Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Good morning, As many of you have read, Google seems to have confirmed that they will give a small boost to sites with SSL certificates this morning.  So my question is, does that mean we have to switch our entire site to https?  Even simple information pages and blog posts?  Or will we get credit for the https boost as long as the sensitive parts of our site have it? Anybody know?  Thanks in advance.

Hi Mozzers, A quick question.  In the last few months I have noticed that for a number of keywords I am having 2 different pages on my domain show up in the SERP.  Always right next to each other (for example, position #7 and #8 or #3 and #4).  So in the SERP it looks something like: www.mycompetition1.com www.mycompetition2.com www.mywebsite.com/page1.html
4) www.mywebsite.com**/page2.html**
5) www.mycompetition3.com Now, I actually need both pages since the content on both pages is different - but on the same topic.  Both pages have links to them, but page1.html always tends to have more.  So, what is the best practice to tell Google that I only want 1 page to rank?  Of course, the idea is that by combining the SEO Juice of both pages, I can push my way up to position 2 or 1. Does anybody have any experience in this?  Any advice is much appreciated.

Good afternoon,
   A quick question.  I am working on a website which has a large page with different sections.  Lets say: Page 1
SECTION A
SECTION B
SECTION C Now, they are adding a new area where they want to show only certain sections, so it would look like this: Page 2
SECTION A Page 3
SECTION C Page 4
SECTION D So my question is, would a rel='canonical' tag back to Page 1 be the correct way of preempting any duplicate content issues?  I do not need Page 2-4 to even be indexed, it is just a matter of usability and giving the users what they are looking for without all the rest of the extra stuff. Gracias. Tesekürler. Salamat Ko. Thanks. (bonus thumbs up for anybody who knows which languages each of those are) 🙂

Good day, I am wondering if anybody here has done something like this before.  I have a page in one of my sites that contains a number of different - but related - free resources.  The resources can be sorted in different ways once the user is on the page. Now I am starting an outreach campaign, and want to be able to send out custom URLS (which pretty much means they have different query strings after them like '?id=123' ) so that when a person clicks on the link to the page it brings up the stuff they are more likely to be interested in at the top.  I expect - hope - that some of these people will put links back to this page as a result of this.  Now all the links may be slightly different, but they will come to the same page and the content will look slightly different.  I will make sure to have the rel=canonical tag in place. Does anybody know if this would be in violation of Google Terms and Conditions.  I can't see how, but I wanted to see what the experts here on Moz think before moving forward. Thanks in advance.

I am writing an online application that among other things allows the users to search through our database for results.  Pretty simply stuff.  My question is this.  When the site is starting out, there will probably be a lot of searches that will bring back empty pages since we will still be building it up.  Each page will dynamically generate the title tags, description tags, H1, H2, H3 tags - so that part will be unique - but otherwise they will be almost identical empty results pages until then. Would Google Count all these empty result pages as duplicate content?  Anybody have any experience with this? Thanks in advance.

This may be an easy questions, but I can't seem to find the answer  anywhere and I never really looked into it before.  In google webmaster tools, in the dashboard there is the section that says "How Your Data Is Linked".  What does that refer to?  Is that just using internal link anchor text, external link anchor text or a combination of both? I am pretty sure that it is a combination of both, but I just want to make sure before making some internal link changes so that the most common anchor text is no longer "Prices" and "Sign up". Thanks.

Hi, I have recently started a project on one of my sites, working with a branch of the U.S. government, where I will be hosting and publishing some of their PDF documents for free for people to use.  The great SEO side of this is that they link to my site.  The thing is, they are linking directly to the PDF files themselves, not the page with the link to the PDF files.  So my question is, does that give me any SEO benefit? While the PDF is hosted on my site, there are no links in it that would allow a spider to start from the PDF and crawl the rest of my site.   So do I get any benefit from these great links?  If not, does anybody have any suggestions on how I could get credit for them.  Keep in mind that editing the PDF's are not allowed by the government. Thanks.

Client decided to keep restaurant and catering businesses completely separate, so he's gotten a suite number and a separate landline. He already set up and claimed the restaurant G+Local/Places page using his personal gmail address. I need to set up the catering G+Local page, but of course he's not crazy about giving me the login to his personal gmail account. But maybe, since they're completely separate businesses, I really should go set up hiscateringbusiness@gmail.com and start fresh with the catering page? I also have an email address, contact@hiscateringbusiness.com, but it seems like Google never likes these. How do you recommend that I set up the catering G+Local pages? (This would also presumably be for Analytics and Webmaster Tools for the domain too.) Should I just start fresh? Can I even do it with a non-gmail account? Or will Google slap him for two unmerged accounts, even though they're for separate businesses? (I've looked all over the place and it looks like that it's still true that he can't just change the email associated with the restaurant G+ page... no?) Thank you!

