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!
-
Dealing with hundreds of spam pages caused by a hacker
A couple of my sites have recently been hacked with the hacker managing to overwrite lots of my pages with their own spam products and also adding in lots of (hundreds) pages that they have created themselves. I have rectified this in so far as removing folders that the hacker used to over write my pages so my original pages are now back showing the correct content and also removed all the hundres of new pages that they had managed to instantly add. I appreciate that google will find and re-crawl all my genuine pages so the correct content is being displayed and indexed for them but what is the best method for dealing with the hundreds of extra spam ages that google had managed to crawl but have now been deleted so there are loads of 404 page not founds in google?
Technical SEO | | Wardy0 -
A tool for seeing all the keywords a website ranks for
As title, is there a tool out there that will allow you to see all the keywords a website ranks for in the first few pages of a particlur search engine? I would be particularly interested for keywords in the first 10 pages of Google. Thanks
Moz Pro | | blagger0 -
Internal Linking: Site-wide VS Content Links
I just watched this video in which Matt Cutts talks about the ancient 100 links per page limit. I often encounter websites which have massive navigation (elaborate main menu, side bar, footer, superfooter...etc) in addition to content area based links. My question is do you think Google passes votes (PageRank and anchor text) differently from template links such as navigation to the ones in the content area, if so have you done any testing to confirm?
Technical SEO | | Dan-Petrovic0 -
Xenu Alternative for Large Sites
We're launching a new site and we're trying to crawl it to check for any problems. It's millions of pages and Xenu seems to start encountering errors as the numbers mount past 500,000. Does anyone know of an alternative, free or paid, that could handle the size better?
Technical SEO | | eLocalusa0 -
Facebook Campaign?
I would like to give away 10 tickets to a local event and if people want to participate they have to like us and share the post on their wall. Everything happens from my website but i don't know how to track the people who have shared the post. Anyone knows how to do this? Would be greatly appreciated!
Social Media | | ldestrooper0 -
MyBlogGuest+Wordpress+Onlywire = viable semi automatic blogging?
Do you guys recommend I pursue this combination? I want a semi-automatic (spend a few minutes a day picking interesting blog articles) blog and to automate its promotion. Is there anything else I could be doing? Also this combination doesn't seem to post to facebook pages well. I'd like to also add buttons to like/tweet/ etc, right on the blog. What are some best practices for this?
Social Media | | ilyaelbert0 -
How to set cannonical link rel to CS CART
I whant to specify a link rel cannonical for each category page, how to do that without changing the code (just from admin section), because filters and sorting search are making the site dublicate content with their parameters; If there is a way please specify the method, i whant to avoid hours of working in a script like this. Thank's.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oneticsoft0 -
Simple Press forum for wordpress
I'm using a forum plugin called Simple Press, and the rest of my site is looking good with only a few minor errors due to a long url. Anyway, the only 4 major errors I have are these; These 3 links have no titles, so is there somewhere I can give them titles, or do a rel=nofollow? /index.php?sf_ahah=acknowledge /index.php?sf_ahah=permissions /index.php?sf_ahah=tags And then the 3 above plus this one; http://www.societyforethicsand…..?xfeed=all Have no META DESCRIPTION associated with them. So, is there somewhere I can add the meta description for all 4? I have spoken to support, and it turns out the first 3 links with no titles are ajax content for pop ups, instead of waiting for them to work out how to resolve this issue, does anyone know how to stop them coming up as major errors?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CosmikCarrot0 -
Good badges?
Hi mozzers, As dissussed last friday at the London Linkbuilding seminar, badges are still working like a charm. I am having some of my designers work on some now (have been in the pipeline for months, but conferences are so good at shifting priorities) and are looking for some examples on good badges. The badges will be an award for other websites. Thanks, Thomas
Link Building | | ThomasHgenhaven0 -
Building Widgets...
Hi all, For a project I'm working on there will be an opportunity to have a number of websites link back to our main site. Rather than giving out a straight forward link text I'm more interested in building and handing out some kind of widget which is topical to both us and the websites giving us links. Although I do a fair bit of web development with various technologies I have never played around with building widgets as such which can pull in data feeds from our database etc... Does anyone have any good recommendations of tutorials covering this area or alternatively any companies offering this kind of widget building service. Thanks in advance, Darren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DarrenAtkinson0 -
Give your opinion about our keyword strategy
This is our idea on how to create pages. Please give us your opinion on this way of targeting keywords. Meta Title Tickets [destination] | Tickets.nl | Flights [destination] Meta description Book your ticket to [destination] online and find the cheapest tickets in just a few clicks… H1: Tickets [destination] H2: Cheap ticket to [destination] – city of … Image Tekst with focus on tickets + destination and ticket + destination City guides general information, More information city guide
On-Page Optimization | | vliegticketsnl
introduction Short snippets of content. More information city guide
Short snippets of content. Additional tekst on flights + destination.0 -
My client has shown me a similar site, though not a competitor. He wants to know what sites they are linked from that give them such a good Google rank for certain kewords. Can SEOMoz tell me this?
