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I'm trying to target one page for one broad 2 word keyword, however, because our niche revolves around this keyword and it's synonyms, the keyword is used on every other page, thus creating the issue of non-targeted pages taking the rank instead of targeted page. I've thought of using synonyms on each page, so that no one page uses the same keyword, but felt this could be seen as spammy or could just hurt overall relevancy towards the main keyword, thus a loss of rank. I understand page authority also plays a part, but also seems that every page other than the page I want get's targeted.

Hello, A client recently did a redesign a few months ago, resulting in 700 pages being reduced to 60, mostly due to panda penalty and just low interest in products on those pages. Now google is still indexing a good number of them ( around 650 ) when we only have 70 on our sitemap. Thing is google indexes our site on average now for 115 urls when we only have 60 urls that need indexing and only 70 on our sitemap. I would of thought these urls would be crawled and not found, but is taking a very long period of time. Our rankings haven't recovered as much as we'd hope, and we believe that the indexed older pages are causes this. Would you agree and also would you think removing those old urls via the remover tool would be best option? It would mean using the url remover tool for 650 pages. Thank you in advance

A competitor is using a weird strategy, one I know isn't legit, however it's not only helping them, but doing in with a lot of speed. I've ran their info through ahref, majestic, moz, semrush and for backlinks they have 225ish, here is their breakdown. 169 follow links from their parent distributor site ( which is located in their parent's site's footer ) and then 3 to 5 links from sites that relate to SEO, marketing, unrelated things like pocket calling article and comment spam. maybe 5 of those links are from anywhere close to a related site, and those are from spammy directories from out of country. Why would these backlinks be helping them so much, and how can I get in front of them when these craptactics are working for them? They have 250 backlinks - 25 of them are follow We have 300 backlinks - 90 are follow and from relevant sites like EPA.gov, some EDUs and related sites to our niche. Some explanations or words of wit would really be helpful here, as I feel like something isn't adding up.

I'm doing a bit of competitor backlink auditing and am curious how you view these domains? I also am doing this for others as a comparison and growing reference maybe of domains that they can crosscheck with their own backlink profile and make sure these aren't on there, in preparation for penguin algo release to core. Either chime in with known domains to be spam, and I will create a live list based on answers here. Domain                     Domain Rating directoryworld.net     64
prlog.ru                     60
torchbrowser.com     60
jzip.com                    58
localbiznetwork.com 58
gimpsy.com               54
pageonepower.com  52
nashvillelife.com       49
2thetopdesign.com   49
seocounsel.com       48
healthywealthyaffiliate.com 48
hollinslegal.com        48 On a working Disavow list either in root domain or extended url form seocourt.com
wldirectory.com
onpaco.com
lostdirectory.com
ligginit.comligginit.com
alivedir.net
tiptopdirectory.com
onemilliondirectory.com
submittolinkdirectory.com I've read that sitewide footer links even from parent company sites will only count as one, regardless of how many links they have, I was wondering if that was true as well?

So there I was looking through my rankings like every other day, when I see a lowercase and uppercase version of a keyword. Most times I see this, I see them with the same rankings, and even researched this about 5 months ago, when I came to the conclusion that google treats them the same way. However, this day I saw them as different ranks, same keyword, only capitalized 1st letter of the 2 word keyword. I asked moz staff about this, as I felt it was an error. But was met with the answer that google does indeed treat these keywords differently. My line of thought was that the rank checker didn't check both the lowercase and uppercase keyword at the same time, and SERPs happened to change when the second word was checked for rank, returning a different rank. So now, I am in doubt again, as to uppercase and lowercase keywords being different or the same in google's eyes? I honestly don't know why a uppercase keyword would have different motive from searcher than a lowercase when many time not, searchers can't even spell the keyword correctly.

