Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Mozzers,
We have contacted our competitors to let them know we would like to sell our website (domain and all content). One of them has asked for Google Analytics data. Which parts of this and how is this data best shared in such a case? As this is the opening of offers, I'm assuming some kind of PDF export with a summary of some Analytics data is sufficient to see who is serious. Then for those who are serious more data could be shared. Or is it ever ok to share your full Analytics with a competitor? Would love to hear what data and best practises are used to share this kind of information. Thank you.

Hi Mozzers,
Hoping for your advice on how to handle the SEO effects an image URL change, that changed 3 times, during the course of setting up a CDN over a month period, as follows: (URL 1) - Original image URL before CDN:www.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg (URL 2) - First CDN URL (without CNAME alias - using WPEngine & their own CDN):
username.net-dns.com/images/abc.jpg (URL 3) - Second CDN URL (with CNAME alias - applied 3 weeks later):
cdn.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg When we changed to URL 2, our image rankings in the Moz Tool Pro Rankings dropped from 80% to 5% (the one with the little photo icons). So my questions for recovery are: Do I need to add a 301 redirect/Canonical tag from the old image URL 1 & 2 to URL 3 or something else? Do I need to change my image sitemap to use cdn.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg instead of www.? Thanks in advance for your advice.

Hi Mozzers, I'm mystified. Why doesn't our site www.bosphorusyacht.com (ranked 15) outrank this site www.bosphorustour.com (ranked 5 and 6) for the keyword "bosphorus cruise"? Particularly for US based searches. We have far more links, shares, higher DA and PA and more related unique content on topic. Somehow they are even appearing with double listings in this search. Why is this? Am I missing something? Any ideas or suggestions appreciated.

Hi all, We've had a website originally built using static html with .htm extensions ranking well in Google hence we want to keep those pages/urls. We are on a dedicated sever (Windows IIS). However our developer has custom made a new DYNAMIC section for the site which shows new added products dynamically and allows them to be booked online via shopping cart. We are having problems displaying them both on the same domain even if we put the dynamic section withing its own subfolder and keep the static htms in the root. Is it possible to have both function on IIS (even if they may have to function a little separately)? Does anyone have previous experience of this kind of issue or a way of making both work? What setup do we need to do on the dedicated server.

Hi Mozzers,
Our site has suddenly been de-indexed from Google and we don't know why. All pages are de-indexed in Google Webmaster Tools (except for the homepage and sitemap), starting after 7 September: Please see screenshot attached to show this: 7 Sept 2014 - 76 pages indexed in Google Webmaster Tools 28 Sept until current - 3-4 pages indexed in Google Webmaster Tools including homepage and sitemaps. Site is: (removed) As a result all rankings for child pages have also disappeared in Moz Pro Rankings Tracker. Only homepage is still indexed and ranking. It seems like a technical issue blocking the site. I checked for robots.txt, noindex, nofollow, canonical and site crawl for any 404 errors but can't find anything. The site is online and accessible. No warnings or errors appear in Google Webmaster Tools. Some recent issues were that we moved from Shared to Dedicated Server around 7 Sept (using same host and location). Prior to the move our preferred domain was www.domain.com WITH www. However during the move, they set our domain as domain.tld WITHOUT the www. Running a site:domain.tld vs site:www.domain.tld command now finds pages indexed under non-www version, but no longer as www. version. Could this be a cause of de-indexing? Yesterday we had our host reset the domain to use www. again and we resubmitted our sitemap, but there is no change yet to the indexing. What else could be wrong? Any suggestions appeciated. Thanks. hDmSHN9.gif

Hi mozzers, Our Spanish homepage doesn't seem to be indexed or cached in Google, despite being online for over a month or two. All Spanish subpages are indexed and have started to rank but not the homepage. I have submitted sitemap xml to GWTools and have checked there's no noindex on the page - it seems to be in order. And when I run site: command in Google it shows all pages except homepage. What could be the problem? Here's the page: http://www.bosphorusyacht.com/es/

So we already have our brand listed in Yahoo Directory for a few years but today I noticed it is not listed in OSE and the pages we're listed on in Yahoo Dir are PA:0 / DA: 100 with 0 links from 0 Root Domains! (or with a PA:1) Does this mean no juice is being passed at all for this listing? Does it mean it is not even spidered by Google then as how can it be found if no inlinks? Does any authority still get passed from Yahoos domain with DA100 despite pages being PA0? I ask because I'm considering adding another company to Yahoo Dir to get some authority rather than traffic.

