Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Rick - I love what you're doing. Quick question - would you be OK with me writing a blog post for the main blog about your site and the SEO recommendations I'd have? Think it would make for a great case study style post.

UPDATE: I filmed a Whiteboard Friday video specifically on this topic, with a few examples, that's likely worth checking out.

Hi James - I would still strongly urge folks to keep all content on a single subdomain. We recently were able to test this using a subdomain on Moz itself (when moving our beginner's guide to SEO from guides.moz.com to the current URL http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo). The results were astounding - rankings rose dramatically across the board for every keyword we tracked to the pages.

I've had the opportunity to see many dozens of other sites do the same, almost always with similarly positive results (assuming they're moving from a subdomain without much other content/link signals to the subdomain that has those signals).

I think the important word you used in describing Matt's video is "implied." He's very careful not to speak in specifics, and often, I think the truth is buried in that non-specific language, rather than in the broader implied phrasing. That said, I do agree with you that after all these years, it seems odd that Google is still behaving in this fashion and that moving from one subdomain to another can have such a dramaticly positive impact on rankings.

p.s. Yes, for devblog, we put it there due to technical limitations. We plan to eventually get it moved to the main site.

Wow - surprisingly good topic for such a relatively basic part of SEO!

So... I think Todd Malicoat and I still disagree. He likes to have a different title + H1 and claims they're good for rankings and keyword diversity. I largely disagree based on user experience and the relative unimportance of H1s (you can see from our correlation analyses and our ranking models work that H1s appear to have virtually no advantage over just having keywords at the top of a page in large text).

My view is that when someone clicks on a search result listing, they expect to find the thing they've just clicked on. The title is what shows in the SERPs, but if the H1 is substantively different, they're getting what feels like a somewhat different page. That dis-congruous experience can result in high bounce rates and in searcher dis-satisfaction.

In addition, I'm not convinced there's a measurable benefit from differentiated titles vs. H1s. No search engine rep has given guidance on this (in fact, they've stayed conspicuously quiet over the years about whether the H1 does anything at all).

So - there you have it - a small controversy on a small point of on-page optimization. I think the best practice is to do what feels right (neither Todd nor I think the other's opinion will have a negative impact) and, if you're uncertain, test it out on different sets of pages.

My general view though is that there's far better uses of most SEOs time than worrying about H1s

Howdy Moz friends,

Today, the Moz team is making a new tool -- Link Explorer -- available in private beta for Moz Pro subscribers (including those taking a free trial). The tool is still a little ways out from public launch, but we wanted to get your feedback to help make it the best product it can be.

What's Link Explorer?

In essence, it's a replacement for Open Site Explorer (Moz's tool for link discovery, competitive analysis, and link building) that addresses many of its most pernicious challenges, such as:

• Daily updates - no longer will you need to wait a month or two to see a new DA score or the links you built last week. Link Explorer updates every 24 hours with all the new links we've discovered that day, and gives a new DA score each night.

• A MUCH bigger index - OSE has always been known for having quality links, but quantity has been an issue. No longer. The new tool's link index is more than 20 times larger than Open Site Explorer's, covering trillions of links across hundreds of billions of pages, while maintaining a focus on high quality domains and pages.

• Additional functionality - new graphs (like link growth over time), new charts (like gained+lost links), new filters and sorts, and some new kinds of data coming soon.

• Improved metrics - Domain Authority and Page Authority have both been upgraded to have better correlations with Google's rankings (and they now update every 24 hours)

• Insanely fast - page load times on the new tool are almost as fast as Google's results Less time waiting means more time to dig into results

• Link Tracking Lists - check a box next to any links of interest and you can build lists in the tool  to track them over time, see whether/when they link, prioritize your outreach efforts, and (in the future) get aggregated data and alerts about those links

There's much more to come, but we'd love for you to check out Link Explorer, find bugs, report things you love (and don't), and help us make it the best possible product for you and your teams.

You can leave feedback here in this Q+A thread, email help@moz.com, or send feedback through the feedback form in Link Explorer.

I wanted to start a thread to share some of the really cool marketing tactics I've seen on the web that I think few folks are using, AND ask the community here what you've seen, too!

