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!
-
Ranking dropping for certain keyword
Hi There, Just wondering what has happened to my rankings as I cant seem to understand it. In the past week we've dropped from page 1 to page 10 for a certain keyword. The URL is also different that google displays - instead of displaying the individual page it now just links to the main domain. All the other keywords have remained consistent and some have improved. The page is still in the Google Index if I manually search for it. There hasn't been any dramatic change to the page except I've created a few links to it. Have we been penalized by Google and is there anything I can do?
Link Building | | danielmckay70 -
Australian Web Design and SEO
Hi Guys, I really could do with some gudienace or answers to the following questions: Are the any specific web design or technical issues that are different in Australian search engines compared to the UK? Are there any web design issues that are different to the UK? Are there any useful things I should consider from an SEO point of view if I am launching a website in Australia compared to the UK? Any helpw ould be much apprciated! Thanks Gareth
Technical SEO | | GAZ090 -
Seomoz staff help needed
I have this new client new domain new website, www.ard.uk.com when seo moz crawls the site it says it has 24 million links mozrank of over 7, looks amazing but impossible can someone as seomoz have a look please
Moz Pro | | francesco-2850160 -
Pagerank mystery
Hello SEO brethren - I've got a mystery I'm trying to solve. I work in house SEO at http://www.uncommongoods.com/ Our home page is a Pagerank 5. All of our sub-pages are Pagerank 0. Even this one below which has 276 links from 57 domains: http://www.uncommongoods.com/product/recycled-wine-bottle-platters Any clue what is going on here? Is a PR 0 typical for a page with this many links / linking domains? Thanks! -Zack
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Meaning of agnostic ?
What is the exact difference of "Page Level Keyword Usage" and "Page Level Keyword Agnostic Features"?
Technical SEO | | petrakraft0 -
Canonicalization - duplicate homepage issues
I'm trying to work out the best way to resolve an issue where Google is seeing duplicate versions of a homepage, i.e. http://www.home.co.uk/Home.aspx and http://www.home.co.uk/ The site runs on Windows servers. I've tried implementing redirects for homepages before (for a different site on a linux server) and ended up with a loop, so although I know I can read lots of info (as I have been doing) and try again, I am really concerned about getting it wrong. Can anyone give me some advice on the best way to make Google take just one version of the page? Obviously link juice is also being diluted so I need to get this sorted asap. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | travelinnovations0 -
Adding Links Under Embedded Videos?
What's the current opinion of adding do-follow links under video embed codes? Like what Vimeo does. Is this allowed, or does Google/Matt Cutts suggest always no-following these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DojoGuy0 -
Can Low Quality Directories Hurt?
I realize that links from low quality directories aren't of much value. Having said that, can doing this kind of linking actually penalize a site?
Link Building | | waynekolenchuk1 -
How can I reduce my webpage load time?
According to google 'On average, pages in your site take 4.6 seconds to load (updated on Apr 3, 2011). This is slower than 71% of sites. These estimates are of low accuracy (fewer than 100 data points). The chart below shows how your site's average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times.' My website: http://ablemagazine.co.uk I've installed Cache plugins, Minify plugins, reduce the amount of posts on my main page. But my website is still taking too long to load and I'm afraid I'm being penalised for it. Any tips?
On-Page Optimization | | craven220 -
Best practise for domain redirect
Hi guys. I have a client that has one main site, with the domain IMOWOOD.PT (Portugal), and then we have the domain IMOWOOD.COM (redirecting to .PT). The problem is (that i verify using site:imowood.com) in Google, apeears that the domain .COM have a lot of indexed pages! This will penalize the 2 pages right? Because the duplicated content (?). What i want to know is... if i have 1 domain (the one i want to be index) what should i do, to do a proper redirect from the .COM to the .PT, making the .COM not indexable? Right now the .COM only redirects @ index page. Dont know why... I've used the domain redirect @ my cPanel. So... whats the best practise for domain redirect? Thanks!
