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!


  • When looking at Traffic Sources in Google Analytics, Google is broken out into paid and organic visits. I want to do the same with Bing.  How do I do it?

    Reporting & Analytics | | cpantages
    0

  • We have an issue on one of our sites we're monitoring a campaign for that seems to have TOO many links on each page. I think the biggest reason is that each product listing on each category page has two separate anchor links into that page. One for the thumb and one for the name.  So even though there should only be 60-70 links on each category page, that amount is being inflated because each product listing technically is being split into two separate links. Question is, should I place the thumbnail and name within the same anchor link?  We do this on a lot of other sites we operate, but I'm not sure what's a better strategy.  It would seem to me that it would be better to have a single anchor link that shares the thumb and product name.

    On-Page Optimization | | AarcMediaGroup
    0

  • Lets face it, it's the corner stone of SEO, reverse engineering sites to guess at what big G does. It would just make sense they did the same to learn all our tactics.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | naffhampton
    1

  • Hello SEOmoz, I have a question to you guys. How typically SEO should be done to fortune 500 comnpanies who are very much famous offline. The problem I see is any links built gets attention and media can make a big deal out of it. For eg: The recent JCPenney SEO issue. Though their paid links got them penalized, other traditional methods can also not fit their stratgy. Here are the traditional methods and how it can not be applied to them. Commenting on blogs - Well, it is reputation here. If some one sees a link on blog comments, it might be fishy and can be named as blog spammers. Forum marketing - Same here. The reputation of clients can go down. Paid post / Paid links - Again risky Please suggest how to build link for type of famous clients. Please do not give stratgic level of advice, but be more specific in your answer. For eg: Do this kind of link building and don't do y. etc., Looking forward for ur answers. Thanks

    Link Building | | SamuelDarwin
    0

  • I have a 3rd party booking engine that is causing my own domain to show up as a top referreral in google analytics.  The vendor is on my very last nerve 🙂  So they're not helping. Would anyone be interested in helping a newbie out with a frustrating problem? Code: Reservations Page - function SubmitReservationForm() {. . . .
                ResLink = "http://www.bookingengine.com/res/vn4/checka.aspx?month=" + Month + "&day=" + Day + "&year=" + Year + "&nights=" + Nights + "&rooms=" + Rooms + "&adults=" + Adults + "&children=" + Children + "&B1=Check+Availability&hotelid=xxxx"
                pageTracker._link(ResLink);
                return true;
            } On Every page: Any thoughts would be appreciated!  I believe the problem  is             pageTracker._link(ResLink); but I'm clueless on fixing it.

    Reporting & Analytics | | jenny05
    1

  • Is there any real difference in uploading an images directly to your google places page or linking an image from another site? I have heard that you get better results if you upload a photo to photo bucket then to insider pages then post that link to your google places page. To me it just seems a bit odd to do things this way. I get that it's suppose to give you more back links however I don't think it would necessarily be relevant or useful for the user. Any thoughts??

    Algorithm Updates | | christinarule
    0

  • I've cut and paste webmaster reports showing the webmaster the "301" page perm moved, however they still believe the pages are running up and normal, as 200s. Its been tough to get them to acknowledge the problem, however I'm certain its negatively affecting results. Any help would be greatly appreciated, asap!

    Technical SEO | | ankurv
    0

  • We are switching one of our sites to a magento site and dont want to loose current rankings what are the best practices for this?  Same Domain but the deep url pages will change urls

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg
    0

  • I'm building a site on a virtual host and now it's ready to go online, but i still have to choose a domain name. One of the main keywords i want to rank for is a 3-word keyword phrase with 9000+ exact match searches per month. Here's an example to better understand my question: 'Guitar training lessons' My main competitor's domain is only 5 months old but it does have the full keyword phrase in it with  '4u' added at the end:  www.guitartraininglessons4u.com I wanted to go with www.guitartrainingcenter.com (notice that 'lessons' is left out of the domain name) but i'm wondering if my main competitor would have a big advantage by having the full keyword phrase in his domain. How much weight does google give to sites that have the exact search query in their domain name? Does a domain still qualify as 'exact match' if a word (info) is added to it? How much harder would it be to outrank this domain as apposed to a site that doesn't have the keywords in its domain name? Thanks in advance Freek

    Competitive Research | | ZeroGrav
    1

  • If you have a site that offers a same day service, e.g. plumbing, electrical, computer support: do you think it would always be a good idea to stick the phone # in the meta description?

