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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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  • The top linked domains in search console are coming from our load balancer setup. Does anyone know how to remove these as unique sites pointing back to our primary domain? I was told Google is smart enough to ignore these as duplicate domains but if that was the case, why would they be listed as the top linked domains in search console? Most concerned....

    | DonFerrari2169
    0

  • I have a site that has 2,50,000 pages and I want to redirect to another domain. Is it good practice for SEO and google?

    | MuhammadQasimAttari
    0

  • seo audit reporting

    Hello, Mozzers! I'm curious to know how you report SEO audit findings. Do you use a spreadsheet? A presentation? A formal report? Or maybe something else. If you have a favourite audit template, I'd love to see it. A second question: what things do you report in an audit? I currently report crawl findings, authority and trust, link profiles, and competitive analysis. I also investigate a site's security—that's not usually part of an audit, but site owners need to know about it. What do you report to your audit customers? Thanks for sharing your auditing wisdom!

    | AndyKubrin
    0

  • Hello! We have a powerful page that has been selected by Google as a duplicate page of another page on the site. The duplicate is not indexed by Google, and the referring domains pointing towards that page aren’t recognized by Google in the search console (when looking at the links report). My question is - if we 301 redirect the duplicate page towards the one that Google has selected as canonical, will the link juice be passed to the new page? Thanks!

    | Lewald1
    0

  • What are the best way to do on page and off page seo in 2021?

    | SaraClay
    0

  • Hi, I am working on an eCommerce website on Shopify.
    When I tried Indexing my newly created service pages. The pages are not getting indexed on Google.
    I also tried manual indexing of each page and submitted a sitemap but still, the issue doesn't seem to be resolved. Thanks

    | Bhisshaun
    0

  • Hi folks! Is it still necessary to add utms to GMB profiles to get clicks from GMB-informed results to register as organic in Google Analytics? I thought so, but I did a test recently and it looks like this isn't necessary anymore (adding utms)

    | SimpleSearch
    0

  • Hi everyone,
    I have one issue about canonical. kindly guide me about it. I have a site example.com/abc and I convert it on an amp and know its URLs is example.com/abc=?amp. but the search console tells me to add the proper canonical URL but both pages are the same. kindly guide me about it. what will I do?

    | MuhammadQasimAttari
    0

  • Can you share your experiences in managing SEO QA automation of large websites with millions of pages?
    what are the things you are regularly testing for, besides the most obvious - hreflangs/canonicals, robots.txt, sitemap, non-200 status codes, redirect rules?
    do you use in-house developed tools or external tools?
    if external - which ones?
    how do you run your QA automation scripts? external server or some online tools? upon every release or hourly/daily/monthly?

    | terentyev
    0

  • Hi All, Our development team needs to do a temporary site name change from www.sitename.com to new.sitename.com and then wants to return to www.sitename.com. They need to do this for the whole site due to how it's built with single sign on (SSO) and how certain post login pages utilize pre login pages and need to keep people logged in. This process is changing with a CMS upgrade and website and post login pages will be independent of the pre login pages moving forward. My question is what is the best way to manage this transition? Right now it seems like the best solution I've been able to work out with development is to reduce the domain shift down to one week and use 302 Redirects, don't index the new.sitename.com site, and for that week and take my lumps as they come from search. Looking for any other suggestion that may help marketing work with dev without casting blame on any teams for drops in organic traffic.

    | dapacifi
    0

  • What should be done with forum questions that go unanswered for a long time (i.e. year or longer)? Are these types of questions valuable content? Should we opt out of having these types of pages indexed? Since these pages are just one sentences doesn't seem like it is adding value to the site.

    | nandaMesa
    0

  • We would like to set up a website in English language only and promote this in various European countries. As said the website will only be available in English language, but we will keep translations (google translate) in backend. When a user in France then enters search query in French language in browser, a search can be done in French content, but we will present relevant content in English. Does anyone have any experience with that? Will it be allowed given the fact that the result (in English language) will probably not include any of the terms that was searched on (in French language).

