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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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


  • I need some advice please. My website got the unnatural links detected message and was hit by penguin.. hard. Can I move the content from the current domain to a new domain and start again or does the content need to be redone also. I will obviously turn of the old domain once its moved. The other option is to try and identify the bad links and change my anchor profile which is a hit and miss task in my opinion. Would it not be easier just to identify the good links pointing to the old domain and get those changed to point to the new domain with better anchors. thanks Warren

    | warren007
    1

  • My keywords are very competitive. My on page optimization report gives A grade for all the keywords I want to target to my Root domain. But my root domain does not show up on search engines for those same keywords. So thanks to SEOmoz i have managed to understand  the place I lack is good link building. My competitors have done lot of link building through spamming, commenting on blogs, directories etc. Now according to good seo, this is not right. What do i do? I get digging more in it, i realized that i am getting traffic mostly for less globally searched keywords. But my competitors get high traffic from well searched keywords. How do i cope with such competition? Thanks

    | MiddleEastSeo
    0

  • After increasing suffering down time from my current website provider, I am seriously considering finding a new one. My only concern is the effect on SERP. Does anyone have any experience with this and what to do and avoid?

    | casper434
    0

  • Hi, I am new to the forum and struggling hard to work on xml sitemap for an ecommerce site. Site is dynamic and more that 50,000 pages (including product pages). Challenges I am facing should I opt for category wise xml sitemap? how to include new product pages (dynamically) I was wondering if there is any tool that can generate xml site map online (I mean as soon as a new page is added to the site it will pick up automatically). thanks

    | posy
    0

  • Hey all, I wish to increase my sites rankings on a variety of keywords within sub categories but I'm unsure where to be spending the time in SEO. Here's an example of the website page structure: General Home Page > Sub Category 1 Home Page
            > Searching / Results pages
                - Sub Category 1
                - Sub Category 2
                - Sub Category 3
                - Sub Category 4 > Sub Category 2 Home Page
            > Searching / Results pages
                - Sub Category 1
                - Sub Category 2
                - Sub Category 3
                - Sub Category 4 We've newly introduced the Sub Category Home Pages and I was wondering if SEO is best performed on these pages or should landing pages be built, one for each of the 4 sub categories in each section. Those landing pages would have links to the "Searching / Results pages" for that sub category. Thanks!

    | DPSSeomonkey
    0

  • GWT is telling me 3 of my include files (Contact Form - Header - Footer) are missing a Title Tag. This has never happened to me before and don't know how to tackle it. On the other hand the warning refers to a subdirectory of my site to these respective include files… The main directory, with literally the same html structure and no Title, returns no errors. Any ideas as to why this error now? or how to fix it? Thanks,

    | dhidalgo1
    0

  • Two days  ago I went from ranking outside the top 50 to ranking  #1 and #4 for two great terms on Yahoo.  Now two days later I don't rank in the top 50 again.  I sure wish I knew what that blip on the radar was all about.  It would be great to get ranked again.  Seems like a mystery.  I have not heard of this happening on Yahoo before.  Maybe it was a problem with the open link explorer?  Anyone see this happen before? Thank you, Boodreaux

    | Boodreaux
    0

  • How to target same site with same content for different countries? Any Useful tips and techniques for both on page and off page

    | cygnismedia
    0

  • I've been banging my head trying to solve a mystery for a few months, with little luck. Maybe one of you has an answer. My home page organic SERP rankings have dropped from #1 or #2 late last year, to between #8 and #25 a few months ago for a couple of important keywords. I did not make any on-page changes during this period. Meanwhile, many inner pages continue to rank well (top 5) for long-tail keywords. All of my SEO is white hat, no unusual on-page tactics, no purchased or otherwise fishy backlinks. In fact, looking closely at the on-page and backlink tactics of some of the websites that have leapfrogged ahead of me, I'd say some of them have (and continue to) engaged in shady practices. No errors reported by SEOmoz. I've been judiciously applying canonical tags and other techniques to ensure minimal duplicate content. I've not received a letter from Google warning me of any unnatural backlink profiles. The biggest part of the mystery is that it seems like my home page was the only page really affected. As mentioned above, the inner pages continue to rank well for their respective keywords. Thus, I don't think I've been hit by any kind of site-wide penalty. Also, I continue to rank well on Bing/Yahoo. Does anybody have an insight into what could have happened? Has anybody else experienced anything similar (home page dropping rank while other pages stay put)?

