Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey everybody. I am working with a handful of medical news websites and some of these sites are rather large. I am noticing/suspecting there is some cannibalism going on here. How do news sites deal with this? Do they noindex the old stuff? Update the old stuff instead of writing a new piece all together? Curious what to do!

Hey everybody! Looking for a few opinions on this. I am working with a site that has some backlinks with extremely high spam scores, all the way up to 86%. I have ran these through screaming frog and A LOT of them are 404's, or even 301. So obviously if they are 404's then I don't need to worry about them as much. They will sort themselves out. But what about all these other ones with a 25% and higher spam score? A lot of them also do not have SSL and are obv insecure. I would presume google doesn't like backlinks from sites that are not secure. Thoughts?

Hey everybody, I am seeing some confusing results. I am seeing that in the back of our Search Console we are showing around 4,500 sites indexed. If I use the "site" operator in google, only 2820 show up... any thoughts as to why that happens?

So i am working with a review company and I am having a hard time with something. We have created a category which lists and categorizes every one of our properties. For example a specific property in the category "restaurant" would be as seen below: /restaurant/mcdonalds /restaurant/panda-express And so on and so on. What I am noticing however is that our more obscure properties are not being linked to by any page. If I were to visit the page myurl.com/restaurant I would see 100+ pages of properties, however it seems like only the properties on the first few pages are being counted as having links. So far the only way I have been able to work around this issue is by creating a page and hiding it in our footer called "all restaurants". This page lists and links to every one of our properties. However it isn't exactly user friendly and I would prefer scrapers not to be able to scrape all properties at once! Anyway, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

So, i have done some research on this and I am running into 2 problems. We run a review site for a specific niche. wordpress is viewing our category pages as an "archive" which i don't know that it really is. Google seems to only be indexing the first 9 pages of this category. We would like google to be indexing these pages because thats the only place on our website where all our specific products are linked. Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.

Is there any tools people know about where I can verify that Google is seeing all of our content at scale. I know I can take snippets and plug them into Google to see if we are showing up, but this is very time consuming and want to know across a bulk of pages.

Hey everybody. In Moz when I compare link profiles to my competitors my domain is showing up as only having 4 internal follow links, and 0 nofollow. I know for a fact this is not the case however it is disconcerting. Is there any reason why Moz wouldn't be able to pick up my internal links? Is there a difference when linking internally by "/page_a" vs actually spelling out the entire URL i.e. "https://www.mysite.com/page_a"

Hey guys, I have a bizarre situation on my hands. I have a URL that is being wonky. The url is redirecting to another url and the 301 redirect is not in my htaccess. There is a 301 redirect in my htaccess but is being overwritten by something else, i.e. whatever is happening in above. So basically URL A should be redirecting to URL B but instead its going to URL C. I know we were not hacked, it's not redirecting to a strange bizarre domain. I have also disabled all of our plugins that redirect (to my knowledge) Any thoughts would be great!

We are at a loss. We have been following Google Pagespeed Insights which gives us horrible marks. Nothing we do seems to really make a difference. GTMetrix and Pingdom give us much better scores. We don't know what to do...

Hey everybody, I have been testing the Inurl: feature of Google to try and gauge how long ago Google indexed our page. SO, this brings my question. If we run inurl:https://mysite.com all of our domains show up. If we run inurl:https://mysite.com/specialpage the domain shows up as being indexed If I use the "&as_qdr=y15" string to the URL, https://mysite.com/specialpage does not show up. Does anybody have any experience with this? Also on the same note when I look at how many pages Google has indexed it is about half of the pages we see on our backend/sitemap. Any thoughts would be appreciated. TY!

