Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
Log in to post

Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

Looking to level up your SEO techniques? Chat through more advanced approaches.

  • Doublestruck


    Hi there, I have been modifying a clients site for months now trying to get higher up in Google for the term "wedding dresses essex" on the website https://www.preciousmomentsbridalwear.co.uk/ It's always ranked around 7th / 8th place and we want to try and get it into 4/5th position ideally. I have optimised pages and then due to the site speed not being that great we moved it to MaxCDN this week which has made the site much faster, but now we have dropped to number 10 in Google and in danger of dropping out of the first page. I was hoping that making the site much faster for desktop and mobile would help not hinder! Any help would be appreciated! Simon

    | Doublestruck
    0
  • HuptechWebseo


    P.S. please suggest me the latest tips and tricks along with the known and lesser known facts regarding the niche question.

    | HuptechWebseo
    0
  • seoanalytics


    Hi, When you do keyword research and my terms is SEO for example. Do I need in the content to have the word "SEO" by itself and then a related keyword like "SEO tools" as 2 separate keywords or can I have "SEO tools" only and will this be counted as 2 separate keyword. The 1 st one will be "SEO" and the other one will be "SEO tools." Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    0
  • KJ_AV


    For last 25 days, we are facing a weird attack on our site. We are getting 10x the normal mobile traffic - all from Android, searching for our name specifically. We are sure that this is not authentic traffic as the traffic is coming from Organic searches and bouncing off. Initially, we thought this was a DDoS attack, but that does not seem to be the case. It looks like someone is trying to damage our Google reputation by performing too many searches and bouncing off. Has any one else faced a similar issue before? What can be done to mitigate the impact on site. (FYI - we get ~2M visits month on month, 80% from Google organic searches). Any help would be highly appreciated.

    | KJ_AV
    0
  • Kingalan1


    We plan on migrating our site to a new shorter domain name. I like the idea of removing "www" to gain an additional 3 letters in the URL display. Is there any disadvantage of doing so from a technical or SEO perspective? Thanks, 
    Alan

    | Kingalan1
    0
  • mgordon


    I have a specific page which needs multiple videos.  A primary video of the client (Youtube Video) and two secondary videos with patient testimonials (Wistia Videos). Here is the actual page: https://www.johnbarrasdds.com/houston-tmj-dentist/ My understanding is Google only values the first video on a page.  Is this accurate and either way what is the best practice for how to post the second group of videos and gain SEO value? Thanks!

    | mgordon
    0
  • wickstar


    Hi Guys, We have a 4 sites One in NZ, UK, Canada and Australia. All geo-targeting their respective countries in Google Search Console. The sites are identical. We recently added the same content to all 4 sites. Will this cause duplicate content issues or any issues even though they are in different countries and geo-targeting is set? Cheers.

    | wickstar
    0
  • sdaily


    We rebranded our organization 2 years ago. We decided to leave some of our archived content with our old name because it was already serving link juice to the website. How long should you leave keywords like that on your site related to an old brand?

    | sdaily
    0
  • seoanalytics


    Hello, This might be a bit of technical question but how is google linking entities together ? I understand that when writing a piece of content I need to cover multiple topics (which are also entities as far as I understand). Then, in order for google to link multiple entities together my guess is that my sentence needs to be written in subject, predicate, object format ? where my topic / entity comes out as the subject of the sentence. For example if I write that: "Tuscany is a famous for it's rolling hills?, here the subject is Tuscany which is what I want as it one of the topics I want to cover. But let's say that instead I write:" Rolling hills is something you find everywhere in Tuscany". Here Tuscany doesn't help because it isn't a subject and is just dropped there, correct ? Concerning the attributs of my entities (the object), does google have a list of what is right of wrong. For example if I say that Washington is the capital of italy ? can I be penalised for that ? I guess this is called entity disambiguation ? If the capital of italy would also be called Washington I believe that I would be ok but see that it isn't, can it hurt ? Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    0
  • seoanalytics


    Hello, Do my secondary related keywords need to also come out as subjects in my sentences or can they be objects / predicate. Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    1
  • phoenixcg


