Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

  1. Home
  2. Latest Questions
Log in to post

Latest Questions

Have an SEO question? Search our Q&A forum for an answer; if not found, use your Moz Pro subscription to ask our incredible community of SEOs for help!

  • clolsen


    Does it matter if I use hyphens in URL versus. "no separation". Ex www.mysite.com/someproducts or
    www.mysite.com/SomeProducts vs.
    www.mysite.com/some-products The last is perhaps more readable by humans, but does it make any SEO difference using one or the other?

    Content Development | | clolsen
    1
  • Partouter


    Hi Are there any SEO guidelines for "one page websites". I'm looking into the 'benefit' it might have in combination with exact match URLs. Many thanks in advance.

    On-Page Optimization | | Partouter
    2
  • David680


    Hi, I have read the book "art of seo", now I found that there is a SEO training videos " Ultimate Advanced SEO Bundle: Tips, Tricks & Tactics Volumes 1 & 2 URL: http://www.seomoz.org/store/4 What is the content inside? is it worth to buy even if I already read the book "art of seo"? please advise. Thanks -David

    Image & Video Optimization | | David680
    0
  • BethelMedia


    I'm being docked for too many on page links on every page on the site, and I believe it is because the drop down nav has about 130 links in it. It's because we have a few levels of dropdowns, so you can get to any page from the main page.  The site is here - http://www.ibethel.org/ Is what I'm doing just a bad practice and the dropdowns shouldn't give as much information? Or is there something different I should do with the links? Maybe a no-follow on the last tier of dropdown?

    Technical SEO | | BethelMedia
    0
  • ngw


    Hi, I have a blog on posterous that I'm trying to rank. SEOMoz tells me that I have duplicate content pretty much everywhere (4 articles written, 6 errors at the last crawl). The problem is that I tag my posts, and apparently SEOMoz thinks that it's duplicate content only because I don't have so many posts, so pages end up being very very similar. What can I do in these situations ?

    Technical SEO | | ngw
    0
  • atohad


    appliance-repair-ny.com I recently got some new good page rank backlinks (4-5) to my site. After a nice increase in rankings i left it for a couple of day (holiday) when i came back i found out that my rankings dropped dramatically for many different keywords when in some cases the backlinks are listed higher than me for the keyword. Any suggestions? should i keep on building links in the same paste, or slow down a little? UPDATE: I now noticed that the seomoz app has a warning that my homepage is missing title tag and meta tag. I'm using wordpress and headspace plugin. I recently updated wordpress.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atohad
    0
  • ir-seo-account


    Has anyone else noticed discrepancies between these tools? Take keyword A and keyword B. I've literally seen situations where A has 3 or 4 times the traffic as B in Google Webmaster Tools, but half the traffic of B in Google Insights for Search. What might be the reason for this discrepancy?

    Technical SEO | | ir-seo-account
    0
  • GardenBeet


    My blog  sits on the wordpress domain http://gardenbeet.wordpress.com/ - it has good page rank and has around 300-400 visits per day  - should i move it to my website or Should I start a new blog? i have a page set up for it on my website but it now has good rank http://www.gardenbeet.com/content/design-blog.html - and now want to keep this URL am a bit confused - what is the best strategy in terms of SEO?

    Content Development | | GardenBeet
    1
  • Thos003


    Just wanted to get a roll call from our active Moz community on who is attending SMX Advanced.

    Industry Events | | Thos003
    0
  • JohnMcGreevy


    We sell some 25,000 products over the web on our site and on March 17, 2011 our orders dropped by 67% and have remained at this lower level since.  Any one know of any Google changes on this date that could have caused this decrease? Thanks John

    Technical SEO | | JohnMcGreevy
    0
  • jcolman


    These are two metrics highlighted in the "Organic Traffic Data" report in the PRO campaigns.  Since this report is composed of data linked from Google Analytics, I bet there's a way to find this same information in GA. So...anyone know how to do that in Google Analytics?  I want this information for some long-tail productivity/potential research.

    Moz Pro | | jcolman
    0
  • VebianWebandMobileDevelopment


    I'm opening up a web development company in Vancouver and I'm stuck between getting hosting in Montreal or Vancouver. Montreal is a cheaper but, my company is in Vancouver. I have a .ca which will be my domain name, so I'm already on top of that aspect. From what I understand it would help for SEO purposes if my IP is a local Vancouver IP for my company website. So my question is... Should I go for the Vancouver hosting and pay more or stick with the Montreal hosting.