Hey Moz, I am working with a dating review website and we have noticed one of our competitors is basically making duplicated of their site with .com, .de, .co.uk, etc. My first thought is this is basically a way to game the system but I could be wrong. They are tapping into googles geo results by including major cities in each state, i.e. "dating in texas" "dating in atlanta" however the content itself doesn't really change. I can't figure out exactly why they are ranking so much higher. For example using some other SEO tools they have a traffic estimate of $500,000 monthly, where as we are sitting around $2000. So, either the traffic estimates are grossly misrepresenting traffic volume, OR they really are crushing it. TLDR: Is geo locating/translating sites a valid way to create backlinks? It's seems a lot like a PBN.

Hey there, I seem to have heard mixed results on this. We have a LOT of pages that we are trying to tell google are important. Does it make that big of a difference if those pages are linked in the homepage/header menu? Or mega menu for example? We are essentially a review site, so we potentially have thousands of links that could be implemented into the menu. Thoughts are greatly appreciated!

So the company I am working with has purchased backlinks from Hoth and Fiverr.  We have noticed that a lot of links seem to be from very low level DA's as well as wix,wordpress blogs that seem like they are the bottom of the barrel as far as links are concerned. Is there any value to even having these. Is there a way we can quantify the value that these links provide. It is relatively expensive to purchase these packages, if the company can ensure DA50 posts is it worth doing that sort of this? Is it better to have a lot of a little or a little of a lot.

Hello! I have a website with over 1300 landings pages for specific products. These individual pages update on a 24hr cycle through out API. Our API pulls reviews/ratings from other sources and then writes/updates that content onto the page. Is that 'bad"? Can that be viewed as spammy or dangerous in the eyes of google? (My first thought is no, its fine) Is there such a thing as "too much content". For example if we are adding roughly 20 articles to our site a week, is that ok? (I know news websites add much more than that on a daily basis but I just figured I would ask) On that note, would it be better to stagger our posting? For example 20 articles each week for a total of 80 articles, or 80 articles once a month? (I feel like trickle posting is probably preferable but I figured I would ask.) Is there any negatives to the process of an API writing/updating content? Should we have 800+ words of static content on each page? Thank you all mozzers!

I have been hired to work with a dating website to help with some SEO. The website itself is in a lot of trouble from an SEO standpoint. I have been working on a plan with them for how to fix their problems. They are currently averaging 1.6k unique users a month and wants to get to 50k in 3 months and 200k in 6 months. This seems entirely unreasonable without spending a lot of money on SEM/Social/Other marketing avenues.

Hey everybody!  It's been a while since off the boards! I am reworking a site and I have been looking into their Redirection Plugin. I personally tend to lean towards just using the .htaccess because, well, why not. However, when looking deeper into the plugin I found myself a little confused with their redirection wording. RewriteRule ^/products/landing-page-october-2015/$ /products/special-education-news-october-2015/ [R=301,L] Is that the same thing as a classic Redirect 301?

First off, I am incredibly excited about this tool. Secondly, I have a slew of questions, but the ones that are lingering for me are as follows. There are a few URLS that we used to control which are showing up in our list as spammy. The websites no longer exist as of roughly a week ago and I presume they still show up simply because of the last indexing.  That being said, if a website doesn't exist anymore, yet the link is showing up in our GWMT or MOZ, is it still necessary to disavow? Is that overkill? http://alcoholdrugrehablosangeles.com/ is an example of a website we used to control and I have removed. My second lingering question is if there are a handful of links that are registering as spammy, and I presume it is due to lack of content/duplicate content, and I move that content to its appropriate place on another website and 301 that domain to its new home, will the "spam score" carry over?

Hey Everybody, Is there any downside to the smart link plugins that I see all over wordpress? Basically in short I enter a keyword and where I want that link to go (primarily internal) and set the parameters of repetition etc and it automatically adds the link to that. Now other than the obvious situation where it might put a link in an awkward place, is there anything wrong with this sort of software? Part of me things that this sort of software would not be liked by Google, and that it isn't really getting counted as a true link, but i wanted to see if there were other thoughts or experience with this.

