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Hi,

How do I "force" Google to change the Parent Organization in the Knowledge Graph box? I've gone about & suggested changes a few times by the Parent Organisation value is still being displayed.

That's good to know! Thanks!

Hi everyone,

We are changing a website's domain name. The site architecture will stay the same, but we are renaming some pages. How do we treat redirects? I read this on Search Engine Land:

The ideal way to set up your redirects is with a regex expression in the .htaccess file of your old site. The regex expression should simply swap out your domain name, or swap out HTTP for HTTPS if you are doing an SSL migration.

For any pages where this isn’t possible, you will need to set up an individual redirect. Make sure this doesn’t create any conflicts with your regex and that it doesn’t produce any redirect chains.

Does the above mean we are able to set up a domain redirect on the regex for pages that we are not renaming and then have individual 1:1 redirects for renamed pages in the same .htaccess file? So have both? This will not conflict with the regex rule?

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond. Our website still has a small amount of SEO authority and I think too much internal links is spreading our equity thin. Having a look at our pages, the blog and product categories are inflating our internal links. I'll see if I can remove these.

Hi Miriam,

Yes, these are very helpful! Thanks for the advice on doing a competitive audit. I will certainly do this for both clients!

Hi everyone,

Too much of anything is not good. In terms of internal linking, how many are too many? I read that the recommended internal links are about 100 links per page otherwise it dilutes the page's link equity. I have a concern about one of our websites - according to search console, the homepage has 923 internal links. All the pages have a corresponding /feed page added to the page URL, which is really weird (is this caused by a plugin?). The site also has an e-com feature, but it is not used as the site is essentially a brochure and customers are encouraged to visit the shop. I assume the e-com feature also increases this number.

On the other hand, one of the competitors we are tracking has 1 internal link site-wide. Ours is at 45,000 site-wide. How is it possible to only have 1 internal link? Is this a Moz bug?

I know we also need to reduce our internal links badly, however, I'm not sure where to start. I don't know how these internal links are linked together - some aren't in the copy or navigation menu. When I scan the homepage links using 'check my links', the total links identified for the homepage is only 170.

kAeYlTM

Hi Miriam,

Thank you for your response and sorry for the delay in responding!

1 - No, there are no other businesses in the same category located at this address. I have seen instances where Google filtered out same category businesses in the same building - one of our clients is actually experiencing this! They are lawyers that share the same office as 3 other lawyers and our advice was to try and have the best ranking power out of the listings they're competing against.

2 - Camp Hill is a suburb in the city of Brisbane. Customers usually use the term "pool builders brisbane" or "pool renovations brisbane" when looking for local pool service providers. We want to rank highly for these terms and also appear in the local maps for these terms, but we are getting filtered out for some reason. I understand that results vary also on proximity of the searcher, however, where I'm searching from (Brisbane's central business district), the business doesn't appear readily on maps. The business is only about 4km away from where I'm searching from, but competitors that are as far as 19km away appear on maps with no issues.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks Miriam!

Hi everyone,

We are having an issue with this local business. The Google listing isn't immediately appearing on the map. You have to move the map or zoom in and out for the listing to appear. I find this really odd as our competitors - with no reviews and way further in proximity - are appearing with no issues.

The listing is only about 4km where I'm doing the search, while competitors with no reviews are about 20km away. We are ranking in the top 5 organically for the search term I used (pool renovations brisbane), but nowhere in local unless the map is moved. When the listing appears, sometimes the pin also looks grey instead of red, while others are red (if that makes sense).

On top of this, their organic rankings have also been on a downward trend since June. I'm currently doing a backlink audit to see if it's contributing to the issue. If anyone also has other ideas, could you please let me know? Thanks.

Yes, thank you very much!

Great article, thanks for sharing!

I was actually also looking for an answer to this and found threads way back 2013 with the same advice that keyword density doesn't matter. What I found using MozPro is that target keywords should be mentioned in the meta title, description, H1, URL (if possible), and at least once in the copy without breaking the keywords apart. I also found that mentioning a target keyword in a 500-word copy more than 15 times is flagged by Moz as stuffing. I just use these as a rough guide. When I'm feeling particularly worried that some keywords have been mentioned too much, I use a free keyword density analyser to see how many times they appeared and reduce if necessary (especially if the copy doesn't read too well because of too much repetitiveness). Hope this helps!

Hi, I contacted Google about not receiving the pin after multiple attempts and they gave me an option to send photos of the place showing the sign and entry. Once you have verified this old address, you have to change the address to your current address and verify one more time.

If you absolutely can't verify the old address, there's also the option of creating a new Google My Business for your current location. Once that's verified, contact Google about merging the two businesses.

Here's also a post from Moz about dealing with duplicate locations - https://moz.com/blog/delete-gmb-listing

and from Google My Business help - https://support.google.com/business/answer/7005371?hl=en

Hope this helps.

Hi, like what Bryan said, it's better if you could avoid having redirects. Because of the extra step, redirects can affect your PageSpeed. We've always used redirects however - it's difficult to avoid - and it's very rarely flagged as a major issue when running the site in Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. The one thing we found that really has an impact on PageSpeed is a redirect chain, which should be avoided. This happens when a redirect goes to another redirect. Example: non-www redirected to a www version of the site, and then later on redirected again to an https www version. PageSpeed sites flag this as an issue, and so does Moz.

Hope this helps!

If you redirect a redirect, that's going to cause a redirect chain. Having too many redirect chains will result to slow page speed. For every step in a redirect chain, about 10% of authority is also lost. The best thing to do is a 1 - 1 redirect if possible. Have a read of this blog post about redirects - https://moz.com/blog/heres-how-to-keep-301-redirects-from-ruining-your-seo

Hope this helps!

Both help in SEO. Internal links for ensuring that bots crawl and connect your pages together. Backlinks for improving your site's authority. The latter has more weight in terms of outranking competitors.

I think it's best to respond as a company rather than as an individual. Company responses seem more legitimate and help to build trust especially when responding to a negative review. Personally, when I see these responses, I don't really think it's the actual owner but are representatives of the company.

Hello there, according to this guide there is no SEO benefit with choosing one over the other - it all depends on preference. Whatever you choose, let Google know your preference through Google Search Console. With regards to technical differences, adding www acts as a hostname that helps with DNS flexibility, restricting cookies etc. non-www doesn't have the same technical advantage according to the guide.

Hi everyone, we noticed while doing last month's reports that even the best performing campaigns have a few keywords that slipped - some up to 10 positions down. We know keywords fluctuate every month, but May was just a weird month for rankings. While looking at possible issues that caused this, we noticed that these campaigns' clicks have gone up. So while keywords have gone down, their visitors seemed to be on the rise.

Is there a correlation? Maybe Google saw an increase in visitors and decided something's up and lowered the rankings (this sounds ridiculous - sorry! May just be pure luck, but thought I'd ask anyway). Has anyone seen a drop in their rankings for May also? I checked everywhere, and I don't think there has been a major update going on.

Thanks!

Hi Jack, try to copy-paste your keyword list directly into the ad group list on the right hand panel. From there, download your list and it should show the search volumes of all keywords on the list even if they've been grouped originally on the 'keyword ideas' table. You would also find that grouped keywords have the same search volume individually. Hope this helps, let me know how you go.

Thanks, Donald and Miriam! It amazes me how I can get more useful responses here than from Google's actual support team.