Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi, There is a huge ranking difference between the GSC and browser  for our primary keyword. As per GSC, our ranking is around 15 and when checking on the multiple different incognito browsers it's around 50. How to handle this? Which is the accurate one? Product expert from Google forums claim that what I see on browsers are the personalized results; but I tried on different browsers with different connections. Thanks

Hi community members, It's been clearly said by Google to interlink the important pages across the website and they give top interlinked pages in "Links report". They do consider the links from the sub-directories like example.com/blog, etc. to sum up the internal linking . But we do employ multiple sub directories and link to various pages which may not be that important to rank, example "terms of use" page at footer section. So, obviously these non-important pages might be over linked as per the search console "internal links report". Will this make Google to consider the highest linked pages as most important and they try to give ranking importance to them? How about links from sub directories? Please clarify and share your opinions.

Hi all, Our company falls into a SaaS industry LIKE seo. We used to rank for our industry keywords just like seo, seo software, etc... We have fallen out of rankings for these obvious top keywords with high search volume, but ranking for these 2 keywords like seo homepage and seo website. I think we have some strong ranking authority at Google by ranking for our industry keywords "homepage" and "website" which represents a very relevant site to the industry. But not sure why we are not ranking for top keywords. Any thoughts on this?

Hi community, As per the "Links" report from GSC, there are  millions of pages pointing to our privacy policy page. We can expect high number of links to this page being  ours an open source product. But these links are overtaking the count of links pointing to our homepage which are very artificial from few  spammy or low quality sites. "Privacy policy" anchor text is also been the top anchor text. Our homepage ranking dropped and I suspect this is the culprit. Google might be considering this is the important page being linked on top with anchor text. Shall I Disavow these sites and will this makes Google stop counting  links, and the anchor text coming from these sites as well? Suggestions please. Thanks

Hi all, We have a discussion forum like subdomain.website.com. Some spammers have created many links with our subdomain URL which are redirecting to high spammy and NSFW sites (Not sure how they did). We are trying to stop the redirects. So far many visitors and bots have recorded visits to these spammy sites with our URL. Will this impact our website anyhow ? I noticed that our website spam score has been increased and not sure if this is coincidental or penalized. Ranking even dropped without manual actions. I wonder how much of this subdomain activity will impact main website? Please advise.

Hi, Let's say we are going to create pages in the URL path www.website.com/directory/sub-pages/. In case this page www.website.com/directory/ doesn't exists or redirected; will the pages created in this URL path like stated above have any issues in-terms of SEO? We will link these pages from somewhere in the website and planning to redirect the /directory/ to homepage. Suggestions please.

Hi all, After Google's confirmed core update in April 2018, we dropped globally and couldn't able to recover later. We found the update is about the content relevance as officially stated by Google later. We wonder how we are not related in-terms of content being ranking for same keywords over years. And we are expecting to find a solution to this. Are there any standard ways to measure the content relevancy?  Please suggest! Thank you

Hi community, We have some top hierarchy pages with spam score 16 as per Moz due to the backlinks with very high spam score. I read that we could ignore as long as we are not employing paid links or never got a manual penalty. Still we wanna give a try by disavowing  certain domains to check if this helps. Anyway we are not going to loose any backlink score by rejecting this low-quality backlinks. Can we proceed? Thanks

Hi all, Found some websites stolen our content and using the same sentences in their website pages.  Does this content hurt our website rankings?  Their DA is low, still we are worried about the damage about this plagiarism. Thanks

Hi, Let's say there are multiple backlinks from different pages of same domain to different pages  of other domain like below: Website A: Page 1 -----------> Website B: Page 1 Website A: Page 2 -----------> Website B: Page 2 Do the pages of Website B pages will get backlinks authority equally or they don't get much backlinks impact as they have multiple backlinks from same domain? There were old school stories that Google ignores second link from same domain.....etc... So, please suggest on this. Thank you. Note: The question is NOT about content relevancy or domain authority score of the backlinks.

