Latest Questions
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Google ranking 301 redirected vanity urls
Yes, that's how you could do it. Thinking about canonicals made me wonder whether this site auto-generates self-canonicals like some sites do? If there was canonical information on the vanity page pointing to itself, that might conflict with the 301 and may be sending Google mixed messages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Linda-Vassily0 -
Why does my ecommerce category page have such low PA?
Hi Joe, On one hand, DA and PA are metrics that are calculated primarily with the links that point to that page/domain. Take a look at these resources: Domain Authority & Page Authority Metrics - Whiteboard Friday What is Domain Authority? - Moz What is Page Authority? - Moz On the other hand, a certain PA/DA doesn't assure nothing in Google SERPs. A PA of 25 may or may not be a "low" PA. There are lots of cases that have fewer PA/DA than their competitors and have better rankings. In your case, I wouldn't worry much at all. Regarding the other matters: Domain change and 301 redirects. Yeap, it could affect some rankings, it was done too long ago to analyze its impact now. Links in OSE. Remember that Moz updates once a moth or so its link index and doesnt crawl the entire web, it may miss some of your links. My opinion: use other tools too (such as ahrefs.com, majestic.com or other). Words in descriptions. (Im asuming that you are referring to meta descriptions) There is no exact amout of words. Take a look at these resrouces: New Title & Description Lengths for Google SEO in Search Results - Moz Title Tag Length Guidelines: 2016 Edition - The SEMPOST Significant Change to SERPs: Google Extends Length of Titles and Descriptions - SEJ Hope I've helped. Best luck. GR.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GastonRiera0 -
Response rate in a linkbuilding campaign
Not much to add to Sean's answer, except make SURE that what you want them to link to is worth it! Ideally, you'll have an angle, such as something the competitor doesn't. Even better, a new feature that the blogger could write about, to give them some 'juice' for their article. Remember to think like them - What can you give to them, to help them make their piece of content better. To get what you want, you really need to figure out what they want
Link Building | | MikeGracia0 -
Any Google Algorithm update?
Hi Alvin, In my end I haven't noticed any major change nor any update. Have you checked these sources? Mozcast.com Algoroo.com You might find any answer there. Also, I'd suggest you to follow some news site such as searchenginejournal.com, usually they are up to date with any update or major changes in the algorithm. Best Luck. GR.
Search Engine Trends | | GastonRiera0 -
404 or 410 status code after deleting a real estate listing
Good answer Dirk. I like your idea of adding valuable, relevant content to the pages Dirk, good thinking. Personally, I'd rather Iet Google know these pages are removed intentionally and not due to errors, so 410 rather than leaving as 40. One thing to be mindful of, though, is how much crawl budget you're willing to give to these pages. If we're talking about a lot of pages in bulk, I'd be worried how much crawl budget they'd eat up over time. As you point out, they'd likely drop in rank anyway due to loss of internal links too, so might be the cost to the crawl budget isn't worth it?. Another solution (using your idea Dirk), would be to somehow automate the process of, when a listing is marked as sold, the listing is removed, other properties in the same area are added (as you suggest), then some time later (month or two?), a 410 header set. The other option would be to 301 the old pages back to the area page for the properties (perhaps with something like a bootstrap message saying the property is sold but others in the area are available). This would pass juice etc back to that page. but, of course, you'd be telling G that the page had permanently moved, which isn't quite the case.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeGracia0 -
Indexed pages
Another option is if the site uses a CMS. If so, then you can create a sitemap for content pages/posts etc,. Personally, I'm with Krzysztof Furtak on SF. Screaming Frog rocks. It'll find most pages, except perhaps Orphan pages as it wouldn't be able to find a link to crawl to discover the page. If it's really important to get as many pages as possible, I'd do the following (I've put an Astrix (*) next to ones that some people may think are a tad extreme) Run a Screaming Frog crawl Grab a sitemap from your CMS Check any server-based analytics (AWSTATS etc) Check your access_log file & parse out URLs in there**(*)** site: queries, with & without www, and also using * as a subdomain (use something like Moz's toolbar to export) As Krzysztof suggests, Scrapebox would extract data too, but be careful scraping, you may get an IP slap.(*) Export crawl data from Moz & a tool such as Deep Crawl Throw the pages from all into Excel and de-dupe. Once you have a de-duped list, as an optional last step, go back to Screaming Frog and enter list mode (I have the paid version, not sure if it's possible with the free one) and run a crawl over all the de-duped URLs to get status codes etc If you're going to do this sort of thing a fair bit - buy a Screaming Frog license, it's an awesome tool and can be useful in a multitude of situations.
