Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I have written MOZ several times requesting account cancellation procedures but they don't seem interested in responding.

I pre-paid my account in October 2019, paying for one year until October 2020. I would like to cancel my account and get a refund of the pro-rated unused amount.

After not getting a response, I searched for a corporate phone number for MOZ. No phone number can be found. I am somewhat concerned as legitimate companies have phone numbers.

Can someone advise me as to how to get my refund?

Also, I subscribe to MOZ local. I need to know of canceling MOZ pro will inadvertently cancel MOZ local.

Thanks, 
Alan

Our SEO provider has been creating content (6 blog posts per month as well as building page write ups) and has been promoting that content.

Several links per month have been created as a result of this effort. Many of the links have been  from commercial real estate publications.

I am concerned that the quality of these links is not high enough to improve our ranking. Most links do not appear on AHREFS, Google Search Console or MOZ.  Is this a red flag that these links are weak?

Ranking and traffic on the site have improved considerably since this provider began the project in April of 2019. They have been writing about 30 pages about New York City. commercial buildings each month in addition to 4 short blog posts and 2 extremely well researched and authoritative blog posts.

My concern is that the links are not of sufficient quality to result increased ranking. That the improvement in ranking is solely due to the addition of new content rather than the creation of these links. Basically, that I am incurring the cost on an ongoing basis of an link building campaign with little to no benefit. That being the case, I would shift resources to content creation and increase and improve content rather than develop links with little value.

A sample of links are below:  Would greatly appreciate some feedback as to whether these are in fact helpful to the domain authority, reputation and ranking of our website.

Thanks, 
Alan

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https://patch.com/new-york/bayside/bayside-queens-priciest-area-retail-office-space-study

https://qns.com/story/2019/12/04/these-commercial-streets-in-queens-were-among-the-most-expensive-in-2019/

https://patch.com/new-york/brooklyn/flatbush-ave-priciest-retail-spot-outside-manhattan-study

http://thejewishvoice.com/2019/12/07/nycs-most-expensive-commercial-streets-neighborhoods-in-2019-would-surprise-you/

https://atalyst.com/investment-banking-interview-metro-manhattan/

Our YouTube Channel was endorsed by a celebrity and suddenly gained 22,000 subscribers. We are now posting videos 2-3 times a week and get a lot of engagement. Each video has an average of 10,000 views.

The result of this is that we get about 200 direct visits to our website every. Almost twice as much as organic traffic from Google. Assuming that this is sustained over time, will it improve the Google  of our website?

Is there anyway to use the popularity of our Google channel to reinforce the ranking of our website?

Thanks!!
Aln

Hi Pat:

Thanks for your answer/response! Our URL is www.metro-manhattan.com

To answer your questions:

1. When we moved the site to a new theme/database the URL structure did not change. However, about a year before we migrated to a new domain and and went HTTP to HTTPS (secure) so there are redirects. 301 redirects were used.

2. All the on page optimization moved when we changed themes.

3. Yes, there are some unnecessary URLs, but they are managed by robot.txt.

4.  Gzip compression/caching/cdn has been implemented to speed up site. My SEO provider is constantly adjusting but the site is not particularly fast.

If we were to custom develop the same functionality without purchasing a theme, would the performance (Google Page Speed, GT Metrix) be much better?

If we are satisfied with the structure, design and functionality of our site, is custom coding a costly venture?

Thanks, 
Alan

Last year we purchased a $79 them and coded a new designer our real estate website. The  database of listings was transferred to the new theme.

A year later we realize the new theme is not that fast; does not perform great, so despite optimizing our server we are not getting very fast performance.

So, my question is, can we take the design, the CSS of our current theme (and database) and transfer it to a better performing theme?  We are in a very competitive niche and our website must perform quickly both desktop and mobile.

If this is feasible is this a major production? Note we are very happy with the design and this would solely be to improve download speeds to improve the user experience and get better ranking.

Thanks,

Alan

That is awful!!!

There must be a way to restore this data!!!!!

Thanks,

Alan

Accidentally Deleted My Campaign, Possible to Restore It?

A design service is using Figma to create modified form. Once the design is complete, Sigma will export CSS files. If we provide these CSS files to a coder, will this greatly reduce the required time to implement the. design on our website?  Our website is designed. with a modified real estate theme.  We are using exactly the same fields and functionality of the previous form.

We are seeking to reduce coding time and subsequent costs.

Thanks,
Alan

Hi Nozzle:

That is an intriguing idea, however I think it would take the user more time and they would  leave before investing the time to view the video.

Our real estate website (www.metro-manhattan.com) now requires visitors to login in if they want to search our listing database.

The result is that. 9 out of 10 visitors leave without searching; they simply refuse to set up an account.

I have attached images of the search bar and login form.

Is there a way to increase the percentage of visitors that login? We have tried to make it as simple as possible, allowing visitors to login by Facebook, Google or by providing their email address. We do not send any verification email.

We are forced to. keep this login unfortunately. But is there anything we can do to reduce the visitor bounce rate?

