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!


  • Update: In addition to the following happening on our /shop/ subdomain (the bread and butter of the site): 1)  Stupidly moving it to shop.domain.com for 2 months, redirecting everything there, then deciding to move it back to domain.com/shop/ .... 2)  Developer failing to enable canonicals resulting in the new shop install having 4+ duplicate pages for every product for about 5 months. I have now found that the default setting for Magento store software is a 302 redirect for the 'Auto-redirect base URL' option.  Our base URL changed from HTTP to HTTPS.   This means that probably for about the last 9 months, our store home page has been 302'd  (no link juice passing, and way too long to use a temporary flag like this). This 302 is Magento's default option, and my developer failed to point out the devastating effect it could have on rankings if we didn't change it to "301". Not sure if this has played a role in our lost rankings, as our store is just a sub-section of our site, and I have no idea how I am going to fix this and tell Google "Wait!  Here's a 301 instead!  Please restore our juice!" 

    Search Engine Trends | | HLTalk
    0

  • Hi onurcan-ikiz! Moz has a great blog post that discusses how many links is too many. I would check that out for advice—while there isn't an exact number of links you should not exceed, many people suggest having fewer than 100 links per page. If you main navigation as a lot of links I would be worried about the link juice. When your website receives a backlink from another website, hopefully with a high domain authority (YAY!), the link juice is being spread out to ALL the pages being linked from the page they are linking to. This means if www.cnn.com (who has a domain authority of 96) links to your company's homepage, they would be spreading some of their authority to you through "link juice". But instead of retaining majority of that juice/authority on the homepage (thus increasing the authority on that page), you are going to be spreading fewer and fewer amounts of that authority through all 100+ pages linked from the main navigation. Check out this link juice diagram to get a visual representation of what I am talking about. Hope this helps!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BlueCorona
    0

  • Thanks Dana , can you help me with redirecting non trailing slash to trailing slash at the end , my wordpress is in sub dictionary http://domain.com/blog/ and i have two .htaccess , one in root and one in the wordpress folder. i tried to solve it by adding that code in the root .htaccess RewriteEngine On RewriteBase /blog/ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$ RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://ghadaalsaman.com/blog/$1/ [L,R=301] Wordpress give 200 OK with the two versions ( with and without trailing slash ) and that hurts my SEO Thanks in advanced

    Technical SEO Issues | | NeatIT
    0

  • I have to agree with EGOL when they stated, "You are asking if Method A is better than Method B. I am willing to bet that the implementation is more important than the method." I think either of these methods (button v. form) can work better, but this is dependent on a few things. You will need to consider what the industry is, who the viewers are, and what they are more likely to do. Aesthetics and verbiage will also make a major impact—so it really comes down to multiple factors. For instance, someone who is younger might be more inclined to simply hit a button for ease of use. Making it less clicks will always improve your conversion. But an older person might prefer to fill out a form—but they might also not want to give out their information. My biggest suggestion would be to sit down and ensure you are thinking about your audience, not necessarily what you think would convert the best. Hope this helps!

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | BlueCorona
    0

  • All keyword rank tracking software, including Moz's, requires you to input the keywords yourself and then they will tell you if any pages (and which pages) are ranking the highest for that keyword. See attached screenshot from Moz Pro rank tracking inside campaigns. This is why in addition to ranking tracking, you need to do keyword research to populate this list of terms. q8RjA

    Keyword Research | | EricaMcGillivray
    0

  • Just jumping in here even though it's an old question. The thing is, Moz is crawling the pages and showing duplicate titles, but if you have page B using rel=caonical pointing to page A, then Google will reference page A. It's ok if page A and page B have the same title if using rel=canonical, because Google will follow that directive most of the time. So if Moz is surfacing duplicate title tags but they are canonicalizing, it's safe to ignore Moz's flagged issue. Don't always take it at face value. It would most likely be a waste of time to go change all the page titles for the duplicate pages if you're using rel=canonical.