    | ahirai
    0

  • Does anyone see this getting any better. It is getting absolutely ridiculous and almost to the point where it looks like soon analytics will be pointless! Can Rand pull some connects and tell Google - Hey Camon! This is ridiculous, we need to see at least a little bit more of these! notprovided.jpg

    | imageworks-261290
    0

  • Hi All, In my e-commerce site in each product page I have the breadcrumbs on top which show the root categories  that lead to this product. However, I saw once that Google even if you use several anchors from page A to page B Google treats only/mainly the first anchor. This means that inserting contextual links on the product text, the product description, that leads to the category page (which is an important landing page) is irrelevant/ambiguous since the link is already in the breadcrumb on top. What do you think? Should I insert contextual links on the item description or is it worthless? Thanks

    | BeytzNet
    0

  • I'm an author, and after doing a search for one of my books I realized that no matter what was searched, the user was getting lead to the homepage. please see the attached picture. How do I fix this and is this hurting my SEO? Capture.JPG Capture1.JPG

    | StreetwiseReports
    0

  • hi, I do have an ecommerce website (www.soundcreation.ro) which in the last 3 months had a drop in the SERP. Started to look around in GWT what is happening. Google is reporting a lot of duplicate meta-tags (and meta-titles problem). But 99% of them had already canonical links setted. I tried to optimize my product listings with the new "prev", "next" tags and introduced also the "view-all" canonical link to help Google identify the appropiate product listing pages. SeoMoz is not reporting thos duplicate meta issues. Here is an example of the same page with different links, but with the same common canonical and reported by GWT "duplicate title tag": http://www.soundcreation.ro/chitare-chitari-electroacustice-cid10-pageall/http://www.soundcreation.ro/chitare-chitari-electroacustice-cid10/http://www.soundcreation.ro/chitare-chitari-electroacustice-cid10_999/http://www.soundcreation.ro/chitare-electro-acustice-cid10_1510/What could be the issue?- only that gwt is not refreshing as should be, keeping old errors?- if so, then there is an other serious issue because of why our PR is dropping on several pages?- do we have other problem with the site, which ends up with google penalizing us? Thank you for your ideas!

    | bjutas
    0

  • Hey SEOMOZ community, I've always been curious about whether or not hosting multiple websites through an 'add-on' domain has positive/negative effects on SEO for websites. Currently, I'm hosting 5 sites through an add-on domain at Hostgator.com. Is this a poor way to set-up my sites or is this OK?

    | NiallSmith
    0

  • Hello, Does anyone have a list or a few good guest blogging sites like Myblogguest.com and guestblogit.com (is this a good on?) where you get a link back in return for a quality post? Thanks!

    | BobGW
    0

  • Hi, I've got a bunch of notices saying almost 1200 pages are no-followed and blocked by robots. They appear to be comments and other random pages.  Not the actual domain and static content pages. Still seems a little odd.  The site is www.jobshadow.com.  Any idea why I'd have all these notices? Thanks!

    | astahl11
    0

  • I have the opportunity to sponsor a variety of sections in a variety of .edu sites. Really appealing since they will both provide high quality traffic as well as to help our rankings... (maybe 🙂 )... Anyway this opportunity involves a monetary exchange, no different than advertising in Adwords and/or buying a display ad with the NYT. The links will be both text and banner... With follow links. My questions to you guys are: Is this practice penalize? And will display ads pass link juice also? Thanks for the help...

    | dhidalgo1
    0

  • What will happen with the value of links when a website subject is changing? Will all value be lost or will it keep certain value? There will be a new subject, new pages, new structure...

    | xicero
    0

  • I was wondering if it is still worth it to use exact match domains to rank for a desired keyword after the last penguin slap and if so, what would be the best strategy. Thanks!