When using google.com.au and searching for "travel to france", www.frenchtravel.com.au is the 3rd organic result. (the 1st two are not travel businesses, they are non profit travel guides) My client, who runs www.visituk.com.au, an Australian site that organises tours of the UK, said "so we just need to add these sort of words to the site?" I said, yes, but it doesn't end there. The real task is to have a link to your site on other sites surrounded with the words "travel" and "UK". He asked if he could see a list of the sites the french site was being referred by relevant to the search phrase. Is there an SEOmoz tool for this? Or is there another way I can generate that list? Thanks Simon
Competitive Research | | electrik0 -
Internal linking
I 'am using a seo component (sh404sef) for a joomla website, for the time being, any internal linking is organized. I've been said the sitelinkx is not advised (a component dedicated to build internal links) with sh404sef... How could i manage to set it up fastly ? Tks a lot..
Link Building | | mozllo0 -
Listing in Local search
Hi, Are several listing in google places allowed ? I've got 1 address but with 3 differents services with 1 website for each activity . Tks a lot..
Image & Video Optimization | | mozllo0 -
Seo impact for template change
Hi, If you change a template (wordpress, joomla cms..) without changing information organization..(urls..) Does this can have an impact on your serp ? Tks a lot ...
Technical SEO | | mozllo0 -
Content Focus
I have a particular Page which shows primary contact details as well as "additional" contact details for the client. GIven I do not believe I want Google to misinterpret the focus of the page from the primary contact details which of the following three options would be best? Place the "additional" contact details (w/maps) in Javascript, Ajax or similar to suppress them from being crawled. Leave "additional" contact details alone but emphasize the Primary contact details by placing the Primary contact details in Rich Snippets/Microformats. Do nothing and allow Google to Crawl the pages with all contact details Thanks, Phil
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AU-SEO0 -
Expired traffic and 301 value
Hi Folks, Here is our situation we have an old brand domain www.asia-hotels.com >> that was redirecting to>>www.asiahotels.com By mistake, we let that domain expired and only noticed the drop a month later We lost all our pages and this for several weeks Not sure of the exact date but approximately around 24th of December, what a merry Xmas! 😞 Since then we have repurchased the domain, Put back all the pages as they were and re-instated all the 301 redirect as they were. Since that date we haven't seen any uplift in our visits or visibility score. Did we do something wrong with our 301 redirect? I know for sure we used ISAPI rewrite mod for the non www. domain although I am not entirely sure how the www. version has been handled. Is there something we should do at a DNS level to flag the site is back? Should we presetn a reconsideration request? Any help would be greatly welcomed. Thanks for your help. Cheers, Freddy More info I placed a bit more info and the visits graph on my blog: http://www.inmarketingwetrust.com.au/seo-effect-of-domain-expiry-on-301-redirects/ I am not sure if this is due to the fact that some information is cached but when i looked at the site on opensiteexplorer I found that the data is still showing as non redirected sites: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/asia-hotels.com/www.asia-hotels.com/a!comparison effect-of-301-redirect-expired-on-SERP-visibility-300x204.jpg
Technical SEO | | Gus_Martin0 -
301 Redirect vs Domain Alias
We have hundreds of domains which are either alternate spelling of our primary domain or close keyword names we didn't want our competitor to get before us. The primary domain is running on a dedicated Windows server running IIS6 and set to a static IP. Since it is a static IP and not using host headers any domain pointed to the static IP will immediately show the contents of the site, however the domain will be whatever was typed. Which could be the primary domain or an alias. Two concerns. First, is it possible that Google would penalize us for the alias domains or dilute our primary domain "juice"? Second, we need to properly track traffic from the alias domains. We could make unique content for those performing well and sell or let expire those that are sending no traffic. It's not my goal to use the alias domains to artificially pump up our primary domain. We have them for spelling errors and direct traffic. What is the best practice for handling one or both of these issues?
Technical SEO | | briankb0 -
Www.text-link-ads.com, worth the trouble?
