Thank you for your input. Some of these are nofollow, those I guess if we are going to disavow them, there is no point?

I was going to disavow some of the links but Google repeatedly gave a warning that you shouldn't do it unless you think it's a "considerable amount" or you're sure you're being penalized. Does anyone have thoughts on that?

Hi,

I recently download the inbound links report for my client to look for some opportunities. When they switched to our platform a couple years ago, the format of some of their webpages change, so a number of these inbound links are going to an error page and should be redirected.

However, some of these are spammy. In that case, someone recommended to me to disavow them but still redirect anyway.

In other cases, some were "last seen" a year or two ago, so when I try to go to the URL the link is coming from, I also get an error page.

Should I bother to redirect in these cases? Should I disavow in both cases? Or leave them alone? Thanks for any input!

Hi Mazen,

Thank you so much for your reply.

Here's an example of a domain with a 43% spam score: 123coolpictures.com. The DA is 26 though. Still seems like a spammy site?

Hi,

I recently downloaded a spreadsheet of inbound links to my client sites and am trying to 301 redirect the ones that are formatted incorrectly or just bad links in general (they all link to the site domain, but they used to have differently formatted urls on their old site, or the link URL in general has strange stuff on it).

My question is, should I even bother redirecting these links if their spam score is a little high (i.e. 20-40%)? it already links to the existing domain, just with a differently formatted URL. I just want to make sure it goes to a valid URL on the site, but I don't want to redirect to a valid URL if it's going to harm the client's SEO. Also not sure what to do about the links with the --% spam score.

I really appreciate any input as I don't have a lot of experience with how to deal with spammy links.

Hello,

We have received permission from a consultant we partner with to publish one of his articles on our site (listing him as the author, of course). However, he currently has the article published on his site, so if I put it on my site will I get penalized for stealing content? Is there some sort of tagging that will provide him/his site credit? Maybe a canonical tag?

Hi Donald,

Thanks for your reply. So if we linked ourselves from the client footer contact us page (the link would go to a content page about us with links to our site), that would likely also be considered spam as well?

Hi,

On our client sites we have a link in the footer that says the site is maintained and developed by my company. That link takes you to a page that has outbound links to our site. Should these links be nofollow, since in a way they are almost like sponsored links? I feel like I read that somewhere but I can't remember where.

Any advice is appreciated!

Thanks!

Hi,

For one of our ecommerce clients, we have brand banners on each brand page that links to their most popular product lines. Some of the banners just have a column of links, and some are paragraphs with copy and anchor text.

Example below:

Brand Line 1

Brand Line 2

Example 2:

For the utmost in quality, performance and comfort, purchase Brand Line 1 . Brand Line 2 offers the perfect ease of use for beginners while not compromising on quality.

Obviously these are just examples, and there are several links (more than 2) per brand, but I was wondering if this harms SEO in any way because of keyword stuffing? It makes sense to have the brand name in the link, otherwise the name of the lines might not make much sense (an example of this is one of the lines is called 849.. so without the brand name that doesn't mean much and looks weird)

Do you think it would be better to have the links in just columns in the first example, or in paragraph format?

Thanks for the input! We actually reached out to google and they admitted it's a bug on their end.

Hi,

My client has PDFs of their catalog on the site which google is indexing. However, it seems that google is taking an image from the catalog and then showing it upside in the index for images/search results. The images are not upside down on the site. Has anyone heard of this happening before or does anyone know a way to fix it?

Thanks

Hi,

In the last couple months my client has dropped for several main keyword (not all but some). I suspect this has to do with algorithm updates in March.

I am trying to better target the site for this keyword as I discovered it is only mentioned in the home page title on their site at this time.

The homepage did not have a good H1 tag, so I added the keyword to that as well. It's in the menu and item page meta descriptions (ecommerce site) and I added it to the homepage meta description. I also suggested to the client that we place it and variants of it in various places throughout the site (where it makes sense).

I have a couple questions:

• Is having an H1 tag at the bottom of the page a concern? It's there because there are various product banners and other information at the top and I didn't want to disrupt the flow of the site. It is above the footer of the page. Does there need to be text underneath?

-Is there anything else I can do to improve my rankings for this keyword? I haven't really dealt with this before and any input is appreciated.

I also suggested they should try to improve their site overall with more descriptive product descriptions and trying to get backlinks from vendors and relevant contacts.

