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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.
Job Title: Senior Search Scientist
Company: Moz
Favorite Thing about SEO
The endless Excel use-cases.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, we’re finally closing Moz Q&A. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we’re locking both new posts and new replies.
Why?
The truth is that the conversation has moved elsewhere. Sites like Twitter, Reddit, and more recently BlueSky and LinkedIn, have largely replaced specialist forums. At the same time, the challenge of moderating a platform like this has become more difficult, and of course, we’re SEOs, and the sheer quantity of new pages generated, often by malicious actors, has its challenges in terms of what it does to the profile of our site.
Forums are still an opportunity for many sites, in SEO and more broadly, but the calculus no longer works for Moz.
Where can I ask my question instead?
If you’re a customer or currently evaluating a free trial, you can reach out directly with questions about the product to our customer support team here. If you want to learn more about SEO, you can check our learning resources here, and we also offer the Moz Academy. If you just want to hang out, you can also still find us on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn.
Thank you
We’re grateful to everyone who has contributed to Moz Q&A over the years. It’s been a blast, and we hope this isn’t the last time we’ll see you here on the Moz site.
Hi
Currently AI overviews only appear for users who are logged into Google search.
Moz, like most SEO tools, parses logged-out SERPs to avoid the effect of personalisation on rankings.
This is obviously something we're continuously reviewing, but for now the answer is no.
Thanks for the context.
I think the drop in DA and the increase in internal links are both things you should be paying attention to, for different reasons - they're almost certainly unrelated.
When you say "the most recent crawl by a Googlebot" - are you talking about server log data here? Or Moz sitecrawl? I should stress Moz is not Googlebot and could never emulate Googlebot behaviour - we are crawling URLs discovered by linking on your site, so naturally won't uncover a botched migration after the fact.
As for the incrase in internal links, I notice they're also marked as nofollow in many cases. Have a look at the "all crawled pages" list, and see if you can find anything that looks like a crawl trap. It looks very likely to me that your site is generating a large quantity of garbage URLs - perhaps through pagination, facets, or something like that. Looking in your own source code for "nofollow" might help you to narrow this down, as we can see over 120k of these internal links are nofollow.
@g3mmab Can you clarify where you are seeing "external links" and "total links"?
In any case, DA is not affected by internal linking. If your DA goes down by a large amount, that usually means you have lost some notable external links, or triggered some spam factors.
As you say, some loss of old URLs on your site may well be the cause of this. The redirect warnings in Moz are designed to alert you but not to be an all-encompassing solution. You need to make sure every URL that historically had external or internal links is still redirecting properly (or better yet returning a 200 response).
Redirecting them in bulk might cause some loss of equity yes - are any of them particularly noteworthy or well linked to? Perhaps just those ones could be left up.
That said, if you have the option to leave these posts live on an archived subdirectory, why is it that you want to take them down at all? Usually the answer would be because they are duplicate or thin content, but clearly that is not the case.
This will ultimately depend on your provider, and they should have supporting documentation.
I think in most cases the redirect will be a 301, but it may not retain the path - in other words, all pages on the old site could redirect to the one new URL that you enter.
Sorry for the slow reply.
You can definitely obtain relevant traffic from sites like these, but links are likely to be nofollow.
Changing URLs in any way will hurt your rankings - the process of redirecting the old URL to the new one causes a loss of equity which then has to gradually be rebuilt.
That said, for new URLs, I would say the only relevant consideration is how the URL will appear in search results and browsers as readable, or not, to human users.
Like our competitors and like Google themselves, we crawl all pages in an ongoing process, with some being re-crawled more often than others, depending on their seeming importance etc.
The larger number of backlinks in SEMRush vs Moz in this case could simply be a fluke of which pages were higher up the queue in which tool. Or, it could be that they're counting slightly different things - dead links, links on duplicate (canonicalised) pages, etc.
There's two answers to this.
One is that whilst it's best practice for all URLs to have a canonical (even if it's self-referencing), if this resource has no duplicates, it's not mandatory.
The other is that yes, you can add a canonical tag to a web page. You'd have to do it at the HTTP header level.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, we’re finally closing Moz Q&A. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we’re locking both new posts and new replies.
Why?
The truth is that the conversation has moved elsewhere. Sites like Twitter, Reddit, and more recently BlueSky and LinkedIn, have largely replaced specialist forums. At the same time, the challenge of moderating a platform like this has become more difficult, and of course, we’re SEOs, and the sheer quantity of new pages generated, often by malicious actors, has its challenges in terms of what it does to the profile of our site.
Forums are still an opportunity for many sites, in SEO and more broadly, but the calculus no longer works for Moz.
Where can I ask my question instead?
If you’re a customer or currently evaluating a free trial, you can reach out directly with questions about the product to our customer support team here. If you want to learn more about SEO, you can check our learning resources here, and we also offer the Moz Academy. If you just want to hang out, you can also still find us on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn.
Thank you
We’re grateful to everyone who has contributed to Moz Q&A over the years. It’s been a blast, and we hope this isn’t the last time we’ll see you here on the Moz site.