Has anyone used http://www.text-link-ads.com for link building. It is a service I've been reading a fair deal about and I was hoping to hear everyone's opinion on it.
Link Building | | calin_daniel0 -
URL question
Hi guys, the pro campaign thing you got going is wicked, love it. I'm recieving good results with my keywords and have noticed that categories that go beyond sub/sub/sub don't do to well. So I wanna move those that do one step up which makes it go from: http://spytunes.com/practice-guitar/advanced-routine/scales/aeolian to here http://spytunes.com/practice-guitar/advanced-routine/aeolian The existing menu system that follow all these categories across the site will soon go so it won't be a user friendly problem, I will have other type of menus. But, and here is the question: Would I greatly benefit from taking the non existent menu away and just go for: http://spytunes.com/practice-guitar/aeolian while i'm at it? Or do I stick with my current structure? I guess my real question is; how much is there to flat URLs? Cheers -dan lundholm spytunes.com
On-Page Optimization | | spytunes0 -
Government Sites Cluttering Results?
Hi Guys, Have you ever come across government sites that are cluttering up SERP's that you're trying to rank for? For a new site that I'm working on one of the keyword terms is "driving test cancellations" and is in the UK. 3 of the top 4 results are government related sites which have verry little (if not nothing) to do with the keywords. Whilst these government sites are (very) loosley related to the keyword terms, and understandably have high pa/da, what would be the best way to try and rrank higher than these sites. I'm in the process of building links and social profiles - I'm really just wondering if there's something I'm missing that is an "easy fix" for jumping ahead of these sites - or getting them removed due to their lack of relevence. Gary...
Competitive Research | | perfectweb0 -
Can someone please help me identify where all these URLS to my homepage are coming from?
Hi. I installed the SEOmoz toolbar for Firefox, and analyzed my home page, then clicked on 'get a full site analysis at Site Explorer'. This is what came up: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.frs-solutions.com%252Fcontent%252Fhome/a!links?src=mb I hope that link works. If not, the URL is www.frs-solutions.com Anyway, there are about 57 different URLS within my site all pointing to my homepage! I have no idea where they are coming from. Can someone with an experienced eye take a quick look and tell me what I might be up against? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | aprilm-1890400 -
Do search engines understand special/foreign characters?
We carry a few brands that have special foreign characters, e.g., Kühl, Lolë, but do search engines recognize special unicode characters? Obviously we would want to spend more energy optimizing keywords that potential customers can type with a keyboard, but is it worthwhile to throw in some encoded keywords and anchor text for people that copy-paste these words into a search? Do search engines typically equate special characters to their closest English equivalent, or are "Kuhl", "Kühl" and "Kühl" three entirely different terms?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TahoeMountain400 -
404 help
Hello all, firstly let me apologize if this is the wrong place to ask this question. I have a site www.promptresponseaccidentmanagement.com which gets a 200ok when checked for crawl issues, however pages such as /whiplash-injury-compensation-claims.php , /road-traffic-accident-compensation-claims.php and quite a few more return a 404. That's fine (usually) as I can quite happily fix that most of the time. However if you actually go to those pages in your browser, or click through to them on any part of the site you will see that they are in fact not redirecting to a 404 and everything is fine!? Any body got any ideas? Best H
Technical SEO | | haydyn0 -
By paying you guys...?
By paying you guys each month will you be making my website more visible and accessible or will you only point out the mistakes I should fix?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vacksah0 -
Hosting a Niche Directory on your Site
I'm keen to hear feedback from anyone who has installed a directory onto their e-commerce site. By directory, I mean that - subject to human review and possibly a small fee - a relevant site owner in my niche can create a listing that is effectively a page on my site where they control the main content, links & images.
Affiliate Marketing | | jdeb
People using our site would enter the directory section from our resources / advice top level category and browse the index of the directory to reach a listed site's dedicated page. The idea for it came up when we were discussing ways to get more backlinks. Offering people a whole page directory listing seems like a good way of negotiating a link in return that isn't just from the other site's link page. I'm looking for everyone's stories on this: your reasons for doing it, how you went about it and the tools you used and what your results where, in particular: was it worth it? We aren't thinking about starting a new site for the directory, it would be added onto our main site (which is old and has good PR etc etc). However, it would still be good to hear from both sides of the fence on that issue. Over to you. J0 -
What is the typical response rate and success rate for email link requests?
What is considered the normal response rate and success rate of acquiring a link through email link requests?
