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I've been using Moz for a long time, and haven't had an issue with the Moz crawl until just recently. I now get the error "We were unable to access your site due to a page timeout on your robots.txt" whenever I try to crawl the site. The robots.txt file hasn't changed and I can view it just fine at https://www.sonomacarpetcleaning.com/robots.txt What could be causing this?

Thanks for the quick feedback! I will not be going down that road. I appreciate the help.

Thanks for the input! Have definitely decided not to go that route.

Link building is the hardest aspect that we, and I'm sure most SEO companies, deal with. I've been looking into a company called Linkredible (https://linkredible.com) that provides link building services that are supposedly pretty "natural." Their explanations and service descriptions all seem to make sense, but I definitely don't want to do anything that could cause link penalties for my clients. Has anybody used this company or any similar services that could give me some input?

Hi Doug,

Thanks for the feedback. Their reasoning for the new site was that the original site was never able to rank well for their main target search term (and similar variations), so they assumed that creating a site that is completely specific to that search term/service would help with ranking for that search term. I actually agree with that thinking, but there is a definite trade-off. It means time has to be taken away from optimization and up-keep of the original site to build up this brand new website, and I could also see a lot of issues with citations and local search discrepancies between the two sites as well.

I'm waiting on access to analytics and webmaster tools data for both sites, but will definitely use that information before making a final decision on which route to take. Data aside, there are A TON of improvements that can be made to the original site that will make a positive difference.

It's good to hear that your thinking is along the same lines as mine. Overall I'm leaning towards proposing that we stick with the original site and put our efforts towards building that up.

I recently met with a new potential client who currently has two websites for his business - one that is for the business as a whole and another that is specific to one of his particular services (his main service and what the overall business is known for).

My first question was "why do you have two websites?" His response was that he has had a really hard time ranking well organically for his main service. He worked with an SEO company for two years and never was able to establish a solid organic presence for searches related to his main service - so he went ahead and had a site built to focus specifically on that service with the hope that it would help him rank organically for searches related to that service. The new site was built very recently (Dec. 2014) and it hasn't had a lot of optimization work put into it. The original site has a much higher Domain Authority, more incoming links, etc.

My typical preference has always been to use one website and drive all traffic to that site, while building out specific content for any products/services on individual pages of the site. For some reason I'm torn as to what to do with this particular situation since his main concern is ranking for his core service, which hasn't happened with the original site. I'm concerned, though, that optimizing and managing two websites will be less effective than driving all of the traffic to one site, and that it could actually be detrimental overall.

What are your thoughts? Suggestions? Feel free to let me know if you need any more details.

Lillie_Charlotte,

Thanks for the feedback. That's a good source we'll add to the repertoire! Thanks!

I'm trying to find the most effective way to do blogger & influencer (YouTube) outreach. Is there some type of site that you can use to find and connect with influencers that are willing to feature products and services in their posts and videos?

Up to this point I have simply been searching for top bloggers in geo-targeted areas - i.e. "bloggers in sacramento" - then sending them an email and connecting that way. It seems like there has to be a better way, though, right? I'm envisioning something like a classifieds site where you can list your clients' biz info, budget and what they need, and an influencer can then decide if that is something they would like to feature.

Does anyone know of something like this exist? Or at least a more effective way to go about connecting with influencers that are willing to feature products and services?

I have had the exact same question. I work primarily with franchise companies that have multiple locations that offer the same services, so this question has been on my mind for a while.

I currently use the same photos for the most part on each of the franchise location's G+ listings, Yelp, CitySearch, etc., without changing the image file names. I have been doing it this way for years and haven't ever seen a negative impact, but would be curious to know if there is potential upside to using unique file names for each image in each location.

Would love to hear what others' opinions are on this topic.

I have used both Yext and Moz Local as well as a few others. Moz Local is without-a-doubt the best option. Less expensive, better management dashboard, more control over your listings. Neither services goes through and actually cleans up duplicate or inconsistent listings, but Moz Local does a great job of notifying you of those so that you can handle it. Yext might have improved since I used it last, but we had a terrible time with duplicate listings and Yext was no help at all in finding, claiming and cleaning them up.

I use Moz Local for all of my clients now and highly recommend it. Local listing optimization will always need to have a personal management element to it, but Moz Local does a great job of eliminating as much as the hand-on work as possible. You will not regret making the switch!

