Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi everyone,

I'm very, very pleased to announce that the latest Mozscape index has been released five days ahead of schedule, and it's back up to the quality you expect from Moz!

It's no secret that we've struggled this year with our index. I can't overstate how much we appreciate everyone sticking with us—we know how hard this has been. The good news—well, apart from the early release—is that we've worked out the issue, and we expect to finally be back on track moving forward.

Director of Engineering Martin York has shared a post to the Moz blog explaining just what's been going so wrong, and outlining our plan for the future. Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts, for being such an incredible community.

As for the folks who are seeing Domain Authority and Page Authority drops since the index release, please see Rand's recent post for more.

Hi there! It's definitely something we're aware folks want, and it's on our radar for the future. There's no official ETA yet, though.

In the meantime, there are some workarounds and tools that may help.

1. If you're not using all of your available campaigns, try adding a second campaign for the same site, and add up to 3 different competitors there (OP alluded to this).

2. Some of the research tools—specifically, Open Site Explorer and Rank Tracker—can help you get data on more competitors. The only issue is that they won't automatically update each week as your campaigns do, so you'll need to go in to pull more data when you need it.

   In OSE, Competitive Link Metrics lets you compare the page-, subdomain-, and domain-level metrics of up to 5 sites at a time (the one you initially searched for and four more).

   Rank Tracker allows you to pull ranking information on-demand for any site.

You may also appreciate the competitive insights you can get from the Keyword Difficulty tool and its Full SERP Analysis Report. Cyrus Shepard does a great job of covering how that works in this video.

I hope that helps hold you over a bit!

Don, this is SUPER cool. I'm pinning it to the top of the forum.

My friend, there likely is no answer to this issue, and the responses you've received pretty well cover the possibilities. They've come from folks known to be experts, as well. To get more specific would require testing against the site in question, and for that you'll need to hire a consultant.

Please be courteous and respect the community members who have generously given of their time and knowledge to answer your question.

If you have questions about our community etiquette guidelines or thoughts you'd like to share, please email us at community@moz.com.

Hi everyone!

This week's Community Discussion comes from Tuesday's Moz Blog post by Mackenzie Fogelson, "Why Content Strategy Isn't Enough." Mackenzie says:

"What you stand for as a company and a brand drives your products, your actions as a company, and also your marketing. More importantly, it will be the spark that ignites a connection with the people in your community.

When it comes down to it, people will continue to have access to more: more content, more products, and more choice. The need to build meaningful relationships with your customers is not an optional approach, but a requirement. Identifying and communicating your purpose as a brand is just one part of making this happen. The rest is delivering a seamless, authentic experience."

It's becoming more and more important to be aware of all aspects of your brand and your customers' experience. When you think of your content strategy, does it include all the potential customer touchpoints in their journey? Is this something you've already been doing, or is it a new idea to you? What's your strategy for making sure your online marketing efforts sync up with a visitor's or customer's experience?

Hi there, Moz Community!

It's Thanksgiving here in the US, and this year I'm thankful for the release of Moz Content. With that in mind, I'd like to revisit Kelsey Libert's November 5 Moz Blog post on creating and distributing content to kick of a community discussion to hold us over during this long weekend. Kelsey said:

"Some content is designed to “go viral,” while other times a piece of content intended to stay among friends takes the Internet by storm. But whether planned or unplanned, rapidly-shared content has several commonalities. One of the key factors is that the content creates a strong emotional response in viewers."

What do you think? How much effort do you put into getting your content distributed? Do you have particular strategies for creating your content? What are they?

Hi everyone,

I hope you all had a wonderful week! This week's discussion question comes from Tuesday's (December blog post by John-Henry Scherck, The Step-by-Step Guide to Turning Link Prospectors into Lead Generators. From the post:

"Digital marketing is a pretty introverted industry. This tends to make us a bit hesitant to embrace sales and outbound selling. There’s no beating around the bush: Sales can be difficult, scary, uncomfortable, and awkward — but if you want to grow your client base, it may require getting out of your comfort zone."

John-Henry shows us the opportunity for people who are good at link prospecting to apply those skills to lead generation, improving business opportunities by creatively using the skills they already have. SEOs and marketers wear many hats, and have a diverse skill set at their disposal—how else can we apply the skills we already have in creative ways?

In today's Daily SEO Fix, Tori dives into using Open Site Explorer to find opportunities—particularly potential keyword ranking opportunities—in your links' anchor text. Watch "How to Use Open Site Explorer to Check Your Anchor Text" to get started!

The Daily SEO Fix is an ongoing series of Moz tool tips and tricks in under 2 minutes. To watch all of our videos so far, and to subscribe to future ones, make sure to check out the Daily SEO Fix channel on YouTube!

