Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I, like most others who have made this community what it is am a bit in shock, yet not surprised.

I would like to open the floor to all of my fellow community members here in the Moz Q&A, a forum that has helped me forge a high-profile career in SEO, to discuss the recent firing of Moz's entire Community team.

It seems to me that Moz has completely no idea who and what makes them special...and as a hint, it ain't the Rank Tracking.

Comments and discussion...commence. I would love to hear what my fellow community members have to say...and so should Sarah Bird and Moz.

Sincerely,

Dana

I totally agree with Joe Link Reclamation is a totally worthwhile endeavor. Keep on it!

Hi again Bob,

Take a look at this thread on how to remove query strings from static parameters...I believe your answer is there.

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-remove-query-strings-from-static-resources

Dana

P.S. Why is this a problem for SEO? A couple of reasons:

1. It's highly likely your content will get shared without the query parameter AND with the query parameter. This will effectively split your link equity between two versions of the same page.

2.Google Search Console is very bad at understanding that the page without the query string is the same as it is with the query string...you'll likely get a lot of duplicate content notifications.

3. From an end-user standpoint, it's just plain ugly....and end user experience matters to SEO right? - I understand that's somewhat facetious....but it's your business right? You want it to look a good, solid, high-quality, professional site. Ugly query parameters scream "I hired my 21 year old nephew to b build me a WordPress site."

Hi Bob,

What CMS are you working with? Once you answer that I might be able to help a little more.

Dana

Hi Inevo,

David and Jake's comments and recommendations are spot on correct. You need to update your robots.txt file. Jake is correct when he said "just because a canonical tag is in place, that doesn't prevent Google from crawling and indexing the page."

Sincerely,

Dana

Hi there,

Every time I get into the "trailing slash vs. non-trailing slash" discussion with my clients I go back and read this excellent post in the Official Google Webmasters Central Blog by Maile Ohye: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

Problem for SEO: Both URLs are producing 200 OKAY status codes, resulting in duplicate content. This can interefere with crawl efficiency and fragments link equity.

Solution: Ideally, rather than relying on canonical tags to achieve what you want, 301-redirect the non-preferred versions of your URLs to the preferred version. Only one URL should return a 200 OKAY status code. The other should 301-redirect. This is a better solution than relying on canonical tags.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Hi,

I agree with EGOL that the "100 links" rule is old information.

To more specifically answer your question, yes, all links in your global navigation, footer and links on category and product pages are all counted as internal links and all (provided you haven't done anything silly like added "no follow" attributes) pass link equity throughout your site. For this reason it's important to be strategic about the architecture of your navigation and internal linking structure. Ideally, your top most important pages should be included, if possible in your navigation and/or footer.

It's not unusual for large eCommerce sites to have significantly more than 100 links on a given page.

For example, Home Depot ranks #2 in Google for the term "flushmount lights" with this page: http://www.homedepot.com/b/Lighting-Ceiling-Fans-Ceiling-Lights-Flushmount-Lights/N-5yc1vZc7nk

As you can see from the attached screenshot, this page has 523 links on it. While clearly exceeding the "100 links" - this page still has no problem ranking very well for a targeted keyword.

For verification that Google dropped the "100 links" rule, check out this Matt Cutts video from November, 2013 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHG6BkmzDEM

EGOL is also right that Moz should update their suggested SEO best practices to reflect more current methodology.

Hope that's helpful!

Dana

BVeoZ

Hi all,

I am working with a developer who believes OSE (Open Site Explorer) is flawed. His reasoning is that OSE shows completely different link equity and domain authority for these two URLs [company name is purposely withheld]:

http://www.mydomain.com/us/

and

http://www.mydomain.com/us

NOTE: http://www.mydomain.com/us has been properly 301-redirecting to http://www.mydomain.com/us/ for years.

The developer's argument is that the URL that is being 301-redirected shouldn't have any link equity at all, therefore OSE is flawed.

Here is the response I would like to give him. Please feel free to poke holes, provide feedback or flat out correct me if I am wrong:

Dear inquisitive developer,

Any URL that is being linked to by another site that has link equity will get link equity passed to it. This is true even if the URL is a page that doesn't exist. What it can't do (if it doesn't exist) is then pass that link equity on to another page. Moz's OSE is showing separate link equity for the two versions of this URL because other sites have linked to both versions. The fact that one 301-redirects to the other is good and ensures that link equity from one is passing to the preferred URL. The 301-redirect does not, however, remove link equity from the first URL, but rather passes the existing link equity from one to the other.

Consequently, Moz's OSE is not flawed, but rather is displaying the link equity of one URL that is benefiting the other via a 301-redirect.

Sincerely,

Dana

Hi Damon,

I believe there may be a third option. In Google Search Console, there is the option to tell Googlebot not to crawl and index URLs containing certain parameters. In this case, it seems like it would be easiest to indicated to Googlebot that anything with the ?tab parameter should be excluded from crawling and indexing.

You can find this in Google Search Console by navigating to "Crawl" and then "URL Parameters," then click "Configure URL Parameters" and Google will show you a list of potential candidates for exclusion.

Hope that's helpful...it's my understanding that Yahoo/Bing have something similar but I've never used those.

Cheers,

Dana

Hi, this scenario isn't uncommon, but seems to have become less problematic in the last few years. a few questions:

1. Did revenue to the eCommerce site also drop?
2. Did you remove your old URLs from Google via Google Search Console's URL removal tool?
3. Have you looked at your server logs to see when and how and which pages Googlebot is crawling?
4. Did you change anything about the way your analytics scripts were installed?
5. What were you using to track rankings?

