Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO
Looking to level up your SEO techniques? Chat through more advanced approaches.
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Google webmaster reports non-existent links between syndicated sites
We have run into an issue with linking that we are completely puzzled by. We syndicate our content to various clients, taking care to ensure that we have followed all the best practices that Google recommends for syndicating content. But recently, we noticed Google Webmaster report links from ClientA to ClientB, and we cannot figure out why it thinks that way. We have never created, and we have never found the links that Google Webmaster claims are there. It is important for us to keep our clients isolated. Has anyone seen such behavior? Any ideas/pointers/hunches would be very much appreciated. Happy to provide more information. We even asked on the Google Webmaster Forum (https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/QkGF7-HZHTY;context-place=forum/webmasters), but thought this might be a better place to get expert advice. Thanks!
| prakash.sikchi0 -
Would a mass data update have a negative effect on SEO?
We have a large eCommerce site with the ability to do an export, change data, and import new data in mass. Over the 15 years that this site has been growing, it has accumulated several inconsistencies in product titles, descriptions, title tags, etc. The question is: If we were to update thousands of product titles ( 's on those pages) and some of the descriptions, would it have a negative SEO impact because of the groundbreaking number of products effected? Or would it only be for the better if they were all technically improvements (both in SEO and UX)? Thanks!
| frankandmaven0 -
URL structure for SEO
Hi Mozzers, I have a site which is a combination of product pages, and news and advice pages that relate to the products. How would you approach the URL structure for this, following SEO best practice? Approach 1 Product pages:
| A_Q
www.website.com/product-category/product-page News and advice pages:
www.website.com/product-category/product-page/news-and-advice-story-1
www.website.com/product-category/product-page/news-and-advice-story-2
etc or Approach 2 Product pages:
www.website.com/product-category/product-page News and advice pages:
www.website.com/news/product-category/news-and advice-story-1 (with internal linking to relevant product page)
www.website.com/news/product-category/news-and advice-story-2 (with internal linking to relevant product page)
etc Or would a different approach be better?0 -
Content very similar on different websites
Hello, I am in the travel industry and I am currently building the same website (different domain names), one for the US and one for the UK (same website design). They will both features the same content (itinerary, activities) on the page with 2 exception, the 1 st one is that I will use different hotels for my uk clientele and for my US clientele and on the UK page I will use the word "holiday" in the UK and the word "vacation" in the US. Can the fact that I do the same "itineraries" and use the same text on 95 % of the page hurt my ranking in one country or another ?
| seoanalytics0 -
Old sitemaps after site migration.
Hi, I was wondering if it's safe to remove all the sitemaps from the old site in search console? It's been 3 months since site migration from http://sitea.com (301 redirected) to http://siteb.com. Therefore, can I delete the old sitemap from the http://sitea.com from search console? Thanks.
| ggpaul5620 -
How does this company rank this page?
If you Google the keyword "used iPhone 5," the URL ranking #1 in the SERP is the following: http://buy.gazelle.com/buy-used-iphone-5/ This page has zero content on it and a button on it that takes you to a category page with the iPhone 5 pre selected. My question is **how does this page outrank the sites products pages? **I ran a backlink analysis and don't see any links pointing to that URL. Also, **how does this site deal with its duplicate content issues? **If you look at the following URLs, you'll see a bunch of duplicate content in the "Key Features" section below the fold. http://buy.gazelle.com/buy/used/iphone-5-16gb-at-t http://buy.gazelle.com/buy/used/iphone-5-16gb-sprint If you think about it, this site will have different product pages for each variations of cellphone carrier and cellphone storage capacity. So for an iPhone 5, they will have 15 pages! Any insight into this would be much appreciated!
| Cody_West0 -
Canonical tags for duplicate listings
Hi there, We are restructuring a website. The website originally lists jobs that will have duplicate content. We have tried to ask the client not to use duplicates but apparently their industry is not something they can control. The recommendations I had is to have categories (which will have the idea description for a group of jobs), and the job listing pages. The job listing pages will then have canonical tags pointing to the category page as the primary URL to be indexed. Another opinion came from a third party that this can be seen as if we are tricking Google and would get penalised, **Is that even true? **Why would Google penalise for this if thats their recommendations in the first place? This third party suggested using nofollow on the links to these listings, or even not not index them all together. What are your thoughts? Thanks Issa
| iQi0 -
22 Pages 7 Indexed
So I submitted my sitemap to Google twice this week the first time everything was just peachy, but when I went back to do it again Google only indexed 7 out of 22. The website is www.theinboundspot.com. My MOZ Campaign shows no issues and Google Webmaster shows none. Should I just resubmit it?