    | hansdef
    0

  • Hi, We have an ecommerce store and currently have topic pages setup for each category/location combination, each topic page lists relevant products available for sale, so for example Most Popular Birthday Party products in UK
    Most Popular Birthday Party products in London
    Most Popular Birthday Party products in Manchester We are now looking at ways of capitalising on longtail keyword searches and a potential solution is to expand the number of Topic Pages/Location combinations so for example Most Popular Birthday Party products in UK
    Cheapest Birthday Party products in UK
    Birthday Party products for small groups in UK
    Birthday Party products for large groups in UK
    Children Birthday Party products for in UK
    etc In general would this be a positive or negative thing to do for our site to give each longtail keyword its own dedicated topic page (given that our crawl budget is not necessarily high). Or should we just try to add longtail keyword to the original topic page itself and make that one rank better? Thanks

    | cmavroudisyahoocom
    0

  • Hi, We currently have a relatively low DA score of 26. We have been working to increase it but of course it takes time. We are starting to adapt our approach and rank for non-competitive, long-tail keywords. If our DA is very low, will this affect our longtail keyword ranking even though there is very little competition for those? Thanks

    | cmavroudisyahoocom
    0
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  • I am moving my website to WordPress after years. I am curious to know what the best route to maintain as much SEO value as possible would be. We have a lot of 301 redirects currently, and we will maintain those, but what else should we do or know? Thanks for any help.

    | hwade
    0

  • Hey again Moz community! I've been trying to read up on schema markup and watch videos multiple times (!) but I can't understand how it works. I would greatly appreciate it if someone can answer these questions: Do I need to ‘markup’ every part of the article? Like “this section can be FAQ snippet, and this can also FAQ etc..". So I guess my question is how detailed does the markup have to be? What are the best tools to use for schema markup for wordpress? What are the best tools to use for schema markup for react web-app? The https://search.google.com/test/rich-results shows if the markup is good for a page, but it doesn’t provide any details. For some articles it says that sitelinks searchbox is detected but that’s only one type of snippet possibility? Do I need to add additional markup for, say, list snippets and FAQ snippets if I want a chance to get those? Thanks a lot! Leo W

    | Leowa
    2

  • Hey everyone, I run a website that publish articles about pets. I have read some great things about Google Discover and the potential traffic it can bring to publishers (Condé Nast reported up to 20% of traffic coming from Discover in the US, at a certain point). I am currently trying to get indexed and after reading Google guidelines and a Ahrefs guide, I have made many optimizations to my site: structured data, creating an author page, fixing image size and publishing date... so far, it's not working. I feel the lack of a knowledge graph for my business may affect my chances. I'm currently building a GMB page to fix this. Do you have other recommendations or success stories of your own experiments with Discover? An example of an article I tried to get indexed was https://www.lebernard.ca/teletravail-chien-guide-survie/. Obviously, I'm not expecting feedback on the quality of the content since it's in French, but I'm curious if you see anything from a technical perspective that doesn't work. Thanks a lot for your help! Charles

    | Cheebee124
    0

  • Hi, I am migrating my e-commerce to another platform of a internet company in Brazil (Tray) that has no way to redirect 301 urls in batch, I also do not have access to files and ftp of it. Anyway, as I have hundreds of urls, I would like to know if there is any way to do batch redirects with an external platform tool? Thank you very much in advance

