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Reducing Spam Flags
OMG! I just did ran Open Site Explorer for ALL links on the site and found what you are talking about. There are DOZENS of spam links that should not be there! It looks like I have been hacked and had links added into my images folder! Grrr. Thanks for finding this. Clean up process begins in 3. . 2. . 1. . .
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | damon12120 -
What is the best way to correct GWT telling me I have mobile usability errors in Image directories
Roberto, I guess you should try out this method. I'm sure, it will work. Do let us know if it works out.
Technical SEO Issues | | UmarKhan0 -
B2b services site, deep long tail services or flat and broad
If you create those pages individually then to me it would seem that magento is not responsive or custom and responsive is not custom or magento. To me it clearly seems that it's just sections of one page and that's how i'd recommend to do it.
Content & Blogging | | DmitriiK0 -
Robots.txt Blocking - Best Practices
Thanks for taking the time to respond in depth, GreenStone. We appreciate the advice and have passed your response along to the web hosting company (along with a frustrated email) explaining they're not adhering to anyone's best practices. Hopefully this will convince them!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReunionMarketing0 -
Google Webmaster Tools Not Showing Correct Data?
Just had to chime in here. I made changes at least 6 weeks ago, probably more like 12 weeks for some pages, and Google is not updating the HTML improvements page. I will look into trying to manually send some URLs in to see if this changes.
On-Page / Site Optimization | | WineCellarInnovations0 -
Tools necessary for a Technical Audit of website with penalties and need remediation?
Joseph, Yes, GWT = Google Webmaster Tools In GA, you will want to take a look at traffic levels, Bounce Rate, Page views, Time On Page, etc. If any of these metrics show a significant decrease instantaneously (over a couple of days) you can be fairly sure there is something going on from a penalization standpoint. That, or the GA tracking code may have been tampered with during a site redesign. The way to know this is occurring is if your rankings are staying relatively high, but your measured traffic is decreasing drastically. We had a client who went through this just this week - it's a small problem to fix, but it can make your heart race when you think it's a penalty. GWT will inform you of any penalization taken against your website (if it is manual). If it is algorithmic, your only real warning will be your ranking and traffic drops. Besides that, it is also fairly good for security issues, but these may not be alluded to directly. A great way to determine whether a site is at risk/hacked is to check the link profile - if there is an unnaturally large number of incoming spammy links, there are good odds you are the target of a negative SEO attack, or the site is hacked and being used for spam. Use a site: search to determine if new pages are being created on your sitemap and what they are targeting. These are worst-case scenarios, so I don't know if you will be tested on them. More likely you will have to make adjustments to some basic on-site ranking factors like H1's or Title Tags. Feel free to touch base any time if you need additional tips - you can PM me anytime. Best of luck!
Moz Tools | | Toddfoster0 -
Multiple H1 Tags on Page
Hello Chad, Absolutely, depending on how you structure your tags. The biggest problem with multiple H1's is that using different keywords can confuse Google and Users about what a page is attempting to rank for. If you have multiple keywords you are attempting to rank for, you are better off creating different pages with a small number of H1's optimized to each keyword respectively. This will help Google contextualize the page. This comes up frequently on Moz Q&A, and opinion has shifted throughout the years, but it is now considered best practice to use a single keyword/H1 tag for each page for best ranking potential. Hope this helps, Rob
Technical SEO Issues | | Toddfoster0 -
Display None (Read More) Implimentation
cheers rob, i will wait a week or 2 before rolling it site wide so i have to evidence of no effect to back me up incase it does go wrong and go from there. thanks for your time
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP0 -
Internationalise all or just part of website?
Good Answer Tim, but I am going to add a bit. Since there are varying services, Tim's recommendation of domain.com/us and domain.com/uk is spot on. If you don't want to change URLs, I understand. You can keep the current URLs, you can geo-target the root to the UK and /us to the US. This route is easier to scale and if you grow each country as it launches, the domain gets stronger which helps each expansion in the years to come. Now, if you are geo-targeting, there won't be much need for hreflang. If there are some product pages that are IDENTICAL across the two countries other than a few changed words, you can add HREFLANG. Technically speaking you wouldn't need it if the content were written and the pages crafted to each country, but until you get to that point, you can use HREFLANG for the pages that are duplicated. Mind you, this isn't best for your audience, but I get that for starters, that's easier. Do test the pages in each market to see if any modifications can be made for each market. I don't recommend launching a .co.uk unless your customers/market demand it. That's a lot of marketing work to build up each one. It sounds like your best bet is / geotarget to GB using Search Console, create a /us for the US, claim that in Search Console and geotarget to the US. Then use hreflang for any duplicated content. Hope that helps!
International Issues | | katemorris0 -
To Pop Up or to not....
Agree 100%. I should have mentioned. We use a slide out on our site and it is pretty effective. We did AB testing to look at the best verbiage on the slide out and we also did some user testing to see the best timing for when and how to slide out.
Whiteboard Friday | | CleverPhD0 -
How are links in ads perceived ?
Brilliant ! thanks so much for all that great info i really appreciate it !! However the Mozbar highlighting doesn't have an effect on links in graphics like banners etc, only on text type links etc as far as i can see. Am i missing something here ? All Best Dan
Link Building | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Pagination and matching title tags - does it matter when using rel="prev" and "next" attributes?
