Welcome to the Q&A Forum

We've been caught a bit off guard with the upcoming Google mobile compliance issue and received the warnings in webmasters about fixing mobile usability issues. It will still be some time before we can have the site re-coded as responsive. I have stumbled upon a converter tool (which turns any site into one that's mobile friendly) called bMobilized, which essentially turns your site into one that's mobile friendly. Have you used bMobilized? Is it a safe idea to use this service temporarily until our new responsive site is ready in a few months? Do you have any suggestions for temporarily getting around the mobile compliance issue while our new responsive site is being built? Thanks

Hello, My client has just opened up two new smaller offices which I now need to have listed on Google Places as the primary office is. How is this done (using best practice)? Thanks

My company wants to set up two or three blogs (on previously unused domains) with the idea being to disseminate good content that gets picked up in SERPs and acts as a lead generator, shows us to be authorities in our market, creates brand (or individual employee who's doing the blogging) awareness etc... From scratch, what are all the boxes that should be ticked to make this work from the outset? What are the must haves?With all the ideals in place, how long could it realistically take to make this work? What are some pitfalls to look out for? Any advice in general will be appreciated. Thanks, M

Hi all, Does anyone have any concise info on how to extract long-tail (or any) terms in Google Analytics that have converted for me as I am having a hard time finding out how to do this? Many thanks

Hi all, Any ideas as to why AdWords and Analytics are showing different Paid Search conversion numbers for me when I check on a daily basis? Both accounts are linked, they share the same destination URLs to trigger a conversion, some days each reflects the same amount of conversions, then some days it's anything from 1-5 conversions different (Analytics is always the one to show more). Thanks M

Hi MOZland, With a new (our first e-commerce) client, we're going through a massive learning curve in handling a site of substantial size and complexity for the first time. While we've weeded out most of the on-page stuff that needed sorting, and we're in the process of dumping poor links implemented by previous SEO/online marketing efforts, do you have any suggestions about how to take a big e-commerce site forward in 2014, especially concerning technical pitfalls and link building efforts (and given that guest blogging has become something of a faux pas). Cheers, M

Happy new year, Mozzers We are about to take on our first E-commerce client which will be something new for us as we expand in 2014. Being a small outfit, we've never taken on a type of site like this before, which is great for new experiences and challenges. Do you have any advice, recommendations, suggestions, things to look out for etc, etc when working with E-commerce sites for the first time ever? thanks M

If you were to offer up some quick wins to a client to get a project off with an immediate bang, what would you recommend as quick wins to get the conversions ticking over from the outset? Thanks in advance.

What are you or your SEO agency doing for your client's link building efforts? What are you (or the agency) doing yourself, or out-sourcing, or having the client do for link building? If a new client needs some serious link building done, what do you prescribe and implement straight off the bat? What are your go-to link building tactics for clients? What are the link building challenges faced by your agency in 2013/2014? What's working for your agency and what's not? Does your agency work closely with the client's marketing department to gain link traction? If so, what are collaborating on? What else might you be willing to share about your agencies link building practices? Thanks

Hello, A client is having one of their daily blogs published on a industry news site along with on their own site. This is a clear-cut case of having a canonical tag implemented on the client's site on each blog page, right? Thanks

Hi all, Of those who've done it or have valuable advice to impart, what are the things to look out for when re-designing a homepage? In the same breath, what are vital considerations and elements to include/features to bear in mind when 'prettying up' a primary landing page as a homepage essentially serves as? UX fundamentals? Thanks folks

Good day, I'm really struggling to get a client to appear in the Google Local map snapshot (on the right of the SERPs), even when their company name is Googled. I've tried everything including getting the main Google Local account verified, had some reviews put up, all the required and relevant info has been completed, yet their location and the map never appear. Any help out there as to how I can remedy this? Thanks

Morning guys, I've the unenviable task of having to rectify poor link building (a previous company's work, not mine) which inevitably means emailing tons and tons of horrible directories with links to the client from as far back as 5/6 years ago. I'm sure many of you are in the same boat so it begs the question: What have you said to these types of sites that is effective in getting them to remove the links? This could even be a two/three-parter: If you've had little joy in requesting removals, have you dis-avowed the links, and what (if any) effect did it have? Thanks, M.

