Thank you, Michael. Great support as always!

Hello Mozzers,

The "Get Keyword Difficulty" button next to the google search bar is not working for me.

All it shows is "--%".

It used to work fine a few weeks ago..

Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance!

I like the idea! Very often I was asking myself why a particular blog post got 6 thumbs down when I thought it was brilliant. Criticism should always be constructive.

Hello Carlos,

There isn't something like the best SEO tool, it always depends on you. I suggest you to test some tools (most of them have a free test month) and decide what works out best for you.

I had the exact same thing.

They have some problems going on: Does OSE look whacky? We've been having some issues with load balancers, which has been causing OSE to throw some exciting errors. Our engineers are all hands on deck trying to figure this out, but we don't have an ETA yet.

Check here too: http://health.moz.com/

I personally would never risk to bother anyone. Most time a middle-way works out.

I like the direction we're heading to --> Search Experience Optimization!

Focus on relationships with the right people (influencers). If you offer some kind of value and share it with the right people, the rest will come!

If all your services are for parties, I would go with subfolders.

For example: yourwebsite.com/catering

This also passes some juice.

Hi Malachy,

Moz has some great stuff about link building: http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building

Have a good read;)

Same here, be patient - you will love it:)

I took it, it's an awesome tool in my opinion!

That last paragraph is exactly what I was looking for, thank you very much, Ryan!

Thank you for your answer, I appreciate that!

Yeah, I know that it's a good sign in general. But if a majority of my best links are from another country, can I compete for searches in my local area. I mean, wouldn't a link with the same strength be better from a Swiss Site?

Hello Mozzers,

Let's say I have a local webdesign business in Zurich, Switzerland.

I try to get good rankings in Switzerland, to get real clients.

Now I have a blog in German (Yes, we speak German in Switzerland) and get most of my links from other German Blogs. Why? Most of the Swiss sites are competitors and there aren't many Swiss blogs for this topic.

Of course I have links from Swiss Sites too. But most of my strong links are from German sites, is this a real problem?

Thanks for your answers, appreciated!

Thump up! Exactly what I was thinking..

Thank you for the help, thats exactly what I was looking for!

Hello Mozzers,

May be a noobish question but I've learned to ask when I stuck.

Can we calculate how many links we need to get for example a domain authority of 40. Like can we say, if we get 8 more 80+ DA links, our own DA rises to 40. I know DA/PA are just moz numbers and it takes a lot more to succeed, but I thought about it and now I want to know it;)

Help is highly appreciated!

Thank you!

Hello Mozzers,

For what date is the next OSE update planned?

Thanks!

I would say WordPress is pretty good: https://wordpress.org/

Does anyone know how to fix this technically? This site /av has already some power, and out of it we get 3 new pages..

Any help is highly appreciated!

Thank you guys for your answers, I appreciate that.

What would be the best approach to fix this technically? There is only one page now (/av) and there will be 3 new pages, each for one service. Normally I would think about a 301 but it's from one page to three. So I don't really know what would be the best solution.

Any ideas?

Hello Yunyi,

In my personal opinion, 300 outbound links on a single page are way too much. There is no exact rule for this  but for highly authoritative sites I would say the maximum is around 80 outbound links. It also depends on how relevant and valuable they are for your visitors. If there is no way around, I personally would nofollow them.

But do you think anyone would read a post about 300 tools? I would break it down to the 15 best tools for example, otherwise your readers could be overwhelmed.

This is just my opinion, I hope it helps at least a little bit.

Hello Sandi,

As you mentioned, if it's a more competitive term - it takes a lot more time. Did you check it in the keyword difficulty tool? Is it worth it and possible to get good results soon? If you can answer these questions with yes, keep going.

Hello Mozzers,

A friend has a business website and the on-page stuff is done really bad. He wants to rank for: conference room furnishing, video conference, digital signage.

(Don't worry about the keywords, it's just made up for an example.)

For these three services he has a page: hiswebsite.com/av

AV stands for audio and video and is the h1.

If you click on one of the service, the url doesn't change. Like if you click on video conference, just the text changes, the url stays /av.

All his targeted pages got an F Grade, I am not surprised, the services titles are in

. Wouldn't it be a lot better to make an own page for every service with a targeted keyword, like hiswebsite.com/video-conference

All this stuff is on /av, how will a 301 resirect work to all the service pages, does this make sense?

Any help is appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

I appreciate it if people tell me when I am on the wrong path.

Thank you Linda, this really helped me further!

Hello Linda,

Thank you for your answer! Does this mean, that internal linking is enough to rank those pages in search engines?

Hello Mozzers,

EDIT: Is internal linking enough?

This question is my head for a long time. Let's say I have a webdesign company and a website (really?). I have a blog and write quality content on a weekly basis. The content is great and people love it, they share it on social networks and other webmasters link to these articles.

