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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

Looking to level up your SEO techniques? Chat through more advanced approaches.


  • Hi Guys, Have a client who's blog is combined with there e-commerce site which is on Magento 2 but there are no SEO fields to add meta title, description. It only has the ability to add h1 tag see: https://cl.ly/3c6897aa5132 We want to add this ability to add meta data like this: https://d.pr/i/8GdbDc Does anyone know how to do this? Cheers.

    | brandonegroup
    0

  • Hi Guys, Currently optimizing my e-commerce store which currently has around 100 words of content on average for each category page. Based on this study by Backlinko the more content the better: http://backlinko.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/02_Content-Total-Word-Count_line.png Would you say this is true for e-commerce pages, for example, a page like this: http://www.theiconic.com.au/yoga-pants/ What benefits would you receive with adding more content? Is it basically more content, leads to more potential long-tail opportunity and more organic traffic? Assuming the content is solid and not built just for SEO reasons. Cheers.

    | seowork214
    0

  • seo tactic 301 redirect domain migration

    Our company (DA 40) recently acquired another company (DA 20). The domain for the acquired company is up, and I am being asked if we should keep paying for the domain. I have a couple of questions regarding this. Is it best practice to continue paying for the older domain and do 301 redirects to our website? If yes, do I have to add 301 redirects for individual matching pages? For example, if the old site has the topic XYZ, should a 301 go to our site if we have a similar page topic XYZ? What about contact pages, about us, etc? Do we redirect all non-matching topics to the new home page? Or in the case of their blogs, do we redirect their blogs to the new blog home page even though we are not keeping their old blogs? What if our company keeps acquiring other companies, are we to assume we have to keep paying for the domains of the acquired companies? Is there anyone out there that would say stop paying for the old domain and just review the company's inbound links, reach out to those sites, and make sure they link to the new site instead? Thanks for the help in advance.

    | CharityHBS
    0

  • My website has been indexed on google and all of its pages can be found on google except for the product category pages - which are where we want our traffic heading to, so this is a big problem for us. Our website is www.skirtinguk.com And an example of a page that isn't being indexed is https://www.skirtinguk.com/product-category/mdf-skirting-board/

    | chelseaskirtinguk
    0

  • 404 error

    Hello everyone! I have always known enough about Google Analytics and SEO to be dangerous, but was not a focus for me. I am working on a project were I am looking at stuff where my knowledge is limited. The scenario is that the domain I am looking at will serve a 404 error, but keeps the url, I guess for tracking purposes. At the same time, there is a page "Page_Not_Found" that has elevated visits. I am not sure how to tell where the visits are coming from to the PNF since the Previous Page is mostly identified as "(entrance)" Is the PNF correlated to the process of serving an error page but not changing the URL? Ideally, I am looking to identify and improve the 404 visits. I hope that I provided clear enough information. Happy to provide more as needed.

    | HankHoffmeier
    0

  • Hi all, I've been using Moz to research, optimise and grade a broad range of copy and blog posts over the years. After the optimisation process I've always seen a relatively quick improvement of pages/posts in SERPs. I am currently working on a new website launched earlier in the year on a subdomain. There's a sitemap, fresh content added every month and the site has an verified Google Analytics and Search Console account. The content is quite niche with low traffic data for related terms, however, I am finding that after three or four weeks the optimised posts aren't displaying in the top 50 results in Google. These are the posts: https://sykeshome.europe.sykes.com/cut-the-cost-of-customer-support-use-a-work-at-home-model/ - optimised for "Cut the cost of customer support" (and also  "Cut the cost of customer support: use a work-at-home model") https://sykeshome.europe.sykes.com/quality-and-compliance-in-a-work-at-home-environment/ - optimised for "Quality and compliance" (and also "Quality and compliance in a work-at-home environment") As a new website launched on a subdomain there aren't currently any inbound links, but I wanted to know if I am simply being impatient in expecting the above posts to rank higher (if only slightly), or if there could be a reason optimised content with a Moz A grade isn't showing in the first 50 results. Any advice or pointers would be much appreciated. Jonathan

    | JCN-SBWD
    0

  • wordpress subdirectory domain authority

    Hi There, I'm working on a WordPress site that includes a premium content blog with approx 900 posts. As part of the project, those 900 posts and other membership functionality will be moved from the main site to another site built specifically for content/membership. Ideally, we want the existing posts to remain on the root domain to avoid a loss in link juice/domain authority. We initially began setting up a WordPress Multisite using the sub-directory option. This allows for the main site to be at www.website.com and the secondary site to be at www.website.com/secondary. Unfortunately, the themes and plugins we need for the platform do not play nicely with WordPress Multisite, so we started seeking a new solution, and, discovered that a second instance of WordPress can be installed in a subdirectory on the server. This would give us the same subdirectory structure while bypassing WordPress Multisite and instead, having two separate single-site installs. Do you foresee any issues with this WordPress subdirectory install? Does Google care/know these are two separate WordPress installs and do we risk losing any link juice/domain authority?