Hi, Just wondering about this whether the orphan pages take away any link juice? We been creating lot of them these days only to link from external sites as landing pages on our site. So, not linking from any part of our website; just linking from other websites. Also, will they get any link juice if they are linked from our own blog-post? Thanks

Hi, We are creating some pages just to capture leads from blog-posts. We created few pages at top hierarchy like website.com/new-page/. I'm just wondering if these pages will take away more PageRank. Do we need to create these pages at low hierarchy like website.com/folder/new-page to avoid passing more PageRank? Is this is how PR distributed even now and it's same for indexed or non-indexed pages? Thanks

Hi, We couldn't able to see the last Google cached version of our homepage after March 29th. Just wondering why this is happening with other websites too. When we make some changes to the website, we will wait to our website indexed and cached, so the changes will have some ranking impact. Now we couldn't able to check if the website got indexed with changes. Is there any other way to check the latest cached version or time of last index? Thanks

Hi all, We have launched the exit intent pop-ups on our website where a pop-up will appear when the visitor is about to leave the website. This will trigger when the mouse is moved to the top window section; as an attempt by the visitor to close the window. We see a slight ranking drop post this pop-up launch. As the pop-up is appearing just before someone leaves the website; does this making Google to see as if the user left because of the pop-up and penalizing us? What is your thoughts and suggestions on this? Thanks

Hi, This may sound a little too suspicious; but just want to take your suggestions and experience in this. We are trying to create articles on third party websites to increase backlinks, our brand popularity and awareness about our features. If the same author is mentioned in multiple or tens of articles with backlinks to same website; will Google monitor the author name? Is there anything wrong in creating too many external articles with same author name? Thanks

Hi, Our WP website redirects without slash to with slash are not working. When we tried with http mode, they are working. So, not working on https mode. Correct code given at .htaccess file. What might be causing the issue? Thanks

Hi all, We have enabled a plugin which translated our site to subdirectories. We are going to geo target certain language sites to their countires. Like Portuguese site website.com/it/ will be targetted to rank in Portugal. I wonder what to do with language sites where the same langauge is spoken in multiple countries. For example, if we target english site website.com to US; will it effects the ranking in other english countires like UK, Australia, Canada, etc....? Thanks

Hi, We are going to install a translation plugin on our wordpress hosted website. It's going to generate sub directories like website.com/it/ or website.com/fr/. The plugin will create hreflang tags automatically in the pages and canonicals will be pointing to same pages. Is there anything to check before deploying this plugin? We are going to generate more than 30+ languages pages which will increase our website pages to 30 times in Google index. Will this dilute the page ranking or have any duplicate content issues? Thanks

Hi community, Ours is a WP hosted website. We have given our site title which reflects across all the website page title suffix. Like "Moz SEO" will be default at the title for pages like "Local SEO - Moz SEO". We have given different page title suffix to our sub-folders' pages like blog and help guides. For blog we have given "Moz blog" as title tag suffix which was working fine. But Google suddenly started showing main website's title as suffix in pages of sub folders. Ex blog: "How to rank better  - Moz blog - Moz SEO". Here we can see "Moz SEO" has been added which is not required. How to handle this? Thanks

Hi, We have lost the non-slash to slash URL redirection in our WP site. We are using Yoast SEO. All the settings are normal and we have enabled the related code in .htaccess too. Still we couldn't able to find why we lost. Please help. Thanks

Hi friends, Our website pages without slash are not redirecting to with slash and vice-versa. Both the versions are returning 200 response code. Both the versions are pointed to with slash URLs with rel-canonical tags. Is this right setup? Or we need to redirect  one another to slash or without slash versions? Thanks

Hi community, Due to some WP plugin issue, many homepages indexed in Google with anonymous URLs. We blocked them later. Still they are in SERP. I wonder whether these are causing some trouble to our website, especially as our exact homepages indexed. How to remove these pages from Google cache? Is that the right approach? Thanks

Hi all, We 2 sub domains with hundreds of pages where we need only 50 pages to get indexed which are important. Unfortunately the CMS of these sub domains is very old and not supporting "noindex" tag to be deployed on page level. So we are planning to block the entire sites from robots.txt and allow the 50 pages needed. But we are not sure if this is the right approach as Google been suggesting to depend mostly on "noindex" than robots.txt. Please suggest whether we can proceed with robots.txt file. Thanks

Hi community, Our company name got attested with our industry keyword over the years; which also primary keyword of our homepage and all of our industry competitors. Best example is... Moz turns to Moz SEO for fraction of the audience or users. Again this is an example. Now if Google thinks "Moz" is only the company name, does it ignores the word "seo" completely? Or Google gives negative score for employing "seo" after "Moz" across all pages? Does the "seo" word will be considered or ignored in this case? How Google recognises the company name? Thanks