    | didi09
    0

  • I have noticed a popular trend in web design which involves sections of content being started with what looks to be smaller sub heading something like <h3>, <h4> or <h5> and then followed by a bigger heading <h2>. My question is, what is the best way to deal with this visual structure and will having a structure like this hurt your SEO? <h5>Contact Us</h5> <h2>Get started with your next project in minutes!<h2> <p>Some text here ...</p> Here are some examples where the header structure is similar to above (smaller before bigger): https://www.snappr.com/ https://form.taxi/ https://fluz.app/ If that structure is bad for SEO, then it seems like a simple solution is to make it purely visual, mimicking a sub header with styling on a span or paragraph like these sites do: https://www.andrejilderda.nl/ https://nightwatch.io/ https://www.swingvy.com/ https://www.figma.com/ My only concern with that approach is because your section sub heading is no longer an actual header you will miss out on ranking important and relevant keyword information for that section. Is this correct something to be worried about? There is one last solution I stumbled upon that involves using headings for both but in reverse hierarchy so a <h3> is first but styled to be smaller, followed by a visually bigger <h4> which provides the addition context. https://avocode.com/ Anyone have thoughts, expertise or resources on the matter?

    | si.analytics
    0

  • I sea tons of website build redirects backlink from google to them , and the have get a high ranking in moz , why moz don't pervent this methods?

    | tailor109
    0

  • I've added some AggregateOffer schema for some products with properties such as lowPrice
    highPrice
    pricevaliduntil
    availability
    itemCondition
    priceValidUntil we change our sale price quite often and I am relying on the priceValidUntil to stop showing the prices once a date has lapsed. However, I am still seeing the prices on SERPPs once the date has passed. Is there anyway to get around this? note: I have tried updating the schema 2 days before the sale ends just to make sure Google has crawled the page in time. However Google is still a bit slow in crawling the pages even after requesting index. Any suggestion is welcome.

    | Vuly
    0

  • What is the best tool to check for the google penalty, What penalty hit the website. ?

    | Michael.Leonard
    0

  • Hello, recently, I found out about all the SEO advantages from 301 redirects. I had 3 websites that are now expired, their topic was Counter Strike 1.6 servers. All of these websites were registered 9 years ago and have few good backlinks (from website with 1%-3% spam score and DA 30+). Now I have one website that is not only about Counter Strike 1.6 but also many other Steam shooter games. If I revive these 3 old domains and 301 redirect them to my new one, will it help me with SEO and increase my ranking on Google?

    | Bonito1993
    0

  • does silo structure has a positive point on Google Ranking or not, and what is the importance of internal linking, how google see the internal linking content as compared to less internal linking, I'm trying an experiment I do a lot of internal backlinking in Website Unionwell as compared to Website B (which has apparently less internal Links) so with your experience in SEO field which site will get traffic rapidly.

    | saimkhanna
    0

  • My site name is bestmedtour .it's in English. I also want to have the Arabic version of the site. If I translate it with Google Translate, is it possible that the Arabic version of the site will be penalized?

    | aalinlandacc
    0

  • Hello everybody, I've been reading quite a lot recently about this topic and I would like to have your opinion about the following conclusion: ecommerce websites should have their own product descriptions if they can manage it (it will be beneficial for their SERPs rankings) but the ones who cannot won't be penalized by having the same product descriptions (or part of the same descriptions) IF it is only a "small" part of their content (user reviews, similar products, etc). What I mean is that among the signals that Google uses to guess which sites should be penalized or not, there is the ratio "quantity of duplicate content VS quantity of content in the page" : having 5-10 % of a page text corresponding to duplicate content might not be harmed while a page which has 50-75 % of a content page duplicated from an other site...  what do you think? Can the "internal" duplicated content (for example 3 pages about the same product which is having 3 diferent colors -> 1 page per product color) be considered as "bad" as the "external" duplicated content (same product description on diferent sites) ? Thanks in advance for your opinions!

    | Kuantokusta
    0

  • Hi I wanted some feedback on how other SEO's structure their time. I feel as though I'm falling into the trap of fire fighting with tasks rather than working on substantial projects... I don't feel as though I'm being as effective as I could be. Here's our set up - Ecommerce site selling thousands of products - more of a generalist with 5 focus areas. 2 x product/merchandising teams - bring in new products, write content/merchandise products Web team - me (SEO), Webmaster, Ecommcerce manager Studio - Print/Email marketing/creative/photography. A lot of my time is split between working for the product teams doing KWD research, briefing them on keywords to use, checking meta. SEO Tasks - Site audits/craws, reporting Blogs - I try and do a bit as I need it so much for SEO, so I've put a content/social plan together but getting a lot of things actioned is hard... I'm trying to coordinate this across teams Inbetween all that, I don't have much time to work on things I know are crucial like a backlink/outreach plan, blog/user guide/content building etc. How do you plan your time as an SEO? Big projects? Soon I'm going to pull back from the product optimisation & try focussing on category pages, but for an Ecommerce site they are extremely difficulty to promote. Just asking for opinions and advice 🙂