    | comancsm
    1

  • Hi, Our site is very good for Javascript-On users, however many pages are loaded via AJAX and are inaccessible with JS-off. I'm looking to make this content available with JS-off so Search Engines can access them, however we don't have the Dev time to make them 'pretty' for JS-off users. The idea is to make them accessible with JS-off, but when requested by a user with JS-on the user is forwarded to the 'pretty' AJAX version. The content (text, images, links, videos etc) is exactly the same but it's an enormous amount of effort to make the JS-off version 'pretty' and I can't justify the development time to do this. The problem is that Googlebot will index this page and show a preview of the ugly JS-off page in the preview on their results  - which isn't good for the brand. Is there a way or meta code that can be used to stop the preview but still have it cached? My current options are to use the meta noarchive or "Cache-Control" content="no-cache" to ask Google to stop caching the page completely, but wanted to know if there was a better way of doing this? Any ideas guys and girls? Thanks FashionLux

    | FashionLux
    0

  • Just this weekend a page that had been ranking well for a competitive term fell completely out of the rankings. There are two possible causes and I'm trying to figure out which it is, so I can take action. I found out that I had accidentally put a canonical on another page that was for the same page as the one that dropped out of the rankings.  If there are two pages with the same canonical tag with different content, will google drop both of them from the index? The other possibility is that this is a result of the recent Penguin update.  The page that dropped has a high amount of exact anchor text.  As far as I can tell, there were no other pages with any penalties from the Penguin update. One last question:  The page completely dropped from the search index.  If this were a Penguin issue, would it have dropped out completely,or just been penalized with a drop in position? If this is a result of the conflicting canonical tags, should I just wait for it to reindex, or should I request a reconsideration of the page?

    | gametv
    0

  • This is more of a problem for people optimizing for keywords in spanish, french, german and such. It is well known that SERPs for keywords with and without accents are different. However, I haven't been able to discover how do I make the incorrectly misspelled keywords rank without messing up the site's content. Another fact to take into account is that more than half the searches made in these languages are done without accents because, let's face it, it's just too much work. An example of my specific problem: The misspelled keyword "cursos de ingles" is currently ranking higher than the correctly spelled keyword "cursos de inglés". However, the misspelled keyword "clases de ingles" is not ranking at all and the correctly spelled keyword "clases de inglés" is on the first page. How is this possible? Now, how can I optimize the misspelled keywords to rank higher without misspelling the content on my site? Thank you! Capture.PNG

    | 7decode
    0

  • How much do good quality infographics cost? And where can I get them made?

    | harrygardiner
    0

  • Hi there, I have recently removed quite a lot of site-wide links leaving the only link on homepage's of some websites, since doing this I have seen a dramatic drop on my keywords, going from position 2-3 to nowhere. Has anyone else experienced anything like this, should I expect to see a return on these keywords? Thanks

    | Paul78
    0

  • Hi all, and first of all, thanks in avant, my question is.... Does a High percentage of nofollow inconming links, harm my campaign?  and when i mean a high percentage, i mean a 67% of all my incomings links, that are nofollow. Thanks! w7HDh.png

    | ofuente
    0

  • What is it that makes people share and spread infographics? How can I make my infographics interesting and encourage people to re-post it?

    | harrygardiner
    0

  • I own a website in a pretty semi-competitive market (220 000 searches a month for my main keyword). I've been doing some intensive linkbuilding with some good results. I got around 10 links from organisations, schools and websites of city halls, all of them, the pages being at least pagerank 3 or 4. I let some time pass inbetween, to let Google craw the pages I got the links from and most of them also start to appear in my GWT. The thing is, my rankings havn't improved anything, they are doing quite some Google dancing, staying around position 50. I got the links about 2 months ago (April). When checking other websites in my market, they all have fewer links and mostly low quality. My website itself is also pretty good, all unique content, updated pretty often, around 100 pages of content. All on-site SEO is done as it should be. Am I just being impatient? Or should i start digging deeper?
    What, on average, is the 'impact time' of decent links on your rankings in a semi-competitive market?? Thanks!