    Technical SEO | | VebianWebandMobileDevelopment
    1
  • EricVallee34


    google analytics

    I recently received help on a question I asked on SEOmoz but need additional clarification.  I am trying to set up goals in Google Analytics for people who click on a “purchase botton” which sends them to PayPal.  I created a Thank You page and tried to get PayPal to redirect to it, however, our customers only get  to our site’s 404 page. Here is what I’ve done so far: Went into my PayPal account and turned the “Auto Return” to ‘on’ Under website payment preferences, I added the following URL http://www.teecycle.org/thank-youutm_nooverride1.  (I formatted the URL this way because the person who provided me with help recommended using the format ?UTM_nooverride=1.  However, our CMS system won’t allow “?” or “=”)

    Reporting & Analytics | | EricVallee34
    0
  • JamesO


    Hey everyone. We are about to create a sitemap.html page and have always just kept the site theme in place and put the sitemap in the "content" section of the page, with the header navigation, sidebars and footer in place. Well, now with the new "only first link counts" Google rule, wouldn't it be better to just have a "plain" html sitemap page without any other links on it?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesO
    0
  • JamesO


    We are working on a new website that is golf related and wondering about whether or not we should set up a subnavigation dropdown menu from the main menu. For example: GOLF PACKAGES
      >> 2 Round Packages
      >> 3 Round Packages
      >> 4 Round Packages
      >> 5 Round Packages GOLF COURSES
      >> North End Courses
      >> Central Courses
      >> South End Courses This would actually be very beneficial to our users from a usability standpoint, BUT what about from an SEO standpoint? Is diverting all the link juice to these inner pages from the main site navigation harmful?  Should we just create a page for GOLF PACKAGES and break it down on that page?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesO
    0
  • JohnBeagle


    My site has been in Google News for about 3 years. Over the weekend, I received this message from Google Hi John, We periodically review news sources, to ensure Google News offers a high quality experience for our users. When we reviewed your site, mainstreetmonroe.com, we found that we can no longer include it in Google News at this time. We reviewed your site and are unable to include it in Google News at this time. We can't include sites that don't have a formal editorial-review process for submitted content. If this exists on your site, please let us know where and we'll be happy to review your site again. Mainstreetmonroe is scheduled to be removed from Google News for a period of at least 30 days. After this 30-day period has elapsed, you can re-apply for inclusion in Google News provided your site meets our guidelines. We appreciate your assistance in this matter. Please note that you'll still be able to find your site in Google Web Search and other Google services. Thanks for your interest in Google News. Regards, The Google News Team What exactly do they mean? I submitted my website news section, but they have been displaying our forum area in the news too. I think the forum is what GN is talking about. What is the best way to fix this problem? Move the forum to a subdomain? Website: http://www.mainstreetmonroe.com/ Forum: http://www.mainstreetmonroe.com/Voice/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=2

    Content Development | | JohnBeagle
    0
  • AaronSchinke


    Well, does it?

    Industry News | | AaronSchinke
    0
  • DanDeceuster


    In the old Q&A set up your response was automatically given a thumbs up by you so that you got a mozpoint for every response you gave. Now you have to manually thumb up your responses. Why was this change made? Can we get it back to the way it was?

    Moz Pro | | DanDeceuster
    1
  • Mulith


    Hi All, I'm launching a new website with a number of country specific sub-domains and I wanted to know if Google will calculate the number of new links as a root domain or if it will treat each subdomain seperately? For instance if I built 50 links per month to each of my five proposed subdomains would google see it as 250 links built to one root domain(and penalise me as a result) or will they view these subdomains independantly and accept these 50 links per page as an acceptable amount per sub domain. Thanks in advance. Ross

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith
    0
  • inhouseninja


    What are the characteristics of a Google penalty - i.e. how do you know by looking at the rankings for your keywords? Do all keywords that you had previously ranked for fall from say top 5 to nowhere? Do you disappear from SERP for a branded keyword? Or something else?? Basically how do you know if you have been penalized? Thanks

    On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja
    0
  • Francisco_Meza


    When can us Mozzers pay for this http://www.seomoz.org/mozcon I need to buy my Mozcon tickets for July 27 - July 29, 2011 and begin arranging hotel and airfare before rates go up even more. It's peak season.