    Hi, I recieve a grade A on my on page grader, however i get "Avoid Keyword Stuffing in Document" - now on my page, i am not sure if its avoidable. It says this is highly important, but here is the issue. My website specialises in a particular product, so we have many variations of that product, different fabrics, styles, trimmings etc, so we have over 50 URLS pertaining to different variations of that "keyword" it's not in a spammy way, its actually done as customers are searching for it that way. Let's say for example scarves. Cotton Scarves, Viscose Scarves, Polyester Scarves, Pom Pom Scarves, etc etc So on my homepage even if i reduce the text mentions of "scarves" the urls still have 50 or so with it as the title, and in the URL. So how do i avoid this form of "keyword Stuffing" ?

    | phoenixcg
    0
  • mdmoz


    Hello, Important: please do not ask why we need to change the domain, its not the matter at all, thank you for understanding. Over a month ago we successfully changed our domain name, 301 redirected, did GWT 'change of address' and all. The old domain was 2 years old, ranking very well, the new domain change of address was a success and traffic back on the new domain after a week. Today we need to change the domain name again, unfortunately, for some reasons, we have to, however we are not sure what to do in GWT, when I went to 'change of address' in the domain (the new first domain), i saw the following message (screenshot attached too): This site is undergoing a move Old URL | New URL If any URL on the left should not be moved, you can withdraw its move request. To do this, click the URL and then Withdraw. Now our questions: 1. For second time moving to a new domain, we should move from the old first domain (301 from the first old domain) or from the second domain (301 from the second domain)? 2. If from the old first domain, should we Withdraw from the first domain (lift up the first change of address in GWT) and then redirect the old first domain to the second new domain (the one we want to move now)? If yes, what to do with the first new domain (the one which we moved to a month ago) 3. If we should move from the first new domain, then what to do? The situation is clear but confusing what to do? It's just that we need to change the domain name again, move to a new one, for the second time, now we should redirect from the first old domain or first new domain? I purchased MOZ just to get help from you guys here, the only place i thought I could be helped. Of course gonna use Moz service too now that i have puurchased it 🙂 Awaiting your quick help guys. Thank you! 8csVpOZ2QoiYCoTR1t_SnQ.png

    | mdmoz
    0
  • seoanalytics


    Hello, What does google mean by don't duplicate your meta description. For example if I my meta says : Stunning golf holidays in Florida , call xxxx and book today. and I have another page with golf holiday but in ireland this time. If I write  Stunning golf holidays in Ireland , call xxxx and book today. Is it considered duplicate ?

    | seoanalytics
    0
  • seoanalytics


    Hello, From my destinations pages, is it beneficial to have a link going externally to the hotels my clients are staying in ? In other words is it beneficial to my website or will it hurt me to link external from all my destinations pages to all the hotels my clients are staying in ?

    | seoanalytics
    0
  • seoanalytics


    Hi, Is there a real benefit to having internal links in content other than at the bottom of a page for example and not surrounded by content. Would the benefit be 1 to 10 or 1 to 1.5 ? Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    0
  • varunrupal


    Guest Post - What to reply when blogger ask for $$ to post a content? I did not want to pay $$ to post guest post.

    | varunrupal
    0
  • KentH


    My client got a manual penalty notice. Need to submit a disavow file and reconsideration request which is new territory for me. The task of contacting/disavowing 100's of sites to remove 1000's of links is a bit overwhelming. Answers to any of these questions would be greatly appreciated. Search console is showing 100's of hacked websites pointing to the site. Many of the incoming links showing in search console are already gone. Should I include in the disavow file or is the disavow file only for links that persist? I have read that Google does not actually read the #remarks in the disavow file. Since its manual penalty should I include them anyway since it's possible that a human could look it over? If anyone who has submitted a reconsideration request for unnatural links can comment on their use or non use of #remarks and the result that would be very helpful. You can tell that Google wants an effort to be made that the site owners are contacted.  What is the best way to document that?  In the reconsideration request?: The disavow file? or both.

    | KentH
    0
  • seoanalytics


    Hello, Does AMP have ranking benefits ? Should I just AMP my post or all the pages of my website, product page, homepage etc... Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    0
  • BeckyKey