"I'm not sure what my actual urls should look like and what the canonical should be set to." - Your "actual" URLs and your canonicals should both be the #! version. In your example, I'm guessing that'd be "http:app.tikimaster.com#!v=1", as opposed to "http:app.tikimaster.com?escaped_fragment=v=1". The canonicals (and other directives) need to be placed on the ?escaped_fragment= version, because that's the only version Google will crawl.
"how I should be setting up my meta information for Google so 1) pages are indexed timely 2) pages are indexed with the correct information." - You need to ensure that the ?escaped_fragment= version of the page contains the appropriate meta tags. Your sitemap and webmaster tools submissions should use the #! versions.
This is a good resource to get started: http://seogadget.com/javascript-framework-seo/
In some ways, aiming for a specific DA is probably not the right approach. DA is a useful metrc for predicting how well a site might rank against another, all things being equal, but there's a lot of nuance to what might help you succeed for a given query.
That said, for newer sites, some links are certainly helpful. There's no one way to go about it.
I'd suggest for a new blog, start by producing some resources you feel others might find useful, entertaining, or otherwise remarkable. Then, find ways to get these in front of people who might consider linking to you from their own sites - perhaps share the resources with your social media followers, email journalists from relevant publications, or engage with platforms like Reddit or forums.
It may be that one version (www or non-www) has more historical links. You say your PageRank for both is the same, but how are you checking that? Google's public PageRank has not been updated in a decade or so.
Either way, I'd generally say that if you pick one version and stick to it (redirect the other, e.g. so every non-www. URL points to its www. equivalent), you should maintain all rankings. There is a theoretical advantage to picking the version with more links, but in my experience in practice this type of migration tends to be smooth.
Hi Alex
I think there's likely two issues here - the SEO one, and the PPC/Ads one.
Hi Alex
Google Ads doesn't particularly care about duplication or indexing, so you can have variants for this purpose that are simply noindex and not linked to on your site. Of course it's also find to use pages that exist as international SEO variants, but it's not necessary to do so.
So, for the PPC issue - I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that landing page experience will affect your cost. However, it isn't related to "duplicate without user-selected canonical" - instead, it's a separate algorithm that figures out whether the ad and the page are relevant to each other. A PPC consultant would be the right person to talk to this about.
For the SEO issue - it sounds like Google maybe isn't respecting your hreflang tags, for it to be flagging them as duplicates. This could be because their content is too similar - even if it's in the same language, it should have localisations for Google to respect it as meaningfully different. Alternatively, it could be because the markup is incomplete.
If you do decide to use canonical tags, each localised page should canonical to itself, whilst keeping the existing hreflang markup pointing to translated versions. Canonical tags can be a good way of sweeping up any variants within a localisation (e.g. UTM tags).
Hope that helps!
Tom
@annegretwidmer Hi Kasey
In short, probably not.
Long titles and URLs are not ideal, but they're not the kind of really egregious error that might cause Google to see a site as toxic or very low quality overall. Missing meta descriptions are also possibly a missed opportunity, but not a serious threat.
That said, these issues might be symptomatic of a general excess of unmoderated or poorly maintained pages, which would be a more notable cause for concern.
Tom
Like our competitors and like Google themselves, we crawl all pages in an ongoing process, with some being re-crawled more often than others, depending on their seeming importance etc.
The larger number of backlinks in SEMRush vs Moz in this case could simply be a fluke of which pages were higher up the queue in which tool. Or, it could be that they're counting slightly different things - dead links, links on duplicate (canonicalised) pages, etc.
Hi
I wouldn't reccommend going through one by one.
Instead, look for patterns that you can fix at scale. For example, many of these titles contain the repetition "Quality Shoes Online | Quality Shoes Online".
See if you can find what in your CMS is adding these, and turn it off 🙂
Hi
Currently AI overviews only appear for users who are logged into Google search.
Moz, like most SEO tools, parses logged-out SERPs to avoid the effect of personalisation on rankings.
This is obviously something we're continuously reviewing, but for now the answer is no.
Sorry for the slow reply.
You can definitely obtain relevant traffic from sites like these, but links are likely to be nofollow.
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12/5/2025
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7/18/2025
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12/30/2024
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10/18/2024
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9/5/2024
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8/9/2024
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7/31/2024
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6/25/2024
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5/31/2024
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5/24/2024
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5/3/2024
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4/17/2024
In this blog post, Tom discusses the reasons why you might block AI bots. In many cases, this will come down not only to your beliefs about how this technology will evolve but also to the specifics of the business involved.
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12/19/2023
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9/22/2023
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9/1/2023
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4/21/2023
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3/29/2023
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2/1/2023
We’re back with another SEO recap with Tom Capper! As you’ve probably noticed, ChatGPT has taken the search world by storm. But does GPT-3 mean the end of SEO as we know it, or are there ways to incorporate the AI model into our daily work?
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I head up the Search Science team at Moz, working on Moz's next generation of tools, insights, and products.
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