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After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

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Latest Questions

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  • Karen_Dauncey


    I used to use the crawl test tool to crawl websites and it presented the information in a really useful hierarchy of pages. The new on-demand crawl test doesn't seem to do this. Is there another tool I should be using to get the data?

    Product Support | | Karen_Dauncey
    0
  • moon-boots


    So I am merging two ecommerce brands together and have decided to do so either under a Subdirectory or gTLD. My aim here is to increase the quality of my SEO for the weaker site (this would be the second italic domain shown in A and B below), thus taking domain authority from the dominant site, while 301 redirecting all pages from the old domain which will hopefully boost the authority and rank for the merged site). My options for the merged site are: A. www.website.com & www.website.com/hreflang=en B. www.website.com & www.website.com/us Or a combination of A & B (below): C. www.website.com & www.website.com/us/hreflang=en Factors: Option A and C results in a longer URL structure for the merged domain which has a negative impact on SEO, while Option B is much more succinct. Both Option A and Option B are the same distance from the root directory, weakening the SEO credibility of the merged domain somewhat. While option C would be further still. Here are my questions: Option B consolidates Domain Authority, but do Option A and C do the same? Will the first domain receive a boost in Domain Authority and Rank due to 301 redirects targeting the second italic domain? Will any option cause duplicate content issues (some categories/products are identical on both sites)? And if so, how best to avoid them (having Google ignore the subdirectory/gTLD is not an option). One website will target the UK/EU while the other will target the US, will the merged italic site be able to rank well in the US? Are there any other ranking factors I have missed or should consider? I know this is quite an advanced series of questions, so I would appreciate the opinions of others so I can make the most informed choice. Thank you

    International SEO | | moon-boots
    0
  • 21centuryweb


    Hi, I would like to ask why our website images not indexing in Google. I have shared the following screenshot of the search console.  https://www.screencast.com/t/yKoCBT6Q8Upw Last week (Friday 14 Sept 2018) it was showing 23.5K out 31K were submitted and indexed by Google. But now, it is showing only 1K 😞 Can you please let me know why might this happen, why images are not getting indexed and showing in Google webmaster.

    Technical SEO | | 21centuryweb
    0
  • lmoraes


    Hi, I have two campaigns running in Google Adwords or Google Ads now and I saw in Google Ads account that I had 5 clicks today (09/18/2018) but when I try to search for this clicks in my Google Analytics in ACQUISITION > All Traffic > Channels I don't find nothing about "Paid Search" or something like that. Bellow is a picture of my Google Analytics account to prove it. The accounts are linked and I can find the 2 campaigns in the Analytics. How can I interpret this picture? Where the paid traffic is showing? or not showing there? Thanks Leandro uvAtrsg

    Reporting & Analytics | | lmoraes
    0
  • threecounties


    I have received the following message from MOZ on a few of our websites now Our crawler was not able to access the robots.txt file on your site. This often occurs because of a server error from the robots.txt. Although this may have been caused by a temporary outage, we recommend making sure your robots.txt file is accessible and that your network and server are working correctly. Typically errors like this should be investigated and fixed by the site webmaster. I have spoken with our webmaster and they have advised the below: The Robots.txt file is definitely there on all pages and Google is able to crawl for these files. Moz however is having some difficulty with finding the files when there is a particular redirect in place. For example, the page currently redirects from threecounties.co.uk/ to https://www.threecounties.co.uk/ and when this happens, the Moz crawler cannot find the robots.txt on the first URL and this generates the reports you have been receiving. From what I understand, this is a flaw with the Moz software and not something that we could fix form our end. _Going forward, something we could do is remove these rewrite rules to www., but these are useful redirects and removing them would likely have SEO implications. _ Has anyone else had this issue and is there anything we can do to rectify, or should we leave as is?

    Moz Pro | | threecounties
    0
  • John8899


    I have two sites that offer help for freelance writers. The first gets almost no search traffic and is very low priority for me. The second is my main priority and gets substantial search traffic. The low-priority site has a significant number of dofollow backlinks from high-domain-authority sites. Is it a good idea to 301 redirect these links to similar/related posts on my high-priority site? Would this potentially boost the SEO of my high-priority site? Thanks for any help!