Content Development | | comercialroldao0 -
SEO question
Hi i changed my page titles for a competitive keyword last week and noticed it has dropped 9 search engine ranking positions. Was ranking 37 and now it 46. Would you guys leave it and see if it starts creeping back up or change again? the page title i used was across my pages for example was Primary keyword | secondary keyword | Heading on page thanks for you help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wazza19850 -
Travel agents are creating Google Place pages for our properties - is this a bad thing?
I'm currently trying to develop a clear understanding and policy for my company on how we deal with Google place pages, specifically where we stand on places pages being created by our agents. We run a business in the travel industry with a number of locations around the world. Our services are sold via travel agents. Naturally, we set up places pages for each of our locations but recently we've noticed agents setting up places pages for these locations with different titles & their own contact details (same address though). In one case we've received verification postcards which we've been asked to pass on. The pages are set up in 'good faith' to promote business in the agents respective countries and languages but i'm concerned that we are ending up with multiple pages for the same location, hurting our brand, losing our own pages through being buried and ending up with our account being suspended at some point down the line. There are a number of terms on Google guideline page, in particular, this one: "Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts." I contacted my Adwords account manager but didn't get a very clear response on this. What i'm looking for is some 3rd party, definitive advice/opinions on this scenario. Should we be asking agents not to create place pages? Why should they list.. could it end up hurting both of us? Are there pros and cons to this or is it a clear cut case?
Branding | | seoec0 -
Should Canonical URLs be used in Wordpress?
Wordpress offers Canonical URLs in the "All in one SEO" settings. I know that canonical tags for page content will cause the search engine to ignore the content, but I don't understand this setting in Wordpress. The Canonical URLs box for my blog had been checked until a couple weeks ago. I unchecked it (removing the canonical tag) and now I have about 300 duplicate content pages acccording to my SEOMoz reports. It appears that it's just the blog tag in the url now that is causing the confusion. Here's an example of the same url with two tags: http://www.rmtracking.com/blog/tag/aclu/ http://www.rmtracking.com/blog/tag/rfid/ Should I activate the canonical URL setting in Wordpress again. If not, how can I fix this? Your assistance is greatly appreciated. Regards, Brad
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0 -
Getting Google to index new pages
I have a site, called SiteB that has 200 pages of new, unique content. I made a table of contents (TOC) page on SiteB that points to about 50 pages of SiteB content. I would like to get SiteB's TOC page crawled and indexed by Google, as well as all the pages it points to. I submitted the TOC to Pingler 24 hours ago and from the logs I see the Googlebot visited the TOC page but it did not crawl any of the 50 pages that are linked to from the TOC. I do not have a robots.txt file on SiteB. There are no robot meta tags (nofollow, noindex). There are no 'rel=nofollow' attributes on the links. Why would Google crawl the TOC (when I Pinglered it) but not crawl any of the links on that page? One other fact, and I don't know if this matters, but SiteB lives on a subdomain and the URLs contain numbers, like this: http://subdomain.domain.com/category/34404 Yes, I know that the number part is suboptimal from an SEO point of view. I'm working on that, too. But first wanted to figure out why Google isn't crawling the TOC. The site is new and so hasn't been penalized by Google. Thanks for any ideas...
Technical SEO | | scanlin0 -
Page title in SERP question
Has anyone typed in a phrase in Google and seen their listing on the SERP, but the page title on the Google SERP is not what the CMS is set to ? Ie the page title in the SERP is not what is expected? Something related to the company, but not what is set on the CMS… Very odd – has anyone seen something like this before? What could be causing it? Is there a way to change it?
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0 -
Link API returns Error 500
http://lsapi.seomoz.com/linkscape/links/nz.yahoo.com?SourceCols=4&Limit=100&Sort=domain_authority&Scope=domain_to_domain&Filter=external+follow&LinkCols=4 Hi folks any idea why the above returns Err 500 ? Seems to pertain to the domain - it works on other sites just not nz.yahoo.com Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jimbo_kemp0 -
Why isnt google picking up my backlinks?
Over the last 2 months, my company has had almost 10 articles placed on very established websites. When I search for my company's backlinks on Google Advance Search, its not picking them up. Why?