Thanks, 
Alan

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Hi Joe:

About 35% of our traffic is derived from mobile so maximize mobile conversion probably worth the effort.

Do you think it would be most effective to display the phone number as an actual button with a similar design as the other 2?  Is there any form of protocol for displaying phone numbers on mobile devices?

Thanks, 
Alan

We are attempting to keep the number of CTAs (Calls to Action) on our commercial real estate website to a minimum. Our adjusted design (see attached) has 2 CTAs. One is "Contact Agent" the other is "Schedule a Tour". We are focusing on the listing page, which is the primary product page and critical in terms of CTA.

Our mobile version does not show a phone number while the desktop version (also attached) displays a phone number.

Should the mobile version also display a button a phone number? Some members of our target audiences, business owners and executives who are often in their 40s and 50s may prefer to call us up rather than communicate by written message. Any suggestions for elegantly displaying the phone number without causing confusion? I have read that the number of CTAs should be limited so I am on the fence as to whether or not to include a phone number

Thanks, 
Alan

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I was horrified to learn that my hosting company, InMotion Hosting does not offer redundant backups, that it is on the customer to set up backups to ensure they don't lose their data.

I plan to back up to Google Drive 3 x a week for 12 backups and also create 3 backups on our server (Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday). So if something goes wrong and we catch it within a week we can generate the backup directly from our server.

There are website backup services such as BlogVault. Do they offer any meaningful advantages to taking the contents of the entire server (16 gigs) and backing it up? They do offer Malware removal. Does this have value?

Is back up on an external service like Google Cloud while simultaneously backing up on the server a safe way to proceed? If not, what is the simplest and most effective manner to backup? I prefer to avoid adding any plugins to WordPress as our site already has too many (about 30).

Thanks!!
Alan

Dear Effect Digital:

Thanks for your very detailed and thorough response. Confirms what I suspected, but with ranking factors in flux great to have this confirmed.

Thanks so much,

Alan

My SEO has advised me that Google has stopped using title and description tags for search results and as such, it is no longer necessary to write specific title and description tags.

I see that Yoast seems to pull text to create these tags and sometimes it looks like it reflects the best elements of the content, sometimes it does not.

Should I be asking our SEO team to write dedicated title and description tags or is it best practices  to leave it to the Yoast plugin? My SEO is of the opinion that writing these tags is not a productive use of time as Google will serve results based on the user inquiry rather than the content on his tags. It sounds logical but it would be reassuring to receive further confirmation of this.

Thoughts?"
Thanks, Alan

Hi Tom:

So are you saying that generally the number of plugins for a Wordpress site should be limited to about 15?

Do you think the Kinsta or Servebolt will be a better platform than a Virtual Private Server on InMotionHosting (what I have now)? I prepaid the annual $1,100 which I will lose if I move, so need to make sure it is better. What can I expect these hosting companies to provide that InMotion does not?

Thanks,
Alan

Hi Tom:

The old domain www.nyc-officespace-leader.com

The new domain is: https://www.metro-manhattan.com/

The google search:

site:www.nyc-officespace-leader.com

Returns 794 results for the old pages. This does not seem normal.

Any ideas?

Hi Thomas:

Thanks for your suggestions. I looked at Github but don't quite understand what it is. Would it allow me to trouble shoot code issues? For example, my developers can't get the wt3 total cache plugin to work. They think our InMotion Server does not support it. Very surprising as InMotion is  a reputable hosting company. So they have installed multiple plugins to replace WT3.

At the moment the site has 50 plugins of which 35 are active. The domain is www.metro-manhattan.com

I ran a dareboost test and the home page received a test of 68%. The interior pages are will certainly be worse.

I am not technical so these issues are really confusing.

Thanks, 
Alan

We completed a Wordpress redesign of our website in December. The project took about 8 months. Important URLs on the new site are performing slowly according to Google Page Speed Insights. For instance, a key product page gets a score of 18 on mobile and 61 on desktop. Home page scores 37 on mobile and 80 on desktop.

My new SEO believes the website is hindered by an excessive number of plugins and widgets. That reducing the number of these may increase performance. Also, my developers were unable to get WT3 Total Cache to work with our InMotion server and have used about 3 plugins for cache.

We purchased a real estate theme (wpcasa) and heavily customized it. Any suggestions for improveing performance? If we recoded the website from scratch without a pre existing theme (using the existing design) would that speed up performance? Is there anything we can do remove complexity and improve URL download speeds? We are in a very competitive niche and we need decent performance in order to rank.

Thanks, 
Alan

One year ago we migrated domain "X" to domain "Y". We did the proper redirects and used Google Search Console. Everything was done by the book. Now when we enter "Site: X" in Google about 650 results listing the old domain still come up. When clicked these redirect to the new domain.

My SEO says that the old domain should not be indexed by Google, that these pages with the old domain should not appear.  Is this in fact an incomplete domain migration?

Our search traffic dropped considerably when we migrated the domain a year ago. My SEO thinks this may explain the drop.

Thanks, 
Alan