    | BeckyKey
    3

  • Using expired domains to redirect on your site? For this you need to first Active your expired domainsand put two to three articles After google will got it that its now active and so google start crawling after that you need to put same articles that you created on expired site on your new site with same urls Now make a wild card redirect to exact urls or posts you created on your site

    | LyleTLai
    0

  • Hi, I have a high number of very-low/zero traffic and zero backlinked product pages that have been discontinued (and wont come back). For these pages we automatically remove them from our website indexes and also removed internal links and then essentially kept the product pages and their urls intact but just added a note saying "no longer available, how about these..." with alternate similar product options. This seems to be the general consensus online for discontinued product pages that have little value. The questions is do I either 404 or noindex these now discontinued pages? What are the pros or cons? Thanks

    | coma99
    0

  • Hi all, So a complicated question that requires a little background. I bought unseenjapan.com to serve as a legitimate news site about a year ago. Social media and content growth has been good. Unfortunately, one thing I didn't realize when I bought this domain was that it used to be a porn site. I've managed to muck out some of the damage already - primarily, I got major vendors like Macafee and OpenDNS to remove the "porn" categorization, which has unblocked the site at most schools & locations w/ public wifi. The sticky bit, however, is Google. Google has the domain filtered under SafeSearch, which means we're losing - and will continue to lose - a ton of organic traffic. I'm trying to figure out how to deal with this, and appeal the decision. Unfortunately, Google's Reconsideration Request form currently doesn't work unless your site has an existing manual action against it (mine does not). I've also heard such requests, even if I did figure out how to make them, often just get ignored for months on end. Now, I have a back up plan. I've registered unseen-japan.com, and I could just move my domain over to the new domain if I can't get this issue resolved. It would allow me to be on a domain with a clean history while not having to change my brand. But if I do that, and I set up 301 redirects from the former domain, will it simply cause the new domain to be perceived as an "adult" domain by Google? I.e., will the former URL's bad reputation carry over to the new one? I haven't made a decision one way or the other yet, so any insights are appreciated.

    | gaiaslastlaugh
    0

  • I have seen that some of my competitors are doing it ,so I was wondering if I can do that as well?

    | EugeneMot
    0

  • Hi folks. Instead of an archive page template in my theme (I have my reasons), I am thinking of simply typing the post title as and when I publish a post, and linking to the post from there. Any SEO issues that you can think of? Thanks in advance!

    | Nobody1616542228134
    0

  • We have a high authority blog post (high PA) that used to rank for several high-traffic terms. Right now the post continues to rank high for variations of the high-traffic terms (e.g keyword + " free", keyword + " discussion") but the URL has been completed excluded from the money terms with alternative URLs of the domain ranking on positions 50+. There is no manual penalty in place or a DCMA exclusion. What are some of the things ppl would try here? Some of the things I can think of: - Remove keyword terms in article - Change the URL and do a 301 redirect - Duplicate the POST under new URL, 302 redirect from old blog post, and repoint links as much as you have control - Refresh content including timestamps - Remove potentially bad neighborhood links etc Has anyone seen the behavior above for their articles? Are there any recommendations? /PP

    | ppseo80
    0

  • will critical error in wordpress to increase memory limit affect seo rankings?

