Welcome to the Q&A Forum

We recently found our site had 65,000 tags (yes 65K). In an effort to consolidate these we've started deleting them. MOZ is now reporting a heap of 404 errors for tag pages. These tag pages should not have links to them so not sure how come they're being crawled. Any suggestions from experience in this area would be useful.

Hi Moz,

We are currently doing SEO for a hand therapy company called the Hand Therapy Group. They rank well, however, one competitor, Sydney Hand Therapy, is ranking higher than them for the term "hand therapy Sydney" (which is one of our highly focused keywords) with three different URLs (their home page, contact page and about page) despite the latter two pages have no backlinks.

I understand why Google might see their homepage as being more relevant because their name is Sydney Hand Therapy (even though the Hand Therapy Group have more backlinks) but why do the other two URLs rank so well?

Any help/info/advice would be brilliant!

Cheers!

What are people calling proposals, pitches & presentations these days?

When someone requests a proposal from us (often for a website & digital strategy) we send 2 documents: A proposal, which is the nuts and bolts - and an accompanying presentation - which goes over our process in a more general manner: our approach to web design, our approach to SEO, digital marketing etc... basically our slick schtick...

What are the terms people use for this type of document or document combo - the proposal and the presentation?

Hello Mozzers

So generally its said that when a site receives a penalty from Google - it's obvious - you can't miss it...

But does google apply minor penalties (say dropping 5-10 places for one not so great link)

One particular campaign we've been working pretty hard - really great stuff - all white hat techniques - but there were a couple of links I wasn't 100% sure on - but got them any way as I guessed that the effect of them, if not positive, would be neutral at worse... (The sites wen't obvious spam sites but just seemed 'not great')

Recently after, we dropped around 8 place for our main keyword ranking. It's not a very competitive space. Is this likely just standard inexplicable fluctuation, or is there such thing as minor penalties or restrictions?

Cheeers

Hi,

That would primarily depend on the goals of the sites / sub-domains.

Hey Mozzers

Hoping to get some opinions on SEO at a small business level.

We're engaged in SEO for a number of clients which are small businesses (small budgets). We stick to strictly white hat techniques - producing decent content (and promoting it) and link building (as much as is possible without dodgy techniques/paying huge sums).

For some clients we seem to have hit a ceiling about with rankings anywhere between roughly position #5 - #15 in Google.

In the majority of cases - the higher ranking clients don't appear to be engaged in any kind of content marketing - often have much worse designed websites - and not particularly spectacular link profiles (In other words they're not hugely competitive - apart from sometimes on the AdWords front - but that's another story)

The only difference seems to be links on agency link farms - you know the kind? Agency buys expired domains with an existing PR - then just builds simple site with multiple blog posts that link back to their clients sites. (Also links that are simply paid for)

Obviously these sites serve no purpose other than links - but I guess it's harder for Google to recognize that than with obvious SEO directories etc?...

It seems to me that at this level of SEO for small businesses (limited budgets, limited time) the standard approach for SEO is the "expired domains agency link sites" described above - and simply paying bloggers for links.

Are the above techniques considered black hat? Or are they more grey-hat? - Are they risky? - Or is this kind of thing all in the game for SEO at the small business level (by that I mean businesses that don't have the budget to employ a full time SEO and have to rely on engaging agencies for low level - low resource  SEO campaigns)

Look forward to your always wise council...

The campaign is yes but we're not sure about the data here. Can it be relied on?

HI MOZ!

A client has asked us to set up their campaigns to help serve ads at the most relevant times of the day based on analytical data. Is there a tool that shows show queries based on time of day?

Thanks!

Hey Mozers,

This is an old and often criticized method of SERP however we have a client who has requested we create suburb specific pages for their site.

PLASTIC PLANTS "SUBURB" NEED PLASTIC PLANTS IN "SUBURB"

They have shown us a competitor who is ranking for hundreds maybe thousands of suburbs in Australia using this method.

Any thoughts or experience in this area would be appreciated.

So that sort of thing is actually going on?

Hey!

We have a site that is fairly well ranking in a niche of the medical profession.

It has a good link profile with great .gov links etc.

OSE doesn't show most of the links, however all the ones it does show are all good.

We noticed an across the board drop in rankings recently, and checked on AHREFS.

What we found, was hundreds of backlinks to a variety of pages on the site from a wide range of spam/porn/Russian/irrelevant sites.

Even stranger is that some of the links have anchor text like "continue shopping" but they link to a page on our site about a type of limb fracture.

Has anyone come across this before? How is this possible?

Thanks

Anyone had experience with this?

