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!


  • Hey guys, I've read mixed reviews on this. Does anyone have an answer to whether or not hiding h1 text  ( ) negatively effects SEO in 2018. Thanks for the help!

    Technical SEO | | Jason-Reid
    0

  • We have the main pricing page here: https://www.eginnovations.com/product/pricing Then depending on what you click, you'll be taken to the appropriate form on one of these pages: https://www.eginnovations.com/product/request-quote?pricetype=audit https://www.eginnovations.com/product/request-quote?pricetype=saas https://www.eginnovations.com/product/request-quote?pricetype=perpetual https://www.eginnovations.com/product/request-quote?pricetype=subscription How should I handle these? Noindex, follow? Set a canonical? I keep getting notifications that these are duplicate content, but it's just a way to keep the form fills organized. Thanks for your help!

    Technical SEO | | eGInnovations
    1

  • Hello, I sell products relating to wood. Although the products vary, I like to give description of the wood type for the customers who might not be familiar with it. Will it hurt my rankings to give the same descriptions for the same wood type as long as the majority of the description is different? Here is an example of the layout: 1. Different description for different products 2. The same short description for the same wood types (seen throughout multiple pages) Hopefully my question makes sense.

    On-Page Optimization | | mattl99
    2

  • Hello, I have a page with multiple bike tours on tour and under my image as anchor text linking to the different destination I have written the region + bike tour. Is it ok to write bike tour that many times bike tours or would it be better to write variations of it such as "Bordeaux biking, Strasbourg to Colmar by bike for (Alsace bike tour) or doesn't it matter ? Thank you,

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
    1

  • When doing a search for "des moines wa events" the top results are the events pack. When we do a search, none of the events are even happening in Des Monies but in Seattle proper. Our pages have events schema on them and they do get warnings but no errors. Here is a link to one of our events pages in Des Moines that does not show up. Is there anything wrong with our page that could be preventing it from ranking? What are the factors that get events to rank in that area? What else could we be doing to improve our results?

    Local Listings | | GRDigital
    0

  • Hi there, this is a general question about link building strategies in 2018. It actually relates to reports derived from the link building audit tool on SEMrush, so forgive that. We use Moz as well, it's just that we happen to be working in SEMrush for link analysis. Basically, the audit tool looks at our links and our competitors' links. It has come back with a number of 'opportunities' for link building and I'm questioning the value of many of them, in 2018. Many of the 'opportunities' the tool is suggesting we explore include answering forum questions on places like Reddit, Quora, etc. The tool has been good at identifying topical threads which might hold promise (a very specific branch of legal services) but most of the threads are 3 - 8 years old. To answer them, I would need to muster someone with expertise to post a relevant answer. So, obviously, my question is does anyone think there is any value in this sort of link building in this day and age? I really think our greatest value will be in guiding their content strategy and looking for content creation opportunities on high authority sites. Thoughts?

    Link Building | | Daaveey
    1

  • Hello, I'm developing a website for a law firm, which offers a variety of services. The site will also feature a blog, which would have similarly-named topics. As is customary, these topics were taxonomies. But I want the articles to enhance the value of the service pages themselves and because the taxonomy url /category/divorce has no relationship to the actual service page url /practice-areas/divorce, I'm worried that if anything, a redundantly-titled taxonomy url would dilute the value of the service page it's related to. Sure, I could show some of the related posts on the service page but if I wanted to view more, I'm suddenly bounced over to a taxonomy page which is stealing thunder away from the more important service page. So I did away with these taxonomies all together, and posts are associatable with pages directly with a custom db table. And now if I visit the blog page, instead of a list of category terms, it would technically be a list of the service pages and so if a visitor clicks on a topic they are directed to /practice-areas/divorce/resources (the subpages are created dynamically) and the posts are shown there. I'll have to use custom breadcrumbs to make it all work. Just wondering if you guys had any thoughts on this. Really appreciate any you might have and thanks for reading

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | utopianwp
    0

  • I'm doing manual duplicate research for an account and wanted to know if anyone had a resource to share on how to find duplicate listings for GMB and other citations. https://searchengineland.com/definitive-guide-duplicate-research-local-seo-238719 Ive been working off of this article from Joy Hawkins, but she mentions using Map Maker to search a phone number, but Google has since shut Map Maker down. Maps doesn't seem to work the same way, as I've searched a phone number which I know has duplicate listings and they don't come up. Any tips on a better tool or process?