Some of my favorite undiscovered or less-used tactics include:

• Making smart use of bios for conferences, events, interviews, etc. where folks ask you or your team members for a "bio" and you get to control the links, link targets, and anchor text. This is super powerful in my experience, so long as you have a moderately strong profile or regular participation in this type of stuff.

• Price anchoring on conversion pages, e.g. http://www.trackur.com/options - note how they start with the highest price to help "anchor" the audience to bigger numbers. A great principle of psychology in action.

• Using re-marketing to draw people to content rather than just purchase/conversion pages. The effectiveness of these is, I've heard, dramatically higher than the usual re-marketing campaigns that take you to a squeeze or purchase page. I can't share the example I'm thinking of, unfortunately, but I'd urge you to try it!

• Get more social shares and clicks by SHARING MORE THAN ONCE! A lot of folks feel like they are burdening their audience on Twitter/Facebook/G+ or frustrating them if they post multiple times, when in fact, very, very few of your followers are online at any given time. I've tested this myself and I get almost no negative feedback but can triple or more the number of shares/+1s/likes/visits/etc I get just by sharing 2-3X! The key is not to be too repetitive or annoying, and to acknowledge past shares (at least for me). e.g. I'll say "my blog post from last night on XYZ" and get a ton more clicks.

What are your favorites? Please share!

Have you had success with any particular methodologies that you'd recommend?

To be honest, it's more than a year out of date, and not the best resource. We've talked internally about a replacement, but need to spec it out and find a contractor (and we have so many other improvements/upgrades/features to PRO we're in the process of making).

That said, I'll ask the team to look into it further. I do think a great directory list would be a valuable part of PRO content.

postscript update: We have a project in process to replace this with something very cool, updatable and more scalable, too. I believe launch ETA is Q3 of 2011. Justin Briggs from Distilled and Cyrus Shepard from Moz are working on this together.

Hey gang,

Russ Jones from Moz has been doing a ton of heavy lifting work to try to get around the new problem posed by Google AdWords recent change to merged-keyword volume data. But, we're fighting back against this obfuscation in Keyword Explorer. I'm sharing two emails (slightly edited) from Russ about what we're doing here:

Introduction to the Problem:

Google Adwords Keyword Planner is the primary source for keyword search volume (how often a keyword is searched monthly on Google) for much of the search marketing industry. While Google has grouped together highly-similar terms for a while (especially misspellings), in June of 2016 they dramatically increased this keyword-grouping. This means similar phrases like "keyword rank", "keyword ranking" and "keyword rankings" would all be reported as having the same, combined search volume, rather than their individual search volumes. If you were to take Google's numbers at face value, you might think there are 3,000 searches per month for these 3 terms, when in reality there is only 1,000, divided amongst the 3 terms.

How we are addressing it:

Moz's Keyword Explorer uses a blend of data sources, not just Keyword Planner, to build our volume metrics. This gives us a distinct advantage in that we can adjust the volume of words that deviate dramatically in one data set verses another. Take for example the phrases "keyword rank", "keyword ranking", and "keyword rankings". While Google Keyword Planner might report all of these as having 1,000 searches per month, Moz Keyword Explorer can detect that these numbers are significantly higher than what our models would predict given our other data sets. We can then adjust the volume accordingly. Moreover, given our huge keyword data set, we can also identify grouped phrases (like these 3) and divide the volume proportionally to what we see in our other data sets. Thus, we address the grouping problem from multiple directions.

Here's email #2 from Russ, detailing more of how we're attacking this:

I have been working pretty much non-stop on this keyword volume disambiguation problem (finding the real search volume of individual keywords when Google clumps several together). I think I have settled on a pretty good solution and am working on getting it all in. For example...

Google Keyword Volume for the phrases "briefcase for women" and "briefcases for women" are both at 3600 because they have been lumped together. My disambiguation script says the singular (briefcase for women) should be 2731 and the plural should be 869. Google Trends roughly agrees with this, showing that the singular is searched more than 2x the plural: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=briefcase%20for%20women%2C%20briefcases%20for%20women&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B4

Basically, Keyword Explorer should already be providing some more accurate/segmented numbers than AdWords, and in the future, we'll get even better thanks to our clickstream data and our evolving models.