We've found (and I'd love someone else to verify this) that there is some invisible meta data in JPEGs when they are first created. The name of the JPEG before it's placed in a site seems to have a significant effect on rankings in some cases. Have a play with some meta data editors and see if that makes a difference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_metadata_editors

Thanks Oleg, are you saying that a piece with an article that goes into 3 breaks article/1 and article/2 and article/3 only counts as one visit if someone clicks through to all 3 pages?

Hey guys,

A client has asked us to install a page break function on their Wordpress site in the hope of increasing page count.

It's a very common practice but have never used it as part of a strategy. Any thoughts, pros or cons?

Hi,

We have been optimising and re-sharing old blogs posts from our feed. If we were to change the date of publishing on the posts in order to bring them to the top of our feed, would this have any negative impacts on the posts' metadata?

Thanks!

Hey,

There are few websites such as http://bestthenews.com/ which regularly copy and paste articles from one of our sites onto theirs - along with all the links back to our site.

The sites don't have a high spam score - but I cant imagine these sites serve any purpose (ie genuine readership) other than trying to boost their traffic.

At the moment we haven't done anything about these, as they are backlinks after all - but could these sites have a negative impact and should we be asking them to remove?

We have even had our content copied and pasted by AGDA (Australian Graphic Design Association) - which is OK as the site has great authority so the links are good, however it's still strange that a large reputable organization would just copy and paste articles without notifying us.

Curious to here other experience / opinions on the matter.

Cheers!

Hey guys,

Just wanted to put the question out there about guest blogging opportunities that are paid for. It's not something we ever go for but a client has the resources to get a few quality paid backlinks. What are people's general thoughts on guest blogging - for a nominal fee - to do so? Pros and cons of the whole process?

Cheers!

yep that's right you can get data on links to your facebook page

Looking forward to seeing those changes and improvements Rand

How long have you been using it Scott?

Howdy folks,

Into our 3rd year of using MOZ and OSE and well not sure about you guys but I think OSE is reporting less and less accurately. Has anyone seen a drop in it's accuracy or ability to delivery what it claims to?

I know many of you also use AHREFS and others but why not get this tool right MOZ?

Hey,

I have a campaign, where in the past week all the traffic has dropped from the moz report (it registered 3 organic and 61 referral visits and nothing else)

All other data remains. I checked google analytics and it's the same - traffic has suddenly dropped from 300 per day to 10 per day. It happened on April 1st (April fools?).

I thought it could be a www. or non www issue, but this shouldn't affect analytics data should it as you only have on property there?

Site is still receiving usual amount of traffic as I can check with Jetpack (it's a wordpress site)

Any suggestions really appreciated.

Cheers

Hey Mozzers

Just want to make sure I have this right - If a website offers a service, say "digital marketing" - and has this link in a dropdown menu in the header, would this make any link in the body of a page (using different anchor text) pointless in SEO terms?.. e.g. a link with "online marketing" or "digital strategy"

Cheers!

Hey Mozzers

If I'm updating old content on a site (for example adding some copy and adding some new links in the page) - Is it important to get Google to recrawl with the feature in webmaster tools? If you didn't do this, could you be waiting a long time for google to recrawl the URL?

Cheers!

Hey,

If a site has category or tag pages showing in search results for a particular keyword - sometimes higher than the page you would like to rank - could using canonical redirects on categories and tags be a solution?

Thanks

Could using canonical links help in this situation? I guess if I have no external links to the category pages then canonical links wouldn't be appropriate here?

Hey Mozzers!

Trying this one again as my timing was probably pretty bad with Easter.

Working with a company who has about 20K followers on Facebook and about 500 backlinks to their current facebook page. They want to change the name of the page to better reflect the business. I need to advise on this but I'm not sure of and how it will effect them.

Any one had any experience in this area?

To be clear that's a URL change not just the name.

Hey Moz!

Working with a company who has about 20K followers on Facebook and about 500 backlinks to their current facebook page. They want to change the name of the page to better reflect the business. I need to advise on this but I'm not sure of and how it will effect them.

Any one had any experience in this area?

Hello

A few times I have come across tags and categories ranking for some relevant search terms.

This seems strange as all category and tag pages would have 0 external links back to them - whereas pretty much every other page on the site would have external links.

In most cases thy seem to rank along with the page, for example: for the search term "voiceover recording xxxxx"  The voice over recording page will rank, followed by a similar tag page...

If I make the tag links 'nofollow' would that help stop this?

Cheers

I'll send across - do I need to put something specific in the subject?

That's really helpful Paddy - Thanks!

Hey,

I'm using OSE to determine top pages for some domains.

This works great for some sites, but I'm finding with a few sites only the home page comes up in the 'top pages' list - is this because the home page is the only one with a PA above one?

Cheers

Hey,

Based on the most up to date thinking - what's the best way to approach a link spring clean?

