Skip to content

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

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!


  • How does the community feel about Free Mass Traffic Software? Is this a scam or what?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | noork
    0

  • hi, I have to "refurbish" a website from scratch. This domain is quite old (2004) and has got a good audience. 1/ Is there a tip or a tool to guess with witch kind of framework (cms) is it  made from ? I mean drupal, joomla, ezpublish, wordpress ..as i can't see it from code source. 2/ Have you got any method to migrate the old database (seems to be iis with asp language)  into a new one  (i work with php mysql) ? 3/ In order not to loose rankings in Serp, is there a tool to list the main urls with best link juice ? I will then  redirect them with a 301 redirection in an .htaccess file. Many thanks..

    Moz Pro | | mozllo
    0

  • Hey Mozzers- I have a tricky situation with one of my clients. They're a reputable organization and have been mentioned in several major news articles. They want to create a Press page on their site with links to each article, but they want viewers to remain within the site and not be redirected to the press sites themselves. The other issue is some of the articles have been removed from the original press sites where they were first posted. I want to avoid duplicate content issues, but I don't see how to repost the articles within the client's site. I figure I have 3 options: 1. create PDFs (w/SEO-friendly URLs) with the articles embedded in them that open in a new window. 2. Post an image with screenshot of article on a unique URL w/brief content. 3. Copy and paste the article to a unique URL. If anyone has experience with this issue or any suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it. Jaime Brown

    Technical SEO | | JamesBSEO
    0

  • We recently put in permanent redirects to our new url, but Google seems to not want to index the new url. There was no problems with the old url and the new url is brand new so should have no 'black marks' against it. We have done everything we can think off in terms of submitting site maps, telling google our url has changed in webmaster tools, mentioning the new url on social sites etc...but still nothing. It has been over 4 weeks now since we set up the redirects to the url, any ideas why Google seems to be choosing not to index it? Thanks

    Technical SEO | | cewe
    0

  • Hello We are just now starting up a niche site that will be the new home for a large group of products from an old site. Apart from straight up informative text links, we have set up 301 redirects for the 100 most important products from the old to the new site. Right now, we are in a transition period where we openly tell our visitors that we have a new site for this certain group of products. My question is: for how long should we keep the products on the old site? Can we remove them straight away, since our intentions of the 301 redirects is to preserve the serp positions for the most important products? Does it matter to google if we let the products remain on the old site for a while? Regards
    Oskar

    Technical SEO | | jsigwid
    0

  • I catched a dropped domain with a nice keyword, but poor reputation. It used to have some malware on the site and WOT (site review tool available at Chrome among others) has very negative reviews tied to the site. I guess that Google has to have records about that as well, because Chrome used to prompt a warning when I entered the site. My question is: how long will the bad reputation last if I build a legitimate website there?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zapalka
    0

  • I run a quality vertical search engine. About 6 months ago we had a problem with our sitemaps, which resulted in most of our pages getting tossed out of Google's index. As part of the response, we put a bunch of robots.txt restrictions in place in our search results to prevent Google from crawling through pagination links and other parameter based variants of our results (sort order, etc). The idea was to 'preserve crawl budget' in order to speed the rate at which Google could get our millions of pages back in the index by focusing attention/resources on the right pages. The pages are back in the index now (and have been for a while), and the restrictions have stayed in place since that time. But, in doing a little SEOMoz reading this morning, I came to wonder whether that approach may now be harming us... http://www.seomoz.org/blog/restricting-robot-access-for-improved-seo
    http://www.seomoz.org/blog/serious-robotstxt-misuse-high-impact-solutions Specifically, I'm concerned that a) we're blocking the flow of link juice and that b) by preventing Google from crawling the full depth of our search results (i.e. pages >1), we may be making our site wrongfully look 'thin'. With respect to b), we've been hit by Panda and have been implementing plenty of changes to improve engagement, eliminate inadvertently low quality pages, etc, but we have yet to find 'the fix'... Thoughts? Kurus

