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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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  • ennovators


    Hi everyone, got a quick question concerning the hreflang tag. I have a website with 2 different language versions targeting to the same region(Reason: The area is bilingual however not everyone speaks the other language fluently) Question:
    Can I use hreflang in that case like: Many thanks in advance

    International SEO | | ennovators
    0
  • Merkle-Impaqt


    My client wants to pull every instance of an absolute URL on their site so that they can update them for an upcoming migration to HTTPS (the majority of the site uses relative linking). Is there a way to use the extraction tool in Screaming Frog to crawl one page at a time and extract every occurrence of _href="http://" _? I have gone back and forth between using an x-path extractor as well as a regex and have had no luck with either. Ex. X-path: //*[starts-with(@href, “http://”)][1] Ex. Regex: href=\”//

    Technical SEO | | Merkle-Impaqt
    0
  • BeckyKey


    Hi We have a number of sister companies and link to them via a drop down in the footer - are these links as dangerous as anchor text links?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey
    0
  • O2C


    As an agency we get quite a few of our clients come to us saying "Ooo, this company just contacted me saying they've run an SEO report on my site and we need to improve on these following things" We had one come through the other day that had reported on something we had not seen in any others before. They called them self-referencing links and marked it as a point of action should be taken. They had stated that 100% of the pages on our clients website had self-referencing links. The definition of self-referencing is when there is a link on a page that is linking to the page you are currently on. So for example you're on the home page and there is a link in the nav bar at the top that says "Home" with a link to the home page, the page you are already currently on. Is it bad practice? And if so can we do anything about it as it would seem strange from a UI point of view not to have a consistent navigation. I have not heard anything about this before but I wanted to get confirmation before going back to our client and explaining. Thanks Mozzers!

    Technical SEO | | O2C
    0
  • viatrading1


    Hi, I have 3 Pages we won't use anymore in our website. Let's call them url A, url B and url C. To keep their SEO strength on our domain, I've though about redirecting all of them to url D. For what I understand, when 301 redirecting, about 85-90% of the link SEO juice is passed. Then, if I redirect 3 URLs to the same page... does url D receive all the link SEO juices for URLs added up? (approximately)
    e.g. future url D juice = 100% current url D juice + 85% url A juice + 85% url B juice + 85% url C juice Is this the best practice, or is there a better way? Cheers,

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
    0
  • kcb8178


    We have a site that has way too many urls caused by our crawlable faceted navigation.  We are trying to purge 90% of our urls from the indexes.  We put no index tags on the url combinations that we do no want indexed anymore, but it is taking google way too long to find the no index tags.  Meanwhile we are getting hit with excessive url warnings and have been it by Panda. Would it help speed the process of purging urls if we added the urls to the robots.txt file?  Could this cause any issues for us?  Could it have the opposite effect and block the crawler from finding the urls, but not purge them from the index? The list could be in excess of 100MM urls.

    Technical SEO | | kcb8178
    0
  • LiamMcArthur


    Our business has 26 stores throughout the UK and the website has a page for each of these that includes contact information, a Google map, a form etc. I was going to add some LD-JSON Schema to all of my pages so that Google would display my social profiles in the SERPS: My problem with this is that I'm worrying my store pages may have a conflict with the data that it is pulling from the individual Google Business Pages that each store has set up. Should I only include the social profile Schema on the home page of my website or could I include this on every page except my store pages - and on these, display "LocalBusiness" Schema? I just don't want to do anything that will confuse Google!