    Local Listings | | formandfunctionagency
    0

  • If you can, please provide any and all talking points that I can use in this argument. It seems that no matter what I show him, including Matt Cutts' video debunking Keyword Density back in 2011, it doesn't seem to stick. He is fully, 100% convinced that keyword density is hugely important and we need to focus our time and energy on it. Any sources you might have to help me show him that this is a myth would be hugely appreciated. Thank you.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TaylorRHawkins
    2

  • Is it necessary to have the exact keyword which you are trying to rank for within the first sentence of the content on your web page? For example if we are selling men's shoes, is it ok to have have the meta title and h1 on page say men's shoes and just talk about shoes within the first sentence of the content on the page. Is it obvious to search engines that this page is selling men's shoes even if you don't have the word men's shoes in that first sentence or is it necessary to have the exact keywords which you are trying to rank for written there?

    Content Development | | whiteonlySEO
    0

  • If you've been with Moz a while, you may have used our old Crawl Test tool. A year ago we launched an all new, campaign-based Site Crawl (with an entirely rebuild crawl engine), but Crawl Test fell into disrepair and we haven't had a solid tool for crawling non-campaign domains. I'm happy to announce that we've just launched an all new On-Demand Crawl, built on the new Site Crawl engine, with a UI that's focused on quick insights. Moz Pro Standard tier customers can run up to 5 crawls per month at 3,000 page per crawl (crawls are saved for 90 days), with per-month limits increasing at higher levels. Most On-Demand Crawls should run in a few minutes, making the tool perfect to get quick insights for sales meetings, vetting prospects, or analyzing competitors. We've written up a sample case study or logged-in customers can go directly to On-Demand Crawl. Try it out -- we'd love to hear your use cases (either here or in the blog post comments).

    Moz Bar | | Dr-Pete
    6

  • I have a unique title tag for every page on my site but depending on what page a user lands on, that title becomes the title tag for the entire site. For example, if you come in from SERPs via the "Zach King: My Magical Life" page, the title "Zach King: My Magical Life" title will be applied to every page on the site even though they have unique title tags. This is the site: https://www.shelfstuff.com/book-shelf. Any ideas on how to fix this?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | craigkleila47
    0

  • Hi SEO Experts, If I add link on Image without alt tag, Would Search Console be shown anchor text as BLANK?

    Technical SEO | | Rajesh.Prajapati
    1

  • Hi there. I have a question about deleting low quality content pages hopefully anyone could share your feedback on. We have a b2c ecom store and Product Pages are our target LDPs from search. We've built many information pages that are related to different products in the long past that are linked to related product pages. Problem is many of them lack so-called quality content in terms of volume and quality and they aren't helping. Especially since early this year, organic traffic started declining after having peaked in Feb. So I'm considering deleting those we and Moz consider low quality that are not receiving search traffic. Firstly, is that a good idea? Secondly, how should I go about it? Just delete them and put a redirect so that deleted pages will point to related pages or even homepage? Looking forward to any expert input.
    -Yuji

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yuji_m
    1

  • A potentially spammy website http://www.rofof.com/ has included a rel canonical tag pointing to my website. They've included the tag on thousands of pages on their website. Furthermore http://www.rofof.com/ appears to have backlinks from thousands of other low-value domains For example www.kazamiza.com/vb/kazamiza242122/, along with thousands of other pages on thousands of other domains all link to pages on rofof.com, and the pages they link to on rofof.com are all canonicalized to a page on my site. If Google does respect the canonical tag on rofof.com and treats it as part of my website then the thousands of spammy links that point to rofof.com could be considered as pointing to my website. I'm trying to contact the owner of www.rofof.com hoping to have the canonical tag removed from their website. In the meantime, I've disavowed the www.rofof.com, the site that has canonical tag. Will that have any effect though? Will disavow eliminate the effect of a rel canonical tag on the disavowed domain or does it only affect links on the disavowed website? If it only affects links then should I attempt to disavow all the pages that link to rofof.com? Thanks for reading. I really appreciate any insight you folks can offer.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brucepomeroy
    2

  • On Keyword Explorer - I added several keywords back in May.  How after do you go back to re-analyze?  I thought it was updated..but many keywords show it was last analyzed last May?