Hi there, Moz Community!

In Tuesday's post on the Moz Blog, "Overcoming Your Fear of Local Landing Pages," Miriam Ellis asks:

When tasked with developing a set of city landing pages for your local business clients, do you experience any of the following: brain fog, dry mouth, sweaty palms, procrastination, woolgathering, or ennui? Then chances are, the diagnosis is a _fear of local landing pages. _

Which brings me to today's question!

What are the toughest challenges you've faced when creating local landing pages? How have you overcome them? What successes have you had, and what lessons have you learned along the way?

Hi there, friends!

This week's discussion comes from today's Whiteboard Friday:

Rand's outlined SEO practices that are outdated and no longer effective. Did anything catch you off-guard, making you want to pivot your strategy? Anything that you disagree with, or that you feel still works well regardless? What other tactics, in your experience, no longer work?

I've heard good things about Moz Local.

Hi there!

We have a list of SEO companies we know and trust here, but they aren't really individual experts there. If you feel at all comfortable working on your site yourself, it's very possible someone here can give you some tips.

Hi Michael!

That is actually not correct. Moz Local and Moz Pro are completely separate products, and having access to one doesn't provide access to the other.

It's possible that you're think of the Check Listing tool, which is a part of Moz Local that can be used for free. It'll let you know the status of your listings, but it won't update them for you.

I'd recommend watching this video on how Moz Local works.

Does that clear things up?

I'm not aware of any penalty based on image size. They can be as big as they need to be, provided the page loads reasonably quickly. You can read up on page speed here.

Hi everyone!

We've deployed a fix, and those links seem to be working. Thanks again for the heads up!

I can't think of a reason to include your website address in an H1 tag at all. H1 is intended to indicate the topic of the content on a page; it functions as a headline similarly to how a headline on a newspaper page works. That's why it's a somewhat decent place to place keywords—it indicates to search engines what the page is about.

For a homepage, I'd recommend using your brand name, in text. If there are other relevant keywords, use them as long as it appears natural and informative to visitors. But actually placing your URL in an H1 is unlikely to have any value for you.

You might want to check out the Beginner's Guide to SEO. This Visual Guide to Keyword Targeting and On-Page SEO could help, too.

Hi Kathy!

It's very difficult to know what could be leading to their rankings, especially not being familiar with the sites or vertical. However, one thing you might try is running a Full SERP Analysis Report through the Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool (a research tool that comes with Moz Pro). You may be able to work out what factors are helping them rank.

Cyrus Shepard made a great video on the report here.

Happy Friday, Q&A friends!

This week's discussion question comes from Amir Jaffari's YouMoz post from Thursday, January 28. Amir explains how he was able to use annotations to massively increase his YouTube videos' views without using ads, and raise his annotation CTR 22,400%.

Have you tested annotations to see if they dramatically improve conversion rates? What were the results? What other strategies have you tried?

Hi Meier,

Since Google will recognize each subdomain as effectively its own site, each one will have to rank on its own terms. la.website.com won't get any benefit from links pointing at sf.website.com, for example.

Personally, I think the subdomains just make things harder.

That's a valid point. I'll make sure our Product folks have seen it.

Just keep in mind that there will be a number of other SEO ramifications if you decide to migrate domains. I can't say for sure not being totally familiar with your company/site, but in my opinion it would almost never be worth it to change domains for the reasons your considering. There isn't much of a bump from the domain name, and the search engines are getting much better at recognizing context, intent, and synonyms.

You may want to read through Cyrus Shepard's "Keywords to Concepts," which may help you understand the concept of topical search. It's actually possible that "yard care" is helping you with "lawn care," too.

You may want to incorporate phrases like "lawn care" into some of your site's copy, just to be safe, but I sincerely doubt it would be worth it to go through a domain migration just to change "yard" to "lawn" in your URL.

Yeah, you guys have pretty much nailed it. So sorry, again, for the delay!

Hi Jubaer,

It's definitely true that there are "diminishing returns" when you get multiple links from the same domain, but remember that search engines treat subdomains are distinct domains.

Hi there! I saw your tweet @Moz, so I wanted to follow up. You can get the guidelines for CSV uploads—including business hours—here:

https://moz.com/local/help/documentation

That said, it sounds like the answer to this might be a little more technical, and thus a job for our illustrious Help Team. The question is in their queue, which generally means there'll be a response within 24-48 hours. Sit tight!

I'd imagine it depends on the context and how it's presented. Can you provide a bit more detail on the case you're referring to?

*Edit: Miki beat me to it, but here's a little more explanation.