    Local SEO | | LiamMcArthur
    0
  • BeckyKey


    Hi I have a couple of questions regarding the best way to optimise SKU pages on a large ecommerce site. At the moment we have 2 landing pages per product - one is the primary landing page with no SKU, the other includes the SKU in the URL so our sales people & customers can find it when using the search facility on the site. The SKU landing page has a canonical pointing to the primary page as they're duplicates. Is this the best way? Or is it better to have the one page with the SKU in the URL? Also, we have loads of products with the very similar product descriptions, I am working on trying to include a unique paragraph or few sentences on these to improve the content - how dangerous is the duplicate content within your own site? I know its best to have totally unique content, but it won't be possible on a site with thousands of products and a small team. At the moment I am trying to prioritise the products to update. Thank you 🙂

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey
    0
  • shauna7084


    I have a client that does website contract work for about 50 governmental county websites.  The client has the ability to add a link back in the footer of each of these websites.  I am wanting my client to get backlink juice for a different key phrase from each of the 50 agencies (basically just my keyphrase with the different county name in it).  I also want a different landing page to rank for each term.  The 50 different landing pages would be a bit like location pages for local search.  Each one targets a different county.  However, I do not have a lot of unique content for each page.  Basically each page would follow the same format (but reference a different county name, and 10 different links from each county website). Is this a good SEO back link strategy?  Do I need more unique content for each landing page in order to prevent duplicate content flags?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shauna7084
    0
  • nowmedia1


    A potentially stupid question. Is the suite number included within the  tag, or should it sit outside of it? The reason I ask is because (a) I've seen it where the suite number sits outside that tag and (b) Google My Business best practices, I've been told (by Google support), is to include the suite in the second address line. I'm wondering if that translates in some way to the local schema on your site. On the other hand, it makes sense to include your suite number within the streetAddress span tag, but sometimes what makes sense doesn't really make sense when you know more, so I'm just covering my bases. Thank you!

    Technical SEO | | nowmedia1
    1
  • blake.runyon


    Howdy, Working on a larger eComm site that 302s you based on your location. With that in mind should I canonicalize the final page. domain.com => 302 => domain.com/us/, domain.com/fr/, etc... (Should these all have a canonical pointing to the root domain.com?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blake.runyon
    0
  • KempRugeLawGroup


    I read about using schema or h1review to add markup that would get an individual person's review to show up in organic search, but it was from 2013. I did a few queries for keywords in my area, and none of the results had this. Then I did some queries for generic things like "best pizza in Tampa" and "coffee in tampa" and they didn't have it either. So, is this still something that can be done or not? I do see it when a review site like yelp comes up or in ads, but I'm specifically talking about organic search results from our website. Thanks, Ruben

    Reviews and Ratings | | KempRugeLawGroup
    0
  • coolhandluc


    Hi there Can someone tell me if the description serves a purpose in the google my business profile since:
    a) It is not displayed anywhere as far as i have seen (maps, 3 pack local results, knowledge graph, organic results)
    b) It is no longer considered as a ranking factor since it was abused so much Thanks

    Local Listings | | coolhandluc
    0
  • Ria_


    So I currently have approximately 1000 of these URLs indexed, when I only want roughly 100 of them. Let's say the URL is www.example.com/page.php?par1=ABC123=&par2=DEF456=&par3=GHI789= All the indexed URLs follow that same kinda format, but I only want to index the URLs that have a par1 of ABC (but that could be ABC123 or ABC456 or whatever). Using URL Parameters tool in Search Console, I can ask Googlebot to only crawl URLs with a specific value. But is there any way to get a partial match, using regex maybe? Am I wasting my time with Search Console, and should I just disallow any page.php without par1=ABC in robots.txt?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ria_
    0
  • Mysites


    Hey guys, We currently have some blogs on one of our pages (fraserisland.com.au) and we are launching a complete rebranding of our sites. We want to move the blogs from fraserisland.com.au to the new parent page of travelfreedom.com.au (but still link it to fraserisland.com.au), however I don't know what affect this will have on the ranking of the blogs. The biggest thing I'm worried about is that the domain will be completely different, and not a sub domain, but I'm not sure what impact this will have on the effectiveness of SEO on the blog. Thanks guys

    Link Building | | Mysites
    0
  • EcommerceSite


    In the middle of September we launched a redesigned version of our site. The urls all stayed the same. Since site launch traffic in Google has steadily increased but Bing traffic has dropped by about 50%. Any ideas on what I should look at?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite
    0
  • MEllsworth