| theinboundspot1 -
Inner pages not ranking well
Hi Guys I'm currently working on a website and scratching my head. It seems certain pages of the website rank absolutely fine. The homepage, certain pages on footer and the primary navigation pages are ranking fine. Pages, however, that sit on the inner navigation (e.g 3rd level navigational pages) - do not rank well at all. Looking in webmaster, it is apparent these are fluctuating in and out of the Google index - sometimes they are there - sometimes not. I fully understand issues with Google penalties but I don't believe this is case as other pages are ranking fine. Link building has been done to these pages but to no effect. We have also increased internal links e.g by putting the pages on the footer - but still nothing. One thing that may impact the ranking is possibly the URL structure The website URLs are all www.Example.com/widgets - even if they sit on the 3rd level of the user navigation. Could this be a reason why? Would it help if 3rd level pages had the URL structure www.Example.com/services/widgets ? If anyone can provide help that would be great!!! thanks, Duncan
| CayenneRed890 -
How to avoid adult traffic to site?
A client of ours is increasingly getting a lot of adult traffic to their site, where they show up only for adult searches and not at all for relevant searches. How can we stop Google associating their site with adult content? Here's a blog example, giving advice to parents on girls and body image issues: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/girls-and-body-image keywords driving traffic to this page are all around images for 'young nude girls' etc.
| MediaCause0 -
P.O Box VS. Actual Address
We have a website (http://www.delivertech.ca) that uses a P.O Box number versus an actual address as their "location". Does this affect SEO? Is it better to use an actual address? Thanks.
| Web3Marketing870 -
SEO impact of 301 redirects based on IP addresses from a specific state
Hello Moz Community! We are facing an issue that may or may not be unique, but need some advice and/or clarification on the best way to address the issue. We recently rebranded and launched a new site under a new domain and things have been progressing well. However, despite all the up front legwork on trademarks and licensing, we have recently encountered a hiccup that forces us to revert to the old URL/branding for one specific state. This may be a temporary issue that lasts a couple of months or it could potentially be in the court system for a couple of years. One potential solution we have discussed is to redirect the new site to the old site based on IP addresses for the state in question. Looking for any guidance on what type of impact this may have on SEO. Also open to any other suggestions or guidance on dealing with this situation. Thanks
| VeteransFirstMarketing0 -
How search engines look at collapse content in mobile while on desktop it open by default?
Hello everyone!
| Roi_Bar
To have a mobile friendly UX we chose to collapse some of the page content.
On the desktop it is in open mode by default and user can see the whole content.
Does the search engines see the content even if it's collapse? is the collapse mode on the mobile only can hurt us with SERP ranking? okgF0pX 1LU6utU1 -
Does rewriting a URL affect the page authority?
Hi all, I recently optimized an overview page for a car rental website. Because the page didn’t rank very well, I rewrote the URL, putting the exact keyword combination in it. Then I asked Google to re-crawl the URL through Search Console. This afternoon, I checked Open Site Explorer and saw that the Page Authority had decreased to 1, while the subpages still have an authority of about 18-20. Hence my question: is rewriting a URL a bad idea for SEO? Thank you,
| LiseDE
Lise0 -
Status Codes - Deleted URLs
Hi I have a dev team 'cleaning' their database and from what I can tell deleting old URL's - which they say are not in use. I don't have much visibility on how our URLs are managed in the back end of the site, but my concern is these URLs should never be deleted, they should have a 301, 404 or 410. This includes product pages no longer available and category pages - my concern is losing authority. Am I worrying over nothing or is this a big issue?
| BeckyKey0 -
How do I not mess up a national seo strategy? All advice appreciated in advance!
