Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi,

From an SEO perspective I don't think you need to worry.

However, from a UX & CRO point of view, descriptions is something you may want to consider.

Would your users benefit from having a description? If so, it's worth adding. You can do this after launch though.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks

SilverDoor

Hi Maia,

Sorry to hear this has happened.

What was the reason for changing the URL in the first place?

This will determine if you redirect the old ones or revert back.

Could you possible specify why the change was made?

Thanks

SilverDoor

Hi Christian,

Did you get a chance to read this over?

If so, what do you think? Have any further questions?

Hopefully hear from you soon.

Thanks

SilverDoor

Great answer with some quality humour. Love it!

Thumbs up for you sir!

Don't do it!

If it sounds too good to be true...it probably is.

From what your saying to me it sounds pretty "grey hat".

This is the sort of thing that might be ok now but at any given time could go black hat. If that happens you'll see a lot more long term damage then short term gain.

It's entirely up to you, but I recommend you avoid doing this.

Hope this helps

Thanks

SilverDoor

I think you might just be being slightly paranoid.

I really wouldn't worry about things like that.

There's no evidence to support that search engines currently or will ever take things like that into account. I think it would really skew the results if they did.

Just ensure that your cleaning your link profile and disavowing anything that would be considered unrelated, spammy or manipulative.

If your trying to clean things up from a brand perspective then it can sometimes be worth attempting to get rid of no-follow links that look spammy or are in bad reference etc. But to be honest, that's normally only necessary for well established brands.

Hope this answers your question.

Thanks

SilverDoor

Another good one is https://monitorbacklinks.com/overview

Cheap and extremely easy to use. It offers a 30-day free trial as well.

From my experience it's by far the easiest to use.

Thanks

SilverDoor

Love the Moz team.

Always quick to respond and happy to help.

Agreed,

Everything seems to be working for me.

Hi TheDude,

In short.....no!

This is an extremely poor way to build trust. It's manipulative, underhand and will inevitably just end badly.

All it takes is for one person to find this out and before you know it, your brand is tarnished.

In my opinion, how Google views this behaviour is completely irrelevant. Even if they won't penalise you for this, it is still bad business practice. I advise you stay well away from things like this.

Instead, put your efforts into long-term strategies that will help you naturally build consumer trust and with it your consumer base.

The right way is often the harder, but it always pays off in the long term.

Thanks,

SilverDoor

Hi Francois,

Hope you're having a nice day.

Did you manage to solve the issue in the end?

If so, what was the conclusion?

Thanks

SilverDoor

Hi,

Domain age can have an impact on Domain Authority.

However, it is generally considered to be fairly minimal and there are plenty of other elements that will impact domain authority on a much larger scale.

Take a look at the following resources on Moz for more information.

Search Engine Ranking Factors

Domain Authority

Page Authority

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks

SilverDoor

Hi Christian,

Firstly, The h1 tag is the most important tag. Every page must have one h1 tag.

Here's an example of how they can be used:

• <``h1``>Main Headingh1>
* <h2>Secondary Heading 1h2``>```* <h3>Sub-section of the secondary heading 1h3``>```* <h2>Secondary Heading 2h2``>```* <h3>Sub-section of the secondary heading 2`h3``>``````

``Advantages of Using Heading Tags:

The heading tag is used to represent different sections of web page content. It has an impact on both the SEO and usability of your site.

Header tags from an SEO point of view:

• **Relevancy: **Search engine spiders check the relevancy of the header tag with the content associated with it.
• **Keyword Consistency: **The search engine spiders check the keyword consistency between the header tags and other parts of the page.
• **The Importance of an h1 Tag: **The h1 is the most important tag and it should never be skipped on a page. Search spiders pay attention to the words used in the h1 tag as it should contain a basic description of the page content, just as the page <title>does .</li> <li><strong>Enriched User Experience: </strong>Heading tags give the user a clear idea of what the page content is about. Search engines give much importance to user-experience on a site, meaning the presence of heading tags becomes an important component of SEO.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Header tags from a usability point of view:</strong></p> <ul> <li>For users of the web who must use a screen reader, it is easier to navigate sections of content by referring to properly structured headings on a page.</li> <li>The h1 heading tag (main heading) of a page gives users a quick overview of the content that is to follow on the page.</li> <li>By reading the different heading tags, users can scan a page and read only the section they are interested in.</li> <li>The primary use of heading tags is for SEO, not to gain the larger, more prominent fonts; but the presentation of a web page does look cleaner with the presence of these tags.</li> </ul> <h4><strong>Things you should not be doing with heading tags:</strong></h4> <ul> <li>Do not stuff your heading tags with keywords.</li> <li>Do not use more than one h1 tag on a page unless really necessary. Usually pages will have a single h1 heading and including two might make search engines think this as an attempt to include more keywords for SEO in multiple h1 tags. It is better to divide the content into two separate topics on individual pages with their own h1 tags. This makes more sense to both readers and the search engine spiders, however, using multiple h1 tags is allowed (but strongly advised against)</li> <li>Do not use heading tags as hidden text. Any hidden text can result in penalties for your site, especially if the hidden part is a component that effects SEO.</li> <li>Do not repeat heading tags on different pages of your site. It is a good practice to have unique heading tags throughout your site.</li> <li>Do not use the same content in your page’s h1 tag as in your meta title tag.</li> <li>Do not use heading tags for styling text but use them for presenting organized and structured content on pages. Use CSS stylesheets for the purpose of styling.</li> </ul> <p>Follow all of the above and you should be fine.</p> <p>Hope this helps.</p> <p>Thanks,</p> <p>SilverDoor</p></title>``