Any questions, let us know!

He's evil and bad! Don't try to contact him or you'll be turned to the dark side, too!

Oh no wait... I'm thinking of a different guy.

Just email me! My email's all over the web and I respond to 99% of real emails I get - rand@seomoz.org

Howdy gang - as you probably saw, we launched our biggest new tool in Pro in many years today: https://moz.com/explorer

If you're a Moz Pro subscriber, you've already got access. We went ahead and gave folks who were at $99/month before today 300 queries/month. If you're signing up new, $99/month doesn't have KW Explorer access, but the other levels - at $149/month and above, do (5,000+ queries/month).

You can read the blog post here for lots of details, but if you have questions or product suggestions, please don't hesitate to ask!

Hey gang - thought I'd jump in with some official word from the Mozscape/Big Data team:

This latest index is smaller than prior ones, meaning we indexed fewer webpages total. However, the quality and importance of those pages in general is higher. In particular we've cut out a exceedingly large number of pages and subdomains on many Chinese sites that appeared to be biasing our crawl priorities and giving us some serious processing trouble.

DA, PA, and link metrics have maintained very similar correlations with Google rankings in this index, so if you've seen a large drop in either, it may be related to the removal of links that Google may not have been counting very highly. However, it's also possible that you've lost DA/PA from links that Google did count and Moz should be, too. As we regrow our index size in the next 2-3 updates, you may see a return of those scores. We do expect the next few indices to process much more quickly than the lag we experienced in the last few, and are watching indices very closely to make sure we're on the right track.

Also, with DA/PA drops, note that every index these occur, primarily because the sites and pages at the very top of the metrics scale (with PA/DA scores in the 99-100 range) are growing their link profiles massively, thus stretching what it means to have those incredibly high scores. If you had a DA of 90, and gained great links at the same rate you did last year, but many other DA 90+ sites were growing their link profiles even more rapidly (which tends to be how the web goes - the rich get richer, faster, every month), your DA would likely fall a few points even though you technically are still growing your link profile. DA/PA of 100 gets harder and harder to achieve every index because of the rate of growth of pages like Twitter.com, Google.com, and Facebook.com.

Howdy folks,

Every time we do an index update here at Moz, we get a tremendous number of questions about Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) scores fluctuating. Typically, each index (which release approximately monthly), many billions of sites will see their scores go up, while others will go down. If your score has gone up or down, there are many potential influencing factors:

1. You've earned relatively more or less links over the course of the last 30-90 days.
   Remember that, because Mozscape indices take 3-4 weeks to process, the data collected in an index is between ~21-90 days old. Even on the day of release, the newest link data you'll see was crawled ~21 days ago, and can go as far back as 90 days (the oldest crawlsets we include in processing). If you've done very recent link growth (or shrinkage) that won't be seen by our index until we've crawled and processed the next index.
2. You've earned more links, but the highest authority sites have grown their link profile even more
   Since Domain and Page Authority are on a 100-page scale, the very top of that represents the most link-rich sites and pages, and nearly every index, it's harder and harder to get these high scores and sites, on average, that aren't growing their link profiles substantively will see PA/DA drops. This is because of the scaling process - if Facebook.com (currently with a DA of 100) grows its link profile massively, that becomes the new DA 100, and it will be harder for other sites that aren't growing quality links as fast to get from 99 to 100 or even from 89 to 90. This is true across the scale of DA/PA, and makes it critical to measure a site's DA and a page's PA against the competition, not just trended against itself. You could earn loads of great links, and still see a DA drop due to these scaling types of features. Always compare against similar sites and pages to get the best sense of relative performance, since DA/PA are relative, not absolute scores.
3. The links you've earned are from places that we haven't seen correlate well with higher Google rankings
   PA/DA are created using a machine-learning algorithm whose training set is search results in Google. Over time, as Google gets pickier about which types of links it counts, and as Mozscape picks up on those changes, PA/DA scores will change to reflect it. Thus, lots of low quality links or links from domains that don't seem to influence Google's rankings are likely to not have a positive effect on PA/DA. On the flip side, you could do no link growth whatsoever and see rising PA/DA scores if the links from the sites/pages you already have appear to be growing in importance in influencing Google's rankings.
4. We've done a better or worse job crawling sites/pages that have links to you (or don't)
   Moz is constantly working to improve the shape of our index - choosing which pages to crawl and which to ignore. Our goal is to build the most "Google-shaped" index we can, representative of what Google keeps in their main index and counts as valuable/important links that influence rankings. We make tweaks aimed at this goal each index cycle, but not always perfectly (you can see that in 2015, we crawled a ton more domains, but found that many of those were, in fact, low quality and not valuable, thus we stopped). Moz's crawlers can crawl the web extremely fast and efficiently, but our processing time prevents us from building as large an index as we'd like and as large as our competitors (you will see more links represented in both Ahrefs and Majestic, two competitors to Mozscape that I recommend). Moz calculates valuable metrics that these others do not (like PA/DA, MozRank, MozTrust, Spam Score, etc), but these metrics require hundreds of hours of processing and that time scales linearly with the size of the index, which means we have to stay smaller in order to calculate them. Long term, we are building a new indexing system that can process in real time and scale much larger, but this is a massive undertaking and is still a long time away. In the meantime, as our crawl shape changes to imitate Google, we may miss links that point to a site or page, and/or overindex a section of the web that points to sites/pages, causing fluctuations in link metrics. If you'd like to insure that a URL will be crawled, you can visit that page with the Mozbar or search for it in OSE, and during the next index cycle (or, possibly 2 index cycles depending on where we are in the process), we'll crawl that page and include it. We've found this does not bias our index since these requests represent tiny fractions of a percent of the overall index (<0.1% in total).

