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!


  • Hi Margaret 301 redirects! I have just gone through the same process as you will be. You may find this blog post of use, Its simple and quick. http://blog.search-mojo.com/2010/10/14/301-redirects-formatting-bulk-redirects-in-4-quick-steps/ Also checkout http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/ which will help you also.

    Link Building | | CDLAB
    0

  • Marcus is a little busy at the moment but I work with Marcus at Bowler Hat and may be able to help here. For google+ I recommend creating a page for each location. Simply because it increase the chance of the company appearing in the local search results depending on the location of the searcher. For example, if you were to only create one page for your Main Office and lets say that was based in California.. If someone was to search for a product or service that you provide but they are located in New York, for obvious reasons you will not appear in the local search results, even though you could have an office around the corner from the searchers location. But remember to not add the location into the title of your Google+ page! If you do it the correct way, you will end up will several google+ pages all called ‘examplebrand’ but Google will be able to recognise your address so there is no need to name your google+ page ‘examplebrand new york’ As for Facebook, it all depends on how much time you are willing to put into your Social Media. It would be great to have a Facebook page for each location as you could interact with the local community and share news about any events taking place. But if you do not have the time or a team to do this, I would recommend having a single brand page as it would be less time consuming but still enables you to interact with customers on social media. Hope this helps Ryan

    Branding / Brand Awareness | | Marcus_Miller
    0

  • It really depends on the kind of content you have and where that will best serve user intent. Ultimately, the intent on product pages and the intent on help pages is nuanced and slightly different. Is a "tutorial" video going to satisfy the user who lands on a category page, likely looking to potentially make refine a selection and make a purchase? Although I haven't seen your videos, so it's hard to say for sure - I'd guess it's probably not ideal. In such an instance, the user probably wants to know more about the features and benefits of a product/category type, rather than "how to use X". Ideally you should re-edit and reframe the videos you have (or make new videos) to match the specific pages - so having one variation for the category page that fits the user intent there and then one for the help page section which better matches that user intent. My gut is to say that your current videos will work better in the help section, but I say this without knowledge of the site or videos, so please take that recommendation with a pinch of salt. I don't recommend following EGOL's suggestion in this thread, because I think it's a slightly old hat "SEO' mentality that puts the search engine factors above the user experience. Just because you won't get penalised for having the same video across multiple pages doesn't mean it's a great idea. Remember that video is just a media type, like text and image. You (probably) wouldn't think about duplicating blocks of text across multiple pages and for the same reasons, I don't think it's particularly wise to treat video any differently. Make sure you're creating content FOR the pages, rather than creating the content and then trying to work out where it fits afterwards. While it's possible that a video you create is relevant for multiple use-cases, in 99% of circumstances, said video would better serve each use case by at least being slightly re-edited for each page that it lives on. If you think that actually, the video is perfectly relevant for each page in question and doesn't need to be re-edited, then you should probably ask yourself whether you need two pages or whether you can consolidate the content into two pages. It's much better (from both a search engine and user perspective) to have one very strong, rich page targeted at a specific topic, rather than to have multiple thinner pages. I hope that's useful! Phil

    On-Page / Site Optimization | | PhilNottingham
    0

  • you took offense for how I communicated, and for that I apologize.  However if you read the opening of my initial response, I stated that what I was going to write was a more complete response because over-simplification is very dangerous in our industry. People make jumps and leaps of assumption all too often when they don't have a more thorough understanding of the nuances of acceptable vs unacceptable.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlanBleiweiss
    0

  • Thanks guys - I really appreciate your quick responses to my silly question:) JJ

    On-Page / Site Optimization | | jjtech
    0

  • Hi Matt, I recommend you read this recent post from Mike Blumenthal at LocalU: http://localu.org/blog/merge-google-pages-usually-cant-now/

    Branding / Brand Awareness | | MiriamEllis
    0

  • Hi Anthony Kurt's answer was pretty dead on (thanks Kurt!). Just want to add some more detail about the disavow specifically. We've been told by John Muller in some of his Google Hangouts (he works on the webmaster tools team) that the disavow can take up to 6 months to fully take effect. This is because Google has to have crawled all the domains/pages in the disavow file, based upon their own crawl schedule (having nothing to do with when you submit the file). As they crawl the disavowed URLs, they then add a nofollow basically on those links. Sounds like you're doing the right things! I would also think about being sure to try to get traffic from other places in the meantime, even paid. I have heard John also suggest that you can start testing page quality with PPC traffic. I also believe evidence of other traffic sources, especially social, will help any site recover much more quickly.

    Link Building | | evolvingSEO
    0

  • Thank you much appreciated. I joined Moz for forum would you believe it I wanted somewhere I could go and post SEO questions, and where I would hopefully get answer, and I was hoping to get answers from "credible" people. So thanks. It's a shame that Moz took out the email the experts feature they used to have a few years ago. Anyway, onwards...