    Industry Events | | Francisco_Meza
    0
  • BlinkWeb


    I'm working on an e-commerce site that currently has about 50 root categories and growing, with no sub-categories. They are all linked from the sidebar of every page and all the products are pretty related. They could probably be sub-categorized in to 5 root categories. At want point does categorization become too flat?

    Technical SEO | | BlinkWeb
    0
  • Matthew_Edgar


    Hi, I have a client who has thousands of pages on his site - 50,000+. It is a news website so most of these pages are old news articles and blog posts that receive very little traffic. We are moving to a new content management system and are debating on whether or not to keep all that old content. So far our decision is to keep the content that has gotten at least 100+ visits from Bing or Google in the last 6 months but dump everything else. This amounts to around 30,000 or so pages most of which have several links pointing to them. My question is from an SEO standpoint is that okay to do? We'd not only lose pages but links as well. Part of me thinks that in light of the Panda update getting rid of old content that is good but not great could about help out the site (we do great in the SERPs and actually got a bump in traffic after the Panda update to new articles/posts). However, we obviously don't want to cause problems and that is why I'd appreciate the thoughts and ideas on the best way to handle this major downsizing in content. Thanks!

    Content Development | | Matthew_Edgar
    0
  • iAnalyst.com


    We work with ecommerce clients specifically and many of them get duplicated content from their manufacturers. I've heard of people using the turk to outsource product re writing and am wondering if anyone here has had success? Do you just get all the product descriptions re written and delivered in a CSV for uploading or have any of you developed a more automated approach? How is the content quality been? Thanks much!

    Industry News | | iAnalyst.com
    0
  • KevinBloom


    My client is a kitchen remodeling company in Sterling, Virginia and is trying to rank well in local results.  I am struggling with keyword selection mostly because I am still learning about local SEO. The city the company is located is Sterling, however their business comes from several other close by cities like Reston, Herndon, and Fairfax (Nobody lives in Sterling so they don't care too much about owning that in search engines). Is the right strategy: 1. Choosing one city and focusing on that (kitchen remodeling in reston, VA) 2. Optimizing for multiple cities (kitchen remodeling, reston, herndon, fairfax...) 3. Optimizing for an entire region (kitchen remodeling, northern virginia) I know it's hard to answer this with little information but gut reactions would be appreciated. I am a new SEOmoz member so excuse me if this question is too specific for this forum.  I'm still getting a feel for the community. Thanks! Sean

    Keyword Research | | KevinBloom
    0
  • RobertFisher


    Does anyone have any experience with getting a local review site to show up when it is turning out tens of thousands of reviews on local companies in one specific industry (no not restaurants) (Insurance agents, etc.)? Is there a submission process for Google? Thanks mozzers

    Branding | | RobertFisher
    0
  • inhouseninja


    So for the past 3 or 4 weeks or so I’ve been making some on page tweaks for keywords that we should rank for, implementing all the keyword recommendations, and  getting “A’s” in the report card for page optimization in the Pro tool, and also doing things like fixing a bunch of 404’s that I found ….so I thought I was doing a bang up job… My rankings for some keywords were generally trending (slowly) in the right direction, but this morning I see that 2 important keywords that I had been working hard on, and which had trended from around 40 to in the high 20’s in rankings, has now dropped out of top 50 altogether…. I’m a little dispirited, and now wondering if I did something wrong?  Any thoughts or recommendations?   Is it normal just to drop out of top 50 when you were in the 20's or 30's? Thanks!

    On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja
    0
  • EdKim


    I know I've asked this one before but I was wondering if you had any coupons to SMX Advanced. I think I've scraped up enough to come to Seattle even without it but I was hoping you might have one as a sponsor. Thanks and looking forward to checking out all your new stuff at your booth! Ed

    Industry News | | EdKim
    0
  • BlinkWeb


    I have started working with a client who did an upgrade on their e-commerce sive in May of last year. It totally changed the URL structure and they didn't redirect old URLs or do any of the things they should have. Not unexpectedly they they went from about 300 visitors a day to 0 for then rose up to maybe 50 and have remained there ever since. There were some major onsite issues including about 15000 internal links that 302 back to the site. In any case I have fixed most of the onsite problems and worked on a little better categorization + content optimization, etc. We have only been working on this for about 30 days and organic traffic is up and they are ranking for much better keywords, but I expected a little quicker rise. Here is a screenshot out of GA of their descent. Its pretty rapid. I dont think it makes sense to redirect their old URLs at this point since most of them have been deindexed for 10+ months. Anyone have any suggestions on how to get back to their previous level. The domain actually has decent authority and link profile, etc. Is this just going to be a slow climb back? Any thoughts? Fxz9Y.png