    | gamstopbet
    0

  • Hi there. I use Genesis and StudioPress themes. I recently noticed that the canonical link for blog pages points to the first page on all paginated pages, which I understand is an SEO no-no. I found some code here that adds a unique canonical link to each paginated page but for categories only. It works fine. I only have one category for my site. My question is: is there a downside (or even upside) to not having a blog page and placing a link to my category page in the navigation bar instead, using the category page as the blog page? It looks good and works. What do you think? I find it odd that this seems to be an issue across the Internet and the only solution that comes up relies on the Yoast plugin, which I don't want to use (don't want to use a plugin for SEO). Thanks in advance.

    | Nobody1616542228134
    0

  • Hi All, I'm desperate for a bit of advice. I run www.tyrereviews.com which has been my project since 2006, and after LOTS of hard work over 15 years held 1000's of P1 positions in the SERPs. I recently moved from the original .co.uk to .com to aid with future internationalising plans. I was very careful not to change ANYTHING else, just 301 from the UK to the .com and updated everything in webmaster consoles. My background is development and I spent weeks triple researching everything to make sure I followed all the google best practices, as this is my life's work and primary income source. From a tech point of view the change went perfectly, but sadly google quickly started deranking the new domain, and now two months on it seems to have stabilised at around 40% down on traffic year on year and mostly dropped from the UK region. This is mostly from medium to long tail keywords. One such example is "Michelin Primacy 4" in google UK, old webmaster tools is showing my average position this time last year as 1.4 and now I'm 12.4! The .com site is geo targeted to the UK by both webmaster tools and href lang tags. So, my question is, so I keep waiting, or do I give up andrisk the switch back to the uk domain before it's too late? Thanks in advance.

    | TyreReviews
    0

  • Hey community, I have a question regarding canonical tags.
    I used the content of one of my domains (nameA.com/ContentA) and copied it to another domain, but on several pages: nameB.com/ContentA1
    nameB.com/ContentA2
    nameB.com/ContentA3
    and so on). So I divided the content from domainA to several pages of domainB. The reason is, that my client wants to build a new business on domainB and wants to use the exact same content from domainA, because he can't afford another copywriter at the moment (and he doesn't want to rewrite it himself). Problem: DomainA is ranking for this content and he wants to keep the rankings, until domainB ranks similar (for the same keywords, of course). So my question is: Can I put a canonical tag on domainA?
    My thoughts are: Not a single page of domainB is 100% duplicate content, as it's always only partialy the same. Can I just choose one of those pages from domainB to put as link-goal for the canonical tag? Or do I need to create a "view-all" page on domainB, with all the content put together, so it's 100% duplicate to domainA, and then put a canonical tag to domainA and link to this "view-all" page? If I do so, do I need to also put canonicals on every single page from domainB, to link to this "view-all" page?
    IMPORTANT: Would the other pages of domainB then be ranked/listed in the SERRPs, or only the "view-all" site? I would really appreciate your help, as I have been seaching for answers to this specific problem since more than a week... Thank you! Best regards

    | ElliPirelli
    0

  • We have about 100 really old blog posts that are nothing more than a short trip review w/ images. Consequently these pages are poor quality. Would best practices be to combine into one "review page" per trip, reducing from 100 to about 10 better pages and implement redirects? Or is having more pages better with less redirects? We only have about 700 pages total. Thanks for any input!

    | KarenElaine
    0

  • Hey guys. I've got a question about the url structure on two different websites with a similar topic (bith are job search websites). Although we are going to publish different content (texts) on these two websites and they will differ visually, the url structure (except for the domain name) remains exactly the same, as does the number of indexed landingpages on both pages. For example, www.yyy.com/jobs/mobile-developer & www.zzz.com/jobs/mobile-developer. In your opinion, can this lead to a Google penalty? Thanks in advance!