Hi Francois,

Is it possible if you could attach a screenshot of the issue occurring?

It's a bit difficult to help you without being able to see the problem.

Alternativley, if you don't want to do the above, you can get in touch with a member of the Moz help team at Help@Moz.com

They're really helpful and will be able to resolve this issue for you.

Thanks

SilverDoor

Hi Alan,

Sorry to hear that this has happened.

The first thing I suggest you do is some detailed analysis of your homepage.

Here are the things I propose you look into:

1. The overall link profile, including internal and external links. Take all relevant action to remove any external links which may be detrimental to your rankings (e.g. comment spamming, directories etc). Also, look at how many internal links point to the homepage. Internal links tell search engines which pages you deem to be the most important.
2. Look at the on-page content. Is it unique, high-quality, relevant content which provides value to the user? If not then change it.
3. Ensure that all basic SEO elements are implemented and fully optimised. All metadata, H-tags, strong tagging etc.

Obviously, the most important thing to do before you make any changes is to benchmark all current stats (rankings, traffic etc.). That way, you will be able to efficiently measure the impact of any changes you make.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks

SilverDoor

Hi,

I really don't think anyone here will be able to answer this question.

I'd suggest that you get in touch with a member of the Moz help team via email at Help@Moz.com

They're really helpful and I'm sure they'll be able to help you reach a solution.

Thanks

SilverDoor

Hi Dan,

I think that people often get too tied up with things like keyword stuffing.

In the way that I see it, if you write, unique, interesting, natural, content then you won't need to worry about things like keyword stuffing.

The only time keyword stuffing occurs is when people have tried to write for search engines and not for the user. It wouldn't be natural to have the name of your company in the body copy lots of times.

If you read the content and it flows naturally then don't change anything. However, if it reads unnaturally then change it and make it natural.

Hope this helps

Thanks

SilverDoor

hemblem5 has started this off perfectly.

Firstly, yes I do live in the UK. A caching issue could potentially be the problem, it'd be interesting to see if that's what fixed the issue.

Just to expand on hemblem5's point, the best way to see exactly how many pages Google has indexed, is by using the search operator **site: **(kudos to hemblem5 for mentioning)

Using this search operator on both the US and UK site, we can see the following results:

site:itelligencegroup.com/uk/ Google is currently indexing 1,160 pages

vs.

site:us.itelligencegroup.com Google is currently indexing 879 pages

We can also see that when using:

site:itelligencegroup.com Google is currently indexing 3,130 pages

From a quick look at the above, I can also see that the domain has 3 sub-domains:

• us.itelligencegroup.com
• blog.itelligencegroup.com 975 pages indexed
• myaccount.itelligencegroup.com 7 pages indexed

I think going forward, the best thing to do would be to see how many pages you actually have across the site. If there all being indexed then there's no huge issue regarding making changes. If they're not then I recommend following my advice in the previous post.

A good tool to use to find all your pages is Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool. However I would recommend running the tool outside of peak visiting hours as it can sometimes cause the host server to slow down in response time due to the large number of requests.

If you have any questions just ask.

Let me know how you get on.

Thanks

SilverDoor

Hi,

That's very strange indeed.

When I go direct to the URL www.itelligencegroup.com, I am automatically redirected straight to itelligencegroup.com/uk/.

Where are you based US or UK?

The http://us.itelligencegroup.com/ version concerns me a little as this is a sub-domain of www.itelligencegroup.com. Your client needs to have some consistency on how they are targeting different locations.

If they want to target by subfolder i.e. /UK/ then maintain that across the board. Don't go switching between sub-domains and sub-folders this is just going to confuse search engines.

However, the method you mentioned above is the correct way of doing it. Giving the user an "intelligence worldwide" option. Although, if this is being offered, I would implement this on www.itelligencegroup.com and and then direct the user from there.

Does this make sense?

Thanks

SilverDoor

Hi,

I've just answered a very similar issue in this Q&A.

While it is referring to GEO-location redirects I've heard of very similar issues with language redirects.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

Thanks

SilverDoor