Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Mozzers, Recently we have had a series of agencies in to pitch for work, one group mentioned that due to our association with a possibly penalised product review website, any links and activity associated with the brand would hinder our SEO. We currently have a  good rating, but we are now no longer pushing our customers to the site as we move to a new platform. The current link back from this website is also no-followed. Any thoughts on how this could impact us? And how the agencies determined the site was penalised and causing us problems. Cheers Tim

Hey All, I am not sure this is possible but here goes... I've a phone number pulled in from "Google My Business" for the company I work for Caravan Guard Insurance. We have different numbers for specific functions e.g. claims, renewals, quotes. Currently If I type in "caravan guard claims number" into Google Search it shows our general tel number which is clearly pulled in from GMB and the Knowledge Panel. Can this be influenced or have multiple options? For example If I were to search "caravan guard number" it would continue to show our default customer number like present, but if I were to search for "caravan guard claims number" it shows our claims number. Not sure it is possible, but thought I would ask. Cheers all Tim Z6iaU9a

HI all, Recently, well a couple of months back, I finally got around to switching our sites over to HTTPS://. In terms of rankings etc all looks fine and we have not move about much, only the usual fluctuations of a place or two on a daily basis in a competitive niche. All links have been updated, redirects in place, the usual https domain migration stuff. I am however, troubled by one thing! I cannot for love nor money get Google to fetch my site in GSC. No matter what I have tried it continues to display "Temporarily unreachable". I have checked the robots.txt and it is on a new https:// profile in GSC. Has anyone got a clue as I am stumped! Have I simply become blinded by looking too much??? Site in Q. caravanguard co uk. Cheers and looking forward to your comments.... Tim

Yesterday my funnel visualisation tab in the updated GA interface was showing data flow. However today there is nothing showing in the graphical element despite showing some goal completion figures as a headline. Have they stopped doing up to the minute visualisation in favour of delayed results? Anyone else experiencing similar? Thanks in advance Tim

Hey all, I have GTM set up on a site and I am trying to enable the Ecommerce tracking functionality. My problem is this, I have access to the basket variables all they way through the checkout funnel to the payment page, but they are then lost on the payment completed page. Does anyone know how I can pass the value of the basket across to the payment completed page so I can mark the transaction completed with an actual value present. I cannot post hidden input fields or change the url get variables as the third party system that us used fails. I have thought maybe javascript calls, but not managed to get to work as yet. Can the Google session pass and hold them in the cookies that are set? Any help greatly appreciated. Cheers Tim

OK Moz peeps... Right then, I have just been reading an article over on SEO RoundTable from Barry Schwartz. NEW Local review guidelines for businesses - take a look. It in effect alludes to Google stamping all over review schema and snippets, third party review solutions/providers and really trying to limit how they are used. I have interpreted the new guidelines to say that you can no longer mark up and use external stats on your own site in the form of aggregate ratings from the likes of TrustPilot, Feefo, Revoo (some uk review sites) and more.... These were the two key lines for more Only include reviews that have been directly produced by your site, not reviews from third-party sites or syndicated reviews. Aggregators or content providers must have no commercial agreements paid or otherwise with businesses to provide reviews. What does everyone else think? and how soon before people get penalised (if ever) for marking up external stats to make your own site and services look more favourable... Could definately be a slap in the face for Serp CTR and onpage conversion optimisation. Also how do people expect this to affect PPC review rating going forward. Will Partner sites become a thing of the past? Looking forward to a good discussion here 🙂 PS - I am not staff at Moz just have a t-shirt which is my avatar. I am not sure why below my avatar it suggests I am Staff due to the tag added to it. Is anyone else getting that on their profile too?