I have a competitor who I've talked about on here before about how they passed us in ranking for our main keywords and that they were a new site ( less than 6 months old ). Well after further digging a few things were found out: Our site seems to have a penguin penalty causing our keywords ( a group of synonyms as well ) from ranking better than rank 30. As well our competitor has been using this weird backlink tactic of using SEO sites ( a friend? ), a parent site to prop it up ( footer links and others ) as well has links inside articles that aren't relevant as in having a commercial niche page inside a lawyer site page talking about phone dialing. Then the low DA directory sites. I'm curious as to if penguin algo will catch them once it comes out, if not penguin a manual review would certainly catch their tactics, but this site is doing everything else other than proper SEO. What do you think?

Hello, I jumped aboard as SEO for a client, who seems to of had been hit by panda and penguin back in 2012 of April, the panda part I feel I've fixed by creating better content, combining pages that were same topic into one, basically creating a better content experience that relates better to search terms users are searching for. Once the site was redesigned and relaunched all keywords improved minus one, the main keyword they want to rank for. Created a landing page for it, that is very nicely optimized for that keyword and it's brothers and sisters, however that page isn't used by google since it's brand new with a PA of 1. Doing a backlink audit I found 102 links out of 400 using the same anchor text as the keyword they want ranked for, they also have synonyms anchor text for other links too but not quite as much. Most of those 102 domains using the main keyword anchor text are directories, in my opinion I'd declare all of them spam, however there are a few with DAs higher than 50, making me little more nervous to disavow, since I want to make sure we get out of the penalty if we were hit by penguin but also don't want to ruin the ranking for other keywords we're doing better with, since they are longtails and short, but very relevant to users. How is the best way to determine if a site / directory is spammy enough that it's penalizing you and how could I approach the anchor text issue with backlinks? 99% of these links I cannot have changed, since they're directories I doubt many have had a human mess with them in a while. Sidenote* If you're going to post a link as a response, try to summarize what that link will be about, as many times links are giving as an answer but end up not really providing the meat we were seeking. Thank you!

I tried adding onto a question already listed, however that question stayed where it was and didn't go anywhere close to somewhere others would see it, since it was from 2012. I have a competitor who is completely new, just popped onto the SERPs in December 2015. Now I've wondered how they jumped up so fast without really much in the way of user content. Upon researching them, I saw they have 200 backlinks but 160 of them are from their parent company, and of all places coming from the footer of their parent company. So they get all of the pages of that domain, as backlinks. Everything I've read has told me not to do this, it's going to harm the site bad if anything will discount the links. I'm in no way interested in doing what they did, even if it resulted in page 1 ( which it has done for them ), since I believe that it's only a matter of time, and once that time comes, it won't be a 3 month recovery, it might be worse. What do you all think? My question or discussion is why hasn't this site been penalized yet, will they be penalized and if not, why wouldn't they be? **What is the good, bad and ugly of backlinks in the footer: ** Good Bad Ugly

Recently did a site redesign, 95% of the site and keywords are matching up in terms of keyword to what page is ranking for that keyword. All and all was expected and pleased with the redesign, except... A subpage ( PA 1 ) really is a landing page for the main keyword in question is only one jump from the hompage, is it's own category and has the exact match anchor text to its page from the homepage, has a total of 14 total keyword usages. The homepage has a PA of 28, mentioned the keyword once in the body text in form of anchor link, yet still steals the thunder from the main keyword. There aren't a ton of backlinks, but ones we do have 95% of them goto the homepage. Subpage in question has a on page grade of A for the keyword, while the homepage has an on page grade of C. No backlinks at all for this page yet. Subpage even uses the keyword as it's url name, so kinda at a loss to what else I can do, it's a new page, so alll I keep thinking is the issue is the page authority, it's linked to from other pages on the site. Any suggestions?