Hello Moz Friends So I have always worked on local seo, websites, and digital brand management. But one of my clients wants to go national. They sell building materials and the competition is pretty fierce. So here is my question and I thank you in advance for any advice: How do I not mess up a national seo strategy, based on local seo efforts? So for an example, say I put the NAP in the footer, but my client sells to 49 states, will this hurt a national campaign? And on the opposite, would getting local links from say construction websites in California, if my NAP is from Florida, hurt or help? I understand that most of this is seo 101, but I am so used to local seo, that I don't want to cause national issues by doing something local. Thank you again Moz Friends "Have a Positive Day" Chris
| asbchris1 -
Does adding more outgoing links on a high PA page decrease the juice passed to previous links?
Hi, I'm not sure how PA DA exactly works when the goal is to create backlinks to your site in order to have the most impact on passing PA DA juice (if there is such a thing) to ones money site. For example let's say you have a blog and the PA is 40 DA is 30. Let's say I create a backlink pointing to my site on the homepage of this blog, in which I desire better rankings for, and the links I created are only 1-3 outgoing links on this post which is again on the homepage. Then say in a months time, I want to add another post on the homepage (so the 40 PA and 30 DA stays the same) creating a backlink to one of my other money sites. Does adding this second round of backlinks result in sending less juice to the first? This is what I want to know. Thank you!
| z8YX9F800 -
Does >70 character title tag affect a pages ranking in search?
We are a publication that puts out hundreds of articles a month. We have +5000 medium priority errors showing that our title element tags are too long. The title tag is structured like this: [Headine] | [Publication Name that is 23 characters] . However, since we are a publication, it's not practical for us to try to limit the length of our title tags to 70 characters or less because doing so would make the titles of our content seem very unnatural. We also don't want to remove the branding because we want it to go with the article when it's shared (and to appear when some titles are short enough to allow room in SERPs). I understand the reasons for limiting characters to 70 or less with regard to SERP friendliness. We try to keep key phrases in the front. People are more likely to click on a page if they know what it's about etc etc. My question is, do the longer titles affect the ability for the page to rank in search? To put it a different way, if we altered all the +5000 of the title tags to fit within 70 characters, would the page authorities and our site's domain authority increase? I'd like to avoid needed to clean up 5000 pages if the medium priority errors aren't really hurting us. Any input is appreciated. Thanks!
| CatBrain1 -
Self referencing canonicals and paginated content - advice needed
Hi, I help manage a large site that uses a lot of params for tracking, testing and to help deal with paginated content e.g. abc.com/productreview?page=2. The paginated review content correctly uses rel next and rel prev tags to ensure we get the value of all of the paginated review content that we have. The volume of param exclusions I need to maintain in Google & Bing Webmaster tools is getting clunky and frustrating. I would like to use self referencing canonicals, which would make life a lot easier. Here's my issue: If I use canonicals on the review pages the paginated content urls would also use the same canonical e.g. /productreview?page=2 pointing to /productreview I believe I am going to lose the value of those reviews, even though they use the rel next rel prev tags. BTW airbnb do this - do they know something I don't, don't care about the paginated reviews, or are they doing it incorrectly, see http://d.pr/i/14mPU Is my assertion above correct about losing the value of the paginated reviews if I use self referencing canonicals? Any thoughts on a solution to clearing up the param problem or do I have to live with it? Thanks in advance, Andy
| AndyMacLean0 -
SEO impact when micro site are hosted on third party url
Have a look at this url
| kjerstibakke
http://www.bekkevold-as.no/.
On the front page they are providing links to a website created by one of their suppliers. (Three cirkle icons in the middle of the page).
The links make the customers leave the site and open on a different domain, even the branding of the page is for Bekkevold Elektro (see log top right)
The question from me: How will this impact the SEO for Bekkevold Elektro. Would it be better to create a subdomain for Bekkevold Elektro and ask the supplier to point to this? Or is it ok to leave it as it is, having links back to the web site for Bekkevold Elektro? Just changing the target of the link to open in a new window.