Technical SEO Issues | | MikeGracia1 -
Best to Combine Listing URLs? Are 300 Listing Pages a "Thin Content" Risk?
Thanks very much. It was easy to set up. You put your contact info in the description area. Sometimes Google will pick up the description word for word for the serps. I got the items from past sales at Trulia, but you could easily put your own listings up. Or you could use Trulia, then put your own live listings at the top, remove them after they've sold. In each pin's description, even the ones from Trulia, you can put your own description, including a link back to your website. Pinterest used to pass on page rank, but it no longer does. Throw a bunch of anchor text links and Voila! there you are. I have lots of different Pinterest pages ranking. I have a huge Pinterest following, so that might help, but I have seen small followings rank also.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | julie-getonthemap0 -
Are Breadcrumbs Really Necessary?
Hi Alan and Jordan, Firstly, Alan, thanks for raising this question as I am currently in a similar predicament and was wondering if Jordan, you could provide some insight? For my website, which is the site for a magazine I work for, the current URL structure is www.website.com/article-title On first glance, I thought it must be that we would have to re-structure the URLs to include the category structure, for example... www.website.com/category/sub-category/article-title However, upon deeper investigation, I've seen that we do actually have breadcrumbs enabled therefore google is indexing and following the structure from this. With this in mind, is it actually worth re-structuring the URLs to include these categories as it will take a long time to organise and implement. Obviously, thinking in terms of UX, it is a must-do, but I'm just trying to weigh up the pro's and cons with this.. Appreciate your help, Leigh
Web Design | | leighcounsell0 -
Different numbers in Moz bar vs. OSE
Hi there! Sam from Moz's Help Team here! This could simply be a case where that example you've linked has the results filtered to 'this page' as opposed to 'this root domain' or 'this subdomain'. If instead you filter by root domain, you should see a far higher number of links populate in OSE. If you're still seeing strange results, it would be great if you could pop an email over to help@moz.com so we can take a deeper dive into this:).
Link Explorer | | samantha.chapman0 -
Why such bad scores?
Hi there - Sam from Moz's help team here! If I plug in that exact URL, I am now seeing the same results that Linda mentioned for the DA (5) and PA (21) (with and without the https). I'm also seeing 6 inbound links! Something to keep in mind is that is actually expected that we won’t find every page and link because we aren’t looking for them all! When we collect this data, we’re looking specifically for the most valuable links and, rather than crawling your entire site or every site, we collect this by starting our crawler on a few highest ranking sites and letting it perform a breadth first search to see what it finds. For each page that we crawl, we first collect each of it’s links before following these and collecting the details of each page that these link to and so on. There’s a set limit of links that we’ll crawl per page and pages that we’ll crawl per site so it’s expected that we may not follow every link on a site this way. So, if we haven't followed all of the links that exist because of this, they won't contribute to your overall DA or PA. Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Mozscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for many reasons - including the crawl-ability of sites, the number of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories. You can see our most recently updated schedule here as well as some more technical metrics on our Mozscape API Updates page. I hope this helps! If you have any further questions, feel free to pop an email over to help@moz.com (our response times can be quicker there:) ).
Link Explorer | | samantha.chapman0 -
We need someone to provide training in using Moz (paid hourly)
What I'd recommend (both as a long term SEO and someone who's used Moz for years), is first book an onboarding session with Moz. I've been using the Moz suite for many years, but recently booked one, just out of curiosity really! (and to see if I had any knowledge gaps with regards what the Moz tools can do). Don't expect strategy advice from Moz, of course, but sitting through a short onboarding session will really help you get to grips with the Moz tools and: Mean you need to pay a consultant for less time training on Moz's tools (so your money can be directed more to strategy & advice, rather than learning the tools) As you'll be a bit more comfortable with the Moz tools, you'll likely understand what the consultant you hire is talking about better Without meaning to be rude to anyone, you'll also find it easier to spot those who can and cannot help you. I'm not pitching for the work or anything here btw (am booked out solid with project work for the next few months, so couldn't even if I wanted to!), I just though the above might be a good way forward for you.