    Hey everybody, I'm going through all my sites and disavowing crap links. However, I'm having trouble distinguishing which high DA sites to disavow. What would you do? For example:
    https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis?site=busca.starmedia.com&target=domain&source=subdomain&page=1&sort=spam_score and https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis?site=cc879fe.activerain.com&target=domain&source=subdomain&page=1&sort=spam_score They both have tons of backlinks - both good and crap. The first has a DA of 72 and a Moz spam score of 4/17 and the second has a DA of 86 and a Moz spam score of 9/17

    Moz Pro | | MEllsworth
    1
  • kellys.marketing


    Hi  guys, Does anyone have any experience of having (trying to rank) two separate blogs existing on one domain, for instance: www.companysite.com/service1/blogwww.companysite.com/service2/blogThese 2 pages (service 1 and service 2) offer completely different services (rank for different keywords).(for example, a company that provides 2 separate services: SEO service and IT service)Do you think it is a good/bad/confusing search engine practice trying to have separate blogs for each service or do you think there should be only one blog that contains content for both services?Bearing in mind that there is an already existing subdomain for a non-profit part of business that ranks for different keywords: non-profit.companysite.comand it will potentially have another blog so the URL would look like: non-profit.companysite.com/blogAny ideas would be appreciated!Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kellys.marketing
    0
  • netzkern_AG


    Hi, Before you shout at me for not searching - I did and there are indeed lots of threads and articles on this problem. I therefore realise that this problem is not exactly new or unique. The situation: I am dealing with a website that has 1 to N (n being between 1 and 6 so far) variants of a product. There are no dropdown for variants. This is not technically possible short of a complete redesign which is not on the table right now. The product variants are also not linked to each other but share about 99% of content (obvious problem here). In the "search all" they show up individually. Each product-variant is a different page, unconnected in backend as well as frontend. The system is quite limited in what can be added and entered - I may have some opportunity to influence on smaller things such as enabling canonicals. In my opinion, the optimal choice would be to retain one page for each product, the base variant, and then add dropdowns to select extras/other variants. As that is not possible, I feel that the best solution is to canonicalise all versions to one version (either base variant or best-selling product?) and to offer customers a list at each product giving him a direct path to the other variants of the product. I'd be thankful for opinions, advice or showing completely new approaches I have not even thought of! Kind Regards, Nico

    Technical SEO | | netzkern_AG
    0
  • xpers


    I run this website: http://knowledgeweighsnothing.com/ It was initially built to get traffic from Facebook. The vast majority of the 1300+ posts are shorter curation style posts. Basically I would find excellent sources of information and then do a short post highlighting the information and then link to the original source (and then post to FB and hey presto 1000s of visitors going through my website). Traffic was so amazing from FB at the time, that 'really stupidly' these posts were written with no regard for search engine rankings. When Facebook reach etc dropped right off, I started writing full original content posts to gain more traffic from search engines. I am starting to get more and more traffic now from Google etc, but there's still lots to improve. I am concerned that the shortest/weakest posts on the website are holding things back to some degree. I am considering going through the website and deleting the very weakest older posts based on their quality/backlinks and PA. This will probably run into 100s of posts. Is it detrimental to delete so weak many posts from a website? Any and all advice on how to proceed would be greatly recieved.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xpers
    1
  • gundogs


    I have legit links from about a dozen .EDU sites. We do training for Universities. The links never show up in webmaster tools "Links to Your Site' and considering how many we have its amazing our rankings aren't better. It's almost as if google is ignoring them. Any thoughts?