My strongest suggestion if you ever have the concern/question "Why did my PA/DA drop?!" is to always compare against a set of competing sites/pages. If most of your competitors fell as well, it's more likely related to relative scaling or crawl biasing issues, not to anything you've done. Remember that DA/PA are relative metrics, not absolute! That means you can be improving links and rankings and STILL see a falling DA score, but, due to how DA is scaled, the score in aggregate may be better predictive of Google's rankings.

You can also pay attention to our coverage of Google metrics, which we report with each index, and to our correlations with rankings metrics. If these fall, it means Mozscape has gotten less Google-shaped and less representative of what influences rankings. If they rise, it means Mozscape has gotten better. Obviously, our goal is to consistently improve, but we can't be sure that every variation we attempt will have universally positive impacts until we measure them.

Thanks for reading through, and if you have any questions, please leave them for us below. I'll do my best to follow up quickly.

Hi Virginia - happy to give my $0.02. Basically, on SquareSpace 6 (the active version out now), I think they've done a solid job with SEO features and functionality. I actually consulted a bit (informally - not paid, just helping out because I want folks to provide good SEO, especially popular CMS') with the SquareSpace team, and reviewed some of their implementations. It's good stuff, and SquareSpace is a good company (good customer service, honorable folks, good about refunds, excellent with uptime, etc).

That said, you can certainly get more flexibility by hosting your own system. Wordpress enables a lot of this, especially if you have a good developer making changes to it. Out of the box, SquareSpace is friendlier on many aspects of SEO than Wordpress, but with customizations, the latter can exceed the former.

One last word of advice - be cautious about trusting all the forum chatter, especially the stuff that comes from SquareSpace v6 and earlier (which wasn't very SEO friendly). I don't mean to be a pure advocate/defendent of SquareSpace (and I have no financial or other interest in the company), but do want to be fair to the strides they've made.

Hope that helps!

Hey gang,

I hate to write to you all again with more bad news, but such is life. Our big data team produced an index this week but, upon analysis, found that our crawlers had encountered a massive number of non-200 URLs, which meant this index was not only smaller, but also weirdly biased. PA and DA scores were way off, coverage of the right URLs went haywire, and our metrics that we use to gauge quality told us this index simply was not good enough to launch. Thus, we're in the process of rebuilding an index as fast as possible, but this takes, at minimum 19-20 days, and may take as long as 30 days.

This sucks. There's no excuse. We need to do better and we owe all of you and all of the folks who use Mozscape better, more reliable updates. I'm embarassed and so is the team. We all want to deliver the best product, but continue to find problems we didn't account for, and have to go back and build systems in our software to look for them.