    Technical SEO | | BlinkWeb
    0
  • Discountvc


    Think of our company as a real estate company, having hundreds of homes, each home has an optimized page and comes with a WP light box and 15 specific photos of a property. The code of the property would be unique, and so is the title tag (key phrase) for each property unique. Each property has a picture of the front, the living room, the master bedroom, a bathroom, the pool, the kitchen... Say the home code is HC007FE and the keyword is "greatest home example ever". How would you suggest naming the pictures and additionally the alt txt for these pictures? Thanks for your help!

    On-Page Optimization | | Discountvc
    0
  • aarondicks


    We're creating a new website for a client, and we have already started link building to the pages, including some deep landing pages. Currently the site is blocked from being indexed - we're just concerned that there may be issues when we launch the site as there will be a lot of links pointing towards the pages from day 1. Are we ok to continue link building?

    Link Building | | aarondicks
    1
  • JonAmar


    Hi there, Here's our situation: there are two people working on the blog. person 1) writes the posts person 2) SEO optimizes the posts I know this is not ideal but it's the best we can do and it's a whole lot better than no blog. 🙂 I'm the fellow optimizing the posts. I've found that my best SEO efforts usually slightly undermine the readability of these posts -- not in an extreme way, I'm not going overboard with keywords or anything. Rather, things like a sexy & enticing article heading may have to be dummed down for search engines... Because of this dumming down, I like to wait a couple of weeks to SEO optimize our posts, the logic being that we get the best of both worlds: a happy regular readership on topic articles that are clearly described for (and aligned to the terms used by) our search engine visitors What I'm wondering is, Generally: can you see any problems with this setup? would you do it differently? Specifically: does Google (et al) punish this sort of backwards re-writing? and, does it somehow amount to less SEO mojo when done retroactively? Thanks so much for your time! Best, Jon

    Technical SEO | | JonAmar
    0
  • tolik1


    Hi guys, Anyone knows a good keywords tool for Yahoo Ads and Bing Advertising? - We are interested to see the search volumes for these 2 search engines (all tough they are together now, people still have searching preferences and usualy only use one of them. - We need to see global search volumes as well as geo-specific data (country level) Thanks in advance

    Paid Search Marketing | | tolik1
    0
  • Juergen-119481


    I found date stamps in front of Google's SERP snippets always very helpful, but where exactly is Google pulling this information from? Some of my sites show dates from past year in the snippets although all of them have a current date stamp on the front page. Would love to make sure that all my sites have show latest date in the snippets.

    Technical SEO | | Juergen-119481
    0
  • EdgySEO


    Hi, Has anyone made functions to get link metrics from SEOmoz API in Google docs spreadsheet? Page Authority Domain Authority Linking Root Domains Total Links _Thanks to Tom Critchlow I got the social metrics, now I just need the ones from SEOmoz api. _ Any help would be sweet.

    Reporting & Analytics | | EdgySEO
    0
  • pablogalante


    Hi, is there a limit on the number of service areas I can choose for my Google place/map listing.? For optimization purposes should I include the whole state, or each specific city. My keyword for google maps is not very competitive and I want to cover a few different states , I have the time to put specific cities just not sure if there is a restriction on number of service areas. Cheers

    Image & Video Optimization | | pablogalante
    0
  • TECHeGO


    My company website recently got its site links in google search... WooHoo! However, when you type TECHeGO into Google Search one of the links is spelled incorrectly. Instead of 'CONversion Optimization' its 'COversion Optimization'. At first I thought there was a misspelling on that page somewhere but there is not and have come to the conclusion that Google has made a mistake. I know that I can block the page in webmaster tools (No Thanks) but how in the crap can I get them to correct the spelling when no one really knows how to get them to appear in the first place? Riddle Me That Folks! sitelink.jpg