    Link Building | | John8899
    0
  • moon-boots


    Does anyone have experience removing /product/ and /product-category/, etc. from URLs in wordpress? I found this link from Wordpress which explains that this shouldn't be done, but I would like some opinions of those who have tried it please. https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/removing-product-product-category-or-shop-from-the-urls/

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots
    0
  • moon-boots


    Okay, so I have read through the following link in respect to International SEO (https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo), and I believe that the way forward it a ccTLD. My thought was to have .com, .co.uk and .eu. Currently my site is .com, but receives most of its traffic from UK sources. I'm concerned that when I switch over to ccTLDs, the .co.uk in particular, that my UK traffic could dry up. Switching from .com to .co.uk and then using the .com to target the US market makes sense, but I would like to know others opinions on the potential dangers of doing this. Also, are ccTLDs kept on the same hosting or would they require individual hosting? The link doesn't cover this question.

    International SEO | | moon-boots
    1
  • ThorUK


    So, when I gain a link I always check to see if the page that is linking is in the Google cache. I've noticed recently that more and more pages are actually not showing up in Google's cache, yet still appear in search results. I did read an article from someone whoo works at Google a few weeks back that there is sometimes an error with the cache and occasionally the cache will not display. This week, my own website isn't showing up in the cache yet I'm still ranking in SERP's. I'm not worried about it, mostly whitehat, but has there been any indication that Google are phasing out the ability to check cache's of websites?

    Algorithm Updates | | ThorUK
    0
  • nhhernandez


    Hi everyone, Too much of anything is not good. In terms of internal linking, how many are too many? I read that the recommended internal links are about 100 links per page otherwise it dilutes the page's link equity. I have a concern about one of our websites - according to search console, the homepage has 923 internal links. All the pages have a corresponding /feed page added to the page URL, which is really weird (is this caused by a plugin?). The site also has an e-com feature, but it is not used as the site is essentially a brochure and customers are encouraged to visit the shop. I assume the e-com feature also increases this number. On the other hand, one of the competitors we are tracking has 1 internal link site-wide. Ours is at 45,000 site-wide. How is it possible to only have 1 internal link? Is this a Moz bug? I know we also need to reduce our internal links badly, however, I'm not sure where to start. I don't know how these internal links are linked together - some aren't in the copy or navigation menu. When I scan the homepage links using 'check my links', the total links identified for the homepage is only 170. kAeYlTM

    On-Page Optimization | | nhhernandez
    0
  • JonathanLeplang


    Hi Mozers, I would like to buy these videos (MozCon Local 2018 video bundle) but I can't find the link. Can you give it to me, please? Thank you for your help. Kind regards, Jonathan

    Moz Bar | | JonathanLeplang
    0
  • ColesNathan


    The website I'm working on has no canonical tags. There is duplicate content so rel=canonicals need adding to certain pages but is it best practice to have a tag on every page ?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColesNathan
    0
  • Sindre


    Hi! As some of you may be familiar with, there is a giant spam-network with the same design and same page title on all domains: "The Globe - The world's most visited web pages". For example: theglobe.at
    theglobe.co.za
    www.internet-search.us I've now discovered that over 900 of these spam-domains link to my site. My plan was of course to disavow them all, but Google is explicit on telling me to be careful. «Only disavow if you are certain that the links are damaging to your rankings». And to be honest, I'm not sure. Also: it seems drastic to disavow almost a thousand pages. I'm afraid to mess something up. What would you do?

    Link Building | | Sindre
    3
  • swapnil12


    We have followers, following, friends, etc pages for each user who creates account on our website. so when new user sign up, he may have 0 followers, 0 following and 0 friends, but over period of time he can get those lists go up. we have different pages for followers, following and friends which are allowed for google to index. When user don't have any followers/following/friends, those pages looks empty and we get issue of duplicate content and description too short. so is it better that we add  noindex for those pages temporarily and remove noindex tag when there are at least 2 or more people on those pages. What are side effects of adding noindex when there is no data on those page or benefits of it?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | swapnil12
    0
  • henrycabrown


