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!


  • Thanks everybody! It looks I need to "sort of" consider them in my analysis

    Technical SEO Issues | | GregB123
    0

  • Hi Fabio! I can't find any good updated information on this either, so I am marking it as Discussion to get the conversation going. From what Pete said on the other post two years ago, it sounds like they may pick it up in a similar way to how Google does: with recognition, but will ignore it if it doesn't make sense. It would be good to hear from people who have implemented this and seen results in Bing, if anyone has experience with this.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaneCopland
    0

  • I did run a search on our old pages in the SERPs and found a large number of them are still showing. I also found most of our new pages, some where both the old and new were represented. I have also seen a lot of our positions go from page one to not in the top 100, these are all from pages which were 301ed to a nearly exact replica in the new version. I had originally thought Google had hit them, but not updated their listing to the new version. I am now thinking that they are just being ignored, and have not had their 301 picked up.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FireMountainGems
    0

  • Thank you all for your Answers, I think the best solution is to craft content on this page. I hope it will be back soon on first page

    Keyword Research | | EnjinFrance
    0

  • Hi Peter, The problem here is most likely that you have two nearly-identical sites. It looks like you have tried to re-write content between pages like http://www.gilnahirktyres.co.uk/services/mot-belfast and http://www.belfasttyres.co.uk/services/mot-belfast, but the content is still incredibly similar. Google will still see this as duplicated: the structure of the sites is nearly identical, the paragraph structures are the same, and Google has taken a lot of measures to be able to identify this sort of thing. The reason they have focused on this is because of how easy it was to "spin" content with synonyms, etc. and have it rank well over and over again. Also, http://www.belfasttyres.co.uk/robots.txt does not block all of this duplicate content either. For users' sake, Google does not want to rank the same content more than once so they weed out duplicates that are this extreme. They want to present diverse results that give people as much opportunity to choose as possible. You will need to focus on using just one of these sites, rather than both. It's interesting that the problem is only showing itself on mobile search right now, but I would not be surprised if this rolls out to the index at large.

    Search Engine Trends | | JaneCopland
    0

  • It really depends on the extent of the damage whether you need a pro or not.  If it's all self contained, as it sounds like, then it will just take identifying the duplicates, and fixing the linking problems. To find duplicate articles just copy a part of the content and Google it with quotes around it.  This will search for that exact text, and allow you to find the instances that it shows up on your websites.  Fix accordingly. As for the links, it's pretty much just a matter of using some link searching tools, Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO, and finding all the instances where you have outbound links from one site to another.  For the time being I would just separate them completely.  After they recover you can go back to connecting them. I just did this for a company out of Florida.  They created their own link network, and it ended up penalizing them.  They recovered in 3 weeks.  They had a penalty, lower case and less destructive, and not a Penguin or Panda.

    Technical SEO Issues | | WhoWuddaThunk
    0

  • Hi thanks that pretty much answers the question was basing the more complicated version on the Amazons of the world so wanted to check there wasn't any fundamental reasons for doing it that way as opposed to the more simplistic way.

    Web Design | | tidybooks
    0

  • Agreed with Andy that this is about what you want to achieve with the content. I would be making this choice based upon what type of marketing you plan on carrying out with the graph. In some cases, something more simple like a jpeg is going to work better. In others, you're going to want to invest in the interactive HTML5 option. I know this is a vague answer, but it really does come down to what will be appropriate.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaneCopland
    0

  • Hi Mike, Well, the site is in Italian, and about Football (which I don't really follow as a sport) so can't really read what is there, but there are two points that I would make. The first, I had only been there 5 seconds, and then I lose the page to a huge mid-window popup. I hate these. The second is that you need to create a Favicon. You can do that here: http://www.favicon.co.uk/ -Andy

    Technical SEO Issues | | Andy.Drinkwater
    0

  • "duplicate content is normally not a penalty." This also depends on just how much there is. If you duplicate a page, that is identical information. You can get around this problem Jon, by using the HREFLANG markup that will also work across domains, but remember that it works on a per URL basis, so you would need to use this for each of the URL's with the duplicate content. Have a read of this article from Google on how to use the markup. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en I hope that helps. -Andy

    Web Design | | Andy.Drinkwater
    0

  • And once your site gets out there as a place with followed links, you'll have more spam issues to deal with than you'll want.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KeriMorgret
    0

  • Hi there Jane, Thanks a lot for taking the time to read and respond to my question. Your response confirms my thinking that the premise is flawed, and brings into question why the faculties just don't activate their own audience as and when required. Thanks again, appreciate it!