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TECHeGO
    0
  • deuce1s


    Hey All, First off I wanna thank everyone who has responded to all my previous questions! Love to see a community that is so willing to help those who are learning the ropes! Anyways back to my point. We have a main site that is a PR 3 and our main focal point for lead generation. We recently acquired 50 additional sites (all with a PR of 1-3) that we would like to use as our own little back linking campaign with. All the domains are completely relevant to our main site as well as specific pages within our main site. I know that reciprocal links will get me no where and that google is quickly on to the attempted 3 way link exchange. My question is how do I best link these 50 sites to not only maintain there own integrity and PR but also assist our main site. Thanks All!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deuce1s
    0
  • SEOpt


    Hi everyone, I would like to know your opinion on this. Do you feel like optimizing, especially pointing links to a subfolder, e.g. www.domain.com/en/ (english language), should be the same as doing that for the main URL (another language)? That said, do you think all the domain will benefit from anchors to subfolders? Thanks a lot!

    On-Page Optimization | | SEOpt
    0
  • leadsprofi


    Hello mozzers, I have a question, for example if we see the seomoz company profile on linkedin, we see the number of employers, and for my company, can't see the number of employers on the public, what is reason? Maybe seomoz is using pro-membership on linkedin? or is doing the linkedin automatically for the employers who are registered with mail at domain name official of company. How to do this..? to see number of employers on public-profile, not on the right side, but on the content, at seomoz you can see the latest 5 new employers. Thanks

    Social Media | | leadsprofi
    0
  • F-D


    In one of my campaigns, competitive domain analysis shows that the total links is always the same as ext. followed links. This can't be right as the site has both external links and internal links. What would be the possible issue here? Thanks for sharing your insight.

    Moz Pro | | F-D
    0
  • vibelingo


    Hi, I'm setting up a Barcelona guide as a hobby: barcelonacitybreak.com. Naturally I take care to use good alt-tags, checking Google images I see one of the photos I took listed as number one: "hibernian bookstore barcelona". There is no doubt that this is the photo I took myself, but when  I place the mouse over the photo the origin is listed as:http://www.auladirectiva.com/. What is even more worrying though is that when I press the image I automatically download this: "Antispy 2011" from http://protectionxpscannermaster.com! Evidently some kind of "anti-virus" program. How is this possible?

    Image & Video Optimization | | vibelingo
    0
  • Dan-Petrovic


    Hi guys, I've done something rather stupid... allowed Google to index two variations of a single viral piece therefore fragmenting the way it's being distributed and diluting its effect. Here are the URLs: http://analogik.com/acid_trip/ (68 Tweets, 254,000 stumbles) http://analogik.com/acid_trip/acid_trip.html (24 Tweets, 155,000 stumbles) If I 301, what happens to counters? What can I do? PS: I cannot update my post on Youmoz now that it's published but I cannot stress the importance of a single solid location of something you want to act as a linkbait.

    Social Media | | Dan-Petrovic
    0
  • cmaddison


    I'm getting the following error when seomoz tries to spider my site: First Crawl in Progress! Processing Issues for 671 pages Started: Apr. 23rd, 2011 Here is the robots.txt data from the site: Disallow ALL BOTS for image directories and JPEG files. User-agent: * Disallow: /stats/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /newspictures/ Disallow: /pdfs/ Disallow: /propbig/ Disallow: /propsmall/ Disallow: /*.jpg$ Any ideas on how to get around this would be appreciated 🙂

    Moz Pro | | cmaddison
    0
  • fastestmanalive


    I am doing work for a local business who has duplicate Google Places listings.  I would like some input from those with experience in this as to how I should go about consolidating these listings. Listing 1 created ~3 years ago by someone in the local business. They don't have the login/password info for this listing. listing has inaccurate info, including the wrong url (it points to their old website which is no longer active, but redirects to the new site) 124 reviews associated with this listing listing is on 3rd page of Local Business results Listing 2 one year old All listing info is current and accurate and I have the login info 18 reviews associated with this listing listing is on 6th page of Local Business results Up until a week or two ago Listing 2 was ranked between 1-3 in the local business results along side the map.  Listing 1 was ranked around #6.  I assume that the duplicate listings with their conflicting info (different url's associated with each) hit some tripwire in Google and they have now been penalized.  Does this sound correct? What is the best method for consolidating the two listings and reestablishing the ranking?  Here are my thoughts, please let me know if there is a better way... gain access to Listing 1 by having the business claim/verify the listing update all info in Listing 1 so that it is current and accurate deactivate and/or delete Listing 2 Is this the best course of action?  Thanks!

    Image & Video Optimization | | fastestmanalive
    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

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