Hey Moz, Bit of a random bug bear of mine, each month I log in to download the latest invoice receipt to hand over to accounts for processing etc. After I click the billing and subscriptions link from the profile drop down menu, I am presented with the subscriptions page. The payment history panel placed located on the right all ways shows my first 3 invoices. As this is a snippet in time, would it not be more beneficial from a UX perspective to show the most recent 3 invoices. That way I can get the info I require that tiny bit quicker rather than be presented with invoices that are 3 years old. I know it is a tiny thing but wondered i it could be accommodated. 🙂 Many thanks Tim ypjDGDk

I am looking into a .htacess file for a site I look after and have noticed that the urls are all 301 redirecting from a none slash directory to a trailing slashed directory/folders. e.g. www.domain.com/folder gets 301 redirected to www.domain.com/folder/ Will this do much harm and reduce the effect on the page and any links pointing to the site be lessened? Secondly I am not sure what part of my htaccess is causing the redirect. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.co.uk [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.domain.co.uk/$1 [L,R,NE] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php
RewriteRule ^(.)index.php$ /$1 [R=301,L] or could a wordpress ifmodule be causing the problem? Any info would be apreciated.

I wasn't sure which category to place this in as Support doesnt feature Q&A or the Moz site in general so I dropped it under other research tools to which the Q&A kind of is 🙂 Now I am not sure if it is just me and that you have rectified the issue, but when ever I click on the "posted by" links to the user. I am getting a page not found error. The links in question can be seen in my two grabs and effect all posted by links on the Q&A section of Moz. A simply trailing slash after .com "/" will do the trick 🙂 https://moz.comusers/view/636129 - BROKEN
https://moz.com/users/view/636129 - FIXED Aj5S2Pj,YfSQEmZ#0 Aj5S2Pj,YfSQEmZ#1

Howdy all, In recent weeks I have seen a steady increase in the number of smartphone related url errors on Googles Search Console (formerly webmaster tools). THe crawler appears to be searching for a /m/ or /mobile/ directory within the URLs. Why is it doing this? Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Unfortunately this is for an unresponsive site, would setting the viewport help stop the issue for know until my new responsive site is launched shortly. Cheers fello Mozzers 🙂 Tim NDh1RNs

Hello fellow Mozzers, We have two websites for two similar brands at my place of employment, the two brands currently serve slighly different products but could be held quite happily under one branded site. As part of a potential group merger into one sole brand, we will have to create one joined up website which will then feature all our products. The newly merged site will also have more scope to allow us to expand our product range where as currently one brand is kind of specific to a particular market due to its name. So as part of the Merge, I have to consider the potential implications for our search traffic, as this is an integral part of our business. Brand A - older, more authorative, great content, good organic positions - top 10 for pretty much all terms we favour. Brand B - younger, but has more marketing scope due to name, still good site and lots of content. Unfortunately Brand B has more in terms of potential lifespan, but is currently the less authorative of the two sites we run. it has lower DA and PR according to my Moz Analytics, a lower number of quality links and less content. In order to give the Brand B website the boost that is needed and in effect replace Brand A in the serps which has great organic positions, I need to make sure all bases are ticked for an action plan. So far this is what I have. Transfer all exisiting Brand A web pages to Brand B website. Rel canonical all Brand A pages to now point to Brand B websites new pages. 301 redirect all pages on Brand A to Brand B during the transfer. Once 301 redirects are in place then request external sites to actually repoint to Brand B website for any links. Update xml Sitemaps Update any content that mentions Brand B to now be Brand A. resubmit sitemaps to Webmaster tools Update all social profiles Update all local search profiles and listings Update all review sites with new brand name / merge any with both brands On a supplementary note for customer information, looking to also keep the older Brand A Home page up for a short time to help people understand the transition rather than a complete redirect which to our demographic could confuse and alienate people. Will also look to send a mass email to roughly 400K people informing them of the move abd how it affects them. I have no doubt there will be some glaringly obvious additions, any further advice would be much appreciated. Hope you are all well. Tim