Good Morning, So the company who redesigned our website forgot to take off any of the no-index stuff that was put onto the site once it went live. I removed everything in the robots.txt and the privacy settings in wordpress but I am still seeing Any suggestions on changing this or if its even necessary to change would be great! Thank you

Hey everybody! I have a question pertaining to our redesign. The situation is as follows: /drug-rehab/alcohol-withdrawal-los-angeles gets a decent amount of views on out website, and we would like it to be on our redesigned site. I was curious what impact, if any, I would see given the two scenarios below. 301 to /alcohol-withdrawal make the new page /drug-rehab/alcohol-withdrawal-los-angeles as well The second situation is that there are a serious of other pages which don't seem to be of drastic benefit, which I don't feel NEED to be on the website. For example: /post-acute-alcohol-withdrawal-treatment/drug-los-angeles /rehabs-resources/drug-abuse/sub-acute-alcohol-withdrawal etc It appears to me that the content on these pages is rather similar, and I feel like they don't really say anything special. Can I 301 them to the new page? Should I let them die in the black hat inferno they were made in? Any thoughts are greatly appreciated! Thanks guys!

Hey everybody! So I was wondering what the difference between the H tags and "H Style". My first thought is that it's just the style guide, and not actually a meta tag, but before I go around changing all these styles I want to make sure my computer isn't going to explode SEO juice. Thanks!

Good Morning! I have a handful of pages that are not ranking very well, if at all. They are not driving any traffic, and are realistically just sorta "there". I have already determined I will not be bringing them over to our new web redesign. My question, could it be in our best interest to try and save these pages with ZERO traction and optimize them? Re-purpose them? Or does having them on our site currently muddy up our other pages? Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Long time no Moz! Ive been away with some server related issues, installing an AD at the company I work for, but I'm back. Our SSL cert just expired and I'm trying to determine the pros and cons of making an entire site SSL vs just the URL. Our previous set up was just a single domain. I know Google has hinted toward SSL preference, and I know its a little early to know for certain how much that's going to help, but I just wanted to know what everybody thought? It expired yesterday, so I have to do something. And we lost our previous credentials so I can't just renew the old one. Thanks!

Good Morning! Does anybody have any experience with SEO behind a paywall. If we have a portion of a website that is going to be locked, will google still be able to access all of that regardless of paying? If not is there any way to circumvent that? Any thoughts are greatly appreciated! MOZel Tov!

Good Morning! My father asked me about Domain Forwarding yesterday and it's impact on SEO. The example he gave was if he had website xyz.com and it was an educational website that sold anger management programs would purchasing the domain socialskills.com and pointing that domain at xyz.com help rank for social skills? My immediate answer was no it would not simply because Google doesn't associate any content with that domain, and Domain Forwarding is different that a redirect, which would apply if a website is already established. Am I correct in my thinking? Thanks guys!

Good Morning! We currently have two websites which are driving all of our traffic. Our end goal is to combine the two and fold them into each other. Can I redirect the duplicate content from one domain to our main domain even though the URL's are different. Ill give an example below. (The domains are not the real domains). The CEO does not want to remove the other website entirely yet, but is willing to begin some sort of consolidation process. ABCaddiction.com is the main domain which covers everything from drug addiction to dual diagnosis treatment. ABCdualdiagnosis.com is our secondary website which covers everything as well. Can I redirect the entire drug addiction half of the website to ABCaddiction.com? With the eventual goal of moving everything together.

Good Morning! I have been trying to clean up this website and  half the time I can't even edit our content without breaking the WYSIWYG Editor. Which leads me to the next question. How much, if at all, is this impacting our SEO. To my knowledge this isn't directly causing any broken pages for the viewer, but still, it certainly concerns me. I found this post on Moz from last year: http://moz.com/community/q/how-much-impact-does-bad-html-coding-really-have-on-seo We have a slightly different set of code problems but still wanted to revisit this question and see if anything has changed. I also can't imagine that all this broken/extra code is helping our page load properly. Thanks everybody!