Hello, I have a keyword for lack of providing too much info we will say my keyword is laptop-bags. Now we have a /laptop-bags/  page and inside that page **/laptop-bags/leather-shoulder/ ** We got a score of 95 for that page. Now I got a score of 99 when I changed it to **/laptop-bags/leather-shoulder-laptop-bags/ ** The way Bigcommerce handles is it will use the product category title in the url, page title and site links, to me it feels like it's spammy, as well as on my /laptop-bags/ page, I now have 18 keywords of " laptop bags " on that page when before it was 12, since I added laptop-bags to all 6 categories inside the laptop-bags page. How would you handle this, use the /keyword/ then /longtail-keyword/ in full or would using /laptop-bag/leather-shoulder/ still rank for leather shoulder laptop bags? I've asked this before and was told to use whatever sounded better to the user, but now moz is telling me different.

Hello, 1st off, let me explain my client in this case uses BigCommerce, and I don't have access to the backend like most other situations. So I have to rely on BG to handle certain issues. I'm curious if there is much of a difference using domain.com/ as the canonical url while BG currently is redirecting our domain to domain.com. I've been using domain.com/ consistently for the last 6 months, and since we switches stores on Friday, this issue has popped up and has me a bit worried that we'll loose somehow via link juice or overall indexing since this could confuse crawlers. Now some say that the domain url is fine using / or not, as per - https://moz.com/community/q/trailing-slash-and-rel-canonical But I also wanted to see what you all felt about this. What says you?

Hello, My client wants to launch a redesign early, problem is they want to do this without a majority of their product pages, since the bulk of their sales aren't from these missing categories, will the resulting 404s hurt them? What is up, is the major pages structured around their primary keyword, most of their sales isn't from the product pages, but from the quotes turned into sales. Big ticket items aren't sold through the cart, they are call or email for quotes and normally those quotes are turned into sales once they realize the price is better. We will be adding these missing categories and products, just one section at a time. Since 404s don't hurt, and we don't rank very well from the products missing, should I be concerned about any thing else? Thank you

I've recently used a organic traffic checker that showed you your traffic compared to each google algo update. I was interested in how they derived the organic traffic totals for each month, without having access to our site's google analytics? I've since compared the data to historical google analytics data and it's not wrong, isn't 100% match either but isn't far from fact. So if they're predicting or making a guess, it's rather spot on, site crawlers and SERPs snapshots only provide so much info, I'm just wondering where they get the rest from and how?

Hello, I'm trying to explain to a client, as to why certain websites that appear in the top 50 listings for a keyword are there when they don't have very good backlink profiles, and for this keyword, seems you need a high PA above 20 or DA above 25, just to page for page 2 - 3. Running a full SERPs report, I have seen that backlinks to the page that's ranking seems to be as high of a factor as PA, followed by DA and overall backlink profile. Having a high score in one of these 4 areas seems to increase your ranking. However, going into page 3 and beyond, seems that things kinda take a weird turn. After comparing the client's site to those ranking on page 2 I could see that all of them had better PA and more links to the page ranking for that keyword, so page 2 I understand why we don't rank on yet. However, looking at page 3, I see that the client's site in question has better PA, DA, links to page and overall links to domain. Which leaves me to think we have a penalty that's keeping us ranking 50 or beyond. Since our metrics across the boards for what MOZ is showing as ranking factors.  The more odd issue is that looking at the line graph, shows right at the time we implemented sitewide https our ranking for this one keyword dropped, while rankings for our other keywords increased. Am I to assume it's a keyword density penalty? What penalties are there with a outcome of ranking limits?

Currently I have for our big keyword oursite.com/big-keyword/ and clicking on a material type will be oursite.com/big-keyword/material-type/ Our competition has **theirsite.com/big-keyword/ **and when you click on their material type **theirsite.com/material-type-big-keyword/ ** The also have 20 some pages, while we have around 652 as a eCommerce site as well, not sure why they jumped so high in rankings, while their backlink structure is so small still and they have a DA half of ours. I'm in the middle of a site redesign and very close to restructuring the urls the way they have it, since it really seems to have worked well. How do you feel about that?