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ryanetc
    0

  • How are you checking their backlinks? Keep in mind that even the best link checkers can find only a fraction of the links pointing to a site. It could be that there are more links going to the site that you're not aware of, that Google knows about. Ahrefs has the largest index of links, in my experience. It's also possible that the site has a lot of other positive signals going to the site. Generally, the more authoritative and trustworthy a site is in Google's eyes, the more it can get away with in terms of spammy tactics without getting penalized. You also don't know which of those links are helping with the rankings, if any. It's entirely possible that the company has already disavowed most of those links in Webmaster tools, or Google is discounting them automatically. Or maybe they will end up getting penalized in the next Penguin update. In short, don't rely too much on competitive backlink analysis. It can give you a few ideas of links to go after, but it doesn't always give you the full picture.

    Link Building | | TakeshiYoung
    0

  • Hi mark, Firstly I do not think that they suppose to rank on normal serp....if you got the rank on google image serp thats the best you will get. The 15th of November update focused on Google Image SERP and did boost lots of web sites that have dedicated landing pages with image presentation about specific products. It happened in one of my test blogs I use for testing various techniques to see what work and what doesnt. I did none of the optimisations you mention above, but I did on-page optimise the web page that hosts the image for the keywords I wanted it to rank, used top navigation anchors and that was it. No image alt tag, no resizing, nothing. Google just picked it up and ranked it. As I was testing the blog for link building and not image rankings that is what i can offer you atm and that was the effect it had on me with the 14th of november update. We are talking about 83.000% increase on impressions on Google Webmaster tools. so all I can advise is, do have a landing page with all your image products there but optimise the landing page for the keywords and not the image itself necessarily. Ofcourse doing the latter wont harm you but make sure that the page is optimised as well to be on the best/perfect side.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | artdivision
    0

  • Thanks for the response Alan, really helpful to get another persons opinion. We're thinking that all  content detail needs to presented on ONE url regardless of the section that you arrive to it from and any inline content reveals will need to be unique to that section – so the content should be more relevant

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair
    0

  • There's a link building section of the Moz Blog that will give you a lot of ideas, as well as our section on links in the Beginner's Guide to SEO at http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KeriMorgret
    0

  • Hi Shaun, Our chat is for billing but you can go ahead and reach out to us through that. You will find it under billing and there will be a link to our chat to the right. Thanks, Steffany

    Technical Support | | StefPachall
    0

  • Hi Clint I'm in agreement with your line of thinking.  Other than building links to the product page itself, you may want to change the way the page looks in order to give it that boost. As you will have seen - in this and other industries - Google is a fan of ranking informational content.  Subsequently, your resource page, which is more likely to have said content, will often rank higher.  The solution would be to add more of this type of content - unique versions of course - to your product page for Google to crawl.  Additionally, you may want to withold or remove that kind of content from the resource page if you really don't want it to rank. The trade-off comes with user experience - by demoting or even removing this resource page, will it come at a serious detriment to users on your site finding what they want?  If there's a hint of this answer being "yes", then I wouldn't do it.  User experience is paramount.  Instead, you may want to add my call to action/sales imagery and/or copy to the resource page to drive conversions. Hope this helps.

    On-Page / Site Optimization | | TomRayner
    0

  • Kurt, Just wanted to let you know, I decided to go with option 1 above.  This is the long route, but the purest form of SEO.  It will cost me more money up front, and will take time to develop, but I think its our best bet for the long run. Thanks again for your help.  I understand the canonical tag better now. Rob

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | partnerf
    0

  • Thank you Ricky! Answered 2 of my inquiries in the past 24hours I like the option of having a NAV item called "cities we serve" with cities such as San Francisco landing to a Welcome Page having all the services displayed there with proper anchors(like you mentioned). Coming back to the NAV I'd like to see the San francisco splitting into the different service pages(attachment). g6t2AwQ.png

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art
    0

  • Hi Rove and thanks for the additional info, Fact you got manual penalty changes the ball game and it depends how deep they will go to your profile. I have a bad experience with manual penalties where google even pointed it out branded anchor texts from PR4 web sites simply because they didnt want the link there. It took 4 reconsideration requests to eventually lift the ban. In that case I would remove those link, or submit without those links included and have the file ready for re-submission 10 days later or so. The fact that you went through the asking/removal root SHOULD be rewarded as they would like to see the effort. Make sure you document everything and state that in your reconsideration request document (mines are roughly 2 full pages) and that you list them properly to your google doc exccel sheet. I will be more than happy to quickly check your profile. Just bear in mind that majestic seo doesnt download all the links so I might miss something. The best tool to get your links downloaded is Webmaster tools which I will also be more than happy to review if you want. Send me a PM whenever you want with your domain.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | artdivision
    0