Good Morning! Now, I'll admit, I may be obsessing a little too much on this, and it may not make that big of an impact in the long run, but with Google being introduced to the world if I were to start a business today I would try and include my keyword into the title of my business. For example Dollar Shave Club, at least they got the word shave in there. My business doesn't have a keyword in our name, is it beneficial to structure our URLs to include a keyword so that all of our URLs include that word? So if I sell organic bananas, but my company is called Evananas, is it worth it to have all domains become a child of Evananas.com/organic_bananas? That way at least we have the keyword "Organic Bananas" in our title? So I could then have things like: evananas.com/organic_bananas/recipes evananas.com/organic_bananas/benefits evananas.com/organic_bananas/taste_really_freeking_good Vs. evananas.com/recipes evananas.com/benefits evananas.com/taste_really_freeking_good I'm not sure it makes a difference. The other problem is I want to keep our URL's as short as possible. I feel like less is always more, but I was always under the impression domain/URL based keywords were rather powerful. What is the best practice in this case? Thanks Guys! Evan(ana)

Hey Everybody, So I am getting to the point where I need to disavow some backlinks. I am noticing a discrepancy between the OSE backlinks and the GWMT backlinks. My question is do I put both sets of links in the Disavow tool? Just the links from GWMT? Just the links from OSE? Etc... Etc... Thanks Everybody!

Good Morning! So I have recently been putting in a LOT of 301's into the .htaccess, no 301 plugins here, and GWMT is still seeing a lot of the  pages as soft 404's. I mark them as fixed, but they come back. I will also note, the previous webmaster has ample code in our htaccess which is rewriting our URL structure. I don't know if that is actually having any effect on the issue but I thought I would add that. All fo the 301's are working, Google isn't seeing them. Thanks Guys!

Is there a way to see specifically which links were added in my campaign? I noticed that this week we have 133 new links that were added to out website, yet we lost 1 link on the root level. So I am a little confused where that is coming from. I wanted to see if I could see where. When I look at the recent inbound links in the OpenWeb explorer there isn't anything listed. Thanks!

Does anybody have any experience with software for identifying this sort of thing? I was informed by a team we are working with that our website may have been compromised and I wanted to know what programs people have used to identify cloaking attempts and/or bad code. Thanks everybody!

Hey everybody! So, for those who have followed some of my posts I have myself in a bit of a quagmire that I am not going to get into. Some solutions have come to light and others are still pending and I will update my past questions with solutions! On the safer side of things I have a new situation. As I am going through our pages we have three different pages for "Admissions" Admissions Admission Guidelines Admission Information The "admissions' page has no link or feed to the other admissions page, and actually has no content on it at all. The "Admission Guidelines" page feeds to the "admission information" page, which although is extremely redundant is a different project for a different day. I am planning on putting a 301 on the "admissions" page and sending it to the "admission guidelines" page. When I do so, should I delete the old page? Does it matter? Is there a pro or con for either? Thanks guys!

My immediate thought is that a link from a website that has a PA/DA of 1 for both or either metric would be absolutely worthless, but I just wanted to make sure. Could this also be from it being recently indexed? Also is there a rule of thumb that anybody knows, or tries to follow at least? Obliviously the higher the better, but for example; A PA/DA of 15 and below is SPAM A PA/DA of 30 and above is GOOD A PA/DA of 50 is GREAT PA/DA of 80 is AMAZING PA/DA of 100 is GODTIER

Good Afternoon! I touched on this question a while back in another post specifically regarding a plethora of duplicate pages that I was finding due to inappropriate tagging in wordpress. As I am going through our website, I am starting to notice it happening again with categories as well. I am including some pictures where you can see the URL structures and titles etc of how everything is laid out. I would like to clarify that I was not the one who did any of this Is it wrong/bad to cross categorize? What I mean by that is put something in more than one category? Would there be any drawback to converting any of these into subcategories? Would that even do anything? Does having two pages that are named the same thing, hurt you? It would seem to me that Google wouldn't like that. I have recently come into the field of thought that Google is getting more and more human, and If it makes a human uncomfortable/confused it will make Google confused. In my pictures you can see we clearly have numerous hard copies of the same thing, not just duplicate elements created by wordpress, that is a separate issue. I personally want to change all of the titles and make everything as different and individual as possible, but i also could be very wrong in my desire to do that. Any thoughts are appreciated! eY4iX2N N3AVqss JZpU7Rq