Morning peeps, A client wants to clone their website for a foreign language market, obviously swapping all English content for whichever language/market they're looking to target. Any advice on how to research a foreign market (when I only speak English), or perhaps any pitfalls to look out for or advice you might have with a launch like this? thanks

I have parts of an online portal displaying in SERPs which it definitely shouldn't be. It's due to thoughtless developers but I need to have the whole portal's domain de-indexed and prevented from future indexing. I'm not too tech savvy but how is this achieved? No index? Robots? thanks

Anyone else find that there are, almost continually, links added to the 'Links To Your Site' list from years ago that weren't previously reflected? I'm seeing links that were added to directories in 2008 (by whoever was doing the SEO then) only showing in the last week or so when these links weren't in the list a few months ago. I don't suppose there's much I can do - it's just annoying in that it adds to more people to contact to have nonsense removed.

It was suggested in Quick Sprout's Advanced SEO guide that it's good form to place your Feedburner RSS link into the header tag of your blog. Anyone know if this needs to be done for every page header of the blog, or just the home/main/index page? Thanks

Mornin' Anyone have any guests blogging resources to find guest bloggers and blogs to guest post on? I've been using My Guest Blog but it runs dry after a while. Thanks

I've received a Webmasters notification about an 'increase in soft 404 errors'. When we had the new site launched three months ago we did away with some old pages, which we either 301 to new equivalents, or, we return a 'Oops, that page seems to be missing' 404 page which has some links to important parts on the site that might be of use to the visitor. Any ideas why Webmasters is issuing the warning? Any suggestions as to what to do? Thanks

I'm looking for decent hosting services in France? Any recommendations? Thanks

We're about to re-launch our site but to think of everything before going live in a week is pretty tough going. Any suggestions or reminders as to what to remember and take care of before going live? What have you found or forgotten in your experience with re-launches? Thanks, Dave

Hi all, A client has been penalised, having received the message in Google Webmasters last week, along with two more yesterday. It seems the penalty is for something specific: “As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole“. This is the first time I've had to deal with this so I'll be a bit layman about it The penalty, firstly, seems to be for the old domain, from which there is a re-direct to the current one. This redirect has been in place since Feb 2012 (no link building has been done for the old domain since then). In Webmasters, I have the old and new domains set up separately and the messages are only coming for the old (but affecting the new, obviously).  I need to determine if it’s the old or new URL I’m being hit for, or would that even matter? Some questionable links I can see in WM: There is an affiliate for whom WM is showing 154,000 links (all followed) from their individual products listings to the client’s site (as a related product) but they’re linking to the new domain if that matters. Could this affiliate be an issue? There is also Updowner, which has added 2000+ links unbeknownst to me but apparently they are discounted by Google. I see a ton of recent directory submissions - right up until last week - that I am not responsible for. Could that be intentional spam targeting? I did also use a 3^rd party link building company for Feb, March and April who ‘manually’ submitted the new domain to directories and social bookmarking sites. Could this be issue? For what kind of time-scale are penalties usually imposed - how far back (or how recently) are they penalising for?  Ranking were going really well until this happened last Thursday. Will directories with non-followed links effect us negatively - one such one has over 2000 links. What is the most conclusive way to determine which are the poor, penalty-incurring links pointing to us? I know I now have to contact all the dodgy directories the site is now listed on to get links removed, but any and all advice on how to rectify this, along with determining what had gone wrong, will be most appreciated. Cheers, David

Hi all, We are launching a new site soon and I’d like your opinion on best practice related to its content. We will be retaining some pages and content (although the URLs might change a bit as I intend to replace under-scores with hyphens and remove .asp from some extensions in order to standardise a currently uneven URL structuring). I will also be adding a lot of new pages with new content, along with amend some pages and their content (and amend URLs again if need be), and a few pages are going to be done away with all together. Any advice from those who’ve done the same in the past as to how best to proceed? Does the URL rewriting sound OK to do in conjunction with adding and amending content? Cheers, Dave