    On-Page Optimization | | ilyaelbert
    1

  • Is the age of a link a ranking signal?

    Link Building | | qlkasdjfw
    0

  • Ok I see this happening all of the time. I get my hands on a new website and there are one of four header tag issues: 1. There are no H1 tags at all 2. There are multiple H1 tags on the same page 3. Every page has an identical H1 tag 4. Header tags are used all out of order Do any of these have a negative impact on rankings? I've always tried to get one H1 tag on each page, have it be the first header tag, and make it unique to each page. Is this a waste of itme? Could improper header tag use hurt a website?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster
    1

  • Or is this a given? I am new to SEO and SEOmoz. One of my campaigns is completley free of errors...the others are a work in progress. Now I realize that SEO is never done, but can a site actually be free of errors? If so... I just gave myself a pat on the back.

    Moz Pro | | AtoZion
    0

  • I bought supplies recently at barcodesinc.com.  While searching I noticed it is clearly the same site as barcodediscount.com.  How do they not get hurt by duplicate content?

    Technical SEO | | jotham2
    0

  • There are quite a few secuirty seals/site safety tools by some big antivirus/trust companies Mcaffe site secuirty, verisign etc. Does Google, or any other big search engines use these as a trust/ranking signal?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhysmaster
    0

  • Just curious what everyone likes best as the default font for text!

    Web Design | | jenny05
    0

  • I put one site (www.fmredesdeprotecao.com.br) and register some keywords, but the keywords don't appear in the results On-Page like the other campaigns. How can I solve that?

    On-Page Optimization | | Ex2
    0

  • I Have been using a link exchange website called linkmarket. I have been told that these kind of website dont really do you many favours but i have signed up for a year so i am currently still using it. What does everyone think? Also is there a proven way to get high quality links with out spending hours traling other websites and asking if they want to exchange links because the normall answer i get is NO!

    Link Building | | WillFrank
    3

  • The website for my London based plumbing company has thousands of specifically tailored pages for the various services we provide to all the areas in London. It equates to approximately 6000 pages in total. When google has all these pages indexed, we tend to get a fair bit of traffic - as they cater pretty well for long tail searches. However, every once in a while Google will drop the vast majority of our indexed pages from SERPs for a few days or weeks at a time - for example at the moment Google is only indexing 613 whereas last week it was back at the normal ~6000. Why does this happen? We of course lose a lot of organic traffic when these pages don't displayed - what are we doing wrong? Website: www.pgs-plumbers.co.uk

    Technical SEO | | guy_andrews
    0

  • Hello, We are in the process of redesigning and migrating 5 previously separate websites (all different niche topics, including dining, entertainment, retail, real estate, etc.) under one umbrella site for the property in which they exist. From the property homepage, you will now be able to access all of the individual category sites within. As each niche microsite will be focused on a different topic, I am wondering whether it is best for SEO that we use subdomains such as category.mainsite.com or subfolders mainsite.com/category. I have seen it done both ways on large corporate sites (ie: Ikea uses subdomains for different country sites, and Apple uses subfolders), so I am wondering what makes the most sense for this particular umbrella site. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Melissa

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg
    0

  • How often do you submit them? What have you seen work? Are there any tricks aside from filling out all of the data fields?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eric_since1910.com
    1

  • Hey all! So I am curious how you recommend using the "on page report card" (which is really helpful) along with the concept of local modifiers.  IE, here is a term I am going after: business forums but really I care about a specific location: business forums | Greensboro NC So the word I hear is typically to do your keyword research & page optimization FOR the primary term, but then tack on your local modifiers after.  So which do you run reports on? Probably both is the best answer, eh? Obviously my local sites won't have a shot at ranking nationally/internationally for such a broad term as "business forums", especially with some monster sites out there with some serious clout.  This is more of a best practices question. Thanks dudes.