Thank you very much for your support on this. I would appreciate any suggestion for improvement for my customer, Bekkevold Elektro. Best regards
Kjersti Bakke0 -
Legacy domains
Hi all, A couple of years ago we amalgamated five separate domains into one, and set up 301 redirects from all the pages on the old domains to their equivalent pages on the new site. We were a bit tardy in using the "change of address" tool in Search Console, but that was done nearly 8 months ago now as well. Two years after implementing all the redirects, the old domains still have significant authority (DAs of between 20-35) and some strong inbound links. I expected to see the DA of the legacy domains taper off during this period and (hopefully!) the DA of the new domain increase. The latter has happened, although not as much as I'd hoped, but the DA of the legacy domains is more or less as good as it ever was? Google is still indexing a handful of links from the legacy sites, strangely even when it is picking up the redirects correctly. So, for example, if you do a site:legacydomain1.com query, it will give a list of results which includes pages where it shows the title and snippet of the page on newdomain.com, but the link is to the page on legacydomain1.com. What has prompted me to finally try and resolve this is that the server which hosted the original 5 domains is now due to be decommissioned which obviously means the 301 redirects for the original pages will no longer be served. I can set up web forwarding for each of the legacy domains at the hosting level, but to maintain the page-by-page redirects I'd have to actually host the websites somewhere. I'd like to know the best way forward both in terms of the redirect issue, and also in terms of the indexing of the legacy domains? Many thanks, Dan
| clarkovitch0 -
Multiple pages for a Profile
Hi All, We have a Biography website in which we have Celebrity News, Videos, Images etc. We have a main page which shows the biography and sides we show 5 blocks of News, Videos, Images etc and have a More option when clicked the page goes to a page where it shows 100's of news of that celeb or Videos etc This is the main page : sitename.com/celebrityname news: sitename.com/celebrityname/news Videos: sitename.com/celebrityname/videos Images: sitename.com/celebrityname/Images Now these 3 pages have no content in them and when we scan via SEMRUSH it shows as "with duplicate title tags". We have 20K such bio's so 20K * 3 such pages is 60K duplicate title tags How can we deal with such pages? Any help please. Thanks
| leengsro870 -
Optimal Page Titles to avoid cannibalization
Hi there Moz community I spent today researching optimal "page titles" to avoid cannibalization of keyword. Why? Because when i set up my site previously for another industry I obviously well and truly stuffed it up with page titles that were different, but still too similar ie field marketing project setup, field marketing saas, field marketing reporting. I never ranked once for that term. Consequently, we nearly went broke in the process. Hence my research, which led me to Rands video and other information about choosing the best page title. However, I came across two opposing name theories. So, before i make a colossal error again, could someone please clearly clarify which would be the best way for me to proceed. First option(according to Rand's video about the snowboard website) Main page title - Field reporting and mobile data collection (same keywords as site title?) Subsequent pages - titles - (p1) Field reporting for construction (2) field reporting for medical (p3) field reporting for retail (or is that cannibalizing "field reporting"?) Second option Main landing page - Field reporting Solutions for your business, for your industry Subsequent page titles - (p1) defect inspection & reporting for construction (p2) incident reporting for medical But my quandary is that I wanted to rank for mobile data collection and field reporting for these industries. So how do I write the page titles without firstly keyword stuffing, secondly avoid cannibalization and lastly, not too long? Any explanation that specifically says yes or no would be greatly appreciated Thanks in advance and happy friday. Sharon
| Sharonrice0 -
Does capitalization matter for SEO?
Two places capitalization comes into play: (1) on-page use (title, h1, body text, img alt text, etc) (2) external anchor text I didn't think it mattered from Google's point of view for on-page usage (is this correct?) but I notice that OpenSiteExplorer' s 'anchor text distribution' tab shows different counts for the same keyword if it's capitalized in different ways (eg seomoz.org is listed separate from SEOmoz.org). Is that just OSE or does Google treat the keyword/phrase different based on its capitalization, too? And if so, then should I be creating external links to my site with the 'regular' and 'Capitalized' versions of my key phrases?
| scanlin1 -
Lately I have noticed Google indexing many files on the site without the .html extension
Hello, Our site, while we convert, remains in HTML 4.0. Fle names such as http://www.sample.com/samples/index.shtml are being picked up in the SERPS as http://www.sample.com/samples/ even when I use the "rel="canonical" tag and specify the full file name therein as recommended. The link to the truncated URL (http://www.sample.com/samples/) results in what MOZ shows as fewer incoming links than the full file name is shown as having incoming. I am not sure if this is causing a loss in placement (the MOZ stats are showing a decline of late), which I have seen recently (of course, I am aware of other possible reasons, such as not being in HTML5 yet). Any help with this would be great. Thank you in advance
| gheh20130 -
Travel site schema problems
I'm developing a travel site for my home state (Kansas - http://www.kansasisbeautiful.com though it's still has some development being worked on), but struggling to find scheme to work with for some items. So far my site is laid out by both region (northeast Kansas, western Kansas, etc.) and location types (waterfalls, parks, etc.). I'm currently working on coding in schema markup. I've found schema types for waterfalls, parks and landmarks, but I'm struggling to find anything for scenic drives (or highways, drives, anything related), hiking/biking trails and regions (northeast Kansas, southeast Kansas, etc.) The question I have is: What can I do to still try and put some kind of markup when there's nothing available that fits the item I'm trying to markup?
| msphoto0 -
Would changing permalink structure of 7,500 articles be good or bad?