The first thing to note here is that Google's indexing doesn't actually have any effect on your Moz crawl report. All of the data you see there comes from our very own rogerbot, which crawls similarly to googlebot.

Though Google's crawler has a wide variety of ways to locate and index content, rogerbot can only crawl links on your site. If your crawl report is picking up each of these URLs, then there must be links pointing to those URLs somewhere on your site. The danger here is that Google and the other search engines will pick up those variants and not be able to determine which of them is the "real" one. That could lead to a) Google listing a URL you'd rather it didn't, or b) Google not understanding how to list your site at all.

A few of these have pretty simple fixes—index.html should be 301 redirected to your root domain, for example. Rel="canonical" is very applicable here, too. Here are a couple resources you may want to check out:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization - Best practices article on canonicalization
http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection - Best practices article on redirects

I hope that helps!

Matt Roney
Moz Customer Mentor

I agree with Bob, and I want to add that one-word keywords tend to be _extremely_difficult to rank for. Your best bet is to focus your pages on the key phrases that make the most sense based on the topics of those pages.

Have you ever read Cyrus Shepard's "Keywords to Concepts: The Lazy Web Marketer's Guide to Smart Keyword Research?" It's a bit on the older side, but is still quite relevant. It might help you wrap your head around some of the intricacies of keyword targeting, and how search engines are learning to understand topics and intent.

Category pages actually turn up as duplicate content in Crawl Diagnostics _really _often. It just means that those categories are linked somewhere on your site, and the resulting category pages look almost exactly like all the others.

Generally, I recommend you use robots.txt to block crawlers from accessing pages in the category directory. Once that's done and your campaign has re-crawled your site, then you can see how much of the problem was resolved by that one change, and consider what to do to take care of the rest.

Does that make sense?

It's not unheard of for new sites to appear pretty high in the SERPs when first indexed, and then drop off within a couple days/weeks.

It's also very possible that their PA & DA aren't really 1, and that the site is simply too new to be in our index yet.

Hi Dusan!

You're definitely on the right track, though I'd make a few adjustments to those metrics. To tell whether changes to your on-page keyword targeting were worth it, I'd suggest focusing on rankings changes and traffic.

While Page Grade will tell you whether a page is compliant with keyword targeting best practices, it won't tell you whether that keyword targeting is positively affecting your rankings or traffic. Page Authority, MozRank, and MozTrust are link metrics, and don't consider any on-page or keyword targeting factors, so they really won't do anything to show the effects of your on-page optimization.

Does that help?

Not using 301s could be a big part of the problem. Do your old backlinks all point to existing pages on the new domain?

Hi Dustin,

You're right—in general, a drop in DA that corresponds with a drop in your competitors' DA is most likely due to changes in the Mozscape index (though not the algorithm so much). It's best to look at DA less as an absolute value than as a benchmark against the competitors in your space.

Matt

Yes. Domain Authority is recalculated with each new index. I'll quote Rand, from a comment on the blog post:

"Yeah - almost certainly related to this update, and very possibly to the quantity of domains we were previously crawling and counting from .cn and .pl. Going forward, PA/DA should keep getting slightly more accurate."

Hi there!

Thanks for posting in Q&A. I'm afraid that there's no way to add another 30 days to your trial. We certainly give extra MozPoints for completing your community profile, but we don't offer an extended trial for it.

That said, we do offer a free month of Pro if you receive 200 MozPoints in one 30-day period. Could that be what you saw?

Hi John,

Welcome to Moz! Thomas definitely has you on the right track, but I've got a few recommendations of my own.

If you'd like to brush up on SEO and inbound marketing in general, I absolutely recommend reading through the Beginner's Guide to SEO, if you haven't before. It offers one of the best introductions available to the basics of SEO, and can be pretty easily read through in an afternoon. Cyrus Shepard's "How to Rank" is another great learning resource, and presents a more practical explanation of the SEO process. Then, of course, there's Moz Academy, which Thomas already covered.

It sounds as if you may have already seen it, but the Getting Started section of the Help Hub provides an overview of each of the tools we have available, including quick video introductions and documentation. I suggest looking it over once, then checking back whenever you feel confused about a tool or feature.

Finally, here's the basic process I tend to recommend to folks who are just getting started:

1. Set up the Brand & Mentions section of your account to get it started collecting data.

2. Add your competitors to the Links section of your account, in order to get their link metrics tracking, as well.

3. Use the On-Page Optimization section of your campaign, and particularly the page grade recommendations to get the on-page elements of your site under control. I recommend checking out Rand's post on the "perfectly optimized page" for pointers.

4. Use Crawl Diagnostics to work out anything that's causing issues for web crawlers.

Where you go from there will depend on your own goals and strategy.

