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We have a https site and have been checking our 301 re-directs from the old http pages. All seem fine except one...and it is ONLY weird in Firefox (it works OK on Chrome and IE). The http version of that one URL is redirecting to the correct https URL, but with ?ref=wookmark being appended to the end. Why? On the Firefox browser only... http://www.easydigging.com/broadfork(dot)html 301 redirects to https://www.easydigging.com/broadfork(dot)html?ref=wookmark From the research I did Wookmark seems to be a JQuery feature, but we do not use it (as far as I know). And even if we do, it probably should not pop up when doing a 301 redirect. I did try clearing my cache a few times, with no change in the problem. Any help is appreciated 🙂

Looking at my "Links > Top Pages" report shows the top fifteen being image URLs (jpg files). Weird or normal? Clicking the "View Links" icon for a few of the image URL's shows that the best links in the list have DA in the 30's and 40's, and some PA in the 20's. But the linking sites have names that SOUND pretty crappy (from sites with names that sound weird or spammy) QUESTION 1: Do links to image URLs...   A) help the overall SEO of the site's HTML pages,   B) only help the specific page the image appears on,  C) or are they of no value to the regular pages? QUESTION 2: What to do with the obsolete images? (images still hosted on our site, but do not appear on any pages)  If I remove the images, the links will be lost. Which is good if the links are hurting us, but it would be bad for our SEO if the links are helping (unless we 301 the obsolete images to current ones) Thanks!

My site is 10 years old, and has always ranked well for the variety of garden tools it sells.  Looking at our Moz Pro > Links > Top Pages report I see that many of the "pages" are actually image URLs. And many of those are images we do not even use anymore (though they are still hosted). Question: As a way of gaining some link juice to deeper pages, what about 301 redirecting some of those old images over to appropriate pages? (example: redirecting old-weeding-hoe.jpg to the page garden-hoes.html) Would it be worthwhile? Would it be safe? Thanks for any and all input!

Some SEO articles say we can completely ignore NoFollow links. Other articles say they still matter - but then are very vague on what they count for or against. So which is it really? I do realize that they can provide traffic, and for that they are worthwhile. But it is SEO I am asking about... The SEO purpose I am most concerned with is the Link Profile. Separating the Follows from the NoFollows often gives really different anchor text distributions. If they don't matter, why do MOZ and other SEO Analysis programs still include them in their standard reports? (I can see some benefit to having them as part of the in-depth reports) So what's your thoughts? Can we 100% ignore the NoFollows for our SEO analysis?

This question is about one of my ecommerce sites (www.BestDryingRack.com) which is ranking really well for one of it's money words, and not at all for the other. See the attached screenshot for a quick overview of the riddle we are facing.... Looking at the "Anchor Text" tab in my MOZ Campaign or in Open Site Explorer would lead you to think that I have WAY too many links with my #1 money phrase. (clothes drying rack, or laundry drying rack, as they are synonyms). And since my product page doesn't rank at all for that keyword, that's what I thought too. (My home page does show up on page 3 or 4 when Googling clothes drying rack) On the other hand, my #2 money phrase (umbrella clothesline, or outdoor umbrella clothesline) has it's product page ranking quite well in the middle of the first page of Google results. Digging deeper into the links spreadsheet from Open Site Explorer shows that most of the links are NOFOLLOW (which means they don't really count, right?) As the screenshot shows, here is the breakdown of links that count: FOLLOW links with Brand and URL anchor text totals 17 FOLLOW links with #1 money phrase anchor text totals 10, with only 1 to proper product page FOLLOW links with #2 money phrase anchor text totals 3, with all 3 to proper product page So the riddle is... Can we improve the ranking of the #1 money phrase by just getting a small number of matching anchor text links to the proper page? (making it like #2's situation) Or do we also need to get rid of some of the 9 links with the #1 anchor text that are pointing to the home page? (since the home is outranking the proper product page for this phrase) BDR-anchors-040614.jpg

I have a couple of new product videos for my ecommerce site. I am wondering if it benefits my marketing more to put the videos on Youtube, or on some video hosting service like Wistia or Vimeo? The benefits of putting them on Youtube seem to be ease of embedding, the ability to get a link back from the Youtube page, and having them appear in Youtube searches. (I hear that Youtube is now one of the most used search engines) I'm really not sure what the benefits of using a hosting service are. But I do remember reading articles saying it was better than using Youtube for some reason.... Help?

Neither of my sites has a robots.txt file. I guess I have never been bothered by any particular bot enough to exclude it. Is there any SEO advantage to having one anyways?