    Moz Pro | | nsmcseo2
    0

  • Hi there, I would like to compare the current volume of inbound links to our website with the past, to see the growth. Is there a way to do this? Thanks, Heath

    Link Building | | Team
    0

  • Look for tools that can visualise a sites architecture (idealy automated). Also looking for tools that can visualise internal linking sturures

    Technical SEO | | Motionlab
    0

  • Hello, I realize (with GAnaltytics and command "link:") this morning that my domain host (share one)  : "mlconseil.com" under which several websites are hosted has been banned from google. Here below the websites : www.amvo.fr  :
    www.apei-cpm.fr :
    www.armagnac-les-vieux-chenes.fr
    www.centraledelexpertise.fr
    www.cleaning-pc-33.com
    www.internet-33.fr
    www.territoires-et-ntic.fr
    www.vin-le-taillou.com
    www.maliflo.asso.fr I don't kow why, i use since end of january 2011 IBP,  only for some submissions to directories and for managing some lists of urls. I submitted about 30/40 directories never at the same time , but raher day after day, smoothly. On www.territoires-et-ntic.fr and www.amvo.fr which are blogs, i have installed some external rss feeds to display as articles, i decided to stop that but i don't know if it's related to such "blacklistage" from google. I don't use any nasty "blackhat" programs or else.. I'am really upset about that, i claim this morning  with the same  words as now, a new indexation but i don't know how long it will take ?Any idea ? Which are the tools which could help me to scan for maybe any malicious maleware on my hosting provider ? Many tks

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mozllo
    0

  • RSS feeds, at least on paper, should be a great way to build backlinks and boost rankings.  They are also very seductive from a link-builder's point of view- free, easy to create, allows you to specifiy anchor text, etc.  There are even several SEO articles, anda few products, extolling the virtues of RSS for SEO puposes. However, I hear anecdotedly that they are extremely ineffective in getting their internal links indexed.  And my success rate has been abysmal- perhaps 15% have ever been indexed,and so far, I havenever seem Google show an RSS feed as a source for a backlink.  I have even thrown some token backlinks against RSS feeds to see if that helped in getting them indexed, but even that has a very low success rate. I recently read a blog post saying that Google "hates aRSS feeds" and "rarely spiders perhaps the first link or two."  Yet there are many SEO advocates who claim that RSS feeds are a great untapped resource for SEO.  I am rather befuddled. Has anyone "crackedthe code" onhow to get them,and the links that they contain, indexed and helping rankings?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tclendaniel
    0

  • Greetings, When running Google Analytics' keyword report, I see that the over 85% of the top 100 keywords used to find us include a word in our name (Eagle's Nest Foundation and Camp -- with "eagle" or "eagle's nest" being the most frequent) or the name of one of our programs.   Does this mean that most folks searching for summer camps in North Carolina already know about us and that we therefore need to optimize for broader keywords, to cast a wider net for folks who don't already know about us? Thanks, Dave

    Reporting & Analytics | | DMoff
    0

  • Hi, I have two websites say website A and Website B. The website A is set up for the UK audience and the website B is set up for the US audience. Both websites sell same products with some products and offers not available in either country. Website A can't be accessed if you are in US. Similarly website B can't be accessed if you are in UK. This was a decision made by the client long time ago as they don’t want to offer promotions etc in the US and therefore don’t want the US audience to be able to purchase items from the UK site. Now the problem is both the websites have same description for the common products they sell.Search engine spiders tend to enter a site from a variety of different IP addresses/locations. So while a UK visitor will not be able to access the US version of the site and vice versa, a crawler can. Now i have following options with me: 1. Write a different product descriptions for US website to keep both the US and UK versions of the site in the Google Index for the foreseeable future. But this is going to be time consuming and expensive option as there are several hundred products which are common to both sites. 2. Use a single website to target both US and UK audience and make the promotions available only to the UK audience. There is one issue here. Website A address ends with '.co.uk' and website B has different name and ends with .com. So website A can't be used for the US audience. Also website A is older and more authoritative than the new website B. Also website A is pretty popular among UK audience with the .co.uk address. So website B can't be used to target the UK audience. 3. You tell me

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DevakiPhatak
    2

  • We have started using Google Site Search (via an XML feed from Google) to power our search engines.  So we have a whole load of pages we could link to of the format /search?q=keyword,  and we are considering doing away with our more traditional category listing pages (e.g. /biology - not powered by GSS) which account for much of our current natural search landing pages. My question is would the GoogleBot treat these search pages any differently? My fear is it would somehow see them as duplicate search results and downgrade their links.  However, since we are coding the XML from GSS into our own HTML format, it may not even be able to tell.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdwardUpton61
    0

  • I Have a print website www.print.dor2dor.com and we print 100's of products. I was wandering what is the best way to rank high for severall keywords as we dont want to just rank high for printing because when people are searching they normally type in the product they are looking for with printing at the end of it.