    Social Media | | cos2030
    0

  • Thanks for your responses Matt and Andy, very useful information and I will go into them deeper to workout what is going on with my site.  It's interesting what Andy says about older sites getting hit the mosts as we are seeing new sites with high rankings, when in the "old days" it would take ages for these sites to rank for very competitive keywords. We have not received a Google webmaster penalty, but have been hit by one of the black and white animals. We have disavowed many links and have seen some recovery, but need to see more progress. I'll check out the links above and see if it will help in understand what to do. Thanks again, ps, if anyone has any more info, do let me know. Tai

    Technical SEO Issues | | Taiger
    0

  • Andy - Thank you!  Very helpful.  I will use the folders option. Jane - Thank you!

    Technical SEO Issues | | InternetRep
    0

  • Hey Dylan Either of those are possibilities for Google finding and indexing a page like that. There could be many ways that happened - I've seen them spider "links" in a drop down depending on how it's implemented. One thing you can do to check how, is looked at the text-only cache of the page (type cache:www.domain.com/page-name in your browser and click text only) - and look to see if the drop down items actually appear and clickable links. You can also try crawling the site with Screaming Frog and set the user-agent to GoogleBot and see if they got picked up. If the filter is just for example re-sorting the list of items in a category, there is probably not a need to have this crawled or indexed, because it's just the same content in a different order. If you do want to remove them from the index, you will want to add a meta noindex tag to the HTML, wait for them to drop out of the index, and then block crawling with robots.txt or nofollow the links that might be generated. Hope that helps! EDIT - I'd also check to be sure they are not showing up in your XML sitemap.

    Web Design | | evolvingSEO
    0

  • Hi Alexander, There isn't a best length to write, but I personally would never make this too long. Remember that this is a small sales page (of a kind), and you are wanting to sell your services. You are much better off with something that quickly describes what you are offering. I think the maximum number of characters you can use is about 4,500, but this would make for an overly lengthy read. There is a lot of personal opinion comes into this question, but for me, I would stick at about 600 characters. Others might choose more - others less. -Andy

    Local Listings | | Andy.Drinkwater
    0

  • Hi Thomas, I am sorry to hear that you have been having an issue with Google Analytics. We generally advise that you refresh your connection, which you can do so by following these steps. Head to your campaign settings by clicking the button on the right-hand side of your campaign: http://screencast.com/t/V01YCyARn -Click the pencil icon next to the Google Analytics section of the settings page: http://screencast.com/t/TYMEMb4UI Disconnect your Google Analytics connection: http://screencast.com/t/psmFgYkOm74R Go back to your settings page and click on "connect account." Please make sure you are logged into the GA account that has admin access to the GA profile for the site you are tracking for this campaign. Hurray! This should let you grab the most current traffic data! If this does not resolve the issue, I suggest you submit a ticket at help@moz.com and we should be able to sort it out. Hopefully this helps and you have a wonderful day!

    Other Research Tools | | Sean_Peerenboom
    0

  • I see, so for example: Foreign Authors Foreign Singers Travel Diaries I think it's getting closer, but i don't think people still search for Foreign Author per say. They just look for an author, or, who happens to be Foreign. It's not possible to distinguish based on these keyword the targeted sub-group, I think. All this made me think. Given that this is about exploration, somehow I need to get the right people with the right mindset on the site, and by EXPLORING, they will see content and choose what interests them. So the site would be kind of a cultural discovery tool. Let's take a Persona, for example: all I know is I want to see something interesting about other cultures or the world, I don't know if it's going to be an author specifically, a new song form malaysia, or an explanation of head bobbing in Indian culture.  I am curious and want to find something interesting. How would one target keywords (or plan an SEO, Social Media Strategy) for that?  Would you still apply your above suggestion of making a list of what would fall under it and create categories with key-word rich category urls, etc. ? I almost feel as if it's better to do content marketing: have cool posts shared elsewhere ( or guest post) that will lead the right kind of people back to the site. What do you think?

    Branding / Brand Awareness | | IamKovacs
    0