    Howdy folks, excited to be part of the Moz community after lurking for years! I'm a few weeks into my new job (Digital Marketing at Rewind) and about 10 days ago the product team moved our Help Center from Zendesk to Intercom. Apparently the import went smoothly, but it's caused one problem I'm not really sure how to go about solving: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/***    is where all our articles used to sit https://help.rewind.io/***    is where all our articles now are So, for example, the following article has now moved as such: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/115001902152-Can-I-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind- https://help.rewind.io/general-faqs-and-billing/frequently-asked-questions/can-i-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind This has created a bunch of broken URLs in places like our Shopify/BigCommerce app listings, in our email drips, and in external resources etc. I've played whackamole cleaning many of these up, but these old URLs are still indexed by Google – we're up to 475 Crawl Errors in Search Console over the past week, all of which are 404s. I reached out to Intercom about this to see if they had something in place to help, but they just said my "best option is tracking down old links and setting up 301 redirects for those particular addressed". Browsing the Zendesk forms turned up some relevant-ish results, with the leading recommendation being to configure javascript redirects in the Zendesk document head (thread 1, thread 2, thread 3) of individual articles. I'm comfortable setting up 301 redirects on our website, but I'm in a bit over my head in trying to determine how I could do this with content that's hosted externally and sitting on a subdomain. I have access to our Zendesk admin, so I can go in and edit stuff there, but don't have experience with javascript redirects and have read that they might not be great for such a large scale redirection. Hopefully this is enough context for someone to provide guidance on how you think I should go about fixing things (or if there's even anything for me to do) but please let me know if there's more info I can provide. Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | henrycabrown
    1
  • JamesHancocks1


    Hi,
    I was wondering what this would be used for as it's in the Robots.exe of a recruitment agency website that posts jobs. Should it be removed? Disallow: /jobs/?
    Disallow: /jobs/page/*/ Thanks in advance.
    James

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesHancocks1
    0
  • Stevepair


    moz academy

    I'm looking to learn more about SEO. Has anyone purchased the courses available through MOZ? If so, are they useful?

    Getting Started | | Stevepair
    0
  • RaquelSaiz


    Hi All, I have a main domain and 9 different subdirectories for languages,  example: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page-uk.html www.example.com/es/page-es.html we are implementing hreflang tags for the languages, but we are thinking to get rid of the dashes on the languages URL: -uk or -es, so it will be: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page.html www.example.com/es/page.hrml would this be a problem? to have same page names even if they are in different subdirectories? would we need to add canonical tags, at lease for the main domain URLs? www.kornferry.com/page.html Thank you, Rachel

    Technical SEO | | RaquelSaiz
    0
  • JamesHancocks1


    I've looked in the robots.txt Tester and I can see 3 warnings: There is a 'syntax not understood' warning for each of these. XML Sitemaps:
    https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/post-sitemap.xml
    https://www.pkeducation.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml How do I fix or reformat these to remove the warnings? Many thanks in advance.
    Jim

    Technical SEO | | JamesHancocks1
    0
  • Tom3_15


    Hi all, I have suddenly noticed a massive jump in indexed pages. After performing a "site:" search, it was revealed that the sudden jump was due to the indexation of many pages beginning with the serp title "Index of /wp-content/uploads/" for many uploaded pieces of content & plugins. This has appeared approximately one month after switching to https. I have also noticed a decline in Bing rankings. Does anyone know what is causing/how to fix this? To be clear, these pages are **not **normal /wp-content/uploads/ but rather "index of" pages, being included in Google. Thank you.

    Technical SEO | | Tom3_15
    0
  • Bush_JSM


    Hi, I've been looking at a clients site and Google is pulling the prices of the products (for some not all) and the pages that rank have started to have a lower organic CTR. Does anyone know how I can control what prices show in the SERPs? There is no Schema on the site to display this and the price is not in the meta title or description - it's just appearing on some pages - it's not uniform across the site? Any ideas? Cheers B

    On-Page Optimization | | Bush_JSM
    0
  • Fubra


    Hi, Will Regex expressions work in a disavow file? If i include website.com/* will that work or would you recommend just website.com? Thanks.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra
    0
  • chuck-layton