Hello All, I have a page (http://www.caravanguard.co.uk/touring-caravan-insurance/) we have seen it drop a bit over recent months and now we have been appearing low on page two (Google UK) for the term "Caravan Insurance". Now I do not expect to rank above some of the big players in our market and the aggregators, but we do feel we have good content and have tried to act as white as we can in terms of SEO, link building and alike, but we are still slipping. My main issue is this - one minute we have the link appearing in the serps and then the next it drops from the serps altogether. At this point i often resubmit for indexing in webmaster tools and a few minutes later its back.... is this just likley something I am seeing local to me due search becoming more personal (I have toggle hide private results too) or is there a cause to its sudden disappearance and reappearance? Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Howdy fellow Mozzer's,
I have been doing some background seo checking on a competitor in my small "insurance niche" to try and see why they have recently shot up the listings and are now consistently out ranking us.
We have quality content on our site and have always taken an approach of trying to be whiter than white when it comes to developing out SEO plans. The site in question has recently moved ahead of us (along with some aggregators e.g. confused.com)  possibly due to shifting patterns from possible algorithm changes favouring brand or could it be a case that Google has dropped a ball when it comes to checking back links as the competitors site is 99% linked to link farms, link submission sites, directories and lots of other spammy/poor quality sites. We do not feel they are doing anything from a content stand to justify their sudden propulsion up the ranks. I am reluctant to pursue dodgy tactics to help get out site back in position as I feel it could then contribute and hurt us down the line. Does anyone know how I can combat against their poor QUANTITY over QUALITY banklink profile that is surely helping them at the minute? At a bit of a loss so any help would be greatly appreciated. aRTu4cT

I have noticed that Google has started to simply link to /section/ as opposed to /section/index.php and I haven't changed any canonical tags etc. I have looked at my pages moz authority for the two /section/ = 28/100
/section/index.php = 42/100 How would I go about transferring the authority to /section/ from /section/index.php to hopefully help me in my organic serp positions etc. Any insight would be great 🐵

Hello fello Mozzers, I have just read a post about 301 redirects on the Blog. A great read and has provided me with a bit more insight and highlights what could be a potential issue for a managed site I look after. On this website I manage, I have inherited a .htaccess file with literally hundreds of non file based existant 301 links. e.g. redirect 301 /dealerbrandname http://www.domain.com/ So we have lots of dealers and they place a link on there site to http://www.domain.com/dealerbrandname We then redirect it to the homepage or a relevant topic page along with some tracking variables. Is this likely causing significant issues, based on the post I read I imagine it will be, but anymore thoughts on this would be hugely helpful. CheersTim

I noticed this morning a drop in the SERPs for a couple of my main keywords. And even though this is a little annoying the more pressing matter is that Google is not displaying the meta title I have specified for the majority of my sites pages, despite one being specified and knowing my site has them in place. Could this sudden change to not using my specified title be the cause of the drop, and why would they be being displayed by Google in the first place, when they are there to be used. The title currently being displayed inthe SERPs is not anything that has been specified in the past or from the previous latest crawl etc. Any insight would be appreciated. Tim

We have been made aware of a series of irrelevant links on some rather dodgy sites. http://www.designerdogstop.com/level-static/http://www.bestfirepits.net/some-of-the-best-vacations-for-families/2010/05/05/ http://whatcigarsdoismoke.com/cigar-lighters/cigarette-cigar-2/ http://dollfuss.org/build-bear-hawaii/ Absolute rubbish im sure you will agree. These links must surely be causing our link profile some damage. They are currently wordpress sites with no means of contacting the authors. What ways and means are there of removing these negative pages and links? Cheers all, any help appreciated.

Hello All, Just a quick question. Since the penguin update our site www.caravanguard.co.uk has seen some pretty fluctuating movement in Google, many of our key terms dropped over night, but over the last few weeks they have slowly started to move back up the rankings. The bizarre thing is despite the recover in rankings our unique traffic has taken a fairly large whack in numbers. Seasonality? Weather? ( it's been nice in the UK for a change) I can only assume the longer tail terms are taking more time to recover. I have tried to look into our back link profile and have noticed a little too much in terms concise keyword targeting, How do you go about changing these terms and removing the really bad links (struggling to identify the worst cases) on totally irrelevant sites or poor directories. Put in place before I started here 🐵 Any help truly appreciated. Regards Tim