    | HimalayanInstitute
    0

  • migration transition planning rebrand

    Hello - my company is planning to transition to a new website domain sometime this year, probably about six months from now. Our current website does not currently get much organic traffic from unbranded search terms. I would really like to fix that by publishing lots of new blog posts and trying to get more backlinks. But with the website transition on the horizon, I'm wondering if I should hold off on posting new pages and getting backlinks for the time being. Then once the new website is live, I can start to ramp things up. What would you do in this situation? Also, does anyone know of any thorough guides or walk-throughs that cover all of the best practices (re: SEO) when migrating to a new website domain?

    | collinburkewg
    0

  • All of my image links are hosted on secureservercdn.net. for example, if i go to a webpage, mydomain.com/blog/blog-post and right click any image with a "copy image address" the images are all linking to secureservercdn.net/blablabla rather than mydomain.com/wp-uploads/blalblabla. this cannot be good for SEO. Any ideas why this would be? My site is hosted through GoDaddy, is it on their end? Thanks, Ryan

    | RyanMeighan
    0

  • title tags

    Hi, We have noticed our home page title tag has now been replaced by our brand name (by Google I'm assuming). We have also noted that the page is dropping off SERPS for our main keywords, I suspect they are related but ofc I cant be sure. I know the recent Google update has impacted titles but I wasn't sure if it would apply here. Has anyone any advice on this and/or having the same issue? We normally rank well for grass seed (UK search) https://thegrasspeople.com/ I also noticed some strange mark up in our source code which seems to have been left behind by Sketch - we are getting this removed. <title>Combined Shape</title> <desc>Created with Sketch.</desc> Chris

    | Chris_Mc
    0

  • navigation breadcrumb trail breadcrumbs ux seo

    Hi Mozzers... I'm working on a Shopify site - it is polyhierarchical with multiple parent categories for each product. Not uncommon with Shopify because of issues with faceted nav on that platform. The problem is that defining ONE breadcrumb trail back to the homepage, it works against UX, as people will be wanting to go back to the previous search results, primarily, to revisit the parent category specific search (this is an ecommerce site with a huge number of products). So heaven knows what to do. I could do: (1) Home / Product to avoid the issue. Not very good for UX though as where is the previous category page (where more than likely a product search was carried out). (2) Home / Specific Previous Search Page - Parent Category / Product (if that is possible without upsetting SEO performance - I don't think it is - but any advice is welcome) (3) or I could define one specific path and also include: Return to Previous Page / Search as a separate clickback link outside of but adjacent to the breadcrumb trail (I think Macy's used to do that): https://baymard.com/blog/ecommerce-breadcrumbs The problem with defining a specific path is it flys in the face of UX in the context of this site! Although of course defining one path seems to be best practice for SEO. Any help would be gratefully received! Thanks a million, Luke

    | LukeRow
    0

  • Hello, I have a product page and just did a little introduction ( 5 lines of text) but I have the feeling this is not enough for google. What is the solution ? Is it to increase the amount of content even though it is not going to be user friendly ? Or will google look at the product page I link too and take into account the content on those subpages to boost my "pillar / product page". Thank you,

    | seoanalytics
    1

  • We purchased a domain from another company and migrated our site over to it very successfully. However, we have one artifact of the original domain in that there was a page that was exploited by other sites on the web. This page allowed you to pass any URL to it and redirect to that URL (e.g. http://example.com/go/to/offsite_link.asp?GoURL=http://badactor.com/explicit_content). This page does not exist on our site so the results always go to a 404 on our site. However, we find that crawlers are still attempting to access these invalid pages. We have disavowed as many of the explicit sites as we can, but still some crawlers come looking for those links. We are considering blocking the redirect page in our robots.txt but we are concerned that the links will remain indexed but uncrawlable. What's the best way to pull these pages from search engines and never have them crawled again? UPDATE: Clarifying that what we're trying to do it get search engines to just never try to get to these pages. We feel the fact they're even wasting their time on getting a 404 is what we're trying to avoid. Is there any reason we shouldn't just block these in our robots.txt?