    | internetrepublic
    0

  • I have seen a sudden and aggressive drop in rankings for my site. The site was ranking #4 for rental insurance and now sits at #9. It was ranking #16 for renters insurance and now dropped to #171. We vary anchor text in our link building campaign and focus on getting links from PR3+ sites as well as produce content for quality sites in exchange for being a featured author + link. The site has not been over optimized (i.e. keyword stuffing, etc.). I would appreciate any insight into what could be causing this significant drop in rankings and what my course of action is to reinstate my rankings - Penguin?

    | mj775
    0

  • Hello, What's the best free tool or method to making our local SEO citations consistent? We have more than one name and phone number out there and there are a lot of citations already.

    | BobGW
    0

  • I have two local google places listinggs unlaimed. Both listings were ranking in the blended search in 7 pack. Once I claimed the local listings for the business both listings rankings have dropped. And one has totally vanished from the search rankings. Is this normal as it appears local places that are not claimed are ranking higher than local places claimed?

    | VivaArturo
    0

  • I have a new site that ranks very well and is rich with content. I know that it would rank better but since it's new I'm assuming that it is being held back. My question is how long does it take for a site to mature?

    | bronxpad
    0

  • I am looking to rank a clients site for certain keywords which have a huge exact local search volume in the 200,000 region. Many of these keywords are celebrity names like Victoria Beckham, Pippa Middleton. etc. 9 times out of 10 these people are in the news and the first page is taken up by new article/news results. My client is a large media publishing company so their site is very relevant. Does anyone know how to optimise for getting on the first page with these types of queries? Thanks Barry

    | HaymarketMediaGroupLtd
    0

  • I keep getting in my analytics www.domain.com/ and www.domain.com/index.php how do i make it consistently redirect to one version and not to both. I know about htaccess redirect and am already using this so am puzzle to which is the best one to use. below is the example .htaccess file im using. Options +FollowSymlinks
    RewriteEngine on
    rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.co.uk [nc]
    rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.co.uk/index.php$1 [r=301,nc] which is better for SEO should i forward to www.domain.com/ or www.domain.com/index.php

    | mattmillen
    0

  • We have recently updated a key page on our website.  It is a template page that is used many times to display search results.   The words "price", "revenue", and "cash flow", "not disclosed"  are used for each listing on the page -- to minimize their impact on keyword density on the page we used images for these words.   Here you can see some examples: http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Florida-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx http://www.businessbroker.net/City/Los Angeles-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx http://www.businessbroker.net/Industry/Auto_Car_Wash-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx You will note these words on this page are images and not regular text. We are certainly not doing this to "dupe" the visitors or Google -- we just want to ensure that each page has keywords pertinent to what the page is about. Bottom line question -- is this an OK practice?  Are we running any risk with Google by doing this?   I'm particularly nervous these days with all of the Google changes. Your thoughts and guidance on this issue would be much appreciated. Thanks. MWM

    | MWM3772
    0

  • I developed a site for another company late last year and after a few months of seo done by them they were getting good rankings for hundreds of keywords. When penguin hit they seemed to benefit and had many top 3 rankings. Then their rankings dropped one day early May. Site is still indexed and they still rank for their domain. After some digging they found the development server had a copy of the site (not 100% duplicate).  We neglected to hide the site from the crawlers, although there were no links built and we hadn't done any optimization like meta descriptions etc. The company was justifiably upset. We contacted Google and let them know the site should not have been indexed, and asked they reconsider any penalties that may have been placed on the original site. We have not heard back from them as yet. I am wondering if this really was the cause of the penalty though. Here are a few more facts: Rankings built during late March / April on an aged domain with a site that went live in December. Between April 14-16 they lost about 250 links, mostly from one domain. They acquired those links about a month before. They went from 0 to 1130 links between Dec and April, then back to around 870 currently According to ahrefs.com they went from 5 ranked keywords in March to 200 in April to 800 in May, now down to 500 and dropping (I believe their data lags by at least a couple of weeks). So the bottom line is this site appeared to have suddenly ranked well for about a month then got hit with a penalty and are not in top 10 pages for most keywords anymore. I would love to hear any opinions on whether a duplicate site that had no links could be the cause of this penalty? I have read there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty per se. I am of the (amateur) opinion that it may have had more to do with the quick sudden rise in the rankings triggering something. Thanks in advance.