In the spirit of transparency (not as an excuse), the problem appears to be a large number of new subdomains that found their way into our crawlers and exposed us to issues fetching robots.txt files that timed out and stalled our crawlers. In addition, some new portions of the link graph we crawled exposed us to websites/pages that we need to find ways to exclude, as these abuse our metrics for prioritizing crawls (aka PageRank, much like Google, but they're obviously much more sophisticated and experienced with this) and bias us to junky stuff which keeps us from getting to the good stuff we need.

We have dozens of ideas to fix this, and we've managed to fix problems like this in the past (prior issues like .cn domains overwhelming our index, link wheels and webspam holes, etc plagued us and have been addressed, but every couple indices it seems we face a new challenge like this). Our biggest issue is one of monitoring and processing times. We don't see what's in a web index until it's finished processing, which means we don't know if we're building a good index until it's done. It's a lot of work to re-build the processing system so there can be visibility at checkpoints, but that appears to be necessary right now. Unfortunately, it takes time away from building the new, realtime version of our index (which is what we really want to finish and launch!). Such is the frustration of trying to tweak an old system while simultaneously working on a new, better one. Tradeoffs have to be made.

For now, we're prioritizing fixing the old Mozscape system, getting a new index out as soon as possible, and then working to improve visibility and our crawl rules.

I'm happy to answer any and all questions, and you have my deep, regretful apologies for once again letting you down. We will continue to do everything in our power to improve and fix these ongoing problems.

Hi Folks! You might have seen my discussion on What Is a Good Keyword Difficulty Score, and this is a continuation of the same vein. Keyword Organic CTR is probably my favorite score we developed in Keyword Explorer and Moz Pro. It looks at the SERP features that appear in a set of results (e.g. an image block, AdWords ads, a featured snippet, or knowledge graph) and then calculates, using CTRs we built off our partnership with Jumpshot's clickstream data, what percent of searchers are likely to click on the organic, web results.

For example, in a search query like Nuoc Cham Ingredients, you've got a featured snippet and then a "People Also Ask" feature above the web results, and thus, Keyword Explorer is giving me an Organic CTR Score of 64. This translates directly to an estimated 64% click-through rate to the web results.

Compare that to a search query like Fabric Printed Off Grain, where there's a single SERP feature - just the "People Also Ask" box, and it's between the 6th and 7th result. In this case, Keyword Explorer shows an Organic CTR Score of 94, because we estimate that those PAAs are only taking 6% of the available clicks.

There are two smart ways you should be using Organic CTR Score:

1. As a way to modify the estimated volume and estimated value of ranking in the web results for a given keyword term/phrase (KW Explorer does this for you if you use the "Lists" and sort based on Potential, which factors in all the other scores, including volume, difficulty, and organic CTR)
2. As a way to identify SEO opportunities outside the normal, organic web results in other SERP features (e.g. in the Nuoc Cham Ingredients SERPs, there's serious opportunity to take over that featured snippet and get some great traffic)

OK, so all that said, what's actually a "good" Organic CTR score? Well... If you're doing classic, 10-blue-links style SEO only, 100 is what you want. But, if you're optimizing for SERP features, and you appear in a featured snippet or the image block or top stories or any of those others, you'd probably be very happy to find that CTR was going to those non-web-results sections, and scores in the 40s or 50s would be great (so long as you appear in the right features).

Hi Niels - yep, I saw a bit of this too. I believe there's two causes:

1. We crawled a larger swath of the web in this index, so we captured more sites and more links, and that may mean the scaling of PA/DA (which are logarithmic) stretches to accommodate the larger number of links found, especially to sites at the top of the scale. For example, if Facebook has a DA of 100 with 5 Billion links, then we find 5 billion more links to it, Facebook still has a DA of 100, but it's a much higher threshold. Thus, sites with fewer links (and less quality links) will fall in DA as the scale is now stretched.

2. We crawled some weird stuff in this index, by mistake (or rather, because spammers built some nasty, deep crawl holes that Google probably didn't fall for but we did). A ton of odd domains on strange ccTLDs were seen, and crawled, because they gamed PageRank with lots of sketchy links. We've now excluded these for indices going forward, and hopefully will see the impact abate.