    | russell_ms
    1
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  • One of my clients has come into the possession of a competitor's website. They sat on it for a while (other things going on) and because the company ceased trading the GMB listing seems to have been removed by Google and the leads have dropped off since this loss. The links are OK, so am considering 301 redirects, if the links still pass any value.
    Linking Domains 98
    Domain Authority 23
    Spam Score 2 % Are the links likely to still pass value? Also in terms of updating the WHOIS info what's the best approach?

    | GrouchyKids
    0

  • [Insert word "hack" if you prefer that, but it's so overused that I'm using "trick" instead] I've been doing SEO for ten years, and I'm pretty good at covering my bases. For the client I'm seeking help with, here's what we're doing: strong and regular onsite keyword optimized content (both long tail and competitive keyphrases), good local SEO, high-quality guest posting on relevant local news sites and blogs, heavy community involvement and support, scholarships and sponsorships, lots of videos, all the social media, tons of competitive research and link building, ongoing website architecture analysis and tweaking, a systematized process for getting reviews, onsite chat, Google Search Ads, etc. This client has been around for years  in a very competitive industry in a medium-sized American city. We do alright in the local pack for certain search terms, but overall his rankings are not good. For anyone who works in a super competitive industry, do you have any tricks you'd be willing to share? I don't want to steal your secrets, but I could use some advice. Thank you!

    | newwhy
    1

  • Hi everyone, I was recently hired as Content Lead for a SaaS company. We are based in Germany with plans to expand into the UK, Ireland, Spain, and the Netherlands. All of our website content is entirely in English and we don't have plans to localize content for any of the new markets. At least not yet.
    One of my responsibilities will be to expand our organic reach through, mostly through SEO content. Though I'm comfortable with the fundamentals of SEO, I'm no expert and I certainly don't have experience with international SEO. I consulted a couple of resources like this guide to international SEO from Moz and this video from Semrush. In a nutshell, this is what I gather: if you want to expand organic reach in foreign countries/markets, you need to 1) decide what kind of domain you want to use and then implement the necessary technical configurations and 2) create localized content in the target market's language. As I mentioned, we won't be localizing any content at first. My question, then, is can we go about creating content in English and hope to gain any kind of meaningful organic exposure in non-English speaking markets? If so, what's the best approach? I apologize in advance if any of this isn't clear or if the answer is super obvious. Happy to provide further details upon request. Thanks in advance for any help that can be offered!

    | localyze_mason
    0

  • Hey guys, I’m somewhat new to SEO, but I’ve caught on a lot these past few years. Recently I’ve started working with a web dev who is one of those types that ‘doesn’t believe in SEO’ whatever that means. I’m a content guy myself, but I know enough about SEO to recognize when something is fishy, especially since this particular case has to do with my job. Here’s the gist of it. The dev wants to keep the main site on a custom CMS, but run the blog on a separate WordPress platform. In other words, nodepositfan.com would be on a custom CMS, but nodepositfan.com/blog would be on a separate WordPress setup. I’ve never seen this done before. I’m wondering how this might affect technical SEO down the road. Will the site be penalized in any way because there are essentially two CMS running on the same domain? I was thinking of escalating this further up the chain, but I wanted to check with you guys first. Let me know if this dude is a complete hack or am I just not familiar enough with this subject.

    | woddyisland
    1

  • Hi, I was wondering if there is a safe way to consolidate link juice on a single version of a home page. I find incoming links to my site that link to both mysite.com/ and mysite.com/index.html. I've decided to go with mysite.com/ as my main and only URL for the site and now I'd like to transfer all link juice from mysite.com/index.html to mysite.com/
    When i tried 301 redirect from index.html to the root it created an indefinite loop, of course. I know I can use a RewriteRule.., but will it transfer the juice?? Please help!

    | romanbond
    5

  • My client is building a new shopping cart that will be mobile friendly BUT will have terrible image quality - tiny images, with text on them. How will these tiny images impact the SEO on the main site? Should they put the store on the mainsite.com or on a subdomain (store.mainsite.com)? Does google see subdomains as part of the main site? I would think that having thousands of shopping product pages could be beneficial to the main site SEO, as long as the images don't negate the content. Thoughts?

    | jerrico1
    0

  • Hi, our e-commerce website has just over 900 products. A vast majority are very unique and not similar to one another. However, early in our development, we listed similar variations separately. For example, we had a separate product listing for different color options: Black, Tan, and Green. They do not rank too great by themselves. However, the product is very popular and the search volume is near 9k a month. Our competitors have one listing with several color options, which is what we are proposing. We would enable 301 redirects from the Tan and Green options, which would redirect to the new variation listing. Is this wise? We want to capitalize on this opportunity, and apply this practice for other product listings.