My client has a site already listed on Google+Local under "5208 N 1st St". He has some other NAPs, e.g., YellowPages, under "5208 N First Street". The USPS finds neither of these, nor any variation that I can possibly think of! Which is better? Do I just take the one that Google has accepted and make all the others like it as best I can? And doesn't it matter that the USPS doesn't even recognize the thing? Or no? Local SEO wizards, thanks in advance for your guidance!

A client has two businesses out of the same address, same phone: an eat-in restaurant and a catering service. He has a separate website for each. He’s dying to optimize the catering, although long-term wants to optimize both. For the moment, Google only knows this restaurant and his only social media presence is set up as the restaurant as well -- thus the links to his social media even off of the catering site link to his restaurant accounts. I think he has two options: 1. Really do separate them. Get a different address (suite # or use his home address?) and phone. Set up new, separate social media. Register both, separately, at all the directories, etc. 2. Merge them both into the restaurant site and have the restaurant offer both eat-in and catering. Have some pages on the site optimized for lunch and others for catering, with the home page saying both. Register the one domain with all the directories, social media under the restaurant, but with a description that includes both lunch and catering as services offered. Variation on #2: Continue to have Google show the address, since it’s a restaurant, but add the “service location” area to show as well, for the catering part. My questions are: 1. If he kept the two websites separate, would hiding the address and just using a “service location” area for the catering one keep Google happy? I mean, could he keep the same address -- although I suppose he’d still have to get a new phone -- and set up the catering entry to show only the service area? And if he did that, would Google not merge them then? In directories, though, he’d still be listing both the restaurant and the catering separately but under the same address, so maybe this is a silly scenario anyway. What do you think? 2. Which option would you choose? 3. Are there any other better options? 4. In the #2 scenario, if a directory allows registry under one category, would you choose “restaurant” or “catering” -- or sometimes one and sometimes the other? Thank you for your insight!

Hi guys, A quick question.  I have a client who has an old business website that had some great links (Forbes.com, CocaCola.com, etc).  The problem is that he knew nothing about SEO and let the hosting expire.  He still owns the domain, but the site is no longer listed in Google.  He did no SEO, so I am not worried about being hit by any artificial anchor text penalties, since the links are as natural as it gets. So my questions is, would there be any benefit from 301 redirecting that site to his new business? The new business is in almost exactly the same niche as the old site.  I am thinking of 301'ing to a sub-page which will refer to his past venture with the old business, not to the homepage of the new site. Thanks in advance for your help.

Canadian client with a suite number in a shopping center. Does it matter if the NAP is the way it's displayed on Google Maps? Canada Post (or in the US, USPS)? Or does it only matter that all the citations are as similar as possible to one another? Canada Post says: 400-3033 IMMEL ST
ABBOTSFORD BC  V2S 6S2 But if I look that up on maps.google.com, it defaults to: 3033 Immel St Abbotsford, BC V2S 4L3, CanadaAnd the client does not appear in the list of about 20+ businesses at this address.Which should I use for Places (and I assume any other citation)?

Hi,
   I was wondering if anybody had some advice on what to do for deep link anchor text in the post penguin world? For the homepage, I am going with almost exclusively branded text with only small variations once in a while.  For the deep links I was thinking of doing a mix of branded text with some additional text such as: "My Brand Name" + Red or "My Brand Name" + Blue Does anybody know if this is the best way to go, or is there any other advice?  Thanks in advance.

Hi,
   After about a month of Penguin and 1 update, I am starting to notice an annoying pattern as to who is beating me in the rankings on google.  I was wondering if anybody else has noticed this. 
   The sites who are beating me - almost without exception - fall into these 2 categories. 1) Super sites that have little or nothing to do with the service I am offering.  Now it is not the homepages that are beating me.  In almost all cases they are simply pages hidden in their forums where somebody in passing mentioned something relating to what I do. 2) Nobodies.  Sites that have absolutely no links back to them, and look like they were made by a 5 year old. Has anybody else noticed this?  I am just wondering if what I see only apply to my sites or if this is a pattern across the web.  Does this mean that for small sites to rank, it is now all about on-page SEO? If it all about on-page, well that is great... much easier than link building.  But I want to make sure others see the same thing before dedicating a lot of time to overhaul my sites and create new content.| Thanks!