Moz Local | | MikeGracia0 -
Can I use two sitemaps?
Hello, Yes you are able to upload multiple sitemaps to your Google Search Console. Often sites that have thousands of pages will create multiple sitemaps to make it both easier for them to manage and search engines to crawl. Just make sure to keep them separate, what I mean by this is have one sitemap dedicated to your blog and blog only, same with your Magento site. Don't cross-reference pages into both. Hope this helps. Chris Hickman Adficient.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris_Hickman0 -
Should an internal link open in a new tab or in the same window?
Internal links should be on the same page, for the most part. The exception, like Emily, said, would be if the link is unrelated and you want them to come back to the original content (e.g. opt-in landing page linked from a blog post). External links in a new tab! For example, this is a link (opens in a new window) And External Link ( Visit Website )
On-Page / Site Optimization | | Saqibssheikh0 -
Moving .com to .co.uk without compromising .com
Hey Gianluca, Thanks for that very detailed response, I have a few extra questions: 1. You say using the canonical tag vs 301 redirects is risky: Is that to say, having this solution in place even for a few weeks whilst we plan and implement a better solution could have negative effects for us? If so, what sort of negative effects could we incur? Before the next question, I'd like to give you a little more background; our site is like an online shop, but refers you to other retailers to complete your purchase. We have department pages, a few content pages like "contact" and "terms", a search listing page, a homepage, and a brands page. Our department pages have links to related articles, brands and products and I expect these will be very different between the two sites. We have a search page, but the data changes daily and the data will be drastically different between the two sites at any one time since the products will be from retailers local to the US/UK Our brands page is mostly generated and so can change slightly per day but is likely to be very similar accross the two sites. Our static pages will likely start of identical and start to evolve independently (if at all) over a very long period. 2. Keeping all of this in mind, I am not sure if hreflang is still appropriate because it is not going to be the same content translated, but instead similar pages with uniquely tailored content based on its location. What are your thoughts on this? Am I misinterpreting or being to strict in my understanding of what hreflang should be used for? 3. in the above response, you wrote: "you should preview a dilution of PageRank because of the internal linking toward the new USA version" - Is this to say we will start to lose page rank on the UK site as people start to visit the USA site? I just wanted to be clear about what this means, because I am seeing words such as "preview", "dilution" and "internal-linking" which sound like they may or may not be SEO related terms. 4. Finally, I have read conflicting articles about the effectiveness of adding a cache expiry to 301 redirects. Could this be effective for our scenario? Will Google interpret it as a temporary redirect? Will user browsers really expire the 301 when we specify? Thanks for your advice, Dipun
Branding / Brand Awareness | | dipunm0 -
SEO - Google Local Listing & Same Day Delivery
Great thank you. I haven't looked into local optimisation before so this helps!
Search Engine Trends | | BeckyKey0 -
How can I get links indexed in Just Discovered Links, or Open site Explorer? (Because it aint Bit.ly or Feedly!)
Hi Tawny, Thank you for the thorough answer. I think you'll need to update that section I quoted.. again..! For the record, that's a real shame. It's now a case of myself and others like me educating clients to use different tools. Good luck! Steve
Link Explorer | | stevestretton11 -
.htaccess Question
This does seem a bit odd. but the domain also doesn't have any inbound links which is what I believe is one of the main things that Moz tool picks up. Perhaps you should build a couple of inbound links to the domain and see what happens?
Technical SEO Issues | | seanginnaw0 -
How do I treat multiple buildings on the same college campus on Google for local SEO?
I hope you succeed with your quest to make it easier to get college businesses listed. I am helping with a music festival in February on Sacramento State's campus. Hundreds of people attending, many who will get lost because the building is not on the map. The campus road system is convoluted with random detours and dead ends to slow down the speeders who are late for class.
Local Listings | | julie-getonthemap1