    | AndrewColvin
    0

  • Hello, I have noticed that if publishe a webpage that google has never seen it ranks right away and usually in a descend position to start with (not great but descend). Usually top 30 to 50 and then over the months it slowly climbs up the rankings. However, if my page has been existing for let's say 3 years and I make changes to it, it takes much longer to climb up the rankings Has someone noticed that too ? and why is that ?

    | seoanalytics
    0

  • Screen Shot 2021-08-26 at 19.02.18.png My search visibility dropped from around 13% a few weeks ago to 8.29%. I know that Google launched a bunch of updates in this past few weeks to ignore spam links, and I'm pretty sure that was the reason for the drop - some of the links to my site date back over 10 years and those links were garbage. Confusingly, at the same time, my Domain Authority went up by 1 to 32, then back down a week later. How can I restore my previous rank in the short term? We're designing a new site at the moment with vastly improved page speed, but I'm not sure what effect that will have yet (thespacecollective.com).

    | moon-boots
    0

  • seo

    What are the factors that matter to increase domain or page authority because we know domain authority is crucial, it's the best and easy way to tell someone about your website that how worthy your site is.
    Is backlinks only the metric to increase domain authority?

    | hfameraya198
    0

  • I'm switching my hosting over from AWS to google cloud, will changing the CNAME record to point to the google cloud server effect my Domain Authority score?

    | Moeealii
    0

  • Hi all, I have got a specific SEO challenge. 6 months ago, we started to build an eCommerce site (located in the UK). In order to speed up the site launch, we copied the entire site over from an existing site based in Ireland. Now, the new UK site has been running for 5 months. Google has indexed many pages, which is good, but we can't rank high (position: between 20-30 for most pages). We thought it was because of content duplication in spite of different regions. So we tried to optimize the pages for the UK site to make them more UK-related and avoid content duplication. I've also used schema to tell google it's a UK-based site and set up Google my business and got more local citations. Besides, If you could give me any suggestions, it'd be perfect.
    Thank you so much for your time and advice.

    | Insightful_Media
    1

  • I need to restructure a section of my website, changing some page titles and moving some pages to other sections. This will then change the URLs but the CMS I use will automatically create 301 redirects so the old URLs still work. The question is, will this have any negative impacts on page authority/page rank? From what I've read, it seems having 301's used to have a negative impact but doesn't anymore?

    | ciehmoz
    0

  • Hi Moz Community, We're looking to replace some URLs on our Wordpress site and I want to make sure we won't hurt our SEO with the changes. The site is lushpalm.com When we originally launched our site we created pages (which are linked to in our main menu) to essentially display our categories. We did this as a workaround because we didn’t like the URL to have the word “category” in it. Now we would like to make some changes and we want to make sure we’re not going to hurt our SEO in any way by accidentally duplicating content or otherwise. We want to fix our structure and now link to our category pages from our main menu, BUT we want to change the URL of the category page so that it doesn’t have “category” in it, essentially renaming it the name of the page currently linked to in our main menu. So basically, the category lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips, would be renamed with the URL lushpalm.com/surf-trips and the current page that is at lushpalm.com/surf-trips would be therefore replaced. My questions are: If we did this, would that mean that the previous “lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips” would cease to exist? Or is there some imprint of that out on the web? And if it is then would it re-direct to the new page? Would replacing the current page URL with a category hurt our current SEO in any way? Would this change cause any duplicate pages somehow? Thanks so much for your help!

    | TaraLP
    1

  • We have a very large store with 278,146 individual product pages. Since these are all various sizes and packaging quantities of less than 200 product categories my feeling is that Google would be better off making sure our category pages are indexed. I would like to block all product pages via robots.txt until we are sure all category pages are indexed, then unblock them. Our product pages rarely change, no ratings or product reviews so there is little reason for a search engine to revisit a product page. The sales team is afraid blocking a previously indexed product page will result in in it being removed from the Google index and would prefer to submit the categories by hand, 10 per day via requested crawling. Which is the better practice?

    | AspenFasteners
    1

  • I was brought on to a project where the network admin has set up a load balancer to distribute traffic but somehow has incorrectly deployed the strategy. Now the site is listed 4 times as links to the primary domain in search console. How can I remove these from the index? I have already requested he no-index them, but they still remain in search console. What else can I do to ensure Google only sees this as a single site?

    | DonFerrari2169
    0

  • 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

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