceptive site warning from Google recently. Seems like there is a deceptive content on some pages of the website. Some pages are removed from Google index. Meta descriptions have been deployed on the site few days ago. There is also java script on the website which we use for tracking visitors like GA. I wonder what's the reason for this alert? We believe its due to the Java script. Do you think meta descriptions will harm this bad? Any ideas? Thanks

    Search Behavior | | vtmoz
    0
  • SolveWebMedia


    Hello! I've build 100's of sites. They mostly have site wide footer links pointing back to me. I know this is now frowned on. But does anyone have a good solution to get maximum value back from these? A few have a footer link to a credit page that then links back. I get quite a lot of work back from them. So I don't really fancy removing them. Many thanks in advance.

    Link Building | | SolveWebMedia
    0
  • chrisyu78


    Hi, everyone Basically I am editing my website page's URL for SEO Optimisation and I am not sure which URL structure is best for SEO. The main different is the sign ( dash or slash ) before the product-code. HERE ARE TWO EXAMPLE www.example.com/long-tail-keyword-product-code www.example.com/long-tail-keyword/product-code To get more idea of my page, here is one of the product from my website : http://www.okeus.co.uk/pro_view-3.html My website is selling my own product, as a result the only keyword can be found was the name of the product and I separated different design by different code. Any experts who are willing help would be very much appreciated.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chrisyu78
    1
  • WhoseNo


    On 26 of October 2018 My website have around 1 million pages indexed on google. but after hour when I checked my website was banned from google and all pages were removed. I checked my GWT and I did not receive any message. Can any one tell me what are the possible reasons and how can I recover my website? My website link is https://www.whoseno.com

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhoseNo
    0

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