Moz Q&A is closed.
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.
What's your best hidden SEO secret?
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Work hard play hard and stay away from grey or black areas

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Hah hah. I agree with Richard. The mo community. And I'm also sympatico with Gianluca. Llong walks outside in the fresh air does wonders for my creativity. Ideas come easier.
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To make rest a project after a while. That pause will benefit your creativity, because your brain will work on it in the background without stress. When you return to the project, it will seems new somehow and those ideas your mind was breeding will come out with force.
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I have not been here long enough to have any 'hidden' secrets except SEOmoz

However, I do find that backlinks with great anchors really, really works well.
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That blackhat is a really poor long term strategy

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That one single hour in each day when I get in the "zone" and do week's worth of work in a single shot. Still figuring out how to extend that for the full 8 hours

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May know what's the meaning of these parameters in .htaccess?
Begin HackRepair.com Blacklist RewriteEngine on Abuse Agent Blocking RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^BlackWidow [NC,OR]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esiow2013
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RewriteRule ^. - [F,L] Abuse bot blocking rule end End HackRepair.com Blacklist1 -
What's the best way to redirect categories & paginated pages on a blog?
I'm currently re-doing my blog and have a few categories that I'm getting rid of for housecleaning purposes and crawl efficiency. Each of these categories has many pages (some have hundreds). The new blog will also not have new relevant categories to redirect them to (1 or 2 may work). So what is the best place to properly redirect these pages to? And how do I handle the paginated URLs? The only logical place I can think of would be to redirect them to the homepage of the blog, but since there are so many pages, I don't know if that's the best idea. Does anybody have any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kking41200