Link Building | | SparkplugDigital0 -
Does changing nameservers negatively impact SEO?
Had to redirect the nameservers to the hosting account in order for the domain email addresses to work. Since then, search results have dropped from the first page to second and much lower with the same keywords. Does that make sense? Another change was redirecting approx 10 parked domains to the main site, was that a mistake?
Technical SEO | | reeljerc0 -
Hiding Page Titles By Display None
Hi. I am new to this community, and new to SEO as well. A friend asked me to give them suggestions on onsite optimization for their Drupal website. I know page titles are very important, and usually they should be set to H1. (At least I think) This particular website has all their page titles set to H2 and they are using display:none in their stylesheet to hide them for graphic design reasons. What would be the most practical work around for this? We don't want this to appear sketchy in the eyes of the SE's, but putting page titles at the top of their pages really would take away from their graphical design. The second issue is that they use a module called Quicktabs for tabbed product specs on each page. Each tab is actually pulled from a post (called a node in Drupal), so each tab has it's own title that is an H2. So not only are they hiding the main page title, but they are hiding 5 others within the tabs, and their are 6 H2 elements showing up on each product page all set to display:none. Any creative suggestions? Hope that makes sense.... Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | aprilm-1890400 -
Google not using <title>for SERP?</title>
Today I noticed that Google is not using my title tag for one of my pages. Search for "covered call search" Look at organic result 6: Search - Covered Calls Covered call screener filters 150000 options instantly to find the best high yield covered calls that meet your custom criteria. Free newsletter.<cite>https://www.borntosell.com/search</cite> - CachedNow, if you click through to that page you see the meta title tag is:Covered Call ScreenerEven the cached version shows the title tag as Covered Call ScreenerI am not logged in, so I don't believe personalization has anything to do with it.Have others seen this before?It is possible that "search - covered calls" was the title tag 9 months ago (before I understood SEO); I honestly don't remember. I cleaned all my titles up at least 6 months ago.Can I force Google to re-index the page? Its content has changed a few times in the last few months, and Google crawls my site frequently according to webmaster tools.
Technical SEO | | scanlin0 -
What are the most valuable links a new website can get?
When you are starting an SEO project for a new website (or an old one with few or worthless links) where to you start? What are your basic "get the link building started" link sources?
Link Building | | DGSEO0 -
Content below the fold and Panda Update
Hi I was at the linklove conference and I heard some worrying stories about the way content is formatted on a page being a factor in ehow has avoided being slapped. It was the first time I had heard the expression "below the fold..." I am producing some very sexy SERP's results and other sexier metrics are up too but I am concerened that thefurnituremarket.co.uk has a ton of images on the home page and the nice content is below all of them.. firstly is this content..."below the fold"? secondly I know the site is old but do you think when this panda update hits the UK... were will be penalised for the look of the site.. I know there was talk yesterday at the conference of coming up woth a tool to check this out... my gut says that this will be a factor... sooner rather than later hence I am looking at magento and how we can skin it to look nice and present products better.. I would be really interested to know what exactly is "below the fold" on the furnituremarket.co.uk and some thoughts on the whole ehow formatting issue..
Algorithm Updates | | robertrRSwalters0 -
Robots.txt
My campaign hse24 (www.hse24.de) is not being crawled any more ... Do you think this can be a problem of the robots.txt? I always thought that Google and friends are interpretating the file correct, seen that he site was crawled since last week. Thanks a lot Bernd NB: Here is the robots.txt: User-Agent: * Disallow: / User-agent: Googlebot User-agent: Googlebot-Image User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile User-agent: MSNBot User-agent: Slurp User-agent: yahoo-mmcrawler User-agent: psbot Disallow: /is-bin/ Allow: /is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/HSE24-DE-Site/de_DE/-/EUR/hse24_Storefront-Start Allow: /is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/HSE24-AT-Site/de_DE/-/EUR/hse24_Storefront-Start Allow: /is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/HSE24-CH-Site/de_DE/-/CHF/hse24_Storefront-Start Allow: /is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/HSE24-DE-Site/de_DE/-/EUR/hse24_DisplayProductInformation-Start Allow: /is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/HSE24-AT-Site/de_DE/-/EUR/hse24_DisplayProductInformation-Start Allow: /is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/HSE24-CH-Site/de_DE/-/CHF/hse24_DisplayProductInformation-Start Allow: /is-bin/intershop.static/WFS/HSE24-Site/-/Editions/ Allow: /is-bin/intershop.static/WFS/HSE24-Site/-/Editions/Root%20Edition/units/HSE24/Beratung/
Technical SEO | | remino630 -
Building Links to Exact Match Domains
What are the pros and cons having exact match domain and how can you create a brand name and build backlinks? Say we have a domain personalizedbirthdaygifts.com We are quite stuck with what anchor text we need to use and how do we vary it? I've heard that we have to stay away from using commercial keywords as anchor text heavily. We have to also use our brand name. And here we get stuck as we don't have a brand name. In this case Our brand name should be personalized birthday gifts but this is also commercial keyword. I have seen before similar websites droped from ranking because they have commercial keywords in their domain and most of their backlink anchor texts are commercial. If I had a website called twentyfive.com selling birthday gifts it would be a lot easier. But when you have a website personalizedbirthdaygifts.com and trying to rank for personalized birthday gifts and birthday gifts it's tough. OR isn't it? I hope I explained it well and didn't confuse anybody... Thanks
Link Building | | Jvalops0 -
Can I have a strong brand category page and a strong product page?
