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?
-
Work hard play hard and stay away from grey or black areas
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
That blackhat is a really poor long term strategy
-
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
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
After hack and remediation, thousands of URL's still appearing as 'Valid' in google search console. How to remedy?
I'm working on a site that was hacked in March 2019 and in the process, nearly 900,000 spam links were generated and indexed. After remediation of the hack in April 2019, the spammy URLs began dropping out of the index until last week, when Search Console showed around 8,000 as "Indexed, not submitted in sitemap" but listed as "Valid" in the coverage report and many of them are still hack-related URLs that are listed as being indexed in March 2019, despite the fact that clicking on them leads to a 404. As of this Saturday, the number jumped up to 18,000, but I have no way of finding out using the search console reports why the jump happened or what are the new URLs that were added, the only sort mechanism is last crawled and they don't show up there. How long can I expect it to take for these remaining urls to also be removed from the index? Is there any way to expedite the process? I've submitted a 'new' sitemap several times, which (so far) has not helped. Is there any way to see inside the new GSC view why/how the number of valid URLs in the indexed doubled over one weekend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rickyporco0 -
Best SEO Strategy for Badges & Awards.
Hello Moz Friends! I was wondering what the correct "SEO friendly" strategy is with badges and awards. We recently got BBB accredited and added their badge to the footer of the website. We also added a review badge from shopper approved to the footer. As I'm joining other communities, I see there's badges given to us. For example, Alignable. Great place for networking. They offer a badge that says "locals recommend us" or something. Should I embed these badges onto our website someplace? Should I create a page for just badges or place them in the footer or sidebar widgets? What the best SEO practice for this? Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE2 -
Forwarded vanity domains, suddenly resolving to 404 with appended URL's ending in random 5 characters
We have several vanity domains that forward to various pages on our primary domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SS.Digital
e.g. www.vanity.com (301)--> www.mydomain.com/sub-page (200) These forwards have been in place for months or even years and have worked fine. As of yesterday, we have seen the following problem. We have made no changes in the forwarding settings. Now, inconsistently, they sometimes resolve and sometimes they do not. When we load the vanity URL with Chrome Dev Tools (Network Pane) open, it shows the following redirect chains, where xxxxx represents a random 5 character string of lower and upper case letters. (e.g. VGuTD) EXAMPLE:
www.vanity.com (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.vanity.com/xxxxx/xxxxx (302, Found) -->
www.mydomain.com/sub-page/xxxxx (404, Not Found) This is just one example, the amount of redirects, vary wildly. Sometimes there is only 1 redirect, sometimes there are as many as 5. Sometimes the request will ultimately resolve on the correct mydomain.com/sub-page, but usually it does not (as in the example above). We have cross-checked across every browser, device, private/non-private, cookies cleared, on and off of our network etc... This leads us to believe that it is not at the device or host level. Our Registrar is Godaddy. They have not encountered this issue before, and have no idea what this 5 character string is from. I tend to believe them because per our analytics, we have determined that this problem only started yesterday. Our primary question is, has anybody else encountered this problem either in the last couple days, or at any time in the past? We have come up with a solution that works to alleviate the problem, but to implement it across hundreds of vanity domains will take us an inordinate amount of time. Really hoping to fix the cause of the problem instead of just treating the symptom.0 -
Partial Match or RegEx in Search Console's URL Parameters Tool?
So I currently have approximately 1000 of these URLs indexed, when I only want roughly 100 of them. Let's say the URL is www.example.com/page.php?par1=ABC123=&par2=DEF456=&par3=GHI789= All the indexed URLs follow that same kinda format, but I only want to index the URLs that have a par1 of ABC (but that could be ABC123 or ABC456 or whatever). Using URL Parameters tool in Search Console, I can ask Googlebot to only crawl URLs with a specific value. But is there any way to get a partial match, using regex maybe? Am I wasting my time with Search Console, and should I just disallow any page.php without par1=ABC in robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ria_0 -
What's the best possible URL structure for a local search engine?
Hi Mozzers, I'm working at AskMe.com which is a local search engine in India i.e if you're standing somewhere & looking for the pizza joints nearby, we pick your current location and share the list of pizza outlets nearby along with ratings, reviews etc. about these outlets. Right now, our URL structure looks like www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets for the city specific category pages (here, "Delhi" is the city name and "Pizza Outlets" is the category) and www.askme.com/delhi/pizza-outlets/in/saket for a category page in a particular area (here "Saket") in a city. The URL looks a little different if you're searching for something which is not a category (or not mapped to a category, in which case we 301 redirect you to the category page), it looks like www.askme.com/delhi/search/pizza-huts/in/saket if you're searching for pizza huts in Saket, Delhi as "pizza huts" is neither a category nor its mapped to any category. We're also dealing in ads & deals along with our very own e-commerce brand AskMeBazaar.com to make the better user experience and one stop shop for our customers. Now, we're working on URL restructure project and my question to you all SEO rockstars is, what can be the best possible URL structure we can have? Assume, we have kick-ass developers who can manage any given URL structure at backend.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _nitman0 -
404's - Do they impact search ranking/how do we get rid of them?
Hi, We recently ran the Moz website crawl report and saw a number of 404 pages from our site come back. These were returned as "high priority" issues to fix. My question is, how do 404's impact search ranking? From what Google support tells me, 404's are "normal" and not a big deal to fix, but if they are "high priority" shouldn't we be doing something to remove them? Also, if I do want to remove the pages, how would I go about doing so? Is it enough to go into Webmaster tools and list it as a link no to crawl anymore or do we need to do work from the website development side as well? Here are a couple of examples that came back..these are articles that were previously posted but we decided to close out: http://loyalty360.org/loyalty-management/september-2011/let-me-guessyour-loyalty-program-isnt-working http://loyalty360.org/resources/article/mark-johnson-speaks-at-motivation-show Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | carlystemmer0 -
ECommerce product listed in multiple places, best SEO practice?
We have an eCommerce site we have built for a customer and the products are allowed to appear in more than one product category within the web site. Now I know this is a bad idea from a duplicate content point of view, But we are going to allow the customer to select which out of the multiple categories the product appears in will be the default category. This will mean we will have a way of defining what the default url is for a product. So am I correct in thinking all the other urls where the product appears we should add a rel canonical to these pages pointing to the default url to stop duplicate content? Is this the best way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spiralsites0 -
Creating 100,000's of pages, good or bad idea
Hi Folks, Over the last 10 months we have focused on quality pages but have been frustrated with competition websites out ranking us because they have bigger sites. Should we focus on the long tail again? One option for us is to take every town across the UK and create pages using our activities. e.g. Stirling
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PottyScotty
Stirling paintball
Stirling Go Karting
Stirling Clay shooting We are not going to link to these pages directly from our main menus but from the site map. These pages would then show activities that were in a 50 mile radius of the towns. At the moment we have have focused our efforts on Regions, e.g. Paintball Scotland, Paintball Yorkshire focusing all the internal link juice to these regional pages, but we don't rank high for towns that the activity sites are close to. With 45,000 towns and 250 activities we could create over a million pages which seems very excessive! Would creating 500,000 of these types of pages damage our site? This is my main worry, or would it make our site rank even higher for the tougher keywords and also get lots of traffic from the long tail like we used to get. Is there a limit to how big a site should be? edit0