Welcome to the Q&A Forum

We actually did this earlier in 2017 with a brand name change (going from Marketingxchange to Lure Creative) and url change (going to http://lurecreative.com/). We saw quite a drop in rankings and DA, but had all of our old website pages 301ed to the most relevant pages on the new website. This was quite a project and now about 3 months later we are finally seeing an increase in traffic, we have gone through and updated a lot of our old brand name links and also sought new links with our new brand name as well, which is what I would recommend doing. Our goal was to try and swing most of our external links anchor texts to be our new brand name (which we used Yext, and alot of time manually link building to do this). It still took multiple months, so it was a pain either way, but we are trending up again.

Hi Alex These are parameters that sit after the main URL and often include 'sort' 'page'.  (They can also be created in some eCommerce pages as 'products' but these should be dealt with a mod-rewrite to show properly constructed URLs with category name and title). There are a number of ways with dealing with them: 1. Google search console - you have to be very careful messing with the rules in parameter handling but for some, this is the way. 'sort' then you can tell Google that it narrows the content on the page - you can then choose to let Googlebot decide or block the URLs - I often block them as they just create skinny and duplicate content. Pagination - 'page' you can tell Google that this paginates and then let Google decide. Look at rel/prev tag on those pages as well. Attributes - like size and colour - I generally block those as they just create skinny duplicates of main categories Others - like Catalog - it depends on what platform you use but there could be other parameters being created - I block most of them as they create useless URLs 2. Robots.txt You can use this file to block the indexing of these pages depending on the parameter by excluding them from being followed by the search bots. Once again be very careful as you don't want to accidentally block indexing of useful areas the site. https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt 3. Canonicals If you are able a great way of dealing with attributes like size and colour is to canonicalize back to the non size specific URL - this is a great way of maintaining the link juice for those URLs which may otherwise be lost if you blocked them all together. You add a rel=canonical tag pointing to the non-parameter version. https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization 4. As a last resort you can 301 redirect them but frankly, if you have dealt with them properly you shouldn't have to. It's also bad practice to have live 301 redirects in the internal structure of a website. Best to use the correct URL. There is more reading here: https://moz.com/community/q/which-is-the-best-way-to-handle-query-parameters https://moz.com/community/q/do-parameters-in-a-url-make-a-difference-from-an-seo-point-of-view https://moz.com/community/q/how-do-i-deindex-url-parameters Regards Nigel

Hi Bill, I think this will help answer your question. The short answer is no, you cannot get a dofollow backlink from YouTube. I believe the Moz bar failing to properly register these 'comment' links as nofollow because they are javascript based and the Moz bar is not compatible with Javascript. The links that I see in the video descriptions are registering as 'nofollow' with the toolbar. Even the links on individual channel homepages are being stripped of SEO value due this 'rel= me nofollow' tag which acts the same as a standard nofollow tag [see screenshot]. I will note that all internal links (links to other youtube.com pages) will register as dofollow. But outbound links will be nofollowed. Hope this helps! MozBar tool doesn't highlight follow/no follow, what does that mean?

We use yext and love it. Yuou can submit and synergies all NAP listings in one spot.

This post is five years old, and I haven't worked as a Moz employee in over two years. If you email help@moz.com, they should be able to help you.

Slap to the forehead! Of course that makes complete sense. It's been a very long Monday. Thanks for your help. -Christina

Hello Kris, Thank you very much for your help. We’ll contact the host to see if they could help. Is there any way to check if it’s the CMS and database structure or is that also something for the hosting company? Also, we checked and there was an issue with the sitemap.xml. Could that have been a potential cause? - More just curious. Please let us know if there are details we could provide that might help. Looking forward to hearing from you! Thanks again. Best,

Hi Corey Don pretty much nailed this answer. I'll make sure to answer your specific questions: You're not negatively affecting your ability to show in search by noindexing tags. They almost never rank or get traffic since they are just pages of thin content. Noindexing them does not affect your other pages. No other repercussions - unless you have a random tag archive getting traffic. Check your analytics, and if so, you can individually leave specific tags indexed with the Yoast plugin. I wrote a post all about this a while back: http://www.evolvingseo.com/2012/08/10/clean-sweep-yo-tag-archives-now/ You would have to figure out how to have unique title tags on each page - which is honestly more effort than is worth it. The Moz tool is showing an 'error' of duplicate content but the issue is just more that tag pages don't have much value and can just be noindexed and then ignored.

thanks William was a pleasure to been useful

Thanks for this update, Pete!

