Latest Questions
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Image Impression Drop
Hi Joe, There haven't been any major image algorithm updates since the beginning of August that I'm aware of. Have you looked at the queries that you rank on image search for to see where specifically you're dropping? There could be another site that popped up in early August that's outranking you. Best, Kristina
Technical SEO Issues | | KristinaKledzik0 -
How Are You Handling Blog Posts/Author Pages when Employees Leave the Company?
Yeps we do the same thing, they won't have access anymore in our CMS so we'll include on their author bio that the editor has left the company and what company they went to work for. In some cases in their new job they also want to contribute and that leaves their (old) content still as it was.
Content & Blogging | | Martijn_Scheijbeler0 -
On-page optimization
Hi Alan! Thanks for reaching out. My name is Erin, and I'm on the Moz Help Team. I'll do my best to address all of your questions! I have a list of the top 350 keywords sending volume to my site, sorted by volume. I am using your On-Page Optimization tool to look at the top 10 keywords and the grade for each of the relevant pages on the website. So for "hard wood flooring," I am searching for that term on Google and finding the first listing for my site lumberliquidators.com that comess up. Then I paste that page link into the On-Page Optimizer. Is this the best way to do this to determine performance for the most relevant page? Moz gave this keyword an F (home page) even though LL came up #2 in the organic Google rankings. On-Page looks at more than where you're ranking for a keyword. This tool is telling you how well optimized your keyword is for the URL your ranking for. You can read more about it all here in this handy article from our Help Hub! Who long does it take a campaign to run before all the final data is there? I have ran 3 different campaigns here because I made some changes int he keywords used. Is the last one, "LL SEO 3 - Lorry Terms" complete? When you initially set up a campaign you'll see GA data (if you have a profile linked), Keyword Rankings (as long as the were added during campaign set up), and your competitive metrics within a few hours. All of your other data should populate within 7 days. After that, your campaign will update every seven days. So for example, your LL SEO 3 campaign was created on August 21st. That means that your next update will occur on August 28th, and show your data from August 21st-August 27th. Your campaign should also update on the same day every week. It says there is a crawl error for Duplicate Content - 42,983 pages on www.lumberliquidators.com have duplicate content - is this possible? Yes, it's possible. It really just depends on how you have your site set up. Campaigns have a 90% tolerance for duplicate content. This includes all the source code on the page and not just the viewable text. So if a URL is at least 90% similar in code to another URL, this warning will appear. You can run your own tests using this tool: http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php We don't know what standard Google uses, but it's safe to say they are a bit more sophisticated than us - so you might be okay in this regard as long as you have a couple hundred words of unique text per page. Google won't say how much duplicate content is too much, so we like to be better safe than sorry. I noticed that when I search for www.lumberrliquidators.com on Google it seems to "redirects" to http://www.lumberliquidators.com/ll/home. Could this be impacting numbers in some way? As long as you have your 301 set up correctly, this should be fine. I hope this helps! If you have any other questions, feel free to email us at help@moz.com! Cheers, Erin
Other Research Tools | | ErinMcCaul0 -
Missing Title for Sitemap
Hi ShatterBuggy, It sounds like it's not the sitemap that's the issue, but rather the title tag on the individual pages are missing or empty. Here's the Yoast plugin tutorial section on configuring and optimizing title tags: https://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/#titles -Trung
Moz Pro | | trung.ngo0 -
How do I know if my SEO person is creating solid links vs spammy links?