We've got a site with a large amount of links (a few of which look a bit spammy - SEO directories etc)

Also, the brand changed it's name and URL a while back so there are directory/web citations using the old URL and sometimes the old name. The old URL is 301'd but I'm thinking (especially in terms of local SEO) these citations with differnt business names/numbers/web addresses could be particularly harmful?

Cheers!

Our host has just offered this response which does not get me any closer:

Hi Radi,

It looks like your site has its own robots.txt file, which is not blocking any user agents. The only thing it's doing is blocking bots from indexing your admin area:

<code>User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/</code> 

This is a standard robots.txt file, and you shouldn't be having any issues with Google indexing your site from a hosting standpoint. To test this, I curled the site as Googlebot and received a 200OK response:

<code>curl -A "Googlebot/2.1" -IL [hhhhappy.com](http://hhhhappy.com)
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2016 22:17:26 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection: keep-alive
Set-Cookie: __cfduid=d3177a1baa04623fb2573870f1d4b4bac1457216246; expires=Sun, 05-Mar-17 22:17:26 GMT; path=/; domain=.[hhhhappy.com](http://hhhhappy.com); HttpOnly
X-Cacheable: bot
Cache-Control: max-age=10800, must-revalidate
X-Cache: HIT: 17
X-Cache-Group: bot
X-Pingback: [http://hhhhappy.com/xmlrpc.php](http://hhhhappy.com/xmlrpc.php)
Link: <[http://hhhhappy.com/](http://hhhhappy.com/)>; rel=shortlink
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
X-Type: default
X-Pass-Why:
Set-Cookie: X-Mapping-fjhppofk=2C42B261F74DA203D392B5EC5BF07833; path=/
Server: cloudflare-nginx
CF-RAY: 27f0f02445920f09-IAD</code> 

I didn't see any plugins on your site that looked like they would overwrite robots.txt, but I urge you to take another look at them, and then dive into your site's settings for the meta value that Googlebot would pick up. Everything on our end seems to be giving the green light.

Please let us know if you have any other questions or issues in the meantime.

Cheers,

Hi guys, a site we manage, http://hhhhappy.com received an alert through web master tools yesterday that it can't be crawled. No changes were made to the site.

Don't know a huge amount about the robots.txt configuration expect that using Yoast by default it sets it not to crawl wp admin folder and nothing else. I checked this against all other sites and the settings are the same. And yet 12 hours later after the issue Happy is still not being crawled and meta data is not showing in search results. Any ideas what may have triggered this?

Hey Moz

Does anchor text with punctuation effect anything, does google even read it?

I know matching exact anchor text to high volume keywords doesn't matter as much any more - but it still definitely makes a different as our reports show.

Thanks

Hi - Thanks for the reply

I am using OSE and using subdomain.mydomain.com (not just mydomain.com) and the PA and DA are slightly less but only slightly?

Hi Ryan,

Hope you are well. Thanks for your swift response to this question last month. I have checked the things you mentioned and thought maybe time will help, however a month and a half later, I still have the same issue. Could I msg you the details?

Thanks!

Hello Mozzers

It was my understanding that google sees a new subdomain as a new domain - however I have created a subdomain for one of my sites, and this has retained exactly the same DA (35) and a high PA (but slightly lower than original domain) of 35 - Is this normal, and if so is it only temporary?

Thanks

Howdy Moz!

So our agency has been around for long enough to have a few sites we've built that have our credit in their footer resulting in a site wide link. Mostly just our name. We've heard that Google does not particularly like site wide links, should we go through and remove some of these old links?

Thanks for pointing that out Matt will do.

Okay thanks Alan we'll dig a little deeper.

Hello MOZ friends!

We recently changed servers and subsequently had a change in IP. It's a better and faster server but have seen a significant drop in SERPS. Could this be a result of moving the site?

Thanks!

Hello

I read that now it's possible to change tracking of keywords from national to local? Is this correct as I can't seem to work out how to do it.

Thanks

Sam

For a while I was seeing Google respond to certain search queries with in depth article options. They experimented with a small section that was similar to page by / author results. It doesn't seem to turn up as much but I did find this:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/3280182?hl=en

Is this still happening?

Hello

I'm just wondering how much of a difference it makes having links to a site from 2 separate domains that are on the same IP, compared to if the domains were on separate IPs?

Thank you!

Sam

Hello

We've recently started a campaign for a local business, and now the domain authority and the number of links to the site are equal if not more to all local major competitors (bar one) and organic rankings for relevant terms are increasing well...

However we still do not appear in the google local listings, despite having a verified location business account - fully set up and active and linked to the website.

Does anyone have any advice for increasing local rankings?

Thanks in advance kind mozzers

Thanks Matt. So is there a way of 'cleaning' my moz data of ghost/spam referral?