Hi Nigel Neither, they use server side filtering.Regards- David

Hey there! Sam from Moz's Help Team here! I'm sorry to hear about the trouble! So we can investigate this for you, could you pop an email over to help@moz.com with the name of the affected campaign? Looking forward to hearing from you!

Hi There URL length is not used as a ranking factor. The guideline is that they mustn't be overly long without reason, otherwise they can look spammy. If your URLs are: Site/Category/Sub-Category/Brand/Product Name Then I see no problem whatsoever. MOZ didn't used to warn on URL length - I generally ignore it and tell my clients not to worry about it. Regards Nigel

If the question is about the "visibility" of a page for a specific keyword then visibility does not need to be weighted by volume.  But, if you are asking about the visibility of a page or a website for a basket of keywords, expressed as a single number, then keyword query volume becomes important.

Katarina shared some good advice. Remember that the Open Site Explorer, good as it is, can't crawl the entire web, so might not discover every single link for a competitor. And to displace an established competitor with consistent rankings doesn't mean matching their inbound links - it means exceeding them, as they'll also have the benefit of the domain history, existing traffic etc. I've done some outreach in the past for a major window supplier in the UK, and if you use your graphics and animation skills in the right way, you should definitely be able to improve your situation. It's just about finding the right angle for the right audiences....

Hi Tawny, It looks like the system is working again - my ranking is back. Thank you Matt

Jon, If there is no content and these pages are just the download link then instead of putting a canonical link on them, set them as noindex.  I assume you have a landing page that directs people to your downloads, this is where you should optimize your content to get organic traffic, the direct download pages (with 0 content) will have no real value from a search perspective.

Thanks great sugestion

Hey 1902, I'm a small business owner, with little to no experience in SEO. I've learned the basics just by doing research online and reading a lot of articles. I rely on my website to get new clients and generate pretty much all of my business. When I first got started, I avoided trying to get backlinks by writing articles and guest posting on other sites because I thought it was too time consuming and difficult to write "kickass" content. I didn't think I had anything amazing to say and didn't think I'd ever be able to get published on sites with really high domain authority. After spending a lot of money on pay per click campaigns, I finally decided to try it. Before I really started focusing on writing articles (about 3 months ago), my site was showing up on page 5 or 6 of organic search results on Google for my focus keywords. After about 2 months of focusing solely on writing, my page is now showing up on page 1 for several of my focus keywords. Guest posting on other sites has by far been the best return on investment for me in getting meaningful backlinks that have increased my organic presence on Google. It did take time, but it wasn't as hard as I thought. I just started Googling reputable sites that posted articles relevant to my industry. I emailed those sites and asked if they accepted guest submissions for publication. A lot said no (or didn't even respond), but enough said yes. I'd say I have about 5 solid sites that I can now submit content to and they provide a bio in each article with do follow links back to multiple pages on my site. These key sites have domain authorities of 60 and above--the best sites have domain authorities of 82 and 92. My content is not anything amazing or groundbreaking. My articles probably aren't going to become the go-to authority on their topics. But they are relevant and they are publishable. I thought it would be nearly impossible to write for the really reputable sites, but I'm now a regular contributor to U.S. News. All I did was email and ask if they'd be willing to accept guest posts and submitted a writing sample on a suggested article. Moral of the story is that, at least for me, writing articles to get back links has by far been the most effective way of boosting my site. Definitely worth the effort and not as intimidating as I thought it would be. I saw significant results after just a couple months of focused effort. Hope this is helpful. Best of luck to you!

I sent you a private message. at top right of your moz account click, on the image profile, the page will display a menu, the las item sill be  private messages. Or if you have any problem this is my email romandelcarmen@gmail.com I can send the instructions of how to get your rank on search console