If you can answer those it might give those of us who can help some additional clues on where to look for issues.

Best regards,

Dana

Thanks Lesley. Yes, I agree. I think the only way we are going to get a definitive answer is to look at the logs. We are working on getting access.

Hi All! What constitutes a normal crawl rate for daily bingbot server requests for large sites? Are any of you noticing spikes in Bingbot crawl activity?

I did find a "mildly" useful thread at Black Hat World containing this quote: "The reason BingBot seems to be terrorizing your site is because of your site's architecture; it has to be misaligned. If you are like most people, you paid no attention to setting up your website to avoid this glitch. In the article referenced by Oxonbeef, the author's issue was that he was engaging in dynamic linking, which pretty much put the BingBot in a constant loop.

You may have the same type or similar issue particularly if you set up a WP blog without setting the parameters for noindex from the get go."

However, my gut instinct says this isn't it and that it's more likely that someone or something is spoofing bingbot.

I'd love to hear what you guys think!

Dana

I totally agree with Moosa....I am guessing you also have limited resources. Maintaining two separate sites, one desktop and one mobile requires a lot of major time that most small businesses and small website owners just don't have. One version of your site that's managed via one CMS that is a responsive design is the way to go if you are short on time and resources...and let's face it...even if you are an enterprise corporation, you are still short on  on resources.

Hi inhouseSEO,

The canonical tag would be an appropriate solution to these duplicate content issues. Another solution, depending on your CMS, would be to incorporate those variation pages into one hub page that allowed customers to select size and color without providing an individual page for each variation to search engines or users. There are a number of ways to accomplish depending upon what CMS your are using. It also depends on whether or not your site is using faceted navigation, which opens up a whole additional can of worms.

That's a very high level answer. If you want something more granular based on your type of navigation and CMS I encourage you to respond because a lot of other site owners here could probably benefit from the discussion.

Cheers,

Dana

Hi Ilka,

Unfortunately, it's probably now more important that you initially realized. This past week, Google announced that mobile usability will be a ranking factor in their algorithm beginning April 12th of this year. On the up side, there may be ways to maintain the design elements of your site that you like while maintaining mobile usability, you just might need a little help.  Remember, no matter how much in love you are with your design, if it's not serving your end users, and the devices that they are accessing your site from....the design is not serving your business goals.

Think of it more like this: Google is saying you have to change your site. Google is trying to tell you that your visitors want you to change your site...that's a whole different thing.

Here's a link to the Google announcement: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2015/02/finding-more-mobile-friendly-search.html

That's probably not exactly what you wanted to hear, but it is important to know where things are headed. If 25% of your site traffic is currently coming from mobile it might be safe to say that will double to 50% over the next year.

Cheers,

Dana

I would suggest creating some kind of simple system that track what improvements you are making to your website over time. The, Make sure you annotate that in Google Analytics so you can look back over time to see what kind of impact it had.

Hi,

You are on the right track by admitting that your content is thin and working to remedy that. I understand, that takes time. However, yes, there are some things you can do to work towards optimization, even in the interim there are things you can do. Use SEMRush to analyze what keywords your competitors are ranking for that you are now. Use Screaming Frog to Optimize your Title Tags, Meta descriptions and H1 tags. All of these can have significant impacts.

I hope that helps!

Dana

Hi,

You've worked really hard at putting together a business, a site and now a plan. When I read your list, I was left asking "Why?"

What drove the decision to distribute one press release per month? Is it for a tangible reason? For example, so you release a brand new product every month? If so, then okay, there's a business reason for that frequency and that goal.  But if not, Why once a month? Is it because you think that's somehow going to get you attention in the search engines?

My same question/challenge transfers to everything else in your plan, You mention Web 2.0 submission Web at Squdoo, Hubpage , Tumblr , Blogspot , WordPress. Why those? What made you choose those? Was it driven by data that tells you that your users are hanging out in those places? Or was it driven by what you think Google is going to reward in the SERPs.

I'd personally revisit every item in the plan and determine whether or not there's data to support that decision, if not, move on and find some other way, some other place to promote that's directly relevant to your particular business.

A linkbuilding plan shouldn't be arbitrary. It needs to be intentional. Just my humble opinion. The days of a formulaic/quantity driven approach to link building are long, long gone.

Cheers,

Dana

I'll reserve my answer until you hear from your dev team. A massive site for sure.

One other question/comment:  just because there are 13 million URLs in your sitemap doesn't necessarily mean there are that many pages on the site. We could be talking about URI versus URL.

I'm pretty sure you know what I mean by that, but for others reading this who may not know, URI is the unique Web address of any given resource, while a URL is generally used to reference a complete Web page. An example of this would be an image. While it certainly has its own unique address on the Web, it most often does not have it's very own "page" on a Website (although there are certainly exceptions to that).

So, I could see a site having millions of URIs, but very few sites have 17 million+ pages. To put it into perspective, Alibaba and IBM roughly show 6-7 million pages indexed in Google. Walmart has between 8-9 million.

So where I'm headed in my thinking is major duplicate content issues...but, as I said, I'm going to reserve further comment until you hear back from your developers.

This is a very interesting thread so I want to know more. Cheers!

Hi. Interesting question. You had me at "log files."  So before I give a longer, more detailed answer, I have a follow up question: Does your site really have 17+ million pages?