Link Building | | BYSM0 -
Bounce rate
Hello, I am kinda looking for experts who have dealt with the issues of Bounce Rates. Site : www.gunshotdigital.com Problem : High Bounce Rate SOLUTION : PL HELP FELLOW SEOMOZZERS 🙂 thank you all in Advance. I love our community! Let me know if there is anything I can do for you - esp in design /branding/ PSD conversions etc 🙂 best regards, Vijay
Web Design | | vijayvasu0 -
Best directory submittal program? Or at least a comprehensive list of non-spammy directories somewhere?
There's a ton of directories. Has anyone had success with a program that will take your info for a site and submit it to all of them at once? Bonus points if you can vary the anchor text and description. Paid or free. And whether there is anything like that, which actually works, I am wondering if there is some relatively authoritative, relatively comprehensive list of non-spammy directories. Any other directory advice would be awesome! Thanks!
Moz Pro | | TheEspresseo1 -
What is the downside with having too long of a title tag?
With Google placing so much relevance on title tags, it seems to help if you mention local cities within your title tag. I'm wondering if the positive of having more keywords in a title tag outweighs the negative of having too long of one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TLSNET0 -
Penalty or Algorithm hit?
After the Google Algorithm was updated my site took a week hit in traffic. The traffic came back a week later and was doing well a week AFTER the algorithm change and I decided that I should do a 301 redirect to make sure I didn't have duplicate content (www. vs. http://) I called my hosting company (I won't name names but it rhymes w/ Low Fatty) and they guided me through the supposedly simple process.. Well, they had me create a new (different) IP address and do a domain forward (sorry about bad terminology) to the www. This was in effect for approximately 2 weeks before I discovered it and came along with a subsequent massive hit in traffic. I then corrected the problem (I hope) by restoring the old IP address and setting up the HTACESS file to redirect all to www. It is a couple weeks later and my traffic is still in the dumps. On WMT instead of getting traffic from 10,000 keywords I'm getting it only from 2k. Is my site the victim of some penalty (I have heard of sandbox) or is my site simply just lower in traffic due to the new algorithm (I checked analytics data to find that traffic only in the US is cut by 50%, it is the same outside the US) Could someone please tell me what is going on?
Algorithm Updates | | askthetrainer0 -
Is there a cost per acuqistion figure I can quote that if I hire an agency to link build that we can guarantee a level of increased traffic from Google?
I am looking to justify to a pubilsher the cost outlay to hire an agency to do white hat link building for me as we do not have time. (the site is fully optimised but we lack the inbound links our competitors have) - is there a way I can explain in terms of numbers ie page impressions that if we build for eg 10k high quality anchor text links into our site we will get x thousand more page impressions as our rankings in the search engines will increase? Just need a justification before the budget is allocated.
Link Building | | Pday0 -
Duplicate content issue with dynamically generated url
Hi, For those who have followed my previous question, I have a similar one regarding dynamically generated urls. From this page http://www.selectcaribbean.com/listing.html the user can make a selection according to various criteria. 6 results are presented and then the user can go to the next page. I know I should probably rewrite url's such as these: http://www.selectcaribbean.com/listing.html?pageNo=1&selType=&selCity=&selPrice=&selBeds=&selTrad=&selMod=&selOcean= but since all the results presented are basically generated on the fly for the convenience of the user, I am afraid google my consider this as an attempt to generate more pages as there are pages for each individual listing. What is my solution for this? Nofollow these pages? Block them thru robots txt?
On-Page Optimization | | multilang0 -
Duplicate content question with PDF
Hi, I manage a property listing website which was recently revamped, but which has some on-site optimization weaknesses and issues. For each property listing like http://www.selectcaribbean.com/property/147.html there is an equivalent PDF version spidered by google. The page looks like this http://www.selectcaribbean.com/pdf1.php?pid=147 my question is: Can this create a duplicate content penalty? If yes, should I ban these pages from being spidered by google in the robots.txt or should I make these link nofollow?
Technical SEO | | multilang0 -
Google replacing subpages in index with home page?