Morning everyone, I'm the tech at a large men's lifestyle publisher and we're currently running the old /year/month/ URL structure in Wordpress. Now I've read countless articles about pro's and con's of month date vs post type formats (/2016/06/sample-post/ vs /sample-post/) and considering we produce both evergreen and daily news content we're stuck with making a decision. Currently we receive about 10,000 organic referrals per day (has been stuck at this for 12 months) but considering we have 7,500 articles, have 10 full-time staff and have been around for close to 7 years we think we're underperforming. Now providing we 301 redirect every old article to the new structure is there any other reason not to do this change? Any advice would be appreciated. Axps36D
| lucwiesman0 -
How much does URLs with CAPS and URLs with non-CAPS existing on an IIS site matter nowadays?
I work on a couple ecommerce sites that are on IIS. Both sites have return a 200 header status for the CAPS and non CAPS version of the URLs. While I suppose it would be ok if the canonicals pointed to the same version of the page, in some cases it doesn't (ie; /Home-Office canonicalizes to itself and /home-office canonicalizes to itself). I came across this article (http://www.searchdiscovery.com/blog/case-sensitive-urls-and-seo-case-matters/) that is a few years old and I'm wondering how much of an issue it is and how I would determine if it is/isn't?
| OfficeFurn0 -
Corporate website in multiple locations and with multiple services
Dear Team, We are a corporate setup in India, we have the following services under different brand names: 1. Security guard services - ORION 2. Facility management services - NOIRO 3. Investigation services - Ascertain Solutions We are located in different locations - India, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi What is the best way to structure our website properties for getting maximum SEO benefit, please inform from the following options: i. One website with one blog, we will have multiple pages dedicated to each service where page titles can be the brand names of the service and the location, the domain will be of the parent company only. So everything comes under orionsecure.com. There will be a security services page for India, for Abu Dhabi , for Bahrain. Similar for investigation and facility management. **ii. Multiple websites for different locations and different services, **so there will be orionsecure.com, orionsecure.ae and orionsecure.bh. Also, there will be a noiro.com, noiro.ae etc. Each website will have a blog for content publishing (although it is hard to imagine how we can develop content for different locations). **iii. One website each for each service, location shown differently through domain masking, **so we keep developing different pages as per the different locations on one website only, but this is shown differently through domain masking. Please help with this query, I really need an answer to this. If any more questions, please connect on [email protected] or call on +91-8510999664. Thanks and Regards, Naman Arora
| Ascertain_Solutions0 -
Redirecting a Few URLs to a New Domain
We are in the process of buying the blog section of a site. Let's say Site A is buying Site B. We have taken the content from Site B and replicated it on Site A, along with the exact url besides the TLD. We then issued 301 redirects from Site B to Site A and initiated a crawl on those original Site B urls so Google would understand they are now redirecting to Site A. The new urls for Site A, with the same content are now showing up in Google's index if we do a site:SiteA.com search on the big G. Anyone have any experience with this as to how long before Site A urls should replace Site B urls in the search results? I undestand there may be a ranking difference and CTR difference based on domain bias, etc... I'm just asking if everything goes as planned and there isn't a huge issue, does the process take weeks or months?
| seoaustin0 -
New Yoast SEO Wordpress Plugin - Using Passive Voice In Copy?
Hi all, we wondered if anyone is using the updated version of Yoast's SEO plugin for Wordpress? We use it on our Woocommerce website (along with the Woocommerce extension) and the latest version seems to have focussed on moving the writing style on. To avoid using passive voice. https://kb.yoast.com/kb/passive-voice/ We're struggling a bit to get this right, it seems to be quite a change to our current style...so we're wondering if anyone else has been looking at this and feeling like they are getting it right? Or if anyone has any resources good for helping to write more in this way? How important do people think this is? Many thanks, James & Ally
| allydr1 -
How do the Quoras of this world index their content?
