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Hi David

I am getting the same issue when I use the Moz On-Page Grader, it is telling me I am using too many title tags, but surely this shouldn't flag an issue as these title tags are external from the head, or does this genuinely impact the ranking of the page?

Here is an example of an SVG our designer has put into a page (one of many) that is being flagged:

<title>Find Your Dealership Icon</title>

In addition do search engines read the title tag or is it ignored?

Thanks in advance to anyone that can help.

Thanks for the clarification EGOL, very useful!

For other users, here's the link to hidden text EGOL is talking about.

Hi Janice,

I have also been wondering the same thing. Although the above replies may have been relevant in 2012, now things seem to have changed. Being from a design background accordions and tabs have always been useful for both visuals and UX, but after reading Barry Schwartz’s article my outlook has changed and a work-around is required.

To conclude the above article, Google are stating hidden content is deemed as unimportant to the user so is 'discounted' and this is something that has been done for a while. If you want your content to have a positive impact on your page ranking it's better left visible unless it's something like FAQ and/or you're not interested in optimising the content on that page. Other members of Moz may have more information on this than me.

Thanks

Hi Dirk,

perfect, thanks a lot for clarifying.

All the best.

Sam

That was a helpful post - thanks for helping out.

Sam

Thanks a lot for your response here, Dirk.

Just to clarify - when you state to use the **correct **spelling on the page, am i correct in assuming you are meaning the spelling with the accent?

and with the foreign characters in HTML, by this are you meaning to use the proper HTML elements in every case rather than copy and pasting symbols in?

Apologies for asking these simple questions, but just wanted to make sure.

Kind Regards

Sam

Hi there,

thanks a lot for your response!

The franchise is a brand name, one that we look after but it is not anywhere in our own brand name. So if you think of a PC shop that sells Apple products, the brand name is Apple but the shop itself has nothing to do with apple and just sells their products - this is the case for us. Would this change your opinion on how to deal with it?

Thanks

Sam

Hi Guys,

My company has a franchise of a foreign company that uses an accent/foreign letter in its brand name. We have to refer to this franchise with this symbol on our website to meet their standards.

I've done some research on this but its not conclusive, so i was wondering whether anyone here can confirm this for me;

Will using the letter with this symbol impair our rankings for this franchise name? Obviously as a UK business people search for this franchise with a regular letter and not the accented one. I would have thought that Google is clever enough to recognise the meaning of the accented letter by now and therefore it wouldn't affect rankings (much). Furthermore, do you think that it would make any difference to use the HTML element to represent the accent rather than copy and pasting the symbol onto our website? I would've thought this would help Google pick it up, but it might not make a difference anyway!

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

Sam

Thanks again for your response Gary.

With regards to how many reffering domains and backlinks, it depends on how much i trust various bits of software (eg. Majestic SEO) when they tell me if the link is live or not.

In total there's about 3,200 referring domains historically with over 350,000 backlinks (lots of spam). Looking at whats live today, thats about 600 domains and 30,000 backlinks or so.

So far I've audited all links (from whats live) into keeping, changing to no follow or removing. Ive reached out to all no follows successfully and I've justified in depth the list of domains I'm keeping. I'm now in the process of reaching out to the poor quality links (first wave) and have covered about 200 referring domains.

The main question here is just exactly what to do with the rest of the links that majestic and GWT are telling me are no longer live (after checking some examples, there are some live that say they aren't live on majestic). Initially I was just going through them and throwing poor quality ones (even if they no longer link) straight into the disavow file to be safe. But since, I've worked with my developer to create a script to check which of the 2,500 none live domains are still live (and therefore cutting down my time considerably).

So overall, I am confident with my approach on links that are live (as this is the standard approach) and I am being as thorough as is possible. But when I wrote this question initially I was unsure whether I had to deal with the 'none live' domains (mainly because I didn't know whether to fully trust Majestic when its saying that they're not live) and so I wanted to check whether it was something I needed to do because it would be extremely time consuming.

Hopefully you understand where I'm coming from with this?

Sam

Thanks for your response Richard.

This is however an extremely generic response to quite a specific question. I didn't ask what a reconsideration request does!

Hi Guys,

My company has a franchise of a foreign company that uses an accent/foreign letter in its brand name. We have to refer to this franchise with this symbol on our website to meet their standards.

I've done some research on this but its not conclusive, so i was wondering whether anyone here can confirm this for me;

Will using the letter with this symbol impair our rankings for this franchise name? Obviously as a UK business people search for this franchise with a regular letter and not the accented one. I would have thought that Google is clever enough to recognise the meaning of the accented letter by now and therefore it wouldn't affect rankings (much). Furthermore, do you think that it would make any difference to use the HTML element to represent the accent rather than copy and pasting the symbol onto our website? I would've thought this would help Google pick it up, but it might not make a difference anyway!

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

Sam

Hi Ruben,

Thanks for your response.

It would so far appear that our target audience are not particularly heavy Google + users. That being said, with it being the automotive industry that my company works in, this should mean that our customer base are very versatile (as almost everyone owns a car) and should therefore include at least some types of people that are Google + users.

So you're suggesting to reach out to other business owners in attempts to get our content out there? this isn't something that we've tried as such so far, although definitely something I will now look into. I think the trouble will be finding these businesses which have a Google + following that is worth pushing.

Sam

Hi Guys,

I've been looking into my company's analytics's data recently to establish where most of our traffic is coming from. More so, I want to get an indication of the percentage of organic traffic that is coming from branded and none branded terms.

Not provided takes up 80% of my organic traffic and the vast majority of keywords that are provided all mention the brand name. Does analytics's provide you with all of your branded traffic but just block others that it doesn't want you to see? Or is it just coincidence that the majority of the terms I can see are all branded?

I am just trying to establish how strong our brand is and how much traffic the brand name brings against none brand terms. All help is appreciated!

Thank you!

Hi Amelia,

Thanks for this response.

I definitely agree that it seems to be just us SEO's out there on Google +, which would be great if my business was a digital agency - I just wish more automotive focused clients would get on there!

From this, I think our business needs to look a bit more outside of the box and look for companies that are somewhat relevant to our business although not directly competing in an attempt to get our content out there.

Great idea, I should really start working on my own Google + following so i can use it as a tool to promote my companies ideas too.

Sam