Greetings, hope you're doing awesome today! I have a current client in an industry niche, I got them to do a site redesign, based on the many factors needing correction on the current site. I have a good 40 some items still to address, from my frequent manual site audit / proofreading. Reason I am here, is that I'm seeking fresh eyes to address anything I may have missed, of course at a glance, I don't expect a site audit, but do have some concerns about url structure and page titles as you move from category to category. It's a bigcommerce site, so some things that are normal SEO actions aren't as simply implemented. Also, since this is a client, and I'm sure they have competitors using sites like this, I need to keep the url private as well as any specifics, of course for readers in the future, I can or you can mention general issues and solutions. Thank you and please, if interested, will send url at request, can send both the live and dev urls.

I'm writing meta descriptions for this site, trying to keep them different, however, for two product types, I want to add the same info I added in the other likeminded product's meta descriptions. Is this ok as long as it's not the whole sentence or am I really to rewrite the same info another way, which is hard for " quick shipping available for x amount of colors ". Any Advice?

Sorry for the title of this, but didn't know the best way to put it. I have a question with category naming for products, To keep things simple, I'll use shoes for this example. Say I have a category, running-shoes, so the url would be, site.com/running-shoes/ and inside this category I have purple-pumas so the url is site.com/running-shoes/purple-pumas/ And I have the title Purple Puma Running Shoes Is that ok, or should I just use the title Purple Pumas ? The breadcrumbs shows Home > Running Shoes > Purple Puma Running Shoes  then and I wasn't sure if that would be too much? Or how about using another version of the keyword for the title, like Purple Puma Jogging sneakers? Any ideas? Thank you!

Hello and thanks for reading! We have a bit of a rare issue, where we are a nationwide distributor but have a local side that handles all tristate area requests, the sales that happen via local basically don't impact the online side, so we're trying to not focus on local SEO but in a sense worry about abroad local SEO. We want to try the location based service pages, but not for every state, at most 5 states and inside those pages target 2 to 3 big cities. Is this a waste of time to even think about or is this something that can be done with a careful touch?

I've been creating new content for our site, lots of help related content, so I created a help hub section. Now the more I go through it, and look at url structure and breadcrumbs, I can't help but think I should be using a keyword in there, but also don't want to over do it, since the keyword we are shooting for is also a subsection of our site, complete with url keyword and breadcrumb. So I just don't want to have too many over redundant titles like keyword this and keyword that, so I came here to get some advice from the awesome community of folks. Keep help hub so it's: Url: site.com/help-hub/helppage1 Breadcrumb: Home > Help-Hub > Help Page 1 or Url: site.com/keyword/help/helppage1 Breadcrumb: Home > Keyword > Help > Help Page 1

So I have 6 big selling item types for our company, it's our bread and butter, now we have subsections for these different types, from cleaning to instructions. We rank number one for various longtail keywords, however, for the two word keyphrase we want to rank for, we don't seem to get passed rank 30 / page 3 for. Am curious since the long tail keywords for the subpages seem to not garner that much traffic if we should be combining all the subpages to just one item type page and optimize from there for the item type keyword ( a 5 word phrase ) This is for a niche industry, and the major keywords we want are two word phrases that have around an average of 48% keyword difficulty with. They're really no other synonyms to use for these, none that customers are using, and figuring out a plan to rank on page 1 for this phrase is proving difficult to say the least. Progress is achieved, however it's just dropping back once we see the change, without much interaction from myself. I understand this is due to the bottom of the bucket characteristics but there must be more I can be doing. Besides being as general as possible when posting questions here. 🙂 Thanks for any feedback and even crystal ball guesses.