Hi,
   I am working on merging a number of my niche websites into a larger site (301 redirects, phased in over a few months).  My question/concern is whether google will penalize the main site when it sees that the homepage has almost no links to it, and that about 10-15 sub-pages have a lot of links back to it. Does anybody have experience with this kind of scenario?  Will it create  a problem? Theoretically I could spend a year or so building up links to the new main page - building the brand - before doing the 301's.  The smaller pages still bring in clients, but it is getting hard to maintain that many micro sites. Thanks in advance for any help.

Hi,
   Over the past few days, I have noticed that a few of my pages that were hit by the Google Penguin update come back from the dead and return to the #1 spot for the main keywords.  I still don't see any change for secondary keywords I used to rank for, but hey at least there is something. Has anybody else noticed this? NOTE:  I did not make any changes to my pages.  I had never done any black-hat (just greyish) so I took the advice of many and just waited.

Hi,
   I am trying to complete my SEOmoz profile, but there seems to be a bug.  I am able to fill out everything except the 'favorite topics'.   It lets me go in and fill it out, but when I click the update button to save it it does not save, and still shows up as missing in bar at the top.  I have tried it in Mozilla, IE and Chrome, and it still does not work.  Am I missing something? Thanks.

Hi,
   I just watched the recent Whiteboard Friday, and I have one question.  He talks a lot about "Building Site Authority".  Is that just Link Building, or is it something else? If it is Link Building, does that mean that exchanging (3 way, or non-reciprocal) links with other "relevant" and good sites still works, as long as you use your brand name and/or url in the anchor text? Or did I misunderstand.  Is "Building Site Authority" something entirely different from Link Building? Sorry if it is a basic question, I just want to make sure I understand the difference if there is one.  Thanks in advance!

Good day,
    I am new to SEOmoz, so please allow me to take this opportunity to introduce myself before jumping into the questions.  I have a small network of sites that focus on language education online.  I have been working on them for about 3 years, and they were starting to do well.  I am sure I made some mistakes along the way with regards to SEO (I paid for article distribution, and directory submission).  I also did link exchanges - mainly with related sites, but some of them were kind of grey .  I stayed away from blackhat entirely. 
  So, like many people I got affected by Google Penguin.  Luckily it was not as bad as many of the people I have heard about.  7 out of my 10 sites, stayed on or near the top for the main keywords.  They did however drop for some of the secondary keywords.  3 of the sites however got hit hard.  Based on this, I have ventured to guess that google is telling me I was doing it about 70% right, and 30% wrong.  Well, live and learn. 
   After April 24th I started to scower the web to find out what happened and to see what to do.  In my readings I noticed that a lot of people were affected, but some where not.  The one thing I found that most of the people who were affected had in commune was that they were on SEOmoz.  So I decided to join.  So now I am here to hopefully learn what I did wrong, and what I need to do right.   I have no problem at all in starting from scratch and putting in the hard work. Now, as for my question.  As I mentioned, not all of my sites were hit by Penguin.  More of them survived than got killed.  I was hoping to be able to leverage those sites to give the new larger site a kick-start.  Just to give you some metric, all 10 sites have a quality rank of between 40-60 according opensiteexplorer.  The linking is nothing extreme.  The pages have anywhere from 200-1000 links.  Nothing more than that.  So here are the questions. 1) The SEO I did on all 10 sites were very similar.  So I am afraid of just doing a 301 redirect from the 7 other sites in the future google may punish them as well, and as such my main page new page will suffer.  What would you guys recommend.  Instead of a 301, I could just ad a link to the sub pages on the new site.   It would be less effective, but also less risky.   What would you all suggest? 2) If I take the 301 option, what is the general recommendation on how to phase it in.  I am assuming Google would not like it if all 7 pages got redirected on the same day.  That would essentially make the page have 5000 or so links overnight.  What is the general recommendation for these kinds of things.  one 301 a week?  one 301 a month?  The 301's would not be to the homepage, they would each go to a relevant sub-section of the site. Sorry for the long first post.  My wife tells me I don't know when enough is enough sometimes.  🙂   Thanks in advance for any assistance and I am excited to see what I can learn on SEOmoz.