Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey crew,
Curious if anyone has an answer for this one.

Someone in our company is encouraging us to start posting our blog content as newsletters on LinkedIn and thinks it will help us grow.
From what I've learned about SEO - this seems like a bad idea that would split traffic for that content between our website and LinkedIn. I also feel like it would create duplicate content - right?

Does anyone have any insight on this?
I see that Moz doesn't do LI newsletters and usually posts links on social media that point back to blogs on their website. That's what I've tried to do with our social media as well.

Am I thinking about this correctly? Would this be bad for SEO?

I am experiencing an issue with negative keywords, but the “negative” keyword in question isn’t truly negative and is required within the content – the problem is that Google is ranking pages for inaccurate phrases that don’t exist on the page.

To explain, this product page (as one of many examples) - https://www.scamblermusic.com/albums/royalty-free-rock-music/ - is optimised for “Royalty free rock music” and it gets a Moz grade of 100.

“Royalty free” is the most accurate description of the music (I optimised for “royalty free” instead of “royalty-free” (including a hyphen) because of improved search volume), and there is just one reference to the term “copyrighted” towards the foot of the page – this term is relevant because I need to make the point that the music is licensed, not sold, and the licensee pays for the right to use the music but does not own it (as it remains copyrighted). It turns out however that I appear to need to treat “copyrighted” almost as a negative term because Google isn’t accurately ranking the content.

Despite excellent optimisation for “Royalty free rock music” and only one single reference of “copyrighted” within the copy, I am seeing this page (and other album genres) wrongly rank for the following search terms:

“free rock music”
“Copyright free rock music"
“Uncopyrighted rock music”
“Non copyrighted rock music”

I understand that pages might rank for “free rock music” because it is part of the “Royalty free rock music” optimisation, what I can’t get my head around is why the page (and similar product pages) are ranking for “Copyright free”, “Uncopyrighted music” and “Non copyrighted music”.

“Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted” don’t exist anywhere within the copy or source code – why would Google consider it helpful to rank a page for a search term that doesn’t exist as a complete phrase within the content?

By the same logic the page should also wrongly rank for “Skylark rock music” or “Pretzel rock music” as the words “Skylark” and “Pretzel” also feature just once within the content and therefore should generate completely inaccurate results too.

To me this demonstrates just how poor Google is when it comes to understanding relevant content and optimization - it's taking part of an optimized term and combining it with just one other single-use word and then inappropriately ranking the page for that completely made up phrase. It’s one thing to misinterpret one reference of the term “copyrighted” and something else entirely to rank a page for completely made up terms such as “Uncopyrighted” and “Non copyrighted”. It almost makes me think that I’ve got a better chance of accurately ranking content if I buy a goat, shove a cigar up its backside, and sacrifice it in the name of the great god Google!

Any advice (about wrongly attributed negative keywords, not goat sacrifice ) would be most welcome.

Recently I've come across a few websites offering (for a fee) to research, write and publish an entry on the likes of Wikipedia, Citizendium or Wikitia - I thought this might be helpful when it comes to marketing and link building for a brand or individual.

Purchasing guest blog posts is a standard way to obtain a high domain authority in-context backlink, but I wondered if purchasing an entry on one of these human edited encyclopedias would be as effective, better or not worth the money?

It costs quite a bit more than guest posting and blog outreach, but on the other hand they are authoritative websites that also include backlinks.

Any thoughts would be most welcome.

Hi,
I have an enquiry in relation to missing H1 headings. I am getting a number of these errors reported for collection pages where I am using a full width banner image at the top of the page with no visible description underneath. In these circumstances is it advisable to somehow include a H1 heading or can I ignore it?

https://osullivanspharmacy.ie/collections/deep-heat

I read some old (10+ years) information on whether footer backlinks from the websites that design agencies build are seen as spammy and potentially cause a negative effect.

We have over 150 websites that we have built over the last few years, all with sitewide footer backlinks back to our homepage (designed and managed by COMPANY NAME).

Semrush flags some of the links as potential spammy links.

What are the current thoughts on this type of footer backlink?

Are we better to have 1 dofollow backlink and the rest of the website nofollow from each domain?

Sometimes I get alerts from Google Search Console that it has detected soft 404s on different websites, and since I take great care to never have true soft 404s, they are always false positives.

Today I got one on a website that has pages promoting some events. The language on the page for one event that has sold out says that "tickets are no longer available" which seems to have tripped up Google into thinking the page is a soft 404.

It's kind of incredible to me that in the current era we're in, with things like chatGPT that Google doesn't seem to understand natural language. But that has me thinking, are there some strategies or best practices we can use in how we write copy on the page so Google doesn't flag it as soft 404? It seems like anything that could tell a user that an item isn't available could trip it up into thinking it is a 404. In the case of my page, it's actually important information we need to tell the public that an event has sold out, but to use their interest in that event to promote other events. so I don't want the page deindexed or not to rank well!

Hello,

I have a very peculiar question about an issue I'm having when working on a website. It's a WordPress site and I'm using a generic plug in for title and meta updates. When I go to crawl the site through screaming frog, however, there seems to be a hard coded title tag that I can't find anywhere and the plug in updates don't get crawled.

If anyone has any suggestions, thatd be great. Thanks!

Quick question: does Google differentiate between terms that correctly include a hyphen (such as "royalty-free") and those that are incorrect ("royalty free")?

I ask because the correct term "royalty-free"(with a hyphen) receives far less monthly traffic for the same term without the hyphen (according to Moz):

Term | Estimated traffic
"royalty free music" | 11.5-30.3K
"royalty-free music" | 501-850

If Moz views the terms separately then I'd guess that Google does too, in which case the best thing to do for SEO (and increased site traffic) would be to wrongly use "royalty free" without the hyphen. Is that correct?

I have a client for just over a year now. I've been using Moz all that time.
Do you know if it will give me data from the very start? Or will it just give me the previous 12 months?

Thanks for reading, I appreciate your expertise

I am getting a lot of 520 Server Error in crawl reports. I see this is related to Cloudflare. We know 520 is Cloudflare so maybe the Moz team can change this from "unknown" to "Cloudflare 520". Perhaps the Moz team can update the "how to fix" section in the reporting, if they have some possible suggestions on how to avoid seeing these in the report of if there is a real issue that needs to be addressed. At this point I don't know.

There must be a solution that Moz can provide like a setting in Cloudflare that will permit the Rogerbot if Cloudflare is blocking it because it does not like its behavior or something.

It could be that Rogerbot is crawling my site on a bad day or at a time when we were deploying a massive site change. If I know when my site will be down can I pause Rogerbot?

I found this https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/general-troubleshooting/troubleshooting-crawl-errors/