Hi Andrew... It is in the title, however I don't think it is anywhere else on the page.

The timing of this correlates with the slight traffic drop (our traffic did not drastically drop but I did see a drop for a few good keywords like I said).
Thanks so much for this!

I should also note that the digital catalogs contain links to products that are on the site

Hello,

I noticed a gradual rankings drop for 3 important keywords over the last month, with a pretty big plummet the last two weeks. Overall in the last month+ we dropped from position 9 to 41.I noticed this when I dug further after noticing traffic dropping since February (not a drastic traffic drop). I should note that the keywords took people to my client's homepage. Their branded keywords have no suffered and I looked at a couple others that haven't either.

Now, there is a link in the site footer (we have site wide header and footer) that takes you to a static page that contains links for the 2 digital flipbook catalogs the customer has (one for US and one for Canada).

My concern is that at the end of January I had a developer implement a noindex/nofollow meta robot & robots.txt disallow specifically on the HTML pages/URL of the Canadian catalog ONLY. It specifically pointed to that flipbook URL. This catalog is nearly identical to the US catalog and I thought I'd be eliminating duplicate content and helping with crawl budget. After looking further into it last week (reading up about internal nofollows not necessarily being detrimental, but not recommended) and noticing the drop in search visibility traffic (starting gradually in March), I had the disallow/nofollow removed. This was last week, and over this last week the traffic took an even bigger drop (not amazingly drastic but enough to be concerned) and I noticed the keywords that we did ok for dropped even more this last week (down to 41).

I'm concerned this has to do with the change I made at the end of January and reversed back. I should note  that I don't think these catalogs or the static page that links to them brought any traffic. The keywords I am concerned about fell on our homepage (where the link to the static page that contains the links to both catalogs is in the sitewide footer)

The catalogs are a couple hundred pages. I honestly don't see how this could do it, unless it has something to do with the footer being sitewide? There have been site upgrades/dev changes over the last couple months too (although I am not sure if that affected other clients who received the same upgrade), so this is hard to pinpoint. Sorry this is so long but I'd appreciate someone offering some insight to help ease my mind a bit!

Thanks for the input, guys!

Hi,

On our ecommerce site, when we load an image for an item, it automatically loads different sizes for that image. (i.e. High Res, Large, Small, Thumbnail, etc). We have an option to add the size to the alt text of the image (in addition to the description of the picture... so for example "Blue casual shirt High Res"... is this necessary?

One of our clients requested this and I am not sure I see the point of having the image size in the alt text unless it helps the visually impaired in some way?

Thank you!

Hi everyone,

My coworker recently stumbled across this article that instructs you to not to alt text for "decorative images" as you might get penalized you for over optimization

https://www.shopify.com/blog/7412852-10-must-know-image-optimization-tips

Has anyone heard of this or have any thoughts?

There is also brand copy beneath the brand logo introducing the brand on each page. Does anyone have an opinion on wrapping the H1 around the brand name beginning the paragraph?

i.e.

Brand Name

produces such and such products for such and such industry.... and so on

Hi,

We're having an issue with a client not wanting the H1 tag to display on their site and using an image of their logo instead. We made the H1 tag white (did not deliberately hide with CSS) and i just read an article where this is considered black hat SEO.

https://www.websitemagazine.com/blog/16-faqs-of-seo

The only reason we want to hide it is because it looks redundant appearing there along with the brand name logo. Does anyone have any suggestions? Would putting the brand logo image inside of an H1 tag be ok?

Thanks for the help

Hi,

We're a discussion about how to structure a clients ecommerce site product page URLs where 12345 represent the product SKU/number:

https://domain.com/Item--i-12345

https://domain.com/product-name/p/12345

https://domain.com/p/12345

It's a toss up between the second and the third URL, but the SEO company is saying the third is best because of the placement with the /p/ and creating a silo for "products" that help search engines recognize it is a product. Does anyone have thoughts on this?

Thanks!

I know that best practice is to keep your domain short, but is there an actual suggested character ballpark when coming up with one? Any thoughts are appreciated.

Thank you for your reply and sorry for the delay in mine. We have the https versions of our site in GA and GSC. The https versions of the sites were not fully indexed. We noticed when traffic was falling significantly on all the sites.