    On-Page / Site Optimization | | Joe.Robison
    0

  • Hi Jordan! Regarding your local landing pages, I think you'll find this Moz Blog piece really fills the bill: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages Regarding optimization, with just 2 cities, you may be able to include both in the tags and titles on some of your main pages (home, about, contact) but that kind of depends. So, for example on your homepage title tag, you could have Green Tree Bank: Serving Jackson, OR and Yola, CA Or, you can skip that approach and just go with the brand and a message on main pages' tags and focus very heavily on geographic terms on the landing pages. It something to experiment with. Main thing is, those landing pages should be viewed as 2 of the most important pages on the website, as they are the ones your citations should link to and your customers will be reaching most easily via those citations. Make these pages shining stars, expending all possible resources to offer an exceptional, persuasive experience in order to maximize conversions. Hope this helps!

    Local Website Optimization | | MiriamEllis
    0

  • Hi there! Tawny from Moz's Help Team here. I think I can help explain why you're seeing such different Opportunity scores in Keyword Explorer for two very similar searches. Opportunity Score is designed to calculate the relative Click-through-Rate (CTR) of the organic web results in any given Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP). Google SERPs that have very few non-traditional ranking features and are more similar to the classic “ten blue links” only model will have very high Opportunity Scores. SERPs that have many features - like images, ads, news results, answer boxes, knowledge graph panels, etc. - will have much lower Opportunity scores. We use an averaged CTR model derived from our anonymized clickstream data to build this useful metric and apply it based on the features we see in Google’s results. I ran a quick test using the search terms "Seattle to San Francisco" and "Flight from Seattle to San Francisco", and here's what I saw: http://www.screencast.com/t/iZzvZKx7ov  It looks like the difference in SERP features present for that search is the reason that searches of this type are getting different Opportunity scores. I hope this helps! If you have more questions or need some further clarification, feel free to write in to help@moz.com any time!

    Feature Requests | | tawnycase
    0

  • Hi Edward, Google Adwords looks at fraudulous clicks and makes sure that these clicks are not using the budget of your Adwords campaigns. Even in their own budget reports/ campaign spend reports you can find a small piece at the bottom that will provide you with more information on what kind of credit you got back form clicks that they analysed as being fake.

    Paid Search Marketing | | Martijn_Scheijbeler
    0

  • Hi, No, those links won't affect the root domain. Just marking them as nofollow is enough, leaving them as plain text is even extremist. There will be no harm. Cheers. GR.

    Link Building | | GastonRiera
    0

  • Hey Steven, Ryan & Varun are correct in the quote of the Google guidelines. You just want to use the name of the church across all three locations unless the churches officially rename themselves with modifiers. You might need to research this a bit. I've never marketed a church and I'm not sure how they are legally registered. Do they have some form of county registration or license? If so, and they feel that their congregation members may be getting misdirected or confused, they might want to consider officially rebranding the three locations so that their location names are part of the church names. So sorry, but I've only worked with commercial entities and am not sure how churches register themselves in communities. I'd look into this, because I think there may be a legitimate concern here, given that the website doubtless differentiates between the 3 locations in the way they are referring to them, and ideally, you'd like their citations to match that, so that James River Church West Campus is being referred to exactly that way, everywhere on the web. Time to do some research Good luck!

    Local Listings | | MiriamEllis
    0

  • Hi Melinda, I'd like to recommend Validately. We specialize in remote moderated and unmoderated user research. Our plans start as low as $199/month. Validately gives you the flexibility to test anything from live websites to prototypes on mobile and desktop. In one platform you can record videos, take notes, create and share clips, and view analytics. There's no cost to use your own testers. You can collect unlimited responses for each test. We offer custom recruiting services that start at $10 per response for unmoderated and $50 per response for remote moderated. We'll never ask you to reveal your clients. Validately is used and trusted by over 1,000 companies, including Google, Salesforce, American Express, Allstate, and many more. If you're interested in learning more, feel free to contact me at jeff@validately.com. I'd be happy to schedule a demo of our platform. Jeff http://www.validately.com

    Online Marketing Tools | | Jeff-Stillman
    0

  • Hello Blue, Thanks for your input several days ago. I apologize for the delay in getting back to you. I was on vacation. Anyway, I appreciate your words of wisdom. I have been digging into the Open Site Explorer but I am far from an expert at this point. That said, I shall continue to persevere. Thanks again. Eric

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | EricFish
    0

  • Hi Completebanker! For a better and more direct response go here: https://moz.com/help/contact/account. Hope this helps!

    Getting Started | | BlueCorona
    0