    Moz Bar | | WalkieTalkie
    2

  • Hello, On product pages does the content matter or does the presentation and answering the user intent matter more ? I know for informational query content definitely matters but with rank brain, I am thinking that for pages where your present product content doesn't matter as much ? Am I right ? Thank you,

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
    1

  • Hello, Is it ok that to use the homepage of website as a product page directly where you present all your products on your homepage or can it penalise you to do that ? and in that case, is it better to have a homepage that you don't rank and create a subpage for your product page. Thank you,

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
    1

  • Hey everyone! I wanted to ask the Moz community on what I should be on the lookout for in this situation; I have a local SEO client, an orthopedic clinic, who out of nowhere completely dropped off the map. Their Search Visibility is now at .001%. I really have no idea what would have caused this... I have dozens of other local SEO clients and have never seen this before.

    Local Listings | | TaylorRHawkins
    2

  • Hi all. I know there several threads related to noindexing blog archives and category pages, so if this has already been answered, please direct me to that post. My blog archive pages have preview text from the posts. Each time I post a blog, the last post on any given archive page shifts to the first spot on the next archive page. Moz seems to report these as new duplicate content issues each week. I have my archive pages set to meta noindex, so can I feel good about continuing to ignore these duplicate content issues, or is there something else I should be doing to prevent penalties? TIA!

    Technical SEO | | mkupfer
    1

  • The old one was very keyword stuffed and repeated words.  see its now gone from search for those main keywords do you think its just playing now and it will be back ?

    On-Page Optimization | | johan8
    1

  • I have noticed that several competitors that rank very well rarely update their blogs, www.42floors.com for instance. We are redesigning our commercial real estate Wordpress website in the hopes of improving traffic, ranking and conversions. How critical is it to invest resources on creating and categorizing blog posts? Is frequently updating a blog post less necessary in late 2018? Curious to hear how much effort we should take to create new blog content and whether or not it will assist us in a competitive niche. Thanks, Alan

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
    2

  • Hi Guys,
    I am getting MOZ reports on a few keywords and that is good But when My client search for the same keywords he doesn't get the same rank, not even on that page. Let me explain in more details:
    I have a keyword that shows on rank #5 in Google Mobile for a Local location for the current week. The client is from the same location as well. But when client search for that keyword from his mobile he doesn't get the keyword listed on that page, not even on other pages. I checked with other online keyword rank checker tool and all are showing the result similar to the Moz ranking report. It's really frustrating for my client. Google analytics shows that mobile users and organic reach are increasing so I am sure MOZ and other tools are showing us correct result. What could be the possible reason that he is not getting the same result as showing by MOZ? I am not from his location so how can I check the keyword result for the selected city using MOZ that is accurate? Any help would be highly appreciated. Please help. Thanks

    Moz Bar | | KanikaG
    1

  • I had a free trial and I thought I had cancelled it, and was charged $179. I need help cancelling the account and getting a refund. i already sent email to help@moz.com but no one answer me...

    Product Support | | i9hdads
    1

  • Recently, in the last two weeks, I started seeing a lot of odd 404 errors in GSC for my site. Upon investigation, the URLs are for fairly new articles, and the URLs are chopped in various places. From missing a character at the end to missing about 10 characters at the end of the URL. (an old similar issue is that GSC reports duplicate contents on weird subdomains that we've never used like 'smtp' 'ww1' or even random ones like 'bobo'.) GSC doesn't report any 'linked from' for those odd URLs and I know for sure these links aren't on the site itself. They're definitely not errors in the CMS. The site is a long established site (started 1997-1998) and we've been subject to a lot of negative SEO. I recently had to disavow about 1000 .ru domain linking to us, with some domains containing over a million link each. Could these chopped links be a new tactic of negative SEO? How do I find these seemingly intentionally broken links to us?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Lazeez
    2

  • https://www.hackerearth.com/blog/artificial-intelligence/artificial-intelligence-101-how-to-get-started/ We are ranking for 121KW for this page. And 22KW are ranking in the 1-3 position. I am not able to understand why will it rank like anything. Considering that it has just 4  inbound links. Will some help me to understand this mystery. When we try to write a good in-depth content then we are not ranking but for such content, we are doing fairly good.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rajnish_HE
    1

  • Hi all, I'm hoping someone can help me solve this once and for all! I keep getting hreflang errors on our site crawls and I cannot understand why. Does anything here look off to you? Thank you! JGdWcqu

    Technical SEO | | eGInnovations
    1

  • Hey there. I'm trying to export a .pdf to send to my client. When I click "export pdf", the page sits for a second then goes to a 404 page? I've never seen this before. Is anyone else getting this problem?