Hi all, A new client of mine is an online music retailer (CD, vinyls, DVD etc) who is struggling against file sharing sites that are taking precedence over the client's results for searches like "tropic of cancer end of things cd" If a site a legal retailer trying to make an honest living who's then having to go up against the death knell of the music industry - torrents etc. If you think about it, with all the penalties Google is fond of dealing out, we shouldn't even be getting a whiff of file sharing sites in SERPs, right?  How is it that file sharing sites are still dominating? Is it simply because of the enormous amounts of traffic they receive? Does traffic determine ranking? How can you go up against torrents and download sites in this case. You can work on the onsite stuff, get bloggers to mention the client's pages for particular album reviews, artist profiles etc, but what else could you suggest I do? Thanks,

So you have a decent blog on the other side of the world ready and willing to work with you. Their content relates to your industry, and you're going to be allocated a lovely page of content, once a week, with a link or two back to your site. Do you think anchor text is still as important in May 2012 as everyone said it was three years ago? How do you determine what anchor text to have based on your answer to the question above?

So, you've recently begun as a SEO manager for a new company who's just launched a lovely, gleaming corporate site to boot. The onsite stuff is taken care of and your attention turns to link building. Now you've been in the game for a few years. You've seen things change in that time. Directories are out. Link networks are done. You're not going to embark on reciprocal linking either because it's bad and looks horribly tacky. Black Hat, White Hat - you know the score. You're lucky that the company produces a page or two of news a day - it's original, informative, is great for keeping your clients informed and you punt this on Twitter and FB. A bit of link bait, eh? But there's a rub: your competitors, with their bigger budgets, and industry clout, have been around for a some time longer than your company has been. They've snapped up all the good (industry-related) sites to get links from. You've approached all potential targets with the offer of good, relevant content and affiliate partnerships but they aren't having any of it. You're simply out-sized by the big boys next door - you can't compete. They're rich kids. There just seems nowhere to get links from. Do you just go the route of press releases and articles? Do you use paid blogging services? Grovel at doorsteps. The industry you're in is incredibly commercial - no meek altruist is going to take pity and give you  a couple backlinks out of kindness. What do you do? What indeed...?

When dealing with affiliate websites, whereby you send them a stock standard bio or info on your company for them to use on their sites, what is best practice? Is is OK to have multiple websites all linking to you with pages that contain the same content? Should I ask them to implement canonical or no-index tags for those particular pages? Should I ask them to rewrite the content (which may be impractical or they're unwilling to do)? Thanks

I arrived at work this morning to find my weekly SEOmoz ranking report for a main competitor waiting in my inbox. 90% of the their rankings have tanked in the last day or so by an average of 3 pages - most down from page 1 or 2 where they had been sitting pretty for ages. I'm not in a state of (total) euphoria about this because a) you should be humble enough not to gloat at your enemy's demise, and b) I need to find out what they did wrong so that I don't make the same mistake, too. **What is your first suggested port of call to determine where my (vanquished) foe has gone wrong? How much can I find out? ** I do know one thing - with OSE I can see they've used dodgy blogging services but this, to my mind, would have been jumped upon by Google last year. No? Thanks guys

Hi Mozland, We are going to have a new Nav Bar for our site built from the horror that we currently have to up with. We want to make it a simple affair, similar to The Guardian two-tier Nav Bar - main menu which will drop down to the 2nd tier according to what you clicked on in tier one. Regular stuff, I think. Any suggestions, from your experience, about how best to implement this, what to include, what not to do, what can be included and done to make it as best it can be to get people to peruse our site as easily as possible? Thanks

Hello Mozland, I'm looking to have a mobile site built. We have a fair amount of traffic coming from smart phones, tablets etc and want to capture this traffic better. Do you have any advice on how to have it built properly, if/how it can be optimised, what good features to include, or anything else you think might be of help? Many thanks Martin

Mornin' In your experience, how much constitutes duplicate content? A sentence, a paragraph, half a page, etc? What about quotes - are they considered duplications, too, if there aren't quotation marks? Over the years, the client has been a bit bad in taking a paragraph from here, a sentence from there, and coupling it all together as daily news on their site. I'm now in the middle of a purge. Oh boy! All hail originality.