    Hi I have some pages on the site which have a quote form, in my site crawl I see these showing as duplicate content - my webmaster says this isn't the case, but I'm not sure. Landing page - https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/high-esd-chairs Page with form - https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/high-esd-chairs?quote-form - this also somehow has a canonical on it pointing to https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/high-esd-chairs?quote-form Which neither of us have added. I'm thinking we need to get the canonical needs to be updated to https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/high-esd-chairs Is it worth doing this for all these pages or am I worrying about nothing? Becky

    | BeckyKey
    0
  • kirin44355


    Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
    https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
    https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
    https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
    https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
    https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
    https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this? 
    Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend. 
    Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
    Chris Gorski

    | kirin44355
    0
  • wickstar


    Hi Guys, On a WordPress site, we are working with currently has multiple different versions of each URL per page. See screenshot: https://d.pr/i/ZC8bZt Data example: https://tinyurl.com/y8suzh6c Right now the non-https version redirects to the equivalent https versions while some of the https versions don't redirect and are status code 200. We all want all of them to redirect to the highlighted blue version (row a).Is this easily doable in wordpress and how would one go about it? Cheers.

    | wickstar
    1
  • catbur


    Will google merge structured data from two pages if they have the same canonical? The crawler should be able to get to the tab through an ahref. The tab in question is "Cast & Crew." Thank you in advance for any insight! szmOmj8.jpg uM8qUfi.jpg

    | catbur
    0
  • seoanalytics


    Let's say on my keyword If I take the 1 st 20 results of google they have an average number of words per page of 3000 words. On my page I only have 1500 words. Does it mean that the frequency of my related keywords should be half of what the others have ? What about if I am over their frequency is it a problem also ? Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    0
  • Ann64


    Hi I want to shorten some URLs, if possible, that Moz is reporting as too long. They are all the same page but different categories - the page advertises jobs but the client requires various links to types of jobs on the menu. So the menu will have: Job type 1
    Job type 2
    Job Type 3 I'm getting the links by going to the page, clicking a dropdown to filter the Job type, then copying the resulting URL from the address bar. Bu these are really long & cumbersome. I presume if I used a URL shortener, this would count as redirects and alsonot be good for SEO. Any thoughts? Thanks
    Ann

    | Ann64
    0
  • KenSchaefer


    Hello all! I'm working on a site that features a service marketed to community leaders that allows the citizens of that community log 311 type issues such as potholes, broken streetlights, etc.  The "marketing" front of the site is 10-12 pages of content to be optimized for the community leader searchers however, as you can imagine there are thousands and thousands of pages of one or two line complaints such as, "There is a pothole on Main St. and 3rd." These complaint pages are not about the service, and I'm thinking not helpful to my end goal of gaining awareness of the service through search for the community leaders.  Community leaders are searching for "311 request service", not "potholes on main street". Should all of these "complaint" pages be NOINDEX'd?   What if there are a number of quality links pointing to the complaint pages?  Do I have to worry about losing Domain Authority if I do NOINDEX them? Thanks for any input. Ken

    | KenSchaefer
    0
  • genevieveagar


    My designer and I have been having an argument: we have a blog with short, 400 words posts. They have an H1 with nice keywords and a catchy title, and then a few subheadings. I don't like making the subheadings H2, because the font looks way too large in Wordpress, so my designer wants to make them all H4s, so the font looks to be a nicer size. Here's my problem with that and why I usually just bold the subheadings: Is it really bad to put a bunch of H4s right under an H1, with not H2's or 3's to separate? I'm reading different arguments on the internet about this and gladly welcome more debate and/or case studies. Thank you!

    | genevieveagar
    0
  • seoanalytics


    Hello, With the new mobile indexing 1 st do search engine (google) give as much value to content in tabs and no visible in the 1 st place as content which is visible on the page ? Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    0
  • MJTrevens


    As far as I know, there is no way to truly FORCE a URL to be removed from Google's index. We have a page that is being stubborn. Even after it was 301 redirected to an internal secure page months ago and a noindex tag was placed on it in the backend, it still remains in the Google index. I also submitted a request through the remove outdated content tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals and it said the content has been removed. My understanding though is that this only updates the cache to be consistent with the current index. So if it's still in the index, this will not remove it. Just asking for confirmation - is there truly any way to force a URL out of the index? Or to even suggest more strongly that it be removed? It's the first listing in this search https://www.google.com/search?q=hcahranswers&rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS753US755&oq=hcahr&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i60j0l3.1700j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