    On-Page Optimization | | WillFrank
    0

  • I've been focusing on the long tail for one of my websites. I've been getting good traffic that has been converting well for me. So far i've mostly been using wordtracker and google keyword tool to find long tail keywords. I did try hitail for a few months, but it gave me very few extra keywords. Does anyone know of some other tools out there to find more long tail keywords? Thanks

    Keyword Research | | PeterM22
    0

  • Most ecommerce sites use the original manufacturer product descriptions in their content. The product features and specifications are the content made by the manufacturer. Sometimes manufacturers insist that the ecommerce sites should use their original content and it is impossible to change what available in the original content and rewrite it.

    Industry News | | IM_Learner
    1

  • I have a client who insists their home page be a single graphic image of their logo with php menus linking to all of the other pages up top. This appears to me to be an seo nightmare. They seem to be unwilling to have anything to do with changing the appearance and want to rely on seo for "all the other pages" on the site. What's an SEO to do in this situation? Is it possible to have a flash image that lands on a "homepage" for google to crawl, rather than a single image? What's the best seo approach here?

    Web Design | | peaceland
    0

  • One of my sites got hit pretty hard during the latest Google update. It lost about 30-40% of its US traffic and the future does not look bright considering that Google plans a worldwide roll-out. Problem is, my site is a six year old heavy linked, popular Wordpress blog. I do not know why the article believes that it is low quality. The only reason I came up with is the statement that low-quality pages on a site may affect other pages (think it was in the Wired article). If that is so, would you recommend blocking and de-indexing of Wordpress tag, archive and category pages from the Google index? Or would you suggest to wait a bit more before doing something that drastically. Or do you have another idea what I could to do? I invite you to take a look at the site www.ghacks.net

    Algorithm Updates | | badabing
    0

  • Hi Moz Team, somehow the last question i raised a few days ago not only wasnt answered up until now, it was also completely deleted and the credit was not "refunded" - obviously there was some data loss involved with your restructuring. Can you check whether you still find the last question and answer it quickly? I need the answer 🙂 Here is one more question: I bought a website that has a huge forum, loads of pages with user generated content. Overall around 500.000 Threads with 9 Million comments. The complete forum is noindex/nofollow when i bought the site, now i am thinking about what is the best way to unleash the potential. The current system is vBulletin 3.6.10. a) Shall i first do an update of vbulletin to version 4 and use the vSEO tool to make the URLs clean, more user and search engine friendly before i switch to index/follow? b) would you recommend to have the forum in the folder structure or on a subdomain? As far as i know subdomain does take lesser strenght from the TLD, however, it is safer because the subdomain is seen as a separate entity from the regular TLD. Having it in he folder makes it easiert to pass strenght from the TLD to the forum, however, it puts my TLD at risk c) Would you release all forum sites at once or section by section? I think section by section looks rather unnatural not only to search engines but also to users, however, i am afraid of blasting more than a millionpages into the index at once. d) Would you index the first page of a threat or all pages of a threat? I fear duplicate content as the different pages of the threat contain different body content but the same Title and possibly the same h1. Looking forward to hear from you soon! Best Fabian

    Technical SEO | | fabiank
    0

  • Suppose an old established site's root has High PA, High DA & High MR scores but the TBPR is significantly low. Can it be taken as a pointer that Google has algorithmically capped that site's  ability to pass link equity when the home page metrics look suspect? Example case: pegasusdirectory*com PA = 88, DA = 86, MR = 6.61, but TBPR = 3 ( aged site ) (p.s: I'm aware that on inner pages of sites, it's quite normal to see high PA, Page level MR but no TBPR; my question is specically about guaging quality of the link for the DOMAIN in question Should I spend time on getting links from such domains ? ) TIA

    Link Building | | seo-wanna-bs
    0

  • Are there any risks of getting penalized by Google if one was to publish a blogger competition on a corporate blog, in which participating bloggers have to include a link* on their blogs to enter? Bloggers also receive a small prize (CD, book,..) to thank them for participating. After what happened with Overstock.com do you think this kind of link-bait is risky? *each blogger has to write an original article and the links are organic. Thanks for your help. o1rRl.png