Hi all, Let's say few pages on the website dropped in the rankings due to poor optimisation of the pages or hit by algo updates. Does Google limits the ranking drop only to these pages or the entire website will have any impact? I mean will this cause ranking drop to the homepage for primary keyword? Will Google pose the penalty to other pages in the website if few pages drop in the rankings. Thanks

Hi all, I wonder that duplicate content is the strong reason beside our ranking drop. We have multiple pages of same "topic" (not exactly same content; not even 30% similar) spread across different pages like website pages (product info), blog-posts and helpguides. This happens with many websites and I wonder is there any specific way we need to differentiate the content? Does Google find the difference across  website pages and blog-pots of same topic? Any good reference about this? Thanks

Hi community, We have couple of pages where we we have given non-https (http) hyperlinks by mistake. They will redirect to http links anyway. Does using these http links on page hurt any rankings? Thansk

Hi community, Generally there will be a primary keyword which everybody concentrates and expect their homepage or website to rank for....like "seo" for seo consulting or seo tools. There might be some companies with this keyword in their brand name like "ABC SEO". So this primary keyword will be all over the website being part of the brand name; especially in page titles and header tags. How Google distinguish and ignores this keyword in brand name to avoid giving more ranking boost to such websites? Will this keyword will be completely ignored being the part of the company name or their domain name? How Google distinguish between a generic keyword and keyword in company name? Thanks

Hi community members, I am looking after SEO at our company and there are lots of changes happening about our website; especially technical changes. It's hard for me to look after every deployment of the website like change of server location, etc. We generally agree that every change related to website must be notified by SEO to understand the ranking fluctuation and how search engines welcome them. I just wonder what technical deployments of a website I could confidently ignore to save time and give a go ahead to technical team without interrupting or waiting for my approval. Thanks

Hi, We have experienced a shift in SERP from internal pages ranking over website homepage for more than a year. Previously website homepages used to rank for the primary keyword like moz.com for "SEO". Now we can see that internal pages like moz.com/learn/seo/what-is-seo been ranking for the primary keyword "SEO". Google is picking up these "what is ABC" pages than the homepage. All our competitor sites are ranking with these internal pages which are about "what is (primary keyword)". We do have the same internal pages "what is....", but this pages is not ranking; only our homepage is ranking. Moreover we dropped more than 15 positions after this shift in SERP. How to diagnose this? Thanks

Hi community, Let's say there is a duplicate page (A) pointing to original page (B) using rel canonical tag. Pagerank will be passed from Page A to B as the content is very similar and Google honours it hopefully. I wonder how Google treats the direct traffic on the duplicate Page A. We know that direct traffic is also an important ranking factor (correct me if I'm wrong). If the direct traffic is high on the duplicate page A, then how Google considers it? Will there be any score given to original page B? Thanks

Hi, Ours is a WP hosted website. We have submitted the XML sitemap with a WP plugin. It's been successfully processed by Google but it's not been indexed in and can't be found in SERP. How to get this indexed? Will there be any low crawling of sitemap as it's not indexed? Thanks

Hi, I have seen number of websites where they keep their website homepage as first link from every page of sub folders and even from sub domain pages some times. For example, giving website homepage as top navigational menu from every page in their blog. Will this helps in boosting the ranking of homepage if we link from sub folder or sub domain pages where they employ related content like blogs or help guides. Thanks

Hi, We have recently received the "deceptive content" warning from Google about some of our website pages. We couldn't able to find the exact reason behind this. However, we placed some script outside the HTML tag in some pages (Not in the same pages with the above warning). We wonder whether this caused an issue to Google to flag our pages. Please help. Thanks

Hi, We have received "Social engineering content" warning from Google and one of our important page and it's internal pages have been flagged as "Deceptive site ahead". We wonder what's the reason behind this as Google didn't point exactly to the specific part of the page which made us look so to the Google. We don't employ any such content on the page and the content is same for many months. As our site is WP hosted, we used a WordPress plugin for this page's layout which injected 2 http (non-https) links in our page code. We suspect if this is the reason behind this? Any ideas? Thanks