Many thanks again CleverPhD, and thanks for your input Martijn - much appreciated. I guess one issue may be the mass alteration of title tags acting as a spam flag, as I have hundreds of pages to deal with - most of the website :-I - I am advising that the changes are implemented gradually so we don't upset Google - is my caution justified?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Existing 301s during site migration - what to do?
Many thanks for your advice - yes, it seems like the logical way forward, so I'm following your recommendations
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Moz crawler only crawls one page?!
Hey Jeremy, I took a look at your campaign and it looks like Lynn's suggestion that Javascript may be blocking the crawl is correct. Unfortunately, our crawler isn't sophisticated enough to parse Javascript and all of the links from the homepage are hidden within the Javascript navigation so we aren't able to find them to crawl past the homepage. I'm afraid it looks like our crawler isn't compatible with this particular site. I apologize for the inconvenience this causes! Please let me know if I can help you with anything further.
Other Research Tools | | ChiarynMiranda0 -
Unable to create a campaign (bug?)
I am also unable to create a new campaign, each time I try it redirects me to http://analytics.moz.com/manage-campaigns Please can someone help Thank http://analytics.moz.com/manage-campaigns
Other Questions | | Chrisst0 -
Open site explorer: error message "There was an error getting your data"
Hi Dirk, Thanks very much for jumping in here! Indeed you're correct. We are experiencing intermittent issues with OSE as a result of longer than normal query times for Mozscape API. We are still keeping an eye and investigating this further at our end, however you're welcome to send further details of any issues you're seeing straight to us at help@moz.com You can also keep up to date with this investigation on our Moz Health page.
Link Explorer | | jocameron0 -
Our web site lost ranking on google a couple of years ago. We have done lots of work on it but still can not improve our search ranking. Can anyone give us some advise
"On the category page - we are wondering whether we should also remove the right side menus ?" Do you mean the left side menus? If so, I can give you a simple answer and I can give you a more complex answer. The simple answer is "if you link to categories and sub-categories that are not directly related to the category you are on at that time, it is at least somewhat of a distraction and dilution issue". The more complex answer is "it depends, and without a full audit, I can't answer that because there are many other factors to consider, some of which are purely User Experience, some are SEO and User Experience, some are crawl allocation related, and some are pure technical considerations".
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlanBleiweiss0 -
Inventory Pages that are Sold, 404 vs 301?
I agree with Moosa, but would add another layer of analysis on this. You need to do a type of content audit on these pages. You can go into GA to just look at traffic or use a tool (my new favorite) called URL Profiler to pull GA and OSE and Majestic link data plus social media shares on your sold product URLs. For each sold product page you have two options: 301 the page - If the "sold' page generates a fair amount of traffic, and even has some links coming in, you probably want to 301 redirect it. The 301 needs to be to a page with similar semantic information. Ideally this would be a main product category page so you can build the traffic to that page. Example: If you sell Ford Mustangs and you have a lot of "sold" pages of Ford Mustangs, and those sold pages still get traffic and even have some links to them, you want to 301 those pages to your main category Ford Mustang page that has links to all of your Ford Mustangs that are still for sale. Good for Google, good for the user. Key point is that a) the "sold" pages are still generating value (traffic and links) and b) that you redirect to a semantically related page. If you use a 301 to redirect to the home page that is a bad idea as it needs to be closely related in topic. When looking at a "Ford Mustang for sale" page, a multiple car brands for sale page (your home page theme) is not as closely related to it as your main Ford Mustangs for sale category page. It would also behoove you to really make that Ford Mustang for sale category page really kick a$$ content wise. 410/404 the page - If you find a large group of "sold" pages that do not get very much traffic to them and/or they do not have much link equity, just let them 404/410. Show a helpful not found page with links to other sections of your site and even a search function. FYI - I like the 410 directive as it is a "permanently gone" directive vs a temporary one. How do you get the data I am talking about on all the "sold" pages? Using a tool like URL profiler, you put in all of your "sold" URLs and the software uses an API to get data from Search Console, GA, OSE and Majestic (among other tools) and pulls them into a single line per sheet. You can then look for each URL any of the data and determine if you use option #1 or option #2. Moz has an article on how to do a content audit you can search the web for other examples. A simpler version of this would be to use the advanced search within GA and pull the organic landing page traffic on those pages. Some SEOs would say that option #2 is blasphemy. ie. you always want to 301 redirect. Why would you ever want to lose traffic by setting up a 410? That will cause errors to show up in Search Console! You will lose link equity and traffic! This is why you have to perform the content audit. If you have 1,000 pages but 800 of them send next to no traffic to your site and have generated 2 links, you can 410 the 800 pages and never notice the difference. You will not miss the traffic or links as they had none to begin with! All those 800 pages are doing is wasting your crawl budget with Google and giving a signal to Google that you have a bunch of low quality pages on your website. Also, don't panic when you see all the 410 in Search Console. Just sort by date and then by priority to make sure that these are all the pages that you want to 410. Over time (about 3-4 months) they will naturally fall out.
On-Page / Site Optimization | | CleverPhD0