Unfortunately according to GSC, Google has still only crawled a small fraction of all client sites and rankings/organic traffic are slightly improving but still not back to normal. We submitted the site maps and have re-submitted some. We can try to again?

Any other input would be appreciated.

Hi,

This was a topic a couple years ago

https://moz.com/community/q/title-tag-use-comma-pipe-or-colon

I was wondering if there was any update on this as the consensus on this thread seemed to say using a pipe as a separator is best, but in Moz's title tag recommendations it has hyphen and pipe

Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name

Does anyone know if using a pipe | between the primary keyword and secondary has adverse effects?

Also, does removing the brand name for the sake of length hurt you in any way?

Thanks for the help!

Hi everyone,

We control several client sites at my company. The developers accidentally had a no index robot implemented in the site code when we did the HTTPS upgrade without knowing it (yes it's true). Ten days later we noticed traffic was falling. After a couple days we found the no index tags and removed them and resumbitted the sitemaps. The sites started ranking for their own keywords again within a day or two. The organic traffic is still down considerably and other keywords they are not ranking for in the same spot as they were before or at all.

If I look in Google Search console, it says we submitted for example 4,000 URLs and only 160 have been indexed. I feel like maybe Google is taking a long time to re-index to remainder of the sites?? Has anyone has this issue?? We're starting to get very concerned so any input would be appreciate. I read an article on here from 2011 about a company that did the same and they were ranking for their keywords within a week. It's been 8 days since our fix.

Gotcha, so it helps but it won't hurt your rankings. Thanks again

Thanks for your reply. In my research this morning I read on a couple of forums that breadcrumbs actually help the search engine crawl the site. Is that still true? The info might have been outdated.

We have full navigational breadcrumbs on our site for the menu and the brand menu.

i.e. Home > Clothing > Jackets

Brand > Brand Name > Brand Jackets

There's been talk of removing this and having it like Chico's does, where on item pages they just have a link at the top to previous category (i.e. you're on a shirt product page and at the top it says "Back to Tops" instead of listing Home > Clothing > Tops)

Is doing something like this detrimental to SEO? From what I've read Breadcrumbs are for user experience but I just want to be sure.

We have full navigational breadcrumbs on our site for the menu and the brand menu.

i.e. Home > Clothing > Jackets

Brand > Brand Name > Brand Jackets

There's been talk of removing this and having it like Chico's does, where on item pages they just have a link at the top to previous category (i.e. you're on a shirt product page and at the top it says "Back to Tops" instead of listing Home > Clothing > Tops)

Is doing something like this detrimental to SEO? From what I've read Breadcrumbs are for user experience but I just want to be sure.

Thank you for your input! Very helpful!

Thank you for your input!

Hi All,

Does anyone have insight on any repercussions from Google if many title tags are changed at once on a site (we're talking 500 to several thousand)?

Appreciate any input. Thanks!

Thanks. I was concerned about the URL because I've read several articles that state adaptive and responsive designs use the same URL whereas mobile dedicated is a different url, usually a subdomain of the root domain. The developers are telling me we have an "adaptive design", but the mobile site is a subdoman setup, where the URL structure for the homepage, some navigational pages and search are different than the desktop site.

If you go to a webpage on a mobile phone and it redirects you to a subdomain with a mobile setup, that sounds mobile dedicated to me, and not "adaptive".... but maybe I am having a hard time grasping the true definition of adaptive.

http://conversionsciences.com/blog/the-make-or-break-differences-between-responsive-adaptive-mobile-optimized-websites/

http://www.clickseed.com/responsive-design-vs-separate-mobile-site-vs-dynamic-serving/

Thanks again.

Do you have an opinion on adding a canonical tag to your mobile site that points to the domain root URL?

Thank you for the reply! Sorry for any confusion, I am just relaying the information I am receiving from designers and developers.

Yes, when you access the site from a mobile device you are sent to /mobileview/mobilehome.aspx.

The homepage banners, top navigation and footer can be made different on the mobile site, and stuff is hidden with CSS. According to my developers "the look is different but the data is the same."

So based off this, it sounds like we need to be careful of the upcoming Google update, right?

Thanks again for your input! It's much appreciated!

I was under the impression our site had a mobile dedicated design, but my developers are telling me we have an adaptive design.