Hi all, Has anyone noticed that achieving an appearance in the Universal Results (7 box) forced their previous organic ranking to drop out completely for that keyword? I thought Google would still show us in Universal AND Organic. Is this typical? Here's what happened: Last Week: Ranked no. 6 in standard organic results for specific keyword (but 7 box universal results appear ahead of us between position 3 and 4 and we're not listed) This Week: We added ourselves to Google Places a few weeks ago and this week we suddenly appear in the desirable 7 box Universal result, which is much higher and better ranking - great!  But interestingly we notice at the same time our normal organic ranking at no.6 has dropped out completely (-50 in moztool). Is it an either/or for Organic vs. Universal or can you ever keep ranking in both?

In the last 2 months, a previously unranked/unheard of website jumped straight to no.1 position for a particular keyword when searched from USA and is even ranking over many other big brands or stronger DA/PA sites. I did notice some very strange JavaScript popup links that are heavily keyword linked from the first mention of the keyword on the page content. What are they trying to do here? Otherwise they don't seem to have much PA/DA or seo going on. Why are they doing so well?!

Hi,
I'm not sure what action to follow as nothing online seems to describe my Google Place situation - trying to merge 2 completely incorrect business listings for our company, that are also not identical. We have 2 listings on Google Places for our 1 company but a recent address number change has added further complication to already incorrect and different listings. our first/oldest listing was created by google but with incomplete business name, wrong map pin, completely wrong address, but shows our trip advisor reviews. created by us a year ago (we didn't realize the dupe issues) with full business name, correct address at the time (now incorrect since address number change), correct map pin, full description photos and info. This does not link to our trip advisor reviews. How to merge these when they aren't curently identical or correct? All online help seems to explain identical dupes but not this situation. What updates I tried recently: After some research, I changed all citations on the web to no.2 business name (except trip advisor who would not change), our new address number and then updated our no.2 address listing. But has stayed pending for months. It seems to be live, but still with the old incorrect address that does not match citations or our website. When I tried claiming both places with same account it showed the same pending new info I updated for no.2 in dashboard (so I can't edit no.1), but this data is not is not live on either. Last week I decided to do something radical, so logged in with a different account to reclaim no.1 and copied all information pending in no.2 to no.1 so that they should be exact same and hopefully force to merge. Both are pending and 2 different accounts now. What else can I do? We can rank locally while the 2 listings are like this. Should I call Google helpline and explain?

How can I see all my on-page grading reports for page grading optimization that decreased for the worse from last week - so as to know which pages to fix? My mozpro email report indicates only ten of them decreased from Grad B to C etc from last week. As I have just migrated to a new cms, I need to find and bring back to grade all effected pages. I can't find how to view historical page grades - just for last weeks. Any ideas anyone? Thanks!

Hi All, To get citations to back up Google Places listings for Europe or Middle-East based companies, what directories or places is it possible to have your business address, name and phone number listed? Perhaps we could compile some listings here. Unfortunately most of the articles and citation sources for Google Places point to local city directories in USA like Yelp, Citysearch etc. which we are not eligible for.

Hi guys, After moving from an old static .htm site to Wordpress, I 301'd all old .htm urls fine to the new trailing slash foldery style /wordpress-urls/ in htaccess no problem. But Google Webmaster Tools tells me I still have hundreds of external links pointing to a similar version of the old urls (but without the .htm), giving lots of not founds and 403s. Example of the urls linked to that 403 not found: http://www.mydomain.com/filename So I'm wondering how I do a 301 redirect from a non-exisiting url that also has no file extention as above and is not like a folder? This seems like a lot of possible external link juice to lose. Thanks!