Back in August of 2013 Google created a form that allowed people to submit small websites that "should be ranking better in Google". There is more info about it in this article http://www.seroundtable.com/google-small-site-survey-17295.html Has anybody used it? Any experiences or results you can share? *private message if you do not want to share publicly...

This is a real-life problem on my ecommerce store for the drying rack we manufacture: Some people call it a Clothes Drying Rack, while others call it a Laundry Drying Rack, but it's really the same thing. Search volume is higher for the clothes version, so give it the most attention. I currently have 2 separate pages with the On-Page optimization focused on each name (URL, Title, h1, img alts, etc)  Here the two drying rack pages: clothes focused page and laundry focused page But the ranking of both pages is terrible. The fairly generic homepage shows up instead of the individual pages in Google searches for the clothes drying rack and for laundry drying rack. But I can get the individual page to appear in a long-tail search like this: round wooden clothes drying rack So my thought is maybe I should just combine both of these pages into one page that will hopefully be more powerful. We would have to set up the On-Page optimization to cover both "clothes & laundry drying rack" but that seems possible. Please share your thoughts. Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Is there another solution? Thanks for your help! Greg

Gotten a few emails recently about their latest promotion. Just wondering if anybody here uses that system (program, method,??) and can share their experiences?

I have an ecommerce site for the clothes drying racks my family business makes, and it sells a few other laundry items also. It's about 5 years old. We used to rank on the first page for basic phrases like "clothes drying rack" and "umbrella clothesline". About 1.5 years ago we fell hard in the rankings. Since then "umbrella clothesline" has moved back to the first page, but "clothes drying rack" is stuck on the 3rd page and always with the result being the generic homepage instead of the good sub-page (which used to rank on the first page) that really shows-n-tells about our drying rack. Here are the three pages I am talking about. Home page = http://www.bestdryingrack.com/   Drying rack page = http://www.bestdryingrack.com/clothes-drying-rack-main.html  and umbrella clothesline page = http://www.bestdryingrack.com/umbrella-clotheslines.html Any ideas on how to get the drying rack page to start ranking well again? (hopefully better than the generic homepage ranks) A little technical background: the Moz campaign on this site says that the home page has a PA = 42 with 190 LRD's and 344 external links. Both the umbrella clothesline page and the clothes drying rack page have almost equal statistics of PA = 35 with 20 LRD's and 23 external links. My anchor text distribution is maybe unbalanced. The drying rack page has 15 external links with the anchor of "Clothes Drying Rack". But the umbrella clothesline page has 14 external links with the anchor of "outdoor umbrella clothesline" and it ranks on the first page for that search. I can't figure out how to get OSE to tell me anchor text stats for just the homepage and not the whole site since www.bestdryingrack.com/index.html 301's to the plain www.bestdryingrack.com  (if you know how, please share) What's wrong with my poor neglected clothes drying rack page? The only way I can get it to show up on the first page is to do a real specific search like "round wooden clothes drying rack" Your help could save a faltering family business. Thank you!

I have ecommerce sites the only serve US and Canada. Is there a way to prevent a site from appearing in the Google results in foreign countries? The reason I ask is that we also have a lot of informational pages that folks in other countries are visiting, then leaving right after reading. This is making our overall Bounce Rate very high (64%). When we segment the GA data to look at just our US visitors, then the Bounce Rate drops a lot. (to 48%) Thanks!

When someone links to your website, but makes a typo while doing it, those broken inbound links will show up in Google Webmaster Tools in the Crawl Errors section as “Not Found”. Often they are easy to salvage by just adding a 301 redirect in the htaccess file. But sometimes the typo is really weird, or the link source looks a little scary, and that's what I need your help with. First,   let's look at the weird typo problem. If it is something easy, like they just lost the last part of the URL, ( such as www.mydomain.com/pagenam ) then I fix it in htaccess this way: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.com$ [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mydomain.com$ RewriteRule ^pagenam$ "http://www.mydomain.com/pagename.html" [R=301,L] But what about when the last part of the URL is really screwed up? Especially with non-text characters, like these: www.mydomain.com/pagename1.htmlsale              www.mydomain.com/pagename2.htmlhttp://   www.mydomain.com/pagename3.html"             www.mydomain.com/pagename4.html/ How is the htaccess Rewrite Rule typed up to send these oddballs to individual pages they were supposed to go to without the typo? Second,  is there a quick and easy method or tool to tell us if a linking domain is good or spammy? I have incoming broken links from sites like these: www.webutation.net      titlesaurus.com     www.webstatsdomain.com      www.ericksontribune.com        www.addondashboard.com       search.wiki.gov.cn       www.mixeet.com       dinasdesignsgraphics.com Your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks! Greg

FYI - it appears that if you have a responsive site that has blocks of text that are duplicated, but Hidden or Visible depending on the screen width, that On-Page Grader will count any keywords in that text twice. I have text shown in one location to Desktop users that needed to be re-located to a different part of the page for Tablet and Phone users to keep the layout nice. And my OP Grader keyword count doesn't match what I saw on the page doing Ctrl-F to find the keywords, unless you count the Hidden text. (not hidden like cloaking or some black hat thing - just not displayed on certain devices) I guess On Page Grader just reads the source code and ignores whether the text is hidden or visible. It would be nice if it read the code as if it was a Desktop device. (suggestion for Moz staff) Does anybody know if Google also ignores device dependent Hidden vs Visible areas???