    Moz Bar | | TaylorRHawkins
    2

  • Hi, Our ad on Google Ads is appearing for a search we don't want. it isn't in our search keywords and when i try and ad it to our negative ones, we get the error " You cannot exclude keywords that are targeted " which i assume means that google thinks we are bidding on it? We have a selection of broad phrase matches so i can only think that this is where it's coming from? Do you have any tips on tracking down which keyword is generating this ad and how we can turn it off? (we don't want to pay for clicks on this search if possible!) Btw - i have turned off each keyword in turn to test it = nothing. have then paused the whole campaign = gets rid of the ad (but this is our most successful campaign so i can't just turn it off). Any advice super super welcome. thank you!

    Paid Search Marketing | | Fubra
    1

  • Hi, I'm a bit confused with Keyword CTR provided in Moz Dashboard. Is its an average of search positions or top 3 positions of SERPs?

    Link Explorer | | NishilP
    1

  • Hello, If we publish a blog post with a url which accidentally contains a number at the end (blog.companyname.com/subject-title-0), is it best-practice to update the URL (e.g. to blog.companyname.com/subject-title) and put in a 301 re-direct from the old to the new one or should it simply be left as is? I've read that 301's lose link equity and relevance so is it really worth re-directing for the sake of a cleaner url? Thanks for your input! John

    Technical SEO | | SEOCT
    1

  • Hi, We have intentionally blocked some of the website files which were indexed for years. Now we receive a message "Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt" in GSC. We can ignore as per my knowledge? Are any actions required about this? We thought of blocking them with meta tags but these are PDF files. Thanks

    Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz
    1

  • I'm getting 401 while trying to make an API call via my web API in C#. When I paste the exact same URL in my browser it works. Does anyone know why? Thanks!

    API | | Kung_fu_Panda
    2

  • Hello, I would love anyone's feedback for SEO before we start adding more products to our e-commerce store. Technical SEO ideas, UX, etc. Thank you!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jamesmcd03
    1

  • MOZ has some really powerful tools available to us, but I was wondering if there are any tools for conducting keyword research for YouTube? Thanks!

    Keyword Research | | Alaeddin
    1

  • The Google Search Console is showing recent "Not found" errors for pages that haven't been on my site for years. The pages are not in my sitemap and there don't appear to be any internal links to the pages. Is this normal? Should I be concerned? (Google Search Console > Crawl > Crawl Errors > URL Errors)

    Reporting & Analytics | | nkolson
    1

  • I have several Tumblr blogs. Created when Tumblr links were worth more, and now primarily for my amusement. But, I'd like to get whatever link juice I can out of them. I thought only the footer links were do follow, but when I check Moz it's showing all links as do follow. Any idea which is true?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | julie-getonthemap
    1

  • I work for a company that builds and manages apartments. I would like to know how we can fix canonicalization. You see, we have been posting our company's blog articles not only on our company's website, but also on LinkedIn. When people search for one of our articles, Google is  displaying the article for LinkedIn. Except, that's not what we want. I'd prefer for Google to display our company's website, to drive more traffic to our website and not LinkedIn. For instance I just Googled the title to one of our company's blog article "Great Leadership is about Influence not Authority." The first thing to show up was a link to see the article on LinkedIn. There was nothing referring to our company's website. Here is a link to the LinkedIn account where we have been posting the blogs: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/great-leadership-influence-authority-mike-kaeding/ Here is a link to the same article, but on our company's website: https://www.norhart.com/blog/2018/08/08/great-leadership-is-about-influence-not-authority/ Why is Google showing the article for Linkedin and not our Company's website? Might LinkedIn have canonicalization over Google? If so, how might we be able to reverse this and drive people to our company's blog instead. Any ideas I'd greatly appreciate it! Thanks.