I am helping a client index lots and lots of pages, more than one million pages. They can be seen as questions on Quora. In the Quora case, users are often looking for the answer on a specific question, nothing else. On Quora there is a structure setup on the homepage to let the spiders in. But I think mostly it is done with a lot of sitemaps and internal linking in relevancy terms and nothing else... Correct? Or am I missing something? I am going to index about a million question and answers, just like Quora. Now I have a hard time dealing with structuring these questions without just doing it for the search engines. Because nobody cares about structuring these questions. The user is interested in related questions and/or popular questions, so I want to structure them in that way too. This way every question page will be in the sitemap, but not all questions will have links from other question pages linking to them. These questions are super longtail and the idea is that when somebody searches this exact question we can supply them with the answer (onpage will be perfectly optimised for people searching this question). Competition is super low because it is all unique user generated content. I think best is just to put them in sitemaps and use an internal linking algorithm to make the popular and related questions rank better. I could even make sure every question has at least one other page linking to it, thoughts? Moz, do you think when publishing one million pages with quality Q/A pages, this strategy is enough to index them and to rank for the question searches? Or do I need to design a structure around it so it will all be crawled and each question will also receive at least one link from a "category" page.
| freek270 -
Are ALL CAPS construed as spamming if they are used in a meta description tag call to action?
I know this seems like an old school question. As a long time SEO I would never use ALL CAPS in a title tag (unless a brand name is capitalized). However I recently came across a Moz video about creating better calls to action in the meta description tags. Some of the examples had CTAs that were using all caps (i.e. CALL NOW! or LOWEST QUOTES!) I realize there is a debate about the user experience implications. However I'm more concerned about search engines penalizing websites that are using ALL CAPS CTAs in their meta description tags. Any feedback/advice would be appreciated. Thanks
| RosemaryB0 -
Is Building a Local Directory of Businesses on a Subdomain Good SEO?
Hello Fellow Moz'ers: I own a small digital shop in a major US city. We had a marketing idea which I'd like some input on the soundness of. We are creating a professional services directory of 'digital professional services providers' in our hometown. The directory's membership will only be open to firms located within our city limits. The directory will be curated and maintained, ongoing, by us. Our motivation is 75% selfish and 25% benevolent. The idea is that, by building the directory on our subdomain, we hopefully will collect links, which ultimately will enhance search visibility. But I'm concerned about the devaluation directories have incurred in recent years and I've even seen advice given to the effect that listings in some directories might be harmful to a site's link profile. It is not our intention to harm those who might list in our directory. Any thoughts on this matter would be greatly appreciated!
| Daaveey0 -
Homepage meta title not indexing correctly on google
Hello everyone! We're having a spot of trouble with our website www.whichledlight.com The meta title is coming up wrong on google. In Google it currently reads out
| TrueluxGroup
'Which LED Light: LED Bulbs & Lamps Compared'
when it should be
'LED Bulbs & Lamps Compared | Which LED Light' Last snapshot of the page from google was yesterday (5th April 2016) Anyone got any ideas?
Is all the markup correct in the ?0 -
Best practice for disallowing URLS with Robots.txt
Hi Everybody, We are currently trying to tidy up the crawling errors which are appearing when we crawl the site. On first viewing, we were very worried to say the least:17000+. But after looking closer at the report, we found the majority of these errors were being caused by bad URLs featuring: Currency - For example: "directory/currency/switch/currency/GBP/uenc/aHR0cDovL2NlbnR1cnlzYWZldHkuY29tL3dvcmt3ZWFyP3ByaWNlPTUwLSZzdGFuZGFyZHM9NzEx/" Color - For example: ?color=91 Price - For example: "?price=650-700" Order - For example: ?dir=desc&order=most_popular Page - For example: "?p=1&standards=704" Login - For example: "customer/account/login/referer/aHR0cDovL2NlbnR1cnlzYWZldHkuY29tL2NhdGFsb2cvcHJvZHVjdC92aWV3L2lkLzQ1ODczLyNyZXZpZXctZm9ybQ,,/" My question now is as a novice of working with Robots.txt, what would be the best practice for disallowing URLs featuring these from being crawled? Any advice would be appreciated!