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kurus
    0

  • When being trashed by a less than white competitor what do you find most effective: lie down with your feet in the air considering a career in gardening? turn grey yourself? rat on them to Google? Phil

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Phil_
    1

  • We're looking for a company that can help us optimize our google product feed.  Does anyone have any recommendations or suggestions? Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eric_since1910.com
    0

  • Posting this for Dave SottimanoI Here's the scenario: You've got a set of URLs indexed by Google, and you want them out quickly Once you've managed to remove them, you want to block Googlebot from crawling them again - for whatever reason. Below is a sample of the URLs you want blocked, but you only want to block /beerbottles/ and anything past it: www.example.com/beers/brandofbeer/beerbottles/1 www.example.com/beers/brandofbeer/beerbottles/2 www.example.com/beers/brandofbeer/beerbottles/3 etc.. To remove the pages from the index should you?: Add the Meta=noindex,follow tag to each URL you want de-indexed Use GWT to help remove the pages Wait for Google to crawl again If that's successful, to block Googlebot from crawling again - should you?: Add this line to Robots.txt: DISALLOW */beerbottles/ Or add this line: DISALLOW: /beerbottles/ "To add the * or not to add the *, that is the question" Thanks! Dave

    Technical SEO | | goodnewscowboy
    0

  • I'm wondering about one of our web-projects. There's a lot of good interesting content but the  statistics of page impressions don't make me very happy. Each user is visiting just 1,5 sites per visit. That's really not much. We have other (similar) projects where this problem does not exist, where user are visiting a lot more sites per visit. I have no idea what could be the reason for it. Do you know / use some tricks to get more page impressions? Thank you, Sally

    Search Behavior | | SallyO
    0

  • Hi guys The widely followed SEO best practice is that 301 redirects should be used instead of 302 redirects when it is a permanent redirect that is required. Matt Cutts said last year that 302 redirects should "only" be used for temporary redirects. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-interview-googles-matt-cutts-on-redirects-trust-more For a site that I am looking at the SEO Moz Crawll Diagnostics tool lists as an issue that the URL /  redirects to www.abc.com/Pages/default.aspx with a 302 redirect. On further searching I found that on a Google Support forum (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=276539078ba67f48&hl=en) that a Google Employee had said "For what it's worth, a 302 redirect is the correct redirect from a root URL to a detail page (such as from "/" to "/sites/bursa/"). This is one of the few situations where a 302 redirect is preferred over a 301 redirect." Can anyone confirm if it is the case that "a 302 redirect is the correct redirect from a root URL to a detail page"? And if so why as I haven't found an explanation. If it is the correct best practice then should redirects of this nature be removed from displaying as issues in the SEO Moz Crawll Diagnostics tool Thanks for your help

    Technical SEO | | CPU
    0

  • I can't seem to easily find this answer anywhere (even in the Google Places FAQ page), so thought I'd stop digging around and simply ask it here: What are the meanings behind the icons to the right of the link and to the left of the "place page" link in Google's local search results? I see a checkmark/question mark in a circle, then a bar chart with various levels filled in, then a dollar sign in a circle, then a magnifying glass. 1. What are these telling me, as a searcher? 2. What are they telling the owner of the business? Thank you for your help; I just can't seem to find a reference for this...

    Image & Video Optimization | | keethgee
    0

  • Hi all, I'm considering creating a dynamic table on my site that highlights rows / columns and cells depending on buttons that users can click.  Each cell in the table links to a separate page that is created dynamically pulling information from a database. Now I'm aware of the google guidelines: "If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few." So we wondered whether we could put the dynamic pages in our sitemap so that google could index them - the pages can be seen with javascript off which is how the pages are manipulated to make them dynamic. Could anyone give us a overview of the dangers here? I also wondered if you still need to separate content from code on a page? My developer still seems very keen to use inline CSS and javascript! Thanks a bundle.