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | mikleing
    0

  • Hello, I've just run a site audit and it has come up with a duplicate title tag issue for the topics section of our blog. For example it is flagging that the following have the same page title. https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name/page/2 How significant is this as an SEO issue and what are the ways we can go about fixing this? I look forward to any suggestions and guidance that can be provided. Thanks, John

    Technical SEO | | SEOCT
    1

  • Thanks in advance for any advice/links/discussion.  This honestly might be a scenario where we need to do some A/B testing. We have a massive (5 Million) content silo that is the basis for our long tail search strategy.  Organic search traffic hits our individual "product" pages and we've divided our silo with a parent category & then secondarily with a field (so we can cross link to other content silo's using the same parent/field categorizations). We don't anticipate, nor expect to have top level category pages receive organic traffic - most people are searching for the individual/specific product (long tail).  We're not trying to rank or get traffic for searches of all products in "category X" and others are competing and spending a lot in that area (head). The intent/purpose of the site structure/taxonomy is to more easily enable bots/crawlers to get deeper into our content silos.  We've built the page for humans, but included link structure/taxonomy to assist crawlers. So here's my question on best practices.  How to handle categories with 1,000+ pages/pagination.  With our most popular product categories, there might be 100,000's products in one category.  My top level hub page for a category looks like www.mysite/categoryA and the page build is showing 50 products and then pagination from 1-1000+. Currently we're using rel=next for pagination and for pages like www.mysite/categoryA?page=6 we make it reference itself as canonical (not the first/top page www.mysite/categoryA). Our goal is deep crawl/indexation of our silo.  I use ScreamingFrog and SEOMoz campaign crawl to sample (site takes a week+ to fully crawl) and with each of these tools it "looks" like crawlers have gotten a bit "bogged down" with large categories with tons of pagination.  For example rather than crawl multiple categories or fields to get to multiple product pages, some bots will hit all 1,000 (rel=next) pages of a single category. I don't want to waste crawl budget going through 1,000 pages of a single category, versus discovering/crawling more categories. I can't seem to find a consensus as to how to approach the issue.  I can't have a page that lists "all" - there's just too much, so we're going to need pagination.  I'm not worried about category pagination pages cannibalizing traffic as I don't expect any (should I make pages 2-1,000) noindex and canonically reference the main/first page in the category?).  Should I worry about crawlers going deep in pagination among 1 category versus getting to more top level categories? Thanks!

    Moz Pro | | DrewProZ
    1

  • Hi there, Can anyone answer whether having duplicate title tags on the blog listing page (e.g.https://blog.companyname.com/)  and the blog date archive pages (e.g.https://blog.companyname.com/archive/2017/10) is an issue? If so why is it an issue and what are the best practices of dealing with this? Thanks! John

    Technical SEO | | SEOCT
    1

  • Hello! I'm rolling out hreflang tags in my client's "main" XML Sitemap. My question is:  do we need to implement these tags in the country level XML Sitemaps also? Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | SimpleSearch
    1

  • Hello, I'm in a unique situation where I need to prevent a web page and business listing from ranking for a keyword in Google. The keyword is a phone number that is not associated with the business and is not listed anywhere on the page or in reviews on the business listing. It's causing confusion for people who perform a reverse phone number lookup and see our business and think we called them. I already submitted feedback on the search results, have contacted GMB support, have submitted the page for indexing in Search Console, and am now going to try displaying the correct phone number in the page title and meta description. 
    Aside from these steps, is there anything else I can do? Your help is appreciated! Thanks! Lindsey

    Local Listings | | geodigitalmarketing
    2

  • Hi All, I have an issue where the content (pages and images) of Site A (www.ericreynolds.photography) are showing up in Google under different domains Site B (www.fastphonerepair.com), Site C (www.quarryhillvet.com), Site D (www.spacasey.com). I believe this happened because I installed an SSL cert on Site A but didn't have the default SSL domain set on the server. You were able to access Site B and any page from Site A and it would pull up properly. I have since fixed that SSL issue and am now doing a 301 redirect from Sites B, C and D to Site A for anything https since Sites B, C, D are not using an SSL cert. My question is, how can I trigger google to re-index all of the sites to remove the wrong listings in the index. I have a screen shot attached so you can see the issue clearer. I have resubmitted my site map but I'm not seeing much of a change in the index for my site. Any help on what I could do would be great. Thanks
    Eric TeVM49b.png qPtXvME.png

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cwscontent
    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.