| centurysafety0 -
Implementing AMP pages on WordPress blog
Hey Moz Users, Has anyone tried using the WordPress plugin for AMP pages on their blog yet? Here's the link to it: https://wordpress.org/plugins/amp/. The implementation seems pretty straightforward but since there will be an AMP and a mobile friendly version of the posts on my blog I'm worried it will create a lot of duplicate content issues. I've seen a lot of articles pointing to a rel canonical tag that can be used to fix this situation. Not sure if I'm going to have an AMP version of all the posts on my blog, so this seems like it would be a pain to place the tag manually on specific pages with the AMP version only. Has anyone tried this plugin and what have you done to fix this duplicate content issue? Thanks
| znotes0 -
The Consequences & Best Practices In Changing Domains
Working with a long established/organic successful site that, for brand reasons I disagree with, is verging on changing its domain name. Other than 301ing individual pages to their new domain name equivalent, getting canonicals updated, updating SSL certificates, new Google Search Console with old settings, maintaining the old robots.txtetc what else is worth paying attention to? Assuming I do all of that, how bad a hit to organic over what period of time might this result in? 6 months ago we migrated to https and that was hardly felt, but this is really a brand new domain name altogether. Thanks!
| 945010 -
Ecommerce SEO: Shared content on product pages
Hi Guys, I am wondering what the best practices are for avoiding duplicate content on product pages that have shared content. For example, say I have a 3 different product pages for each of the following: Verizon IPhone 5 16GB, AT&T IPhone 5 16GB, AT&T IPhone 5 32GB. Obviously each product is for the most part the same (all are IPhone 5). The only differences lie in the carrier of the phone and the storage capacity. I want to write product descriptions for each page to target a variety of different keywords, but I don't want to get penalized for duplicate content. Does anybody have any experience in what the SEO best practices are for product pages that have shared content like this? Thank you!
| Cody_West0 -
What is the average time table to boosting SEO rankings through a complete website frontend+backend refresh?
I am hoping someone who encountered a similar situation can help out. Here are the general details. Our company website is being rebuilt from the ground up - new copy, new information architecture, new theme, ideal URLs, data-driven research on search queries and keywords with an inbound marketing emphasis, CDN, the whole nine yards - as for several years under old management there was little emphasis on beating competition in the search results, or really on any of the fundamentals that matter. The only thing that cannot be reset, and will need to be tackled over time, is a link profile audit and weeding out the bad backlinks accrued over a decade. We are in a very small niche, and even with impeded website design, copy, content and misaligned architecture, we are still somewhat competitive vis-a-vis our competitors, just not top-3 triangle competitive for the terms that really matter. In addition, nearly all of our competitors do not (or at least do not appear to) optimize for SEO and UX, they just happened to choose to include terms in the copy that prospects would use when searching, rather than worrying about the semantics of branding (as in our old management's iron clad preference). Can someone here give an indication of when we would see rankings begin to improve in the search engine results pages upon completion and deployment of the new website? I understand I could be looking at up to a 6-month window, but I am looking for a definitive answer to tell my bosses, who may be expecting an immediate boost in the rankings.
| NikeFire0 -
Home page suddenly dropped from index!!
A client's home page, which has always done very well, has just dropped out of Google's index overnight!
| Caro-O
Webmaster tools does not show any problem. The page doesn't even show up if we Google the company name. The Robot.txt contains: Default Flywheel robots file User-agent: * Disallow: /calendar/action:posterboard/
Disallow: /events/action~posterboard/ The only unusual thing I'm aware of is some A/B testing of the page done with 'Optimizely' - it redirects visitors to a test page, but it's not a 'real' redirect in that redirect checker tools still see the page as a 200. Also, other pages that are being tested this way are not having the same problem. Other recent activity over the last few weeks/months includes linking to the page from some of our blog posts using the page topic as anchor text. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Caro0 -
Google displaying SERP link in Japanese
A chamber of commerce site near me has Google displaying their link in japanese characters when they search for them by name. If you google Eastern monmouth chamber of commerce, you will see this. The site is emacc.org. Can anyone tell me what might cause this or how to resolve?