Hello and good morning / happy Friday! Last night an article from of all places " Venture Beat " titled " Google Search starts indexing and letting users stream Android apps without matching web content " was sent to me, as I read this I got a bit giddy. Since we had just implemented a full sitewide https cert rather than a cart only ssl. I then quickly searched for other sources to see if this was indeed true, and the writing on the walls seems to indicate so. Google - Google Webmaster Blog! - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2015/12/indexing-https-pages-by-default.html http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-to-prioritize-the-indexing-of-https-pages/147179/  http://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-indexing-https-by-default,30781.html https://hacked.com/google-will-begin-indexing-httpsencrypted-pages-default/ https://www.seroundtable.com/google-app-indexing-documentation-updated-21345.html I found it a bit ironic to read about this on mostly unsecured sites. I wanted to hear about the 8 keypoint rules that google will factor in when ranking / indexing https pages from now on, and see what you all felt about this. Google will now begin to index HTTPS equivalents of HTTP web pages, even when the former don’t have any links to them. However, Google will only index an HTTPS URL if it follows these conditions: It doesn’t contain insecure dependencies. It isn’t blocked from crawling by robots.txt. It doesn’t redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page. It doesn’t have a rel="canonical" link to the HTTP page. It doesn’t contain a noindex robots meta tag. It doesn’t have on-host outlinks to HTTP URLs. The sitemaps lists the HTTPS URL, or doesn’t list the HTTP version of the URL. The server has a valid TLS certificate. One rule that confuses me a bit is : **It doesn’t redirect users to or through an insecure HTTP page. ** Does this mean if you just moved over to https from http your site won't pick up the https boost? Since most sites in general have http redirects to https? Thank you!

This newly created site has a DA of 1 and PA of 1, no backlinks, no optimized urls, the keyword they ranked better than us on was listed a total of 6 times on the homepage. Our PA is 29 and DA is 18 for the page that ranks for this keyword. They really copied a few elements of our site but made sure to change a few things, but also list at the bottom of their site 5 keywords that are crucial to our niche industry but they're all linking to the same page. Any ideas? It's an SEO guy running the site, we've watched them toy with adwords trying to be number 1, but not liking the price, so they are here and there with it. Mainly I don't see why they'd rank better for this keyword, we our site have prolly 500% more content that's both of quality and relevance to our customers, in the form of Pdfs, infographics, help sections, and video. Very baffled here, any advice would rock!

What would be the negative aspects to sending customer's requests for a backlink in conjunction with asking how their experience with us was? Backlinks are one of the toughest for our niche industry to acquire and this seems like one of the best angles to cover, since we have .edu , .mil , .gov , and many bigname companies making purchases from us. Would if be wrong to offer a small 5% discount during their next purchase if they create a backlink with us? Or if we added a " Customer's we've served " section including their logo or text link? Thank you! I hope you're all having an awesome day / week / month!

What are some things I can look into to figure out why google is ranking us on page 5 sometimes page 6, with some slight rank boosts to rank 36 from 48 but then falls right back. While Yahoo and Bing rank us page 1 consistently, without these big drops back. I use google search ( webmaster tools ) daily, fix 404s and make sure to fetch new content I create. Our site is within the Sandbox issue time frame, google 1st indexed the site about a year and a half ago, the site has been through various SEO service checks, and has had those issues fixed ( some bigcommerce won't allow, such as full sitewide ssl and a few other small factors ) but all the big stuff was handled or will be 100% handled after this redesign is complete. But just still seems we're stuck in the google hole again. We do use adwords, but no clear signs as to why we'd suffer such hardships with google ranking, only thing we don't have optimized in terms of on page optimization from moz is keyword in url, of which will be changing within the next month or two, as we're rolling our a new redesign with SEO 100% at the forefront, nice url paths, with keywords in their url, much more responsive site that uses less resources. But before we release this redesign, I'd like to find out what toe we stubbed of google's to give us such a ranking blackeye... We don't have that many backlinks, and I know these are a huge factor, however, building quality backlinks it's harder than walking on water at time and on the same level as spinning hay into gold. Any ideas community...