    Link Building | | gundogs
    0
  • DmitriiK


    Hello, fellas. I've been trying to find some type of comparison analysis for online SEO related tools and I couldn't find any, which are fresh and overview more than three. I'm interested to see if anybody saw good comparison reviews of such tools, as well as your own thoughts (back your thoughts up with more than just "I like it", please 🙂 The tools I'm interested in comparing are: MOZ Ahrefs Majestic Spyfu SEMRush Raven Wordstream whatever else you use or have in mind

    Competitive Research | | DmitriiK
    2
  • CayenneRed89


    Hi Guys, I am currently working on website that has been penalised by Google for a spam link injection.  The website was hacked and 17,000 hidden links were injected. All the links have been removed and the site has subsequently been redesigned and re-built.  That was the easy part 🙂 The problems comes when I look on Webmaster.  Google is showing 1000's of internal spam links to the homepage and other pages within the site.  These pages do not actually exist as they were cleared along with all the other spam links. I do believe though this is causing problems with the websites rankings.  Certain pages are not ranking on Google and the homepage keyword rankings are fluctuating massively. I have reviewed the website's external links and these are all fine. Does anyone have any experience of this and can provide any recommendations / advice for clearing the site from Google penalty? Thanks, Duncan

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CayenneRed89
    0
  • KempRugeLawGroup


    We have an old unverified listing that has our information on it, but we can't get it off google. I told them months ago it was closed, and it is marked as closed in Google...but it still shows up. Moz Local is telling me this is an inconsistency that hurts our local rankings. I went to delete the page from our Google Business/Place, but if I did that, the warning said that I would just not have access to the page, and that the listing would still show up on google. How do I permanently get rid of those thing, so it's not longer an inconsistent listing? Ruben

    Local Listings | | KempRugeLawGroup
    0
  • Flock.Media


    In the Directives tab within Screaming Frog, can anyone tell me what the difference between "canonicalised", "canonical", and "no canonical" means? They're found in the filter box. I see the data but am not sure how to interpret them. Which one of these would I check to find canonical issues within a website? Are there any other easy ways to identify canonical issues?

    Technical SEO | | Flock.Media
    0
  • monicapopa


    Hi Moz Guru's Our website was hacked a few months ago, since then we have taken various measures, last one being redesigning the website all together and removing it from a WordPress platform. So far all is going well, except that the 404 not found errors keeps coming up in Google Webmaster tools. The URLs are spam pages that were created by the virus. And these spam pages have been indexed by Google, and now we are struggling to get rid of them. Is there any way we can deal with these 404 spam pages links? Is marking all of them as fixed in the webmaster tools - search console- crawl errors helpful in any way? Can this have a negative impact on the SEO ? Looking forward to your answers. Many thanks.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monicapopa
    0
  • iamgreenminded


    Hello, Can anyone help me find a solution to Fixing and Creating Magento CMS pages to only use one URL  and not two URLS? www.domain.com/testpage www.domain.com/testpage/ I found a previous article that applies to my issue, which is using htaccess to redirect request for pages in magento 301 redirect to slash URL from the non-slash URL.  I dont understand the syntax fully in htaccess , but I used this code below. This code below fixed the CMS page redirection but caused issues on other pages, like all my categories and products with this error: "This webpage has a redirect loop ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS" Assuming you're running at domain root.  Change to working directory if needed. RewriteBase / # www check If you're running in a subdirectory, then you'll need to add that in to the redirected url (http://www.mydomain.com/subdirectory/$1 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Trailing slash check Don't fix direct file links RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
    RewriteRule ^(.)$ $1/ [L,R=301] Finally, forward everything to your front-controller (index.php) RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule .* index.php [QSA,L]

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iamgreenminded
    0
  • Alder


    Hello, I'm working with a client that is creating a new site. They currently are using the following URL structure: http://clientname.com/products/furry-cat-muffins/ But the landing page for the directory /products/ does not actually have any content. They have a similar issue for the /about/ directory where the menu actually sends you to /about/our-story/ instead of /about/. Does it hurt SEO to have the URL structure set up in this way and also does it make sense to create 301 redirects from /about/ to /about/our-story/?

    Technical SEO | | Alder
    0

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