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

Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Change Google's version of Canonical link
Hi My website has millions of URLs and some of the URLs have duplicate versions. We did not set canonical all these years. Now we wanted to implement it and fix all the technical SEO issues. I wanted to consolidate and redirect all the variations of a URL to the highest pageview version and use that as the canonical because all of these variations have the same content. While doing this, I found in Google search console that Google has already selected another variation of URL as canonical and not the highest pageview version. My questions: I have millions of URLs for which I have to do 301 and set canonical. How can I find all the canonical URLs that Google has autoselected? Search Console has a daily quota of 100 or something. Is it possible to override Google's version of Canonical? Meaning, if I set a variation as Canonical and it is different than what Google has already selected, will it change overtime in Search Console? Should I just do a 301 to highest pageview variation of the URL and not set canonicals at all? This way the canonical that Google auto selected might get redirected to the highest pageview variation of the URL. Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SDCMarketing0 -
Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?
Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this?
Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend.
Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
Chris Gorski0 -
How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?
Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bankable1 -
One of my Friend's website Domain Authority is Reducing? What could be the reason?
Hello Guys, One of my friend's website domain authority is decreasing since they have moved their domain from HTTP to https.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Max_
There is another problem that his blog is on subfolder with HTTP.
So, can you guys please tell me how to fix this issue and also it's losing some of the rankings like 2-5 positions down. Here is website URL: myfitfuel.in/
here is the blog URL: myfitfuel.in/mffblog/0 -
Ranking 1st for a keyword - but when 's' is added to the end we are ranking on the second page
Hi everyone - hope you are well. I can't get my head around why we are ranking 1st for a specific keyword, but then when 's' is added to the end of the keyword - we are ranking on the second page. What could be the cause of this? I thought that Google would class both of the keywords the same, in this case, let's say the keyword was 'button'. We would be ranking 1st for 'button', but 'buttons' we are ranking on the second page. Any ideas? - I appreciate every comment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Is Chamber of Commerce membership a "paid" link, breaking Google's rules?
Hi guys, This drives me nuts. I hear all the time that any time value is exchanged for a link that it technically violates Google's guidelines. What about real organizations, chambers of commerce, trade groups, etc. that you are a part of that have online directories with DO-follow links. On one hand people will say these are great links with real value outside of search and great for local SEO..and on the other hand some hardliners are saying that these technically should be no-follow. Thoughts???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Magento: Should we disable old URL's or delete the page altogether
Our developer tells us that we have a lot of 404 pages that are being included in our sitemap and the reason for this is because we have put 301 redirects on the old pages to new pages. We're using Magento and our current process is to simply disable, which then makes it a a 404. We then redirect this page using a 301 redirect to a new relevant page. The reason for redirecting these pages is because the old pages are still being indexed in Google. I understand 404 pages will eventually drop out of Google's index, but was wondering if we were somehow preventing them dropping out of the index by redirecting the URL's, causing the 404 pages to be added to the sitemap. My questions are: 1. Could we simply delete the entire unwanted page, so that it returns a 404 and drops out of Google's index altogether? 2. Because the 404 pages are in the sitemap, does this mean they will continue to be indexed by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Include Cross Domain Canonical URL's in Sitemap - Yes or No?
I have several sites that have cross domain canonical tags setup on similar pages. I am unsure if these pages that are canonicalized to a different domain should be included in the sitemap. My first thought is no, because I should only include pages in the sitemap that I want indexed. On the other hand, if I include ALL pages on my site in the sitemap, once Google gets to a page that has a cross domain canonical tag, I'm assuming it will just note that and determine if the canonicalized page is the better version. I have yet to see any errors in GWT about this. I have seen errors where I included a 301 redirect in my sitemap file. I suspect its ok, but to me, it seems that Google would rather not find these URL's in a sitemap, have to crawl them time and time again to determine if they are the best page, even though I'm indicating that this page has a similar page that I'd rather have indexed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WEB-IRS0