So let's say I have a parent page for shoes, and I have subpages for dress shoes, work shoes, play shoes, then inside each of those pages I have dress shoe cleaning, dress shoe repair, same for work and play shoes. Would it be ok to use h1 tags like this: Shoes > Dress Shoes  > Dress Shoe Cleaning Dress Shoe Repair Work Shoes  >  Work Shoe Cleaning Work Shoe Repair Play Shoes   >   Play Shoe Cleaning Play Shoe Repair Would these be considered duplicate h1 tags since cleaning and repair are used for each subpage? In certain niche companies, it's rather difficult to use synonyms for keywords. Or is it ok to just keep things simple and use Shoes > Dress Shoes > Cleaning and so on? Especially since we have urls and breadcrumbs that are structured nicely using keywords, for this example both breadcrumbs and urls read like sitename.com/shoes/dress-shoes/cleaning. Any advice?

Curious why moz would pick up our blog tags as causing duplicate content, when each blog has a rel canonical tag pointing to either the blog post itself and on the tag pages points to the blog as a whole. Kinda want to get rid of the tags in general now, but also feel they can add some extra value to UX later on when we have many more blog posts. Curious if anyone knows a way around this or even a best solution practice when faced with such odd issues? I can see why the duplicate content would happen, but when grouping content into categories?

So far I've gathered that backlinks are really king, however you can't get good backlinks without well written content that serves a purpose. As well you can't do a great job with that content and not keep a good user experience, since why would anyone want to backlink to content that can be helpful if you squint an eye and suffer a few scrolling cramps. So how would you rank user experience in the everlasting war of SEO for Google? With this in mind, why would using bootstrap resources pose a problem? I've seen it could add issue to pageload times, however seems minifying could easily solve that. I personally enjoy the use of Bootstrap since it's very easy on the eyes and can have real positive effects when a user looks at content on such a framework.

So I have a site that operates in a very niche industry, reading all I can about building backlink, I've come out of the walls of text with a few tidbits, however they're not very helpful still, since the playing field is so small. Looking at manufacturer's sites, finding broken links or typos even, pointing them out in hopes for backlinks only goes so far. Guest blogging seems to have reached it's climax and is slowly rounding the toilet. They're active in social media, but due to the niche market, a few likes is the best that can happen. So most efforts these days are around creating helpful resources for users related to the products they sell. What other ways would you suggest looking into for building meaningful backlinks with other sites? In these niche markets, it seems very daunting to say the least, while competitors use their own sister sites for some backlinks, this site doesn't have any sister sites. What has been some beneficial backlink tactics you've employed for niche market sites?

I have a large site that sells various products, I have been on a kick creating new content relating to the many aspects of upkeep with these products after purchase, I wanted to create a blog post combining all the info for the group of products, but will be reusing some of the FAQs and even tips, since I'm more or less relocating the info. Since this blog post is using many different sources on our site, using a rel=canonical isn't possible. Is there anything I should watch out for, Will rewording / phrasing here and there be enough or should I steer clear of this as a whole?

After doing some backlink searching on competitors, I see a great deal of competitor's backlinks are obvious linkfarms and just completely unrelated to their field. Also I see a lot of forum comments using links are showing as backlinks, upon inspecting the html element I see they're " no follow " links. Why are they showing up as backlinks with link equity then?

After inquiring to Moz.org about this, they suggested this might be due to a new feature that was rolled out, however, this 2 year old backlink still hasn't shown up and I'm a little concerned. Has anyone else experienced this?

So we aren't interested in paying a thousand dollars a month just to have https when we feel it's the only selling point of that package, so we have https for our store and the rest of the site blogs and all are http. I'm wondering if this would count as duplicate content or give us some other unforeseen penalty due to the half way approach of https being implemented. If this is hurting us, what would you recommend as a solution?

While analyzing competition, I frequently see backlinks being the biggest factor at deciding rank for keywords, while content and keyword page grading can say great things, it always comes down to backlinks it seems. Even our DA is better or equal, Why would this be?