    Web Design | | tgraham
    0

  • Given a choice, for your #1 keyword, would you pick a .com with one or two hypens? (chicago-real-estate.com) or a .co with the full name as the url (chicagorealestate.co)? Is there an accepted best practice regarding hypenated urls and/or decent results regarding the effectiveness of the.co? Thank you in advance!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joechicago
    0

  • Is there tool that can do the same as Bing's "linkfromdomain:" feature? Using Bing for it is fine, but I'd like to triangulate the data. I have tried both SEOmoz tools and LinkResearchTools, but none of them can give me the variable. Xenu might be an option, but it takes too much time to crawl the entire website when we have to check several hundreds. Suggestions? Thanks! Thomas

    Competitive Research | | ThomasHgenhaven
    0

  • Hi, I just wanted to get some clarification on whether Google would penalize your site if you had many links coming from a questionable site. We've been struggling with rankings for years even though we have one of the oldest sites in the industry with a good link profile and the site is well optimized. I was looking through webmaster tools and noticed that one website links to us over 100,000 times, all to the home page. The site is www.vietnamfuntravel.com. When I looked at the site it seems that they operate a massive links exchange, I'm not sure what the history is and why they link to us so much though. Is there any chance that this could impact us negatively? if it is then what would be the best way to deal with the situation? I could ask them to take the links down but can't guarantee they would do it quickly (if at all). Would blocking their domain from our htaccess file have the desired effect?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maximise
    0

  • I've had a few articles made up about Microsoft Training for the training company I work for.  What's the best practice to submitting these articles, any tips on how best to use these articles to boost seo for our website? All help is greatly appreciated. Jack

    Algorithm Updates | | jpc1004
    0

  • Is anyone aware of any high quality link building services, preferably that guarentee a set number of high quality links for a montly fee. I'm familar with webuildpages. I was wondering if there are any other companies who provide a similar service.

    Link Building | | PeterM22
    0

  • Greetings! I actually don't have a definitive answer to this so wish to throw it out to the community for thoughts and feedback. I have a client who we shall call "Site 1", but they also have a job board, we shall call "Site 2". A product of their own success, they have a high bounce rate with visitors landing on Site 1, seeing a job they want to apply for and bouncing straight off to Site 2. The problem is that this is resulting in Google seeing some of these pages as having bounce rates of 80% to 100%, based on this formula: Bounce rate = total number of visits viewing only one page / total number of visits Now, I hate anything black hat or grey hat so wish to know how you would deal with this... If the results from Site 2 were displayed in a new framed page on Site 1, would this still be classed as a bounce? If when they click on a job on Site 1, they were taken to an intermediate page on Site 1 saying "Thank you, you are being redirected to your chosen job" for 5 seconds before being taken to Site 2, would this be classed as a bounce? Perhaps the job they wish to apply for 'pulled' from Site 2 and actually displayed in a new page on Site 1 would be a better way to go? I think that option 1 might work, sure that number 3 would but not so sure about number 2, but look forward to your comments and thoughts. Regards, Andy

    Reporting & Analytics | | Andy.Drinkwater
    0

  • I read the post about question and answer on your blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-reasons-why-qa-sites-can-boost-your-seo-in-2011-despite-googles-farmer-update-12160 What is from SEO view the difference between a forum and QA ? Jan

    Link Building | | turnon
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, I have a small question. If my website niche is Rent a Car, and lot of friends, people around the world, have restaurant, for example friend of me was a CHEF of restaurant for about 15years, and now he started working with Cars, how is danger if he receive backlinks from the restaurant websites? Its this danger? can google penalize the site if receive backlinks from different niche,different cctld domains,and language too? Thanks

    Link Building | | leadsprofi
    0

  • Would you bother using meta keywords?