Hi all, We received a deceptive site warning from Google recently. Seems like there is a deceptive content on some pages of the website. Some pages are removed from Google index. Meta descriptions have been deployed on the site few days ago. There is also java script on the website which we use for tracking visitors like GA. I wonder what's the reason for this alert? We believe its due to the Java script. Do you think meta descriptions will harm this bad? Any ideas? Thanks

Hi community, We started showing 10 blog-posts from our blog on our website homepage. Will this hurts us anyway by taking away link juice? Thanks

Hi all, Rand Fishkin once tweeted about success story of Quickbooks blog as they deleted their old and outdated content to show only high quality content to their audience. We are planning to implement the same strategy to our blog which consists of 800+ blog-posts. I'm just wondering the best way to proceed on this and planning to follow as below. Please correct me if I'm wrong and if there are any better steps of follow: Get the list of blog-posts. Check the traffic of each blog-post. If the blog-post needs to be existed, update any info on the blog. If the blog no more needed, do I need to delete or noindex or redirect? What's the better way to measure the success? Thanks

Hi, We have intentionally blocked some of the website files which were indexed for years. Now we receive a message "Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt" in GSC. We can ignore as per my knowledge? Are any actions required about this? We thought of blocking them with meta tags but these are PDF files. Thanks

Hi, We know that it's common to see some ranking difference in browser and GSC for a keyword. But I can see there is a huge difference from last 3 months. We position at 15 to 20th position when we search in browser (different IPs without signing in to any Google account; where as the rank in GSC varies between 35 around. I wonder if anything changed in the way Google reports and does anybody face the same issue? Is there anything we can do about this? Thanks

Hi community, We are using wordpress website. We have redirected hundreds of URLs from wordpress redirect manager for last 10 years around. Suddenly from last one week, the redirects are taking too long to navigate to the pages; like around 1 minute. Could you anybody face the same issue? Please help me on this. Thanks

Hi community, I am just trying to figure out which can be priority in on page, off page and technical SEO. Which one you prefer to go first? Which one is easy to handle? Which one is easy to measure? Your opinions and suggestions please. Expecting more realistic answers rather than usual check list. Thanks

Hi Moz community, As the different usability issues like pagespeed or mobile responsiveness are playing a key role in website rankings; I wonder how much the same factors are important for sub directories or sub domain pages? Do each and every page of sub directory or sub domain must be optimised like website pages? Does Google gives same importance? Thanks

Hi all, We know that generally logo with the website homepage link is the first link crawled by Google and other search engines. Can we change the anchor text from "logo" to "keyword"? Have any one tried or seen others doing? How Google considers it? Thanks

Hi Moz community, We wanna give a try by removing all the links from homepage to internal pages and keep just a free trial button. Will this impact our SEO anyway? We have nearly 15 important internal pages at 2nd and 3rd hierarchy level. They may drop in rankings but we want to risk for few days to understand how it works. Your opinion please! Thanks

Hi community, Let's say there is a page with 50 back-links where 40 are non-relevant back-links and only 10 are relevant in-terms of content around the link, etc....Will these non-relevant back-links impact the ranking of the page by diluting the back-link profile? Thanks

Hi all, Ours is WordPress website and we have a blog...website.com/blog/. All the important pages in the website are well linked from top and footer menu. But in our webmasters...internal links section, only homepage is at the top. Blog-posts are others followed by homepage. I wonder why blog pages are dominating our website pages. Please give your suggestions on this. Do you think Google will give more priority for the blog-posts than website pages as they are more linked technically? Thanks

Hi Community, I have seen number of back-links where the content in that link is not matching with page content. Like page A linking to page B, but content is not really relevant beside brand name. Like page with "vertigo tiles" linked to page about "vertigo paints" where "vertigo" is brand name. Will these kind of back-links completely get wasted? I have also found some broken links which I'm planning to redirect to existing pages just to reclaim the back-links even though the content relevancy is not much beside brand name. Are these back-links are beneficial or not? Thanks

Hi Moz community, We can see the 404 and soft 404 errors in Google web masters. Usually these are non-existing pages which are found somewhere on internet by Google. I can see some of these reported URLs don't have any back-links (checked on ahrefs tool). Do we need to redirect each and every link reported here or ignore or marked to be fixed? Thanks

Hi community, I would like to know what is the criteria to rank a landing page in specific country Google search. For example, if we want to rank our landing page for "GDPR Australia", what are the factors which will impact beside writing the cotent related to the above mentioned keyword? Thanks