    Hello, I had a question about noindex and Rel=Canonical on category page pagination. On my site, the category page the meta="robots" has "Index,Follow" tags and the rel="canonical" is the main category page, but when a user sorts the page the meta="robots" changes to "NoIndex, Follow." My question is should the sorted page be name="robots" content="INDEX,FOLLOW" /> since the  rel="canonical" is pointing to the main page?? Or does it matter that it is NoIndex?? Any thoughts on this topic would be awesome. Thanks. Main Category Page
    https://www.site.com/category/
    name="robots" content="INDEX,FOLLOW" />
    rel="canonical" href="https://www.site.com/category/"/> Name Sorted Page
    https://www.site.com/category/?dir=asc&order=name
    name="robots" content="NOINDEX, FOLLOW" />
    rel="canonical" href="https://www.site.com/category/">

    On-Page Optimization | | chuck-layton
    0
  • AL123al


    Hi, My client has a large website and has a navigation with main categories. However, they also have a hamburger type navigation in the top right. If you click it it opens to a massive menu with every category and page visible. Do you know if having a navigation like this bleeds page rank? So if all deep pages are visible from the hamburger navigation this means that page rank is not being conserved to the main categories. If you click a main category in the main navigation (not the hamburger) you can see the sub pages. I think this is the right structure but the client has installed this huge menu to make it easier for people to see what there is. From a technical SEO  is this not bad?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AL123al
    0
  • timdavis


    Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last.  I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis
    0
  • AmandaBridge


    This is in my robots.txt file, does anyone know what this is supposed to accomplish, it doesn't appear to be blocking URLs with question marks Disallow: /?crawler=1
    Disallow: /?mobile=1 Thank you

    Technical SEO | | AmandaBridge
    0
  • nhhernandez


    Hi everyone, We are having an issue with this local business. The Google listing isn't immediately appearing on the map. You have to move the map or zoom in and out for the listing to appear. I find this really odd as our competitors - with no reviews and way further in proximity - are appearing with no issues. The listing is only about 4km where I'm doing the search, while competitors with no reviews are about 20km away. We are ranking in the top 5 organically for the search term I used (pool renovations brisbane), but nowhere in local unless the map is moved. When the listing appears, sometimes the pin also looks grey instead of red, while others are red (if that makes sense). On top of this, their organic rankings have also been on a downward trend since June. I'm currently doing a backlink audit to see if it's contributing to the issue. If anyone also has other ideas, could you please let me know? Thanks.

    Local Listings | | nhhernandez
    1
  • DivyaDubey


    After migration of web  application from aws  ec2 instance to Microsoft azure web App service,  we observed that we lost  our 50% traffic. Our site  custom domain is ihealthmantra.com and azure web App has default domain azurewebsites.net  . Azure  WebApp service has drawback that default domain gets in picture after mapping to my custom domain .We have mapped  azure webAPP host name to our custom domain as CNAME record in DNS Table .  Now same site working with two domains i.e ihealthmantra.com as well ass  azurewebsites.net . As we seen this issues we made 301 redirection from azure default domain to our custom domain, Still no change in traffic.Google is now showing external links from azurewebsites.net  to healthmantra.com . We are totally confused now . We don't know what exactly affected to our search traffic . Please Help us.

    Technical SEO | | DivyaDubey
    0
  • MikeZur


    Hi I have recently noticed that by mistake our eCommerce site was incorrectly using the schema mark up featured product sliders, upsells and category pages. Example: Im aware that google is not a fan of misusing the mark ups. Would the above have a negative effect on rankings?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MikeZur
    1
  • flo_seo


    Hi all, Recently, got an unusual issue with images in Google index. We have more than 1,500 images in our sitemap, but according to Search Console only 273 of those are indexed. If I check Google image search directly, I find more images in index, but still not all of them. For example this post has 28 images and only 17 are indexed in Google image. This is happening to other posts as well. Checked all possible reasons (missing alt, image as background, file size, fetch and render in Search Console), but none of these are relevant in our case. So, everything looks fine, but not all images are in index. Any ideas on this issue? Your feedback is much appreciated, thanks

    Technical SEO | | flo_seo
    1
  • Firestarter-SEO


    Let's say I built a directory link and it takes a while to go live. Is there a tool that will crawl the site and notify me when the link goes live?

    Link Building | | Firestarter-SEO
    0
  • mattl99


    So I would like a few opinions. How long should a product description be? Enough to get the point across? 100 words? 800 words? Over detailed? Any advice would be appreciated.

    On-Page Optimization | | mattl99
    0

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