Latest Questions
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How can i cancel my membership?
Every time I try to "confirm cancel" using the link: https://moz.com/subscriptions/cancel an error message appears that says, "Your account is still active. You must cancel first before completing this survey." Is there another way to cancel this subscription?
Technical Support | | juliasphoto0 -
Disavow & nofollow from same IP
Thanks. I'm going to err on the side of caution and nofollow ALL of the links from my personal blog to my business. In the grand scheme of things, it makes up such a small percentage of links to our store. Our pagerank won't suffer. The sponsorships are literally 10 or 12 logos on a sporting club or surf club website. For those we made ourselves that I have easy access to, I have also done the nofollow as they're all living on the same bank of servers. (we donated the hosting space and websites as our sponsorship deal). Others where we have just given money or time and have no control over, I'm comfortable that they're legit and wont' get penalised. Asking a volunteer at a surf club to nofollow a hyperlink will be met by strange looks Staying away from dodgy $5 deals with a 40-foot pole.
Link Building | | sparrowdog0 -
Better for SEO to No-Index Pages with High Bounce Rates
Hi Samuel: Thanks so much for taking the time to respond to my post!! You make an excellent point about the necessity to create content useful for humans rather than search engines, a position my SEO firm has also taken. My site has received no manual penalty from Google. Besides launching an upgraded version that made mostly cosmetic changes, not much has changed on the site since February. But I should mention that in late April a link removal requests were made to about 100 toxic domains. About 30 web masters voluntarily removed their links. In mid May we filed a disavow request with Google for the other 70 domains. Could the removal of these links and the disavowal request have something to do with the fall in ranking and traffic? Please note the site only had about 280 domains linking to it in March and now there are even less. The quality of the incoming domains was pretty poor. Good suggestion regarding adding no-follows to the poorly performing building and listing pages. But we have a bit of a challenge with listing pages. They get rented quickly and it becomes unfeasible to add them to the site, and they are absolutely essential, if we need to add 300-400 words of content and write title and description tags. So how would you suggest we manage listings if we should not "no-index" them? Regarding our potentially spammy domain, we have used it for the site since 2006. An alternative domain (www.metro-manhattan.com) exists that redirects to our primary domain (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com). Do you think it would be better to redirect the site to the www.metro-manhattan.com domain? It better matches the brand "Metro Manhattan Office Space". But I have heard domain changes can be dangerous nightmares. You point out a potential issue with dashed in our domain. Do you think the single dash in Metro-Manhattan.com would also appear spammy? Incidentally, I don't think the content on our site looks spammy at all, maybe there is some thin content but not spammy. Thanks for your assistance!!! Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
After Ranking Drop Continue SEO or Focus on Improving User Experience Instead?
Hi Alan, First, a few things to consider: Did your site actually get hit with a penalty? You talk about removing unnatural links. Was that just to be safe, or something else? If your 1st site revision changed site urls and generated a lot of 404s, without proper redirection, you'd get the exact result you're describing. Did you get new copy written for your 1st site revision? If so, and you didn't write it, take a few sentences from different pages and search for them, in quotes, on Google. Make sure they weren't plagiarized, because that would explain a drop in traffic, too. All of that said, here's what I'd do: **Definitely **work to improve engagement. Engagement is good for your business anyway, so even if it had zero effect on visits, you'd make existing visitors happier. And, Google at least rewards you because of the secondary effects of a great UX: More attention and citation, more positive reviews, fewer bounce backs, etc. And yes, there's some evidence Google rewards great UX, whether deliberately or as a side effect. Look for lost links and repair them. Use OpenSiteExplorer and get the Top Pages report. Look for all pages that respond with a 404. Put those pages back (if you had that page before), build a page at that location (if you never had that page) or do a 301 redirect from the page URL to a 'real' page (the easiest fix). Check site performance. Did site load speed take a huge hit with the new design? Look at your log files. Go all the way back to before the 1st site relaunch. Compare Googlebot activity on your site from that period to now. What's changed? Is Googlebot getting trapped somewhere? Has crawl traffic dropped? Finally, I wouldn't engage in old-fashioned link building. It's a terrible idea for a site with a low DA. If you want to acquire citations, you're going to have to do it by making customers really happy, offering great information and content, and generally offering a great experience. I hope this helps. There's no easy answer here. You're going to need to take a very strategic approach, rather than focus on a single tactic, if you're going to make this work. Ian
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wrttnwrd1 -
Guest blogging??