Good Afternoon! Does anybody know what sort of impact I can expect to see from switching hosting? Not only that but how long it takes to come back from that sort of thing? Our website has steadily been dropping since I took it over about a month ago. I have been slowly, tediously trying to prune the bad stuff, and one of our issues is with out host. Any thoughts would be great! Thanks.

Hey Mozzzzzzzzzzzzzzers! I work for a high end rehab. We have a Facebook page with 800 fans, twitter with 5,500 followers, and a linkedIn with around 1,000. I noticed that the previous CEO probably bought our twitter followers, so that explains our minimal engagement. The part I am having a hard time grasping is that all of our competitors, including the big guns in the industry are struggling as well. I see numbers like these all the time: 30,000 facebook fans with posts getting 5/6 likes and a comment here and there. 7,000 twitter followers with every 10th tweet getting 1 or 2 favorites, a RT is a blue moon Experts in the industry with high blog views, high credibility in their field, huge fan base, and engagement like the engagement above. If I look back since 2005, we have accrued 250,000 hits on our website... 236 are from facebook. Our best month was last year in December and I honestly can't figure out why, there was nothing done differently. I am a firm believer that if there is no audience then it's not worth the time. That being said, I can't help but think we are all missing something in the addiction field. I guess my questions are: What do I do in an industry where there appears to be minimal engagement across the board? (Dr. Drew doesn't count.) When do you/have you decided to cut your losses on social media and just use it as a place to have representation and not as a place to drive profit? Is there always a way to get engagement? Do you believe some industries are just doomed? (That's an unfair question isn't it?) Anyway, just food for thought. Would love to hear your opinions! I also would love to know about any marketing and or social media forums you all participate in that I can direct some of the more social media/marketing specific questions towards. I don't want to make things too convoluted. Thanks everybody!

Hey everybody. Our server guy, who is sorta difficult, has put these ridiculous security measures in place which lock people out of our website all the time. Basically if I ping the website too many times I get locked out, and that's just on my own, doing general research. Regardless, all of our audits are coming back with 5xx errors and I asked if we could add rogerbot to the robots.txt. He seems to be resistant to the idea and just wants to adjust the settings to his firewall... Does anybody know if putting that in the Robots.txt will override his firewall/ping defense he has put in place? I personally think what he has done is WAY too overkill, but that is besides the point. Thanks everybody.

So this is just a thought. I am not Rand, therefor I am not the Moz man himself, and therefor I am not telling anybody how to run this website or forum. But, I've been thinking... and usually that a dangerous thing. So many times when I answer a question I end it with: "Keep me posted" "Keep us updated" "Good Luck" In the same light there have been plenty of times when I have had my questions answered by people like EGOL, RobertFIsher, KeriMorget and they have said that they have wanted me to keep them posted. Now sure, some of you are sitting there being Melancholy Mozzers thinking that all those wonderful people are just being polite by adding some nice parting words... but what if I they are being Sincere Seoers? What if I WANT to fill them in and don't want to ask a question? What if... THEY REALLY LIKE ME?!?! I could also send a DM to those 3 people, I mean let's get honest I'm not THAT popular.... but I can dream can't I? Again, this isn't really an SEO question, more of a thought on where I'm supposed to give updates on my project. In all honesty I do want feedback on what I'm doing, and sometimes I don't even know what questions I'm supposed to ask!

Simple as that. Pointless random tags that are serving no purpose other than adding apparent bulk to a website. They are just showing duplicate content and literally are random keywords that serve almost no purpose. And the tags, for the most part are only used on one page. If I remove them however, they will probably drop our site from around 650 pages to 450 (assuming I keep any tags that were used more than once). I  have read through some of the other posts on here and I know that Google will do some work as far as duplicate content is concerned. Now as far as UX is concerned, all these tags are worthless. Thoughts?