I agree with Cole on this one. If the forum has a legitimate purpose on your site and will benefit the user, then go for it. Google definitely shouldn't punish you for creating the forum, again assuming that the forum isn't just built to act as a home to link spam, and I would expect it to have a positive SEO impact on the site as a whole.

The URL structure of site.com/forum/topic should be beneficially as well. Hope that helps!

I have read a lot about how it is important to keep URLs as short as possible, but I have also seen first-hand how longer, descriptive URLs have performed really well.

You'll probably get different answers from different people, and I don't know that either is right or wrong. In my opinion the longer URL would be more beneficial, assuming that trail of URLs isn't going to continue on and get too long - /anniversary_flowers/dozen_roses/red/bouquet - you get the idea.

My reasoning behind going with the longer URL structure is because you get the benefit of having both potential keyword search terms, anniversary flowers & dozen roses, in the page URL. Hope that helps!

Nettv,

You're right, you need to have content to help get the site ranked. Site's that are primarily images or videos can be tough to rank, but there are still things that you can do to help.

As you mentioned, you could definitely include a description of each video with applicable details that will help both search engines and users to know what your site is all about. I hope that helps!

Thanks for the quick response, EGOL. Very helpful.

I'm not at all familiar with your 3rd suggestion in your response. If we were to strip them off at the server level, what would that actually look like? Both in terms of the code that we need to use in .htaccess as well as the resulting change to the URL?

Would that affect the pages and their ability to be indexed? Any potential negative SEO effects from doing this?

Just trying to make sure it's what we need and figure out the best way to relay this to the web developer. Thanks!

Those pages will eventually drop out of Google's index, but if there are still sites (either pages within your own site or others) that are linking to any of those pages you will continue to see 404 error codes. I'm working on fixing the same issue on a site that I just started optimizing.

The best thing you can do is a 301 redirect from each of the old .php pages to a similar, relevant page that currently exists on the site. This will fix the 404 codes and also pass any page authority from the old page to the new page that it is being directed to.

Here's some helpful info from Moz on 301 redirects: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

Hope that helps!

I'm managing a site that has thousands of pages due to all of the dynamic parameter strings that are being generated. It's a real estate listing site that allows people to create a listing, and is generating lots of new listings everyday. The Moz crawl report is continually flagging A LOT (25k+) of the site pages for duplicate content due to all of these parameter string URLs.

Example: sitename.com/listings & sitename.com/listings/?addr=street name

Do I really need to do anything about those pages? I have researched the topic quite a bit, but can't seem to find anything too concrete as to what the best course of action is. My original thinking was to add the rel=canonical tag to each of the main URLs that have parameters attached. I have also read that you can bypass that by telling Google what parameters to ignore in Webmaster tools.

We want these listings to show up in search results, though, so I don't know if either of these options is ideal, since each would cause the listing pages (pages with parameter strings) to stop being indexed, right? Which is why I'm wondering if doing nothing at all will hurt the site?

I should also mention that I originally recommend the rel=canonical option to the web developer, who has pushed back in saying that "search engines ignore parameter strings." Naturally, he doesn't want the extra work load of setting up the canonical tags, which I can understand, but I want to make sure I'm both giving him the most feasible option for implementation as well as the best option to fix the issues.

Dana - thanks for the response! That is very helpful. We're going through the site now to make sure that none of the site's pages are still linking to or calling those deleted images, so I'm sure that will help as well.

Do you think it is worth replacing any of those images with another image that has the exact same URL, or just deleting the links and html for them if/when we do find references to them on the site?

We're working with a site that has gone through a lot of changes over the years - ownership, complete site redesigns, different platforms, etc. - and we are finding that there are both a lot of pages and individual images that are returning 404 error codes in the Moz crawls. We're doing 301 redirects for the pages, but what would the best course of action be for the images? The images obviously don't exist on the site anymore and are therefore returning the 404 error codes.

Should we do a 301 redirect to another similar image that is on the site now or redirect the images to an actual page? Or is there another solution that I'm not considering (besides doing nothing)?

We'll go through the site to make sure that there aren't any pages within the site that are still linking to those images, which is probably where the 404 errors are coming from. Based on feedback below it sounds like once we do that, leaving them alone is a good option.

Thanks David! This clears up a lot for our team, and we appreciate the quick response!

One of our clients is marked in Moz Analytics as ranking 24th, but we don't see that when we search for the same key term. However, when we hover over the Universal Image Results icon, we noticed that the ranking is actually for google.co.uk/search. The campaign settings for this campaign are all set to use google.com or the US version. Does anyone know why Moz is bringing in these UK results?

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