Morning, We're moving our site to a new server today and having never done so before in an SEO capacity, are there any SEO implications, pitfalls, things to watch out for? Advice and comments appreciated. Thanks.

So checking out the backlinks on a competitor’s page for a term I’m looking to work on, a page they rank pretty well for, I can’t but happen to note the kinds of sites that grant this company – who are well known in their field – its successes. Many of the links to this page I’m interested in appear within short articles on blogs, really bad Wordpress blogs that are certainly just for SEO use. My questions are: Where do people usually source these blogs which typically contain material on a range of different topics? Are these probably paid links? How do they get so much content out there, albeit similar content, to so many of the hastily cobbled efforts? Would that be an agency with connections or a blogging community site? How can any search engine lend credibility to my competitor’s links when the article below has nonsense for penis enlargement stuff. Seriously?!? How are they not being penalised? It’s frustrating because these aren’t the tactics I want to employ but they seems to offer success, but also, if your link is in an article that followed by another on penis pills, how I can take Google seriously in its stated aim of making things this prone to manipulation.

Since relaunch earlier this year, we've had patches where our site has failed to load. It's happened every so often, but, until I receive the server logs from the company who hosts the site, I won't know exactly when this issue has occurred. Until now, we've only noticed it when someone in the company has tried, and failed, to access the site. Again, it happened today. After hassling our developers/hosting firm for a conclusive answer as to why, it emerged that their server (perhaps our site in particular because of the nature of our business) had been the target of an attempted hacking. We've now concluded that every time our site has messed around like this, it's because of a possible hack. Would anyone in SEOmoz Land be able to tell me if this is going to have a negative impact for our SEO and site performance? Would search engines be able to tell if a potential hack is, or was, occurring? Would we then be penalised? Please feel free to elaborate on the hacking process in general, too, if you can because this is the first time I've encountered it. Thanks

Hi guys, I have, for the first time, set up a Wordpress blog. I'm moulding the overall theme of it to relate to the industry we operate in. I'm new to this, so looking for any advice, help and info etc on how best to utilise it that you can offer. My initial plan is to write articles as often as possible on what's happening in the markets, and link back to our site where applicable. I'll also do content exchanges with other relevant sites (using My Blog Guest as one means to find relevant bloggers), and give access to contributors as well (felt a bit weird about doing it initially). Sound like a decent blogging strategy? Any and all ideas welcome. Thanks

Afternoon Mozzers, We run a basic affiliate program whereby we distribute banners and tools to affiliate sites who then link back to our homepage via these, often through a tool that incorporates an HTML link with our primary keyword term embedded. This banner/tool/link heads to our homepage, and will then incorporate that particular affiliate's unique code in the URL, eg. www.example.com/1A-265-GNH Seems pretty standard practice so far? So, considering this, that we include our primary keyword term in HTML in some banners, some also link to our homepage via an embedded image (and others then just work off cookies as per usual), can anyone hazard a guess, or know for certain, the beneficence of this as a link building means? I ask in terms of trying to determine whether to continue punting our tools and banners as a decent link building opportunity, or concentrate more on other link building means. Hope I've been clear enough, but am happy to elaborate if need be. Cheers

We have a pagination issue, which the developers seem reluctant (or incapable) to fix whereby we have 3 of the same page (slightly differing URLs) coming up in different pages in the archived article index. The indexing convention was very poorly thought up by the developers and has left us with the same article on, for example, page 1, 2 and 3 of the article index, hence the duplications. Is this a clear cut case of using a canonical tag? Quite concerned this is going to have a negative impact on ranking, of course. Cheers Martin