Hi! I run a backlink building company. Recently, we had a customer who had us build targeted backlinks to certain subpages on his site. Then something really bizarre happened...all of a sudden, their subpages that were indexed in Google (the ones we were building links to) disappeared from the index, to be replaced with their home page. They haven't lost their rank, per se--it's just now their home page instead of their subpages. At this point, we are tracking literally thousands of keywords for our link building customers, and we've never run into this issue before. Have you ever run into it? If so, what's the best way to handle it from an SEO company perspective? They have a sitemap.xml and their GWT account reports no crawl errors, so it doesn't seem to be a site issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ownlocal0 -
Google webmaster tools data update frequency?
What is the lag time for changes to a site to be reflected in Google webmaster tools Diagnostics section? They pointed out some duplicate titles which I fixed a week ago and yet they still show up as an HTML Suggestion. What has your experience been with making changes and then seeing them reflected in the HTML Suggestions section? My site is crawled every day, including the pages I have updated with new titles. Seems like it takes a while for the data to trickle into Webmaster tools, no?
On-Page Optimization | | scanlin0 -
If non-paying customers only get a 2 min snippet of a video, can my video length in sitemap.xml be the full length?
I am working on a website that all of its primary contents are videos. They have an assortment of free videos, but the majority or viewable only with a subscription to the site. If you don't have a subscription, you can see a 2 min video clip of the contents of the video. But all the videos can be anywhere from 10min to 1.5 hours. When I am auto-generating the sitemap.xml, can I put the full length of the videos for paying members in the XML in the video:duration property? Or because publicly only 2 minutes is available (unless you pay for a membership) is that frowned upon?
Technical SEO | | nbyloff0 -
Is there any correlation between the on-page factors being complete in moz and having a good quality score in Adwords?
I've been optimizing the website for a few keywords we're targeting and I'm looking to improve the quality score for my Adwords landing pages. My on-page scoring is great, but my scores in Adwords are low. Ideas?
Paid Search Marketing | | Bombbomb0 -
Are asp redirects permanent?
I need to redirect a windows-hosted domain with permanent (301) redirects so as to preserve most of the link juice. I would be using asp page-level redirects, as there are only about 50 relevant pages. Are these as effective as linux-based 301 redirects in conserving link juice?
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Should I be optimizing for Keywords that we already rank for?
When selecting which Keywords to optimize for, should I choose all words that I want us to move up for? Like that my company appears ranked for 5, 10, 42, 44, etc.? Or should I select a mix of some that rank well (top 1-2 pgs in Google) /rank near pg 5/ and some that aren't showing up in the top 50 yet? I don't want to waste my time optimizing for words I don't need to. Thanks!
Keyword Research | | aircyclemegan0 -
Removed listings: 404, internal links or redirect?
For a classifieds web site with medium/high turnover for the various listings: How would you deal with pages of removed listings? a) would you be "honest" and return a 404 since the listing is not available anymore? b) would you maintain historical data about deleted listings so that you can try and 301 redirect to a relevant search results page? c) would you keep the page alive (maybe add a noindex meta tag?) and show links to multiple relevant search results pages in an effort to strengthen internal linking?
On-Page Optimization | | seo-cat0 -
Best way to display maintenence mode on a website?
I have a website with lots of traffic and sometimes the backends fail. I want to use lighttpd to show that the website is under mantenence and should be back up shortly. I was thinking of using Soft 503 errors or doing a 302 for every page to /maintenance.html. What would you do (besides fixing the backends, we are already doing that :P) to avoid hurting your SEO efforts? Thanks in advance Mariano
Technical SEO | | marianoSoler980 -
Should I follow a key competitor onto business.com?
A key competitor of mine has just purchased a link on business.com, my question is should I follow them in? We’re close in terms of Domain Authority and little things can make the difference in our case. Also does the farmer update (which is yet to hit the UK) influenced your answer? As we’re yet to see the effect of this update should I exercise caution?
Link Building | | RodneyRiley0 -
Nich phrase ranking
I'm trying to get a page ranked for a niche phrase. There are a few established players in the industry but no competition for this phrase beyond that. Open site explorer reports that main competitor for the phrase this page points to has 538 links but they are all internal with no extermal links. DA is 45 and PA is 25 My client has25 links for the phrase this page points to from 10 unique external domains in addition to internal links. Domain is only 3 months old. DA is 20 and PA is 30. Right now I'm buried in back pages and feel I should be higher. Should my strategy be to build trust and authority or concentrate on more keyword specific links?