Hi, I've just added a sitewide header image link (60 pages) from our general company site pointing to homepage of another brand site of a product that we also own (which focuses in depth on that one brand). I haven't put a nofollow on it as it's just info for those who'd like to reach our other site. Should I expect anything negative out of this for either site? Could it seem like it picked up 60 image links suddenly and raise a flag?

I have a 60  page site that had some nofollow links sprinkled throughout, 50% of which are probably on its mailto: email links. Should I remove all nofollows all in one go, or just the mailto links first, and later the others? Or has anyone had any negative effects in 2012 from this?

Hi Mozzers, I'm investigating multilingual site setup and translating content for a small website for 15-20 pages and came accross WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin) which looks like it could help, but I am curious as to whether it has any major international SEO limitations before trialing/buying. It seems to allow the option to automatically setup language folder structures as www.domain.com/it/ or www.domain.com/es/ etc which is great and seems to offer easy way of linking out to translators (for extra fee), which could be convenient. However what about the on-page optimization - url names, title tags and other onpage elements - I wonder if anyone has any experiences with using this plugin or any alternatives for it. Hoping for your valued advice!

Which metrics would be more attractive for receiving a linkback from, at least in theory, from the examples below? Gettting a link from a high PA page on a low DA site or gettting a link from a low PA page but on a high DA site, or something in the middle with both (assuming all other factors similar). For example which of these page metrics would be more preferable to be listed on? site 1: PA:19, DA:75 site 2: PA:1, DA:80 site 3: PA:39, DA:55 Thanks!

Hi guys, A local company provides tourism services in Spain but its potential clients reside abroad in USA mostly. This means we have 2 search potentials:
1. For reaching international clients via international search in advance before they arrive (preferred).
2. Last minute booking potential for local serach when they have already arrived and seek a service while already here. So far we have targeted USA and international searches solely and ignored local search. We have tried to target our website to USA in GoogleWebmasterTools and link building location mostly. But what about local search? Would establishing ourselves in Local Search (google places and maps etc) be a confusion for Google and mess with our good rankings in US? Or would it add to our potential of additional last minute local seaches? What's the best approach in a situation like this? Is a happy medium possible? Thanks in advance.

Hi guys, We've a small 15 page site in English for renting out our own boat to tourists which seems to be especially popular with Russian and Arab visitors, so they are our priority languages for translation right now. We would like to translate our site into a condensed single page summary for each language of the services we offer for now and  trying to make it rank in Russian/Arab serarch engines. I do some seo in English on our site and it's starting to rank well, but that's my only language, so I would definitely need to hire someone to do it for us in Russian and Arabic translation and related keyword phrases and how  to rank in the search engines those countries most use etc. Can you recommend any companies for doing this russian-seo or arabic-seo stuff? Or any other advice.. Thanks!

I'm about to buy one directory link (just the one!) but can't decide which URL to place my link on in that directory because of the varying metrics - which is better of the below (bearing in mind my own site is still a PR0 sitewide)? www.exampledirectory.com/categoryA/subtategory1/
Metrics: 21 linking domains, PA 44, DA 59, PR0 www.exampledirectory.com/categoryA/
Metrics:1 linking domain, PA 35, DA 59, PR5 I know PR is no longer relevant and usually ignore this metric (except for possible penalties) and just focus on Seomoz toolbar metrics, but as my own site itself is PA:37 and DA:28 homepage but PR0 completely sitewide (over 6 months old but relatively new site), I thought this might help to balance things. Thanks for your advice.

Hi mozzers I have 2 domain names, brandname.com and keywordname.com and but have a question related to web vs print marketing on deciding which domain to use or redirect. We already have established unique content first on the Keywordname.com site over the last 6 months and it has started to climb well in google rankings. But now we'd like to do some print advertising and think it would make more sense to use Brandname.com when refering to our website. So the 2 question are: Should I 301 redirect brand.com to keyword.com (preferred as all content and rankings on keyword.com) or vice versa, as I realize I can only have one site to avoid duplicate content. And is it possible to use domain name masking on brand.com if redirecting to keyword.com to avoid risking our rankings, or is masking bad for seo? Thanks!