Hey Mozzers, So plenty of you who follow these threads have come across my posts and have read bits and pieces of the strange dark dark gray hat webspace that I have found myself in. So I'm currently doing some research and I wanted all of your opinion too. Will Google always notify you before they stop indexing your website? Will Google always allow you back if you do get pulled? Does Google give a grace period where they say "fix in 30 days?"? What is every bodies experience with all of this?

So, many of you know my current bizarre situation. We are getting some assistance. If you are curious my posts are on here and you have all been extremely  helpful. To my question: So in my Moz campaign I am tracking a handful of keywords and such, and then there are all the keywords that are sending results currently. Some of these I feel are pretty reasonable to transfer over to my keyword list. Some are pretty obvious that we should not use. Then there are some that seem to be luke warm. Are then worth tracking just because they are sending traffic? I guess the better question would be to look at if they are actually converting. Are people who are looking for Ice Cream upset when then end up at a place that doesn't sell Ice Cream.

Good Mozzing, So, as some of you may know based on my previous post, I am working with an odd situation here. I have taken over an account for a company and the Main domain pretty much falls into the category of everything Google hates. I have suggested to the CEO that the practices they did before me were sorta in the Grayhat realm bordering on Blackhat but I need empirical data before I can make any drastic changes. In May and June of 2013 Panda, Penguin, and Payday Loan all had updates. Our company has nothing do to with porn, apartment rentals, finances, or anything like that, but the SEO methods used were, as I said, questionable. In June of 2013 there was a drop from 8,000 sessions to 5,000 sessions from organic traffic. If I switch over to all referring traffic the loss increases to 11,000 to 7,000 sessions. To me that seems pretty substantial. Not only that, but according to the data we have not been able to recover.There was a steady climb for about 5 months before the drop, and then now we are in this middle ground. I have only been here for about 2 weeks, so the things I have been uncovering are pretty amazing. Is that enough to assume that we were indeed hit by the updates?

Envato.com is a marketplace for various things. They act as an umbrella for 8 different websites that fall underneath them and each one offers a specific thing. Is there any SEO benefit to doing this? Wouldn't it have been better off for them build all of these into envato.com. i.e. envato.com/themeforest as opposed to the current ThemeForest.net The only thing I can think of really is branding? Let's assume that they didn't do this because they needed space to house all of the digital data or anything like that.

So, as the title says, I am stuck. I recently have been brought on as the SEO guru for a small-mid size company with the task of rebuilding their web presence. Their website is in pretty unfortunate condition. The more research I do, the farther and farther I am going down the rabbit hole of chaos. Essential the previous CEO was doing all SEO work. He purchased 1500 domains, all keyword specific. Installed wordpress on roughly 1,000 and then began pumping out content. Of the 1,000 roughly 300 of them have about 600-2,000 characters worth of content that is absolute fluff. From there the linking began. Now the content is different enough that Google doesn't seem to notice that its the SAME FREEKIN THING on each domain, but I am very concerned. The company has their main multi-page domain which has other links and sources of traffic, but in essence the previous owner created a micro link web. My advice is to cut those links ASAP and remove the previous work. At the same time, I also don't want them to lose rank. So I guess I am asking a whole slew of questions... Am I right in thinking that we have to build a bridge before we burn a bridge? Is it worth fixing up some of those other domains to have original content to try and bolster what we already have? Would it be better to combine everything into one website, or try and have different domains represent different things. For example Envato.com is an umbrella website with 8 separate websites operating under the same roof using different domains.? Where do I begin? I feel like I have started this project numerous times. I know the keywords, I know where the duplicate content is, I know the structure of the main domain, I am getting the structure of the entire link web. Lastly, any thoughts you all have would be greatly appreciated. I realistically have minimal experience in this realm. I am a a major nub. I understand SEO in theory, sorta. So I'm getting there!