    Link Building | | ref.price
    0

  • Can anyone weigh in on their own efforts to build links into international TLDs? Which tactics have been successful? Which have failed? Have you engaged any agencies to manage this for you and if so, how did they perform and who are they? We have nine ccTLDs plus our .com site to manage so it's a bit overwhelming! Fortunately, we have teams dedicated to managing day-to-day operations of each site. Each team is comprised of managers who speak the targeted language as their first language and have intimate knowledge of the targeted culture. I want to leverage them to help my SEO efforts, but I'm not sure how my advice should be different than what we do for our .com site.

    International SEO | | RyanOD
    0

  • I'm running a news site, and I have a problem of accuratly measuring which traffic is REALLY coming from google news. I analyzed a lot of  individual articles and I come to the conclusion, that the visits, that come from the google news section in the universal search results are counted as "normal" search engine traffic in google analytics. So if you do a Google search for a topic that includes links from Google news, you don't get an accurate referral count. As an example, if you do a search for "eBay", incorporated into the page 1 search results you may also see Google news results as well. 
    If someone clicks on that Google news link that appears in Google search, it shows up in Google analytics as a referral from Google search, when it was actually from a Google news referral. I was already checking google analytics and google news help forums and searched SEO blogs for this. But I wasn't able to find a working solution. Can anybody help me out with this problem? Thanks so much, Matthias

    Reporting & Analytics | | Mulle
    0

  • I know that link building is one of the more important tools for great ranking and know that "paid links" may hurt a sites ranking. How do I know if a company offering link building will be classified as "paid links"

    Link Building | | stevecounsell
    0

  • Hello If I am trying to rank for the term blue widgets as a primary, and also the term shiny blue widgets , and big shiny blue widgets as secondary - would the url /blue-widgets or /shiny-blue-widgets or /big-shiny-blue-widgets be better (all else equal) Would the word shiny / big dilute or affect of KW in the domain for  the rankings for blue widgets (all esle equal) Regarding anchor text of inbound links, if the anchor text is shiny blue widgets, is that going to help me rank for both queries "blue widgets" and "shiny blue widgets" equally? (all else equal), or would including shiny, affect my ranking for "bliue widgets" Or is it better to keep the anchor text as just blue widgets (of course we could vary it) but Im trying to get a feel for how that would work as we are builfing some links I can control the anchor text. I hope this was clear enough Thanks Sam

    Link Building | | Impact-201555
    0

  • Hi, We are working with a site that we can refer to as: www.clientsbrand.com.au It has a subsection of our clients services at www.clientsbrand.com.au/keyword The client has now decided that this subsection is in fact the most important thing they should be trying to rank for. A large amount of the content that is already existing under clientsbrand.com.au/topic1 /topic2 /topic3 etc would fit naturally under clientsbrand.com.au/keyword/topic1 etc The root domain is currently not ranking for the keyword they wish to target. I am planning on moving a lot of this content to the subfolder to try and boost that silo and get things going for that keyword. As long as we 301 the old URL's to their corresponding new position are there any issues any of you see with doing this? I am worried there may be some traps for young players I have not considered. Thanks in advance for any responses.

    On-Page Optimization | | MrPaulB
    0

  • Working on a forum site that has multiple versions of the URL indexed. The WWW version is a top 3 and 5 contender in the google results for the domain keyword. All versions of the forum have the same PR, but but the non-WWW version has 3,400 pages indexed in google, and the WWW has 2,100. Even worse yet, there's a completely seperate domain (PR4) that has the forum as a subdomain with 2,700 pages indexed in google. The dupe content gets completely overwhelming to think about when it comes to the PR4 domain, so I'll just ask what you think I should do with the forum. Get rid of the subdomain version, and sometimes link between two obviously related sites or get rid of the highly targeted keyword domain? Also what's better, having the targeted keyword on the front of Google with only 2,100 indexed pages or having lower rankings with 3,400 indexed pages? Thanks.

    Technical SEO | | Hondaspeder
    0

  • Wondering why my domain authority has dropped after about three months of trying to implement the best practices suggested on this site. Can anyone help?

    On-Page Optimization | | MauiCoffee
    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.