It seems Google base and other Comparison Shopping Engines like to see the brand in the product name. But, on my category page for that brand, website optimizer tells me including the brand name with each product is cannabilizes links. For example; I have a page for jewelerABC with 20 pieces of jewelry listed as well as original content about jewelerABC. I do not currently name these products as xyz by jewelerABC. This page comes up nicely in the serps. But in Google base The top listings for jewelry by jewelerABC seem to have every product named xyz by jewelerABC or JewelerABC xyzs. What is the best way to optimize.for both? Stephen
On-Page Optimization | | stephenfishman0 -
ROI in Social Media Optimization
Could you please explain the link values to be earned through Social Media Optimization?
Social Media | | gmk15670 -
One Website - Local + National Ranking
If a client (e.g. a winery) wants to rank both nationally and locally, what are some best practices for doing this on one Website? So the goal is to: Rank nationally for their wines, wine varietals, etc.so they're found by restaurants, distributors, customers (could include national directories, content creation ,etc.) Rank locally for their tasting room and wines for people looking locally or looking at that specific region (this could also include include Google places, local directories, etc.). I'm wondering if the site would need to be subdivided (or "siloed") where one section is heavily focused on national and another is on regional? Also, for the home page, which focus would be most important (maybe national because it's harder)? Thanks a for any ideas! Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DirectionSEO0 -
Sitemap question
My sitemap includes www.example.com and www.example.com/index.html, they are both the same page, will this have any negative effects, or can I remove the www.example.com/index.html?
Technical SEO | | Aftermath_SEO0 -
Value of PDF's in SEO
I have a client who has a lot of information in PDF form. They think they should move some of it over into HTML pages so it indexes better. Is there a benefit to converting these PDF's into HTML pages? It seems to me that HTML pages would be good, IF they are relevant pages that could be used online.
On-Page Optimization | | lvstrickland0 -
Not making a change of the 100's in crawl Diagnostic
Based on the PRO crawl Diagnostics – if we don’t make a change on 1 page, does that just affect the SEO on that one page, or does it affect the SEO on all pages of the site? E.g. If we get a “Too many on page links” for a certain page that we don’t really want to rank for – does not fixing that particlaur page affect the site as a whole? Hope I explained this ok..
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0 -
Rel=Canonical URLs?
If I had two pages: PageA about Cats PageB about Dogs If PageA had a link rel=canonical to PageB, but the content is different, how would Google resolve this and what would users see if they searched "Cats" or "Dogs?" If PageA 301 redirected to PageB, (no content in PageA since it's 301 redirected), how would Google resolve this and what would users see if they searched "Cats" or "Dogs?"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | visionnexus0 -
Track Google/Bing Shopping as Referrer
Is there a way to track Google & Bing Shopping referrals independent of standard Google/Bing tracking? It would be nice if we could see the difference between Google PPC, Google Organic & Google Shopping. I notice in analytics that we get some traffic from google/ppc, some from google/organic, some from google.com/referral (not sure what this is), and some from googlebase/cse (I know this is Google shopping, but I don't think it's tracking all shopping referral visits as this).
Reporting & Analytics | | JerDoggMckoy0 -
SEO friendly way to move a wordpress installation
Hi Mozzers I am working with a client who currently has 2 wordpress installations on their site - one is in the root domain and one is in a subdirectory /hub which is where the majority of their content is. They want to move all of their content over from the /hub directory into the root installation. Any ideas of the most SEO friendly way to do this? Thanks for any suggestions.
Technical SEO | | beva0
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.