The mobile site is set up different and has different content and the url is as follows:

www.site.com/MobileView/MobileHome.aspx

Can it still be considered adaptive if the URL is not the exact same? Hopefully this make sense and I appreciate anyone's input!

Thank you for your input. Does it make a difference if the mobile URL is actually within the site like I stated above? i.e. www.site.com/MobileView/MobileHome.aspx.

My developers are telling me are design is more like "adaptive", but can that be the case when the url is not the exact same?

Also, what are your thoughts on adding a canonical tag on the mobile site?

Thanks again!

Just wanted everyone's input/opinion on this article that basically states Google will move to a solely mobile index in the future

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/mobile-vs-responsive/

That seems like it would negatively impact sites that have a separate URL for their mobile site. In this particular case I'm talking about... the mobile site URL is this layout: www.site.com/MobileView/MobileHome.aspx

Any thoughts/input would be enormously appreciated.

I apologize in advance, but I am an SEO novice and my understanding of code is very limited. Moz has issued a lot (several hundred) of duplicate content and 404 error flags on the ecommerce site my company takes care of.

For the duplicate content, some of the pages it says are duplicates don't even seem similar to me. additionally, a lot of them are static pages we embed images of size charts that we use as popups on item pages. it says these issues are high priority but how bad is this? Is this just an issue because if a page has similar content the engine spider won't know which one to index?

also, what is the best way to handle these urls bringing back 404 errors? I should probably have a developer look at these issues but I wanted to ask the extremely knowledgeable Moz community before I do

Hi Paul,

Thank you so much for replying. I don't think they're as concerned about ranking for the recipes as they were about doing something that would be harmful to SEO (as far as adding so many extra pages/URLs to the site). It's a hunting gear website so the chances of ranking for recipes are probably extremely low I totally agree with you that from a social sharing standpoint it is necessary.

Thank you so much for the taxonomy/search tip also. That's a great idea!

Hi Everyone,

I'm not a designer/developer and am an not extremely knowledgeable in SEO, but I'll try to be as clear as I can. One of the designers here is creating a recipe section on our website. He created it so that it's a container (or iFrame?) on the page. Basically, no matter what you click (different sections and recipes) the URL stays the same. I was told to find out from an SEO perspective if it's better to do things this way or have a separate URL for each section and recipe.

It's been brought up that from a social/sharing standpoint separate URLs would be better so people can send a link directly to the specific recipe they want to share.

Any thoughts/comments are appreciated! Thanks for the help!

This is kind of a loaded question. I'm completely new to SEO. I think my boss signed up for Moz Pro sometime in February and started adding data to our Ecommerce site to help with rankings. Sometime before this, I changed some of the title tags on the site (trying to help with organic search and CTR). I did not do a site wide change.... just changed maybe 10-20 (just a guess). I did it with keywords in mind but did not make note of when I did it. I didn't really know better at the time, and I did not have access to Google Analytics or Moz Pro.

I was looking through the ranking data/graph for February and March. It won't let me look before February 29th (so that's why I think my boss started the Mos Pro subscription around at that time). On that day it said we ranked 12 keywords in the 1-3 spot, and then the following week (march 7) it went down to 6. I don't think or know if any major site changes were implemented, so I'm not sure why that happened and if it has anything to do with my title tag changes I did maybe a week or two before (again I am not sure when I did this unfortunately). Since then the keyword ranking numbers stayed about the same with organic traffic slowly going down (it could be because we are getting out of season for our industry though). The second week of March the site was upgraded and since then the menu has been completely changed around. Last week I did a site wide title tag change. So the minor changes I made in February are no longer in effect anyway.

I added more keywords to Moz earlier this week and the number for 1-3 spot keywords went up from 6 to 20. It also says my ranking moved up 4 keywords and down 13 keywords. Anyway, I am wondering how seriously I should take these changes and if I'm damaging the site. I am new to Moz Pro also so all the data you can access is kind of confusing/overwhelming.

If your title tag is over 55 characters, is it generally OK or good practice to abbreviate your brand name (at the end of the title tag) for the sake of the other keywords in the tag?

We have a page set up that has anchor text with header tags. There is an instance where the same anchor text is on the page twice linking to the same page, and I know that Google will ignore the second instance. But in the second instance it also had an H2 tag (which I removed and put it on the first instance of anchor text even though it's smaller). Is this good practice?