    On-Page Optimization | | wazza1985
    0

  • Hello! I would like to have your input about how I can deal with a specific page in my website You can see my page here As you can see, we have a list of 76 ski resort, our pagination use ajax, wich mean we have only one url, and just below the list, we have a simple list of all the ski resort in this mountain, which show all the 76 ski resorts.. I know it's quite bad, since we can reach the same ski resort with two différents anchors links. Thanks you very much in advance, Simon

    Technical SEO | | Alexandre_
    0

  • We have a main sales page and then we have  a country specific sales page for about 250 countries. The country specific pages are identical to the main sales page, with the small addition of a country flag and the country name in the h1. I have added a rel canonical tag to all country pages to send the link juice and authority to the main page, because they would be all competing for rankings. I was wondering if having the 250+ indexed pages of duplicate content will effect the ranking of the main page even though they have rel canonical tag. We get some traffic to country pages, but not as much as the main page, but im worried that if we remove those pages and redirect all to main page that we will loose 250 plus indexed pages where we can get traffic through for odd country specific terms. eg searching for uk mobile phone brings up the country specific page instead of main sales page even though the uk sales pages is not optimized for uk terms other than having a flag and the country name in the h1. Any advice?

    Technical SEO | | -Al-
    0

  • Right then here we go You have a link in an article on a well known national newspaper site that points at your website. Is there any benefit of linking to the newspaper article in order to build up the PR of the article page and therefore passing over some link "juice"? Sub questions 1. Would it be more beneficial simply to gain links to your main website? 2. What are the chances of the article going into the archives and then at some stage being deleted? 3. If the article link points to a domain, which then forwards to a another domain will this pass on any "juice"? 4. If the article points to a domain that then 301's to another domain will this pass on any "juice"? 5. Does Google simply register the link and "juice" on the first pass or will it revisit and upgrade the "juice"? 6. What are the negatives? 7. What are the positives?

    Link Building | | therealmarkhall
    0

  • Is there a way of geo-targeting the Juicy Link Finder so the results only contain websites from the UK?

    Link Building | | Spreader7376
    0

  • Question just about said it all: I've seen a number of pages on sites that have a PA of 1 (with the metrics being 0 links from 0 root domains) when I can see on the site that it is linked to internally - from the main nav (which is CSS, not Javascript) and also from the footer, if not other places.  Why would this be? Update: upon looking further at the site, it appears that there's some kind of redirect going on, where the page linked to from the nav actually redirects to the real page. Would that eliminate PA, even if it's a 301? And additionally, is whatever is causing this lack of PA a reflection of how Google would relate to the page? Thanks, Aviva

    Moz Pro | | debi_zyx
    0

  • I'm curious where the line is drawn for "duplicate content" by the search engines. Obviously the same article, or even the same article with minor edits, can and should be detected as duplicate. I have a use case where there is a database of similar, but not duplicate, content that changes as time passes. I want to serve this content up via html template but don't want the 1000 pages to be considered duplicates of each other. Example: Imagine local weather. You could create a template for city name, longitude, latitude, altitude, and current weather conditions. The values for all fields would be different for each of the 1000 database entries (cities) and one of the "current weather conditions" would change frequently (hourly, let's say). Now, if I have a nice heirarchical index pages (first one maybe points to 50 state sub-pages, and each state page points to 20 city pages) that point to the 1000 city-specific pages, would the city-specific pages be considered 'duplicate' since they are based on the same HTML template but all have different values in key areas? Does the answer change based on the % of the template (or visible text) that changes for each city? My goal is to get these 1000 subpages as part of my site, have them indexable, and have them each flow a little bit of link juice to my home page. Best practices? What should I be careful of? Thanks!

    Link Building | | scanlin
    0

  • While article marketing my not be at the top of the SEO strategy heap, it has, thus far, had a place small place at the table. In light of the Panda-Farmer-Anti-Demand-Media-Content update, I'm re-thinking article marketing altogether. Which, if any, general article directories are still worth adding content to in terms of links and eyeballs? Should these general article directories be avoided altogether?