All that said, over time, as our index grows, you can expect that raw DA/PA numbers could get harder to achieve, meaning a lot of sites will drop in PA/DA (and some will grow too, as we discover more links to them in the broader web). My best advice is always to not use PA/DA as absolutes, but rather relative scores. That's how they're designed and how they work best.

It's like back when Google had PageRank, and Moz.com grew from PR4 to PR7, then as Google got bigger and bigger, and the web got bigger, Moz.com fell to PR5, even though we had way more links and ranked for way more stuff. The raw PR scale had just become stretched, so our PageRank fell, even though we'd been improving.

Hi All!

Continuing my series of discussions about the various keyword scores we use here at Moz (previously: Keyword Difficulty & Keyword Opportunity)... Let's move on to Volume.

Volume in Moz's tools is expressed in a range, e.g. Bartending Certification has volume of 201-500. These ranges correspond to data we have suggesting that in an average month, that keyword is searched for a minimum of X to a maximum of Y (where X-Y is the volume range). We use clickstream data as well as data from Google AdWords and then some PPC AdWords campaigns we run and have access to when we build the models for our volume data. As such, we've got very high confidence in these numbers -- 95%+ of the time, a given keyword's monthly search volume on Google will fall inside that range.

If you want to see all the nitty gritty details, check out Russ Jones post on Moz's Keyword Volume and how we calculate it.

As far as a "good" volume score -- higher is usually better, as it means more demand, but lots of keywords with low volume scores can also add up to strong traffic when combined, and they may be more relevant. Capturing exactly the audience you want that also wants you is what SEO is all about.

p.s. When Keyword Explorer or Moz Pro gives you a "no data" or "unknown" volume number, it may just mean we haven't collected information from our clickstream providers or AdWords crawls, not that the keyword has no volume (though it sometimes means that, too, we just don't know yet). One way to verify - see if Google Suggest autofills it in when you type in the search box. If it does, that's usually a sign there's at least some volume (even if it's only a few searches a month).

Hi AWC - this is tangential to the topic, but important for Q+A and Moz community participation in general.

Please, in the future, work to be as generous and empathetic in replies as possible. This community is meant to be a haven from many of the nastier corners of the web and while your comment was not excessively insulting, it wasn't kind either. Contributions both big and small are welcome here, as are opinions.

If we're going to maintain the amazing community here, we have to be mindful about the impacts of negativity. Thanks for understanding.

Hi Rosemary - thankfully, I have data, not just opinions to back up my arguments:

• In 2014, Moz moved our Beginner's Guide to SEO from guides.moz.com to moz.com itself. Rankings rose immediately, with no other changes. We ranked higher not only for "seo guide" (outranking Google themselves) but also for "beginners guide" a very broad phrase.
• Check out https://iwantmyname.com/blog/2015/01/seo-penalties-of-moving-our-blog-to-a-subdomain.html - goes into very clear detail about how what Google says about subdomains doesn't match up with realities
• Check out some additional great comments in this thread, including a number from site owners who moved away from subdomains and saw ranking benefits, or who moved to them and saw ranking losses: https://inbound.org/discuss/it-s-2014-what-s-the-latest-thinking-on-sub-domains-vs-sub-directories
• There's another good thread (with some more examples) here: https://inbound.org/blog/the-sub-domain-vs-sub-directory-seo-debate-explained-in-one-flow-chart

Ultimately, it's up to you. I understand that Google's representatives have the authority of working at Google going for them, but I also believe they're wrong. It could be that there's no specific element that penalized subdomains and maybe they're viewed the same in Google's thinking, but there are real ways in which subdomains inherit authority that stay unique to those subdomains and it IS NOT passed between multiple subdomains evenly or equally. I have no horse in this race other than to want to help you and other site owners from struggling against rankings losses - and we've just seen too many when moving to a subdomain and too many gains moving to a subfolder not to be wary.

Just FYI (as an update), I met last week with some folks and spec'd out a project to replace the directory list. We plan to have an updated version ready to launch in the next 60 days. It will be WAY better, have some very cool interactive functionality, and feature three sources - web, social + local directories (all of which will have subcategories, too).

I think this replacement will be awesome and can last for years to come.