I learn so much from reading the Moz forum everyday. I would like to expand my learning and start following some other SEO forums as well. What are your recommendations for additional SEO forums?

Trying to set up the styling on a new Shopping Cart, and having trouble with Internet Explorer (IE) When I view it in IE, I click on F12 to identify the code viewer (like FireBug) and it lets me choose to view it using the browser IE9 or earlier. So far, so good... But right next to the browser selector is the "Document Mode" selector and sometimes it says "Quirks Mode" and sometimes it says "IE9 Standards" (when using  IE9 browser) - and parts of the page styling goes crazy when I switch back and forth from Quirks to Standards. Help!  Which does IE9 and IE8 actually use?  Does it have to work for both?  Is there a way to force it to one or the other? Any guidance or tips is appreciated. Thanks, Greg

To find all the pages on my site that are indexed by Google I can search using site:mydomain.com and it gives pages of results. But what does the order of results relate to? Is it page rank or strength? My list of pages doesn't appear to be in order of strength. And it's definitely not by age or alphabetical...

It keeps loggng me out, not showing my campaigns, and generally being weird. Is anybody else experienceing this?

A Thursday morning brainstorm that hopefully an important Google manager will see... Google could quickly end all the problems of link buying, spammy links, and negative SEO with one easy step: Only count the 100 best follow links to any domain. Ignore all the nofollows and everything beyond the 100 best. They can choose what "best" means. Suddenly links would be all about quality. Quantity would not matter. Fiverr links, comment links, and all the other mass-produced spam links would literally be ignored. Unless that's all a domain had, and then they would surely be stomped by any domain with 100 decent natural links. Would it be an improvement over today's situation?

I have some old images that are no longer used, but they have a few decent external links pointing to them. Can I 301 them to the page they used to be on? And if yes, will their link juice flow to the page?

I redirected a few pages that had funky URL issues (capitals and underscores and useless words) to the same page renamed with proper URLs. The sitemaps were changed also, and re-submitted. Like this:  mydomain.com/Not_Pertinent_Words.html  >>>  mydomain.com/good-words.html Google seems to have found them and changed the search engine results listing in about 8 days. But it's been about a month now and Moz and OSE still have not transferred all the strength and link data from the old URLs to the new ones. Question 1: How long does it usually take Google to transfer all the link and strength data for a 301? Question 2: How long does it take Moz and OSE to do the same? Is there something I need to do to tell them about the changes?

I had a Moz account earlier this year, let it drop for a few months, then decided it really was important to have one. So I'm back. But there is still something about it that I really find frustrating. I can't seem to find any answers to what seem to be basic questions. Maybe they are too simple, maybe they are just dumb questions, but I sure would appreciate it if somebody could lead me to another source of information. Maybe somebody has written a "Moz for Dummies" book? Here's an example: I'm setting up campaigns for my websites, and I get to the Brand and Mentions section. It tries to autofill the space using my campaign name, but that's not accurate. So I go look at the Help Hub for Brands and Mentions, and it gives an example using MOZ as the brand name. But not many sites have a three-letter domain name, do they?. One of my domains is EasyDigging.com (2 words) and the other is BestDryingRack.com (3 words). So I look and look, but can't find any examples of longer domain names. So I have no idea how to enter my Brand. Should it be the whole "EasyDigging.com" or should it just be "EasyDIgging" or should it be broke up into "Easy Digging"? This is just 1 example. I find these sort of unanswered questions almost every time I try something new. Is there a collection of examples anywhere? I really hope so. Surely there are others who learn best from examples, who hate having to guess based on slim or vague instructions. Keeping my fingers crossed that somebody can lead me to the goldmine of good examples. Thanks!

Setting up canonical tags for an old site. I really need advice on that darn backslash / at the end of the homepage URL. We have incoming links to the homepage as http://www.mysite.com (without the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/ (with the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/index.html I know that there should be 301 redirects to just one version, but I need to know more about the canonical tags... Which should the canonical tag be??? (without the backslash) or (with the backslash) Thanks for your help! 🙂