    | vde13
    0

  • Hi folks. I would like to discuss pagination. I use WordPress (Genesis, specifically). I ran my site through a site scan and it flagged an error which told me that my blog was producing duplicate meta descriptions because the  blog is paginated - the same meta description from the blog page is being used on Page 2, Page 3 etc. I looked into this and the Internet is awash with many other people scratching around for a solution. My understanding is that using a canonical link on the first page is not a good idea, because it says to Google that only Page 1 of the blog is important. I also read an article that states Google no longer reads the Rel=Prev/Next code that could be used to tell Google to ignore the issue. So, what's the solution? Do I even need one? As a side-thought, it seems to me that pagination is, well, pretty useless. I mean, if my blog has 20 pages and I've worked hard to create content, who is going to click through to anywhere near page 20? Nobody. There has to be a smarter way for people on-site to access content. I would love your thoughts on all of this. Cheers.

    | Nobody1616542228134
    0

  • I have been hit by DDoS attacks lately...not on a huge scale, but probably done by some "script kiddies" or competitors of mine. Still, I need to take some action in order to protect my server and my site against all of this spam traffic that is being sent to it. In the process of researching the tools available for defending a website from a DDoS attack, I came across the service offered by CloudFlare.com. According to the CloudFlare website, they protect your site against a DDoS attack by showing users/visitors they find suspicious an interstitial that asks them if they are a real user or a bot...this interstitial contains a Captcha that suspicious users are asked to enter in order to visit the site. I'm just wondering what kind of an effect such an interstitial could have on my Google rankings...I can imagine that such a thing could add to increased click-backs to the SERPs and, if Google detects this, to lower rankings. Has anyone had experience with the DDoS protection services offered by CloudFlare, who can say a word or two regarding any effects this may have on SEO? Thanks

    | masterfish
    1

  • A year or two ago we put up some websites which were specific to brands we own. Sure enough those sites (eg 'myBrand.com') started to rank pretty well for those brand terms eg 'mybrand curling tongs' (it's not curling tongs, btw, but you get the idea). We were getting a decent amount of traffic presumably from people who have bought or seen these products on our amazon/ebay stores. Before long, we see us starting to rank well for non branded searches eg 'curling tongs' even among decent competition. Next thing you know I'm getting told by the boss that we need to put up websites for all specific ranges, not just brands, because specificity is a bonus for ranking well. While there's probably a point that a site for MybrandCurlingTongs lends itself well to ranking for curling tongs, is there also an element that the branded searches we got (via making our brand known on amazon/ebay) helped the site gain recognition and authority? As such a new website about 'ionising hair dryers' would not rank well based on being specific, because it wouldn't be helped by a lot of branded traffic?

    | HSDOnline
    2

  • We have a promotion landing page which earned some valuable inbound links. Now that the promotion is over, we have redirected this page to a current "evergreen" page. But in the search results page on Google, the original promotion landing page is still showing as a top result. When clicked, it properly redirects to the newer evergreen page. But, it's a bit problematic for the original promo page to show in the search results because the snippet mentions specifics of the promo which is no longer active. So, I'm wondering what would be the net impact of using the "removal request " tool for the original page in GSC. If we don't use that tool, what kind of timing might we expect before the original page drops out of the results in favor of the new redirected page? And if we do use the removal tool on the original page, will that negate what we are attempting to do by redirecting to the new page, with regard to preserving inbound link equity?

    | seoelevated
    0

  • Using the on-page grader and whilst further investigating internal linking, I'm concerned that as the ecommerce website has a very link heavy mega menu the rule of 100 may be impeding on the contextual links we're creating. Clearly we don't want to no-follow our entire menu. Should we consider no-indexing the third-level- for example short sleeve shirts here... Clothing > Shirts > Short Sleeve Shirts What about other pages we're don't care to index anyway such as the 'login page' the 'cart' the search button? Any thoughts appreciated.

    | Ant-Scarborough
    0

  • For example, https://www.jamestowndistributors.com/product/epoxy-and-adhesives?page=2&resultsPerPage=16 is the paginated URL of the category https://www.jamestowndistributors.com/product/epoxy-and-adhesives/. Can I remove the &resultsPerPage= variation from the canonical without it causing an issue? Even though the actual page URL has that parameter? I was thinking of using this: instead of: What is the best practice?

    | laurengdicenso
    0

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