Did you see the post authored by Cyrus Shepard earlier this week (http://moz.com/blog/bye-bye-author-pics)? He concludes there are still plenty of good reasons to use Google Authorship. Assess the quality of the publication you're considering writing for, and decide based on that. If it's a reputable site, I would set yourself up as an author. Look at the recent posts on Moz and other leading SEO blogs. They're still using authorship and follow links. Let that be your guide.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DonnaDuncan0 -
Site: inurl: Search
Thumbed up for being a great response! Wish I had thought of that.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamuelScott0 -
Too Many External Links A Problem
Thanks for the input SamuelScott. Generally, I plan to keep the external links well under 100 per page, by breaking them into sub-categories. I agree with your assessment that if it's good for the viewer, then it's good with Google because all they're suggestions on site design is geared towards the end user. My main concern, as you've stated, is that by leading users off the site, would I not reduce the page rank, and ultimately ranking. I appreciate that you seem to think, not.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alrockn0 -
Is Q&A on a website good or bad for SEO?
Great feedback! Thanks! Now I am thinking about moderating ALL comments and approve the ones that are quality, and delete the ones that aren't. The submit auto response could say "thank you for submitting your question, you will receive an email once an answer to your question is submitted. So, if their question is bad, then they won' t receive an answer (ever). So basically I filter out the bad from the good and build a high quality Q&A for future users to search through, and eliminate the "thin" and "spam" issue. So, I won't have to delete bad questions, they will never even make it on the site. I just probably won't get much repeat activity from the users who posted bad content that never make it to the forum. But this is not intended to be an online community, it's going to just be a place for quick questions on a specific topic. Thanks for your time in responding to me! I appreciate it! BB
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBuck0 -
Static or Dynamic Home Page? Please Help!
Hi again Catinas, I would say that, ultimately, worry less about SEO and more about what's best for visitors/customers. Especially because Google tends to think like a potential customer, so if you stick with that in mind, you should be OK. That being said, as a gamer myself, I think the best method would be to keep your content dynamic. Also, is the article you mention actually useful for customers, or is it really only for SEO purposes? Because Google's becoming more and more savvy with its algorithms, and you may want to rethink that particular strategy. Good luck!
On-Page / Site Optimization | | Lumina0 -
Should I ask sites that link to me to update links that redirect?
I'm going to agree with Dana and say "it depends". I wanted to add as well that a 301 redirect still passes somewhere between 95-99% of the link equity, so if this were my site I wouldn't bother unless there was a huge number of links that came this way. The exception would be if the site is doing a redirect to a page that is blocked by robots.txt and then redirecting that page to yours. If that happens then you don't get any of the link equity and yes, I'd want it changed. But then again, if someone is doing that, it would be on purpose and they probably wouldn't want to change it.
Link Building | | MarieHaynes0 -
Getting A hug from Roger
Woh! I did not know this. YAY! ROGER! We are HUGGING in just a few weeks! So excited for Mozcon.
Technical Support | | MarieHaynes2 -
Sitemap include all site links or just ones we want indexed?
Hi again JS, I think it's great that you continue to evaluate your platform from all perspectives and evaluate its strengths/weaknesses. Many times, a platform can do a lot of the basics well, but fall short on the details that differentiate us from our competition. For example, opencart may do the basic SEO requirements well, but not include ecommerce microdata (schema.org) which have a high impact on our search listings. You can do a lot of harm/good with the robots.txt file - like deindex entire website (probably not a good thing) or block certain directories (your /product issue). I would gain some deeper knowledge about what you can do with the robots.txt file and how you need it to perform for your business.
On-Page / Site Optimization | | Ray-pp0 -
Rubber Ball Ranking Results
Looked over it briefly, looks fine. Point more internal links to that page though.. currently only have them from all "fundraising supplies" categories/products. Add to blog, link from text in other categories, special offers, etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | OlegKorneitchouk0 -
Thoughts on the Keywords sending visits.
I guess the better question would be to look at if they are actually converting. You answered your own question, sort of! Are then worth tracking just because they are sending traffic? No! A keyword is not worth tracking just because it is sending traffic. If the traffic is of too low quality, then incurring a cost to track it is probably not efficient. However, those low quality, high traffic keywords are great to identify to know how to adjust from that point. I.e. should you create a new landing page targeted towards the keyword that is sending a lot of traffic? Are people who are looking for Ice Cream upset when then end up at a place that doesn't sell Ice Cream. That depends. 'Ice Cream' is a very generic keyword and a portion of the traffic searching for that term and landing at a website that doesn't sell ice cream would be upset. However, you'd want to look at the long-tail terms for that keyword and really identify what the traffic is trying to accomplish and why they came to your website. I add keywords from the keyword opportunities list if they achieve the following: Is unique enough from my current list of keywords to warrant tracking (because every keyword tracked through Moz cost me some $) Does it work towards completing one of my goals (i.e. does the keyword drive sales, leads, any valuable traffic) Are my competitors bidding or trying to rank for the term and I should be as well Do I have the room in my Moz account to track the keyword That last one is important because I tend to max out my keyword quota and every new keyword that I add I need to remove other keywords to make room.
Moz Pro | | Ray-pp0 -
What is the appropriate Robot.txt to unblock if Google cannot get all the resources from my homepage?
Remove the following line: Disallow: */wp-content/ And add: Allow: /wp-includes/js/
Search Engine Trends | | OlegKorneitchouk0