Link Building | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Facebook comments and seo
hi everyone i wondered if googlebot explores facebook comments and if not, what are the seo benefits of facebook comments module? As you can see below, techcrunch has added facebook comments in pages http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/04/facebook-iphone-event-check-ins So is it useful for SEO purposes?
Social Media | | FranckNlemba0 -
Tool for scanning the content of the canonical tag
Hey All, question for you. What is your favorite tool/method for scanning a website for specific tags? Specifically (as my situation dictates now) for canonical tags? I am looking for a tool that is flexible, hopefully free, and highly customizable (for instance, you can specify the tag to look for). I like the concept of using google docs with the import xml feature but as you can only use 50 of those commands at a time it is very limiting (http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/how-to-build-agile-seo-tools-using-google-docs/). I do have a campaign set up using the tools which is great! but I need something that returns a response faster and can get data from more than 10,000 links. Our cms unfortunately puts out some odd canonical tags depending on how a page is rendered and I am trying to catch them quickly before it gets indexed and causes problems. Eventually I would also like to be able to scan for other specific tags, hence the customizable concern. If we have to write a vb script to get it into excel I suppose we can do that. Cheers, Josh
Moz Pro | | prima-2535090 -
How many links to aquire from one IP until penalty?
My client has a small site with about 340 links pointing to it. About 60 of them stem from one domain, a directory listing that posts new entries on almost every single site of their domain. My question now is: This obviously isn't a really clever link profile. But I can live with that as long as it doesn't HURT rankings or attracts some kind of penalty. Is there a rule of thumb how many (maybe percentage) links can safely stem from one domain without getting penalized?
Link Building | | jfkorn0 -
The effect of same IP addresses on SERPs
Hi All, Just wondering if anyone could shed some light on the following. If I was ranking number 1 for a term, what would the effects be of creating another site, hosted on the same server / IP, same whois info, same URL but a different TLD, and trying to get this to rank for the term also. Does G restrict search results to one IP per page or is this perfectly possible? (The term is fairly uncompetitive) Thanks, Ben
Technical SEO | | Audiohype0 -
How to implement 503 status?
Hello, I want to know how to implement 503 status for a website hosted on Windows server? Will this code trigger automatically as per some specific condition or is it done manually? THanks & Regards
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
HTML5 and using multiple H1 tags
Hi All, Our dev team have just asked me a very interesting question........ Within the context of an HTML5 page, where it is supported and encouraged to use multiple H1 tags, will the use of multiple H1 tags be detrimental to SEO? or does Google fully understand how HTML5 works and therefore not penalise a website for using multiple H1 tags? I have an opinion on this that if it helps usability and user experience then it is likely that it will be good for SEO. It would be really good to hear views of people who have tried this or have decided against it! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | A_Q0 -
How to index our dynamic Servlets to profit from inbound Links?
We have several dynamic Servlets on our Website which help Users to calculate Mortgages: Example: http://www.interhyp.de/interhyp/servlet/interhyp?view=showKaufMietSchieber&STYLE=b2c&alttrackwidth=546 Until now these Servlets are blocked via robots.txt to avoid "stange results being in the Googleindex". Problem / Question: These Servlets are used from lots of external Affiliate Websites, and i like to know how to optimize these inbound Links? Thx.
Technical SEO | | BerndAngermann
Manuel0 -
Keyword Variations?
Hi, can anybody tell me if it is useful to optimize the following keyword in all 3 Versions?
Keyword Research | | mbase22
As I know google separates the 2 words as if using a hyphen - so it would be the same as if just using a space between the words.
But if you search for the different Versions in google there are different SERPS for every of this versions? Not many users will search using a hyphen between the words I guess - butt I saw some few keywords tipped in with hyphen in my google analytics report. And I want to be on top 😉 Piloten Ausbildung Piloten-Ausbildung Pilotenausbildung thx!0 -
How do I put something below description in the SERPs of Google?
How do I put something below description, the search box within the website, and map in SERPs of Google? For example, when I enter ‘mit’ as the keyword in Google, the description of MIT is shown more. Many thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | OSO0
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.