    Link Building | | Gyi
    0

  • Signed up to the trial version of Seomoz today just to check it out as I have decided I'm going to do my own SEO rather than outsource it (been let down a few times!). So far I like the look of things and have a feeling I am going to learn a lot and get results. However I have just stumbled on something. After Seomoz dones it's crawl diagnostics run on the site (www.deviltronics.com) it is showing 20,000+ plus errors. From what I can see almost 99% of this is being picked up as erros for duplicate content due to session id's, so i am not sure what to do! I have done a "site:www.deviltronics.com" on google and this certainly doesn't pick up the session id's/duplicate content. So could this just be an issue with the Seomoz bot. If so how can I get Seomoz to ignore these on the crawl? Can I get my developer to add some code somewhere. Help will be much appreciated. Asif

    Moz Pro | | blagger
    0

  • I read somewhere - pretty sure is was in Art of SEO - that having dates in the blog permalink URLs was a bad idea. e.g. /blog/2011/3/my-blog-post/ However, looking at Wordpress best practice, it's also not a good idea to have a URL without a number - it's more resource hungry if you don't , apparently. e.g. /blog/my-blog-post/ Does anyone have any views on this? Thanks Ben

    Technical SEO | | atticus7
    0

  • I see large differences in Google and Bing/Yahoo SERP results for many keywords. Google shows many of our primary keywords in their top ten, while Bing/Yahoo rank the same one 40-50 or above. Do you have any insight on their differences that might account for this variation? We are legitimate, long time, white hatters at a small manufacturer that is one of the leaders in our industry. The only thing I can think of that might describe  this issue is PPC advertising. Their algorithms wouldn't be that inconsistent would they? (We do much more paid advertising on Google) But generally this should have no affect, right? Thanks, George...

    Reporting & Analytics | | rhawk
    0

  • I have a number of clients that own businesses in 'boring' sectors, such as: Toxic Waste Removal Steel Erecting Household Plumbing (Boilers, etc...) Link building for these sites is quite difficult. Creating compelling content and 'link bait' is particularly tricky. I found a good post from Michael Gray on the subject, but I don't think food (or McDonalds in this case)is a particularly difficult subject to write about. Any more tips on how to approach this would be appreciated. Thanks

    Link Building | | cmaddison
    0

  • I'm just a little curious about this and thought I would make use of the new Q&A system. This is my first open question. I recently acquired some blogroll links on 3 fairly popular and well trafficked sites, some with more authority and pages than mine (Get Right Music). I was wondering if anyone is familiar with the time frame in which I should start to see that affect my rankings in Google. Also, the time frame when I should start to see those domain links appear in Open Site Explorer. I'm just curious. Thanks everyone. Jesse

    Link Building | | getrightmusic
    0

  • I suspect there might be an easy way to do this.. but alas Icould not seem to find it with by performing some search queries in the Q and A  thus figured I would just ask :).. sorry if being repetitive with this question. I have all sorts of tools to track the number of overall inbound links to my site, but is there an easy tool to check for specific new inbound links from one specific page/site..aka if I set up a link in a directory or I get a mention in an article.. what is the easiest way to search to see if this link has been picked up by google and how much link juice it might be giving to my site? Thanks for your time, John

    Link Building | | JohnHerrigel
    0

  • Alright so here's my situation and hopefully someone can help... I want to be able to pass Google Analytics variables onto my affiliate links so I have some better conversion tracking data (not PPC traffic so no easy dynamic keyword insertion variables). I want to do something like this: User searches "keyword" in Google > User lands on mysite.com > search data is assigned to global variables that I can use in my affiliate link redirect script. afflink.com/?id=123&keyword=[GA keyword variable] Anybody know how I would go about doing that? I've seen other Non-GA tracking scripts do this but I can't figure it out here and it's driving me crazy! Thanks,
    Drew EDIT: Just figured it out after a lot of guess and testing... I'm not sure if the way I'm doing it is the fastest, most optimized way but it works. Solution: I can pull the GA cookie and break it down to retrieve the keyword using PHP. For anyone searching for this in the future, here's how I did it: $gacookie = $_COOKIE['__utmz'];
    $keyword = substr(strstr($gacookie, 'utmctr='),7); ?> Then I can use the $keyword variable wherever I need it. I haven't actually tested this on a live site yet but everything is working fine as of right now. If anyone has a better solution please feel free to answer.