Does that help at all?

Hi there!

It's very hard to say what could be preventing you from ranking, especially without more information, or the ability to look at the pages. That said, keep in mind that the on-page grader does not indicate your likelihood to rank. The grade is based entirely on how well the page adheres to commonly-understood on-page best practices for a given keyword. Since on-page optimization is only one factor, it's entirely possible to have an A-grade and still not rank.

One Moz tool you may want to check out is the Keyword Difficulty Tool, and specifically the Full SERP Analysis Report. It can let you know what factors could be helping the top 10 for a given keyword to rank, which can give you a sense of what you'll need to do. Check out Cyrus Shepard's Moz Academy video on the subject.

Seconding adding noindex to tag pages. Unless you want those to rank—and I'm not sure why you would—that's a great way to avoid any issues.

I'm fairly certain it's not the worst duplicate issue to have, though.

Hi friends! To be as clear as possible, this functionality is now available in Moz Pro. You can learn about it here.

I'd actually recommend checking out the Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool, and the Full SERP Analysis Report it can generate. That can give you a breakdown of the factors that are most likely helping the top 10 sites for a given keyword rank, which can in turn help you work out what you'll need to do.

Cyrus Shepard made a great video on it here.

Thank you EGOL! Yes, this is going to become a regular thing.

I LOVE your process here, especially your very controlled research phase and your guidelines for offering guest content. I think it could be very valuable to our other community members.

Patrick nailed it, but I'll add that when you see a drop in DA, the first thing you should do is look up your competitors in Open Site Explorer. If they've dropped too, then it's very likely you're just seeing the effects of an index refresh.

Honestly, maybe both? For me, it would depend on how useful those old posts are. Are they getting traffic? Are there valuable links pointing to them? If so, it may be worth it. If not, 301 redirect them to new, relevant, optimized posts.

For what it's worth, I also wouldn't recommend "churning out" blog posts unless they add value for your visitors.

Hi Gowtham!

May I ask, how long has it been since you removed SSL?

It's entirely possible that Google simply hasn't reindexed your site yet. If that's the case, I'd suggest resubmitting your sitemap in Webmaster Tools to draw their attention to it.

Hi Donald!

EGOL is spot-on. I just also want to share a couple resources you have access to from Moz that could help. Apologies if you've seen these elsewhere in Q&A; I recommend them all the time.

The first is Cyrus Shepard's "Keywords to Concepts" blog post. It'll give you a really good sense of how to approach your keyword targeting from a topical perspective, rather that scrambling to rank for specific keywords.

The second is the Full SERP Analysis report, which is part of the Keyword Difficulty Tool. You can run it on the keyword you're trying to rank for and see what factors are most likely leading the first-page sites to rank. There's a video on it here.

I hope that helps!

I would absolutely recommend canonical in this case, and I'm afraid you're working on a bit of a misconception about indexed pages and the effects of duplicate content.

When a user searches Google, Google tries to serve them the most relevant, useful pages and resources based on their perceived intent. If multiple pages on your site appear to potentially fit the needs of the searcher, then Google is likely to do 1 of 2 things—rank one of the pages (potentially the wrong one), or determine that the appropriate page isn't clear and skip your site entirely. What canonical does is let Google know what you consider the appropriate result.

Having these duplicates is likely to do the opposite of what you're expecting. More pages indexed ≠ greater visibility.

Hi there!

I recommend this all the time—this is the second time today—but the Full SERP Analysis report in the Moz Keyword Difficulty tool may help. It can give you a sense of what the first-page sites are doing to rank. Cyrus Shepard made a video on it here.

Otherwise, you might have better luck getting answers if you can post more specific questions. An audit of your site is a pretty big job, and not one that a lot of community members are likely to do for free. Maybe you can tell us a bit about the SEO work you've already done on the site?

In my opinion, it depends on the network. A tweet, for example, is said to have a total lifespan of 18-24 minutes; if a follower doesn't see it during that window, it's extremely likely they simply won't see it. For any Moz Blog or YouMoz post, we'll tweet a total of 12 times over six days—once each AM and once each PM, never tweeting the same hour twice. Posts for other sorts of content vary.

Of course, our social following is massive and globe-spanning, so a tweet during business hours where we're located in Seattle, WA, USA is unlikely to be seen by any of our UK followers, for example. I'd recommend testing your own post frequency to see what works best for your audience.

Hi Robert,

I recommend this all the time, but one thing that may shed some light is the Full SERP Report in the Keyword Difficulty Tool in Moz Pro. It can give you a sense of what your competitors on the SERPs are doing that's helping them pull ahead.

Cyrus Shepard made a quick video on it here.

Hey Taiger! Get this worked out?