Now I have one optimized page, that brings me the business. Lets say:

mywebsite.com/webdesign-service

On this page I only have boring stuff like saying what I am offering and testimonials and stuff. So basically a page no one shares and no one links to. But it's important to rank with the keywords targeted on this site.

How do I get to rank this page? A page that doesn't offer value to anybody. Normally, we shouldn't have pages like this, but some companies do boring stuff and creativity doesn't help.

Maybe this question is stupid, forgive me but I don't get it.

I am thankful for any answers on this!

I am pretty sure it has to with the

tag, try the W3C Tool: http://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_input

To pass the juice a permanent redirect (301) would be the best solution for this.

Check out this resource about redirects: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

Hello Mozzers,

Matt Cutts once told that guest blogging is a bad way to get links, then he relativized it again and said it's okay. We all know Google doesn't want to count those links, what they want are editorially given links.

Now my question, what's your view on this topic? Do you still use guest blogging as a link building technique?

Best regards,

grobro

"Has anyone got any ideas as to why google just dosnt like our site,..."

She choosey, choosey.

How old is your website? Sometimes it's hard to outrank sites that have been on good positions for years.

Yes, for example the comments on this page (selbstaendig-im-netz.de/2014/08/12/blogs/aufbau-eines-blog-business-tipps-fehler-und-erfahrungen-interview-mit-dem-affenblog) are nofollow, thats the code:

Google

In Open Site Explorer they are listed under equity passing.

The code worked fine, thanks again for your help!

Thank you for your answer! Can I use this code in the .htaccess?:

Redirect 301 /portfolio-items/ http://mysite.com

Choose the subfolder, a subdomain counts as if it's a completely different domain. I recently moved my blog from a subdomain to a subfolder and the results were great!

Hi,

Please let us know the country, it may be easier to help you.

Did you already check if the country is included in Bing's keyword tool? I am sure there is a tool that includes this country, if there isn't you could try it with google suggestions, not a very good solution though..

They told me this:

Salman wrote:

Hi There,

These are not pages or posts which you can remove by just clicking on a button. These are custom posts types and you can not directly remove slugs within current setup. You have following options though.

1. Add some code to unregister these custom post types.

2. Use a plugin to re-write slugs

3. Use .htaccess to redirect users when this URL is access. This might work

BEGIN REMOVE SLUG CUSTOM POST TYPE RULES

RewriteRule ^portfolio-items/(.+)/$ /$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^faq-items/(.+)/$ /$1 [R=301,L]

END REMOVE SLUG CUSTOM POST TYPE RULES

I hope you understand that the solution you need is not possible with our current set of options and will require some customization of the theme. We’d love to help you with this customization but we are only able to provide support for basic theme issues and bug fixes. We do provide support for small customizations but unfortunately this request is beyond that.

There aren't any similar pages, I guess I 301 redirect them to the home page. It's three pages, will this have any negative effects?

Thanks for the help, highly appreciated!

Sorry for bringing up this thread again, I have the same problem. When I check the links of a competitor, it shows nofollow comments as equity passing. It seems like a mistake..

Best regards!

Thank you guys! I did it with the Yoast Plugin, works perfectly!

You can do a lot better if that's really everything they did. This is a great resource to get started: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

Side Note:

Matt Cutts told in a video in 2011, that it's not a problem to have the same content on like 3 or 4 top level domains, if they are for different countries but in the same language. But you should make sure that country specific words and for example currency signs are correct.

Hello Mozzers,

I am sure a lot of people here are using wordpress. How do you handle Categories & Tags? I came across that they produce a lot of duplicate content in the google index. My website is brand new so I don't have any traffic yet, how would you handle it?

noindex, follow?

Or block /categories/ and /tags/ from robots.txt?

Probably I am completely wrong with both ways?

I am grateful for your answers!

Best regards!

For more competitive keywords it's quite hard to rank with forum posts. I am running some quite successful forums and all the traffic I get is from long tail keyword searches. Basically, you have to do the same optimizing as for other websites.

Are you talking about a specific forum post or forum posts in general?

Thanks for all the answers! Sorry, I didn't have a chance to respond earlier.

Unfortunately, I still couldn't fix this. I talked to the original devs (on their support forums) and they couldn't help me further with this. It's about these 3 pages:

/themefusion_es_groups/group1/

/portfolio-items/

/faq-items/

I don't know what else I could try..

Best regards!

Hello Mozzers,

I am using wordpress and I have a small problem. I have two sites, I don't want but the dev of the theme told me I can't delete them.

/portfolio-items/

/faq-items/

The dev said he can't find a way to delete it because these pages just list faqs/portfolio posts. I don't have any of these posts so basically what I have are two sites with just the title "Portfolio items" and "FAQ Items". Furthermore the dev said these sites are auto-generated so he can't find a way to remove them.

I mean I don't believe that it's impossible, but if it is how should I handle them? They are indexed by search engines, should I remove them from the index and block them from robots.txt?

Thanks in advance.