    Affiliate Marketing | | drewhammond
    0

  • We currently use SEOMoz's campaign tool to review the SEO progress of our site.  One thing we are unsure of is that SEOMoz gives us a warning for over 1000 of our pages because we have around 200 links on those pages (all in the Menu Drop Downs).  I read the post and watched the video, Whiteboard Friday Flat Site Architecture a while ago and Rand mentioned there is no issue with having a web page with 200 to 300 links and he even encouraged it.  So why would these show up as warnings in our Campaign?

    Moz Pro | | PBCLinear
    0

  • What has to be changed to improve rank? We had "hip hop jewelry" keyword for a while, position 4. All of the sudden it dropped for position 6 and never went back. We did some on page optimization and got couple of links here and there... but so far we still at position 6. Please suggest us what has to be done?

    Technical SEO | | DiamondJewelryEmpire
    0

  • I know buying new websites hoping to 301 redirect them to achieve higher rankings before they’re established is not a good idea, but what about uploading a info pages +  on-page SEO + some link-building and when the site is established (it ranks) direct visitors to a landing page? Buying a new domain for the SINGLE purpose of 301 redirecting won’t boost the rankings (don't think it would get penalties either, unless it’s the only link building activity). Not planning to redirect to the homepage, but to the related sub page on our main site (specific landing page). Will this pass the appropriate anchor text and link authority to the right page on our website and help those pages to rank for their keywords? Only thinking of a few pages (no more than 3).

    Technical SEO | | Diana.varbanescu
    0

  • Our website www.clientfirstfunding.com ranked 13th for the keyword "structured settlement". After this weekend we are no longer ranking for this keyword at all. We haven't made any changes at all to the site and i haven't gained any backlinks that appear to be spammy. We have held this position for the last several months. I can understand a drop in SERPs but one this drastic is shocking. Any ideas as to what could have caused this would be greatly appreciated.

    Technical SEO | | Tony1986
    0

  • <colgroup><col width="411"></colgroup>
    | One of the most common warnings on our site www.sta.co.uk is the use of parameters in URL strings (they're crawled ok, it's mainly duplication content issues we're trying to avoid). The current traffic manager suggested ‘stage 1’ - remove the unwanted folder structure but wouldn’t tailor the dynamic url I'd say it is difficult to quantify what result this would have in isolation and I would rather do this update in tandem with the ‘stage 2’ which adds structure to the dynamic urls with multiple parameters.(Both stages will involve rewriting the page url and redirecting the long url to the short) Any thoughts, please? Is there any benefit in removing the subfolders (1) or should we wait and do it in one go? Thanks everyone, |

    Technical SEO | | Diana.varbanescu
    0

  • Hi, I'm looking for a tool that will be able to run a list of keywords 1 by 1 through the Google Adwords keyword tool and place them together in a list, in order to get as much long tail keywords as possible. Thanks for any suggestion!

    Keyword Research | | DeptAgency
    0

  • Hi all, I'm using the links seomoz API, and it's working great for me, except it only appears to return 3 results. Seems to only return 3 results on the anchor text api also. Is there something basic I'm not doing to get more results? Thanks!

    Moz Pro | | jimbo_kemp
    0

  • hi I have been checking through all the Q and A but i i'm still not sure how you get http://www.domain.co.uk/index.html to be just http://www.domain.co.uk/? Do you add canonical to the index page to point to the page you prefer and then add a 301 redirect? thanks

    Technical SEO | | challen
    0

  • After searching for (city name) (business type) a number of my competitor's sites come up with the title of their web page as the results (including geographic descriptors).  However, my site is listed by name and does not reflect our URL title.  How is this possible (did someone manually change the title of our listing?) and how can I change this back so that the title includes a geo descriptor?  Do I simply edit the listing under google places or will this have a negative effect on our rankings?

    Technical SEO | | helliottlaw
    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


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