| jeremyskillings0 -
Keyword ranking verse all other data
Hi there I have just joined Moz so I am not sure if i am doing a good job of analysing all the data, but from what i can see i have a few questions: 1. I seem to have a fairly high visibility compared to a few other competitors 2. All the other competitors i am looking at have a much lower domain authority 3. I win the link metrics in all categories compared to my competitors 4. I have a page optimisation score of 94 5. I dont have any crawl issues (except that i just changed to https and i believe there is a synching issue with Moz and cloud flare..) YET I barely rank for any of the main keyword in my industry.... Kitchen, New Kitchen, Kitchen Renovation etc. I also have a page optimisation score of 94 for related keywords. I feel like i am really missing a big point and was hoping I could get your expert thoughts on this 🙂 Thanks so much! PS my domain is www.bluetea.com.au
| bluetea0 -
H2 vs. H3 Tags for Category Navigation
Hey, all. I have client that uses tags in the navigation for its blog. For example, tags might appear around "Library," "Recent Posts," etc. This is handled through their WordPress theme. This seems fairly standard, but I wonder whether tags are semantically appropriate. Since each blog post is fairly lengthy (about 500-1000 words) with multiple tags, would it be more appropriate to use tags for this menu navigation? Are we cutting into the effectiveness of our tags by using them for menu navigation? The navigation is certainly an important page element, and it structures content, so it seems that it should use some header tag. Anyways, your thoughts are greatly appreciated. I'm a content creator, not an SEO, so this is a bit out of my skillset.
| Ask44435230 -
How long to re-index a page after being blocked
Morning all! I am doing some research at the moment and am trying to find out, just roughly, how long you have ever had to wait to have a page re-indexed by Google. For this purpose, say you had blocked a page via meta noindex or disallowed access by robots.txt, and then opened it back up. No right or wrong answers, just after a few numbers 🙂 Cheers, -Andy
| Andy.Drinkwater0 -
Heading Tags (Specifically H2) being used within images
Hello, Mozzers I have a question regarding placement of heading tags. I have seen this asked a few times on the forum but some are from a couple years ago so wanted to get a more up to date answer regarding this. We want to add H2 tags across our site but our two options are to wrap images we are using as navigation on the top of the page, these are directly below our pages H1 tag and actually make sense. Example H1 title: Vehicles Images are specific brand logo with H2 being wrapped to pull the img alt: "Ford Vehicles" "Checvy vehicles" etc. The wrap would look something like this: I appreciate your time, Chris
| kirin443550 -
If Robots.txt have blocked an Image (Image URL) but the other page which can be indexed has this image, how is the image treated?
Hi MOZers, This probably is a dumb question but I have a case where the robots.tags has an image url blocked but this image is used on a page (lets call it Page A) which can be indexed. If the image on Page A has an Alt tags, then how is this information digested by crawlers? A) would Google totally ignore the image and the ALT tags information? OR B) Google would consider the ALT tags information? I am asking this because all the images on the website are blocked by robots.txt at the moment but I would really like website crawlers to crawl the alt tags information. Chances are that I will ask the webmaster to allow indexing of images too but I would like to understand what's happening currently. Looking forward to all your responses 🙂 Malika
| Malika11 -
Google Indexing of Images
Our site is experiencing an issue with indexation of images. The site is real estate oriented. It has 238 listings with about 1190 images. The site submits two version (different sizes) of each image to Google, so there are about 2,400 images. Only several hundred are indexed. Can adding Microdata improve the indexation of the images? Our site map is submitting images that are on no-index listing pages to Google. As a result more than 2000 images have been submitted but only a few hundred have been indexed. How should the site map deal with images that reside on no-index pages? Do images that are part of pages that are set up as "no-index" need a special "no-index" label or special treatment? My concern is that so many images that not indexed could be a red flag showing poor quality content to Google. Is it worth investing in correcting this issue, or will correcting it result in little to no improvement in SEO? Thanks, Alan
| Kingalan10 -
Related products & SEO
My company has a comprehensive set of historical images and text - hosted separately on a free museum site - it's currently displayed on our main site as an iframe. I realize the iframe brings no SEO juice to the site - but we are updating our site - and thinking of bringing the images and text to our site. I'm wondering if this could help or hurt us - the historical information is about "boat widgets" and we sell "car widgets" - could a lot of information about "boat widgets" dilute our "car widgets" seo ?
| ThomasErb0
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