    | MJTrevens
    0
  • Janki99


    I did a detailed analysis of the loss in rankings for about 100 pages on my site over the last 6 months. For few pages the SEO clicks have dropped by 40%. This is not due to algorithm penalty but one of the following reason Competitor with a higher DA created a similar article Existing Competitors get more backlinks Search volume itself is down - (Don't care) Loss in long tail traffic can you guys recommend a system to automatically track this and make a report? Also what would be corrective action in case of reason 1 and 4

    | Janki99
    0
  • jonmc


    After reading several posts about the benefits of pruning old, irrelevant content, I went through a content audit exercise to kick off the year. The biggest category of changes so far has been to noindex + remove from sitemap a number of blog posts from 2015/2016 (which were very time-specific, i.e. software release details). I assigned many of the old posts a new canonical URL pointing to the parent category. I realize it'd be ideal to point to a more relevant/current blog post, but could this be where I've gone wrong? Another big change was to hide the old posts from the archive pages on the blog. Any advice/experience from anyone doing something similar much appreciated! Would be good to be reassured I'm on the right track and a slight drop is nothing to worry about. 🙂 If anyone is interested in having a look: https://vivaldi.com https://vivaldi.com/blog/snapshots [this is the category where changes have been made, primarily] https://vivaldi.com/blog/snapshots/keyboard-shortcut-editing/ [example of a pruned post]

    | jonmc
    1
  • cathywix


    Hey guys, We did reputation management back in March 2017. We basically built high quality links to online assets such as linkedin, twitter, facebook, positive PR articles and other web properties in order to rank them higher then negative PR. However there was 0 change (the link building was solid). And the negative PR remains in the top 10 with also positive new articles about the site. At this point, i believe that Google is keeping the negative PR in the top 10 to keep balanced SERP results. Does anyone know if this is something Google does to balance positive and negative results? Cheers.

    | cathywix
    0
  • Cutopia


    I have build several pages (A and B) with high quantity content. Page A is aged and gets lots of organic traffic, ranks for lots of valuable keywords, and has only internal links to this page. Page B is newer (6 months) and gets little traffic, ranks for no keywords, but has terrific content and many high value external links. As Page A and B are related to a similar theme, I was going to merge content from page B onto page A, but don't know which would be the best approach for handling the links going to page B. For the purposes of keep as much link equity as possible, is it best to us a 301 redirect from B to A or use a canonical URL from B to A?

    | Cutopia
    0
  • seoanalytics


    In content, does the proximity of semantically related keyword matter ? Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    1
  • seoanalytics


    search intent

    Hello, Is there a tool that can tell me what the user intent of my keyword is and how I should present my page (the type of content users want to see it, what questions they want answered ? Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    0
  • seoanalytics


    Hello, When you do a major change of content on a page I know it takes time to start seeing some results in terms of ranking. Let's say I make a change today expecting to see the first results of that change 2 months from now. Let's say in a month I decide to add some content and make again some minor changes. Do I have to wait another 2 months starting on the date I made my 2 nd changes to see some results or will I see the results of the 1 change as originally planned 2 months after my major content change ? Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    0
  • seoanalytics


    Do alt tags really give you a boost in terms of ranking or is it more for ranking in google images ? Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    0
  • BeckyKey


    Hi We've started to see steady drops in revenue since Jan 22nd each day & I can't seem to pinpoint why. We aren't seeing a drop in traffic for those pages, but we have seen ranking drops in other areas. The main revenue drops are coming from the homepage - it seems like a downwards trend - any ideas at how I can pinpoint the issue? https://www.key.co.uk/en/key

    | BeckyKey
    0
  • joaozzi


    Hi I Want to know why my website domain authority drop last month it is in 20 now it is in 18 i want to know what are the reasons.

    | joaozzi
    0
  • seoanalytics


    Hello, Is it ok to talk about multiple topics under an H tag or should I stick to 1 topic per H tag. Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    0
  • LindsayE


    Does Google determine how your permalink shows up in the search results or is that a setting on our end? I noticed most of our competitors have their permalink show up in their snippet results. Ours shows "knowledgebase" instead. I think seeing the keywords in the permalink helps with conversions. https://screencast.com/t/fyFyNaWayajx

    | LindsayE
    0
  • seoanalytics


    Hello, I have that search engine discounts stop words in order to gain computing power. Is there a list of those words that are discounted ? Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    0
  • cathywix