Some good suggestions above, try some back link checking tools, check their Domain Authority, etc. However, in my opinion, the best way for you to ensure your SEO person is building good links is to learn the basic difference between a good and bad link and actually check them yourself (the bigger your site and the more links you build, the less feasible this is, but the concept that you should be able to look at the links being built and understand what is a good or a bad link is still applicable). Obviously if you are building massive numbers of links, this is difficult (although there are tools that can help), but if your SEO employee (I assume it is singular) is building good links, they shouldn't be building massive numbers of them unless they are coming organically (through creating content or a product that is so popular that high quality links are appearing without traditional link building). Also, how are you measuring success? Ranking growth? Number of links? Quality of links? If you ask your SEO person to report on the links being built and ask he/she to include measures like Domain Authority, Page Authority, etc and then just try and audit the links periodically, you'll start to learn enough about SEO to measure their performance yourself (seriously, try Googling "audit my back links," there's some great tools out there, as well as reasonably simple explanations of the major things to look out for. I also agree with those mentioning that outsourcing SEO is a dangerous (if somewhat necessary) strategy. In my opinion, learning about SEO basics is one of the single most valuable things a small business owner can do, since it will both improve your ability to market online, as well as protect you against hiring a bad employee.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alecfwilson0 -
Should we change the publish date in WordPress when updating a post?
Thanks for the great answer, Ray. We have been adding a note at the bottom of the post that it's been updated. I think we'll take your advice and give it a bigger call out at the top.
Technical SEO Issues | | TomNYC0 -
Clean up of Links, What to get rid of?
Good points. Following on from recent developments from the Matts Cutts comments about Directories, we get loads of links which could be, might not be really from Directories. As these are not top links we have removed some, which we can see are not related to our business at all and have removed these, but some are in that grey area, where the directory has good Trust and authority, but the links are somewhat generic. We have been working on removing links for quite a few a month or so, and we have seen our Global rank drop like a stone, as unlinking is not a good sign from where-ever, so we know this will recover. The balancing of this debate is how far you go to strip back to pure distilled links and allow a few diluted links.
Search Engine Trends | | BruceA0 -
How to locate page with the duplicate title? (Crawl Diagnostics - Duplicate Titles Warning)
Hi, when you click on the error, it should list the URL of the page which has one title, and then underneath that, the other page(s) that have the same title.
Getting Started | | ProductPearson0 -
Site migration - 301 or 404 for pages no longer needed?
Hi James, If you can redirect the pages from the old site that are no longer needed, to the same or similar on the new site, then I would do a 301 redirect. You are still sending users to where they are looking to go and will pass along any rankings to the new pages. In general you don't want 404 pages on your site, so if you have pages that are not relevant on the new site, or if say they are products you do not offer any longer then I would use the GWT URL removal tool and have those pages removed from googles index so they do not come up in search results. Hope that helps.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whebb0 -
Meta Refresh
Hi, this means you have redirects set up which are not particularly SEO friendly. Moz has the following description of Meta Refreshes. Meta Refresh "Meta refreshes are a type of redirect executed on the page level rather than the server level. They are usually slower, and not a recommended SEO technique. They are most commonly associated with a five-second countdown with the text "If you are not redirected in five seconds, click here." Meta refreshes do pass some link juice, but are not recommended as an SEO tactic due to poor usability and the loss of link juice passed." So, if you have something on your site saying something like "you are about to be redirected", it is basically saying you should not have this, and instead use a direct redirect which passes link juice more. Ash
On-Page / Site Optimization | | ProductPearson0 -
How to Index my backlinks?
Maybe try linking to the linked pages from your site you're trying to get links from. I think posting them on social media like Twitter could help too to let the SERPs know they're relevant links.
Link Building | | KyleEaves0 -
Ongoing problems with Panda
Hi Sandra, I apologize it has taken me this long to get back to you about this post. It looks like you are in good hands and it is all settled. Sincerely, Thomas
Link Building | | BlueprintMarketing1 -
Discrepancy between Google analytics and Alexa
I'll 2nd what Martijn is saying, Alexa can be hugely inaccurate, and the smaller your site is (traffic wise) the more inaccurate it is. If you have Alexa installed on your browser then you are boosting the stats on alexa as you spend more time on your site than anyone else. I only use Alexa an odd time to get a very rough idea of competitors traffic.
Local Website Optimization | | PaddyDisplays0