    Hi we recently did a migration and a lot of content changed locations see: https://d.pr/i/RvqI81 Basically, the 301 goes to the correct location but its a relative URL (as you can see from the screenshot) rather than absolute URL. Do you think this is a high priority issue from an SEO standpoint, should we get the developer to change the redirects to absolute? Cheers.

    | cathywix
    0
  • Kingalan1


    Our website was designed in 2013 using a custom theme. Some of the plugins are built from scratch. Ranking in our industry is hyper competitive. We are seeking a better interface and also to improve ranking. I have read that custom themes use lighter code and can rank better. Does this apply to a custom theme from 2013? Will we have an SEO advantage using a custom theme? If so, will that advantage be significant? We are using a discontinued plugin called "Firestorm" to display real estate listings. That plugin has been customized. Can we use that plugin on a new "custom" theme? How about on a "child" theme? In terms of the cost of future maintenance, will a "custom" theme require much more intervention (manual installation of updates) moving forward? Which of the following options is best: 1. Adapt our existing custom theme
    2. Create a new custom theme
    3. Create a child theme Thanks, 
    Alan

    | Kingalan1
    0
  • benoit_2018


    Me and my team are working hard to put a good SEO strategy in place and good, useful content for our visitors. We're online for a little more than a year and we got some success but nothing compared to the majority of our competitors. The only thing we noticed so far is that our strongest competitors all seem to have a website based on WordPress... well is it possible to rank better than a site based on WP if we optimize everything well? One of our competitor is a very simple, thin affiliate website based on WP and is called www.comparatif-meilleur.fr ... their content is limited but they do better than us in term of ranking organically... On our side (www.lecomparateur.net) we have backlinks from Wikipedia, Dmoz and a couple of other very good sites, plus a better content, better design and better overall optimization. There must be something we do bad, but we can't find it. Please help 😞 P.S. We update our site quite often too

    | benoit_2018
    0
  • RickyShockley


    Hi all, So if we used to have a domain (let's say olddomain.com) and we had a new site created at newdomain.com how do we properly setup redirects page to page. Caveat, the urls have changed so for instance the old page oldomain.com/service is now newdomain.com/our-services on the new site. Do we need to have hosting on the old site? Do we need to setup individual 301s for each page corresponding to the new page? Just looking for the easiest way to do this CORRECTLY. Thanks, Ricky

    | RickyShockley
    3
  • brian-madden


    Hi all, My website currently has 2 pages that address the theme 'property investment in manchester' or 'buy to let manchester'. https://www.knightknox.com/developments/manchester/ https://www.knightknox.com/investments/manchester I am a bit concerned that we are competing against ourselves for these keywords. In my opinion the /investments page provides better content, but the /developments page ranks higher in Google. What do you think would be the best course of action?: Leave as is Merge the contents of both pages Redirect the /developments to /investments Or something else? Any ideas welcome. Thanks

    | brian-madden
    0
  • seoanalytics


    Hello, Let's imagine I do a search for barcelona in the keyword tool. One the the words that comes back with high relevance is barcelona city. I am writing a my content but as a human it sounds more natural to write the city of barcelona. My problem is the the city of barcelona is not given by the keyword explorer, what should I do stick with barcelona city use the city of barcelona even though it is not in the list of keywords ? Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    0
  • seoanalytics


    Hello, The related searches we see at the bottom of google search results. Is this what people also search for ? If it is why does the keyword so no volume for those related searches ? Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    0
  • FPD_NYC


    Google Search Console is telling us that there are 5,193 sitemap "issues" - URLs that are present on the XML sitemap that are blocked by robots.txt However, there are only 1,222 total URLs submitted on the XML sitemap. I only found 83 instances of URLs that fit their example description. Why is the number of "issues" so high? Does it compound over time as Google re-crawls the sitemap?

    | FPD_NYC
    0
  • BeckyKey


    Hi SEMRush is flagging these pages as having duplicate content, but we have rel = next etc implemented: https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/brand/bott?page=2 Or is it being flagged as they're just really similar pages?

    | BeckyKey
    0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


Start my free trial


Browse Questions

Explore more categories

  • Moz Tools

    Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

  • SEO Tactics

    Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

  • Community

    Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

  • Support

    Connect on product support and feature requests.

Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.