    | rmsmall
    0

  • I recently acquired a domain and the previous owners practiced some very shady link practices. The current backlink profile is flooded with link spam with foreign anchor text, amongst links from spam directories. What are some good practices to help clean up the backlink profile of this domain so it will not hurt me in the long run?

    | smilingbunny
    0

  • I get the recent change where adding a nofollow to one link wont increase the juice passed to other links. I'm wondering if nofollow still passes link-juice into the void. i.e. if a page has $10 of link-juice and has one link then regardless of whether this link is follow or nofollow will the page will leak the same juice? Specifically, Is this site benefitting from having a nofollow on the links in it's car buyer's checklist: http://www.trademe.co.nz/motors/used-cars/mitsubishi/diamante/auction-480341592.htm

    | seomoz8steer
    0

  • Hi The Googlebot seems to come around healthily, every day we see new pages that we've written the week before get ranked, however, if we are adding 12-15 new products/blog entries/content bits each day, only about 2-3 ever get indexed per day and so, after a few weeks, this builds up to quite a time lag. Is there any way to help step up the amount of new pages that get indexed every day? It really will take 2 or 3 each day, but no more than that, it seems strange. We're fairly new, around 6 months creating content but domain name 18 months old. Will this simply improve over time, or can something be done to help google index those pages? We dont mind if the 15 we do on Monday all get indexed the following Monday for example?

    | xoffie
    0

  • I own a website, and recently had a HUGE spike in organic search traffic from Google over the weekend. It seems to be going back down. Anyone have any idea why? Anyone have any similar experiences? odd-traffic.png

    | alhallinan
    1

  • The SEO agency I am working for are currently trying out a unique link building tactic that i was hoping for some feedback about. Basically, we have launched a Free SEO package, and have posted it across various established social media profiles. So far we have had about 20 sign up. We gain access to their site and provide them with 4 keywords that we will be working on, we do the necessary on page optimization to get them ranking. We will then perform some very basic link building tactics on their site. In exchange for our services, we will get the following: Firstly, we will place a link on their home page linking to our own site. Secondly, we will personally write content related to their site, create a new page within their site that will contain this article. We will then have a link from this article leading to one of our own client's sites. (paying customers) What do you guys think? The Free SEO client sites have minimum PR's of 2, and we are hoping to build a database of these free clients that will be responsible for boosting the ranking of our paying customers. Is there anything that could be improved with this technique?

    | danielblinman
    0

  • I had two pages on my site with identical content. What I did was 301 redirect one page to the other. I also added canonical redirect code to the page that held the 301 code.  Here is what I have: www.careersinmusic.com/music-colleges.aspx - this page was a duplicate and I needed it to resolve to:
    www.careersinmusic.com/music-schools.aspx Here is the code I used: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX music-colleges.aspx
    <%@ Page Language="VB" AutoEventWireup="false" CodeFile="music-colleges.aspx.vb" Inherits="music_colleges" %>
    http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
    http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> http://www.careersinmusic.com/music-schools.aspx"/> XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
    music-colleges.aspx.vb
    Partial Class music_colleges
    Inherits System.Web.UI.Page
    Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
    Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
    Response.AddHeader("Location", "http://www.careersinmusic.com/music-schools.aspx")
    End Sub
    End Class XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX The problem:
    For some reason, when the search “music colleges” is done in Google, I am #7. When the term “music schools” is done, I am around 119. I MUST be getting a penalty for some reason, I just cannot figure the reason. When perform well for one term and terrible for the next? All I can come up with is a duplicate content penalty or something along those lines. Also, music-colleges.aspx seems to still be in Googles index, even though the above 301 happened months ago. Thoughts? site:www.careersinmusic.com/music-colleges.aspx Any insight into this would be GREATLY appreciated. Many Thanks!

    | 4Buck
    0

  • Hi,
       After about a month of Penguin and 1 update, I am starting to notice an annoying pattern as to who is beating me in the rankings on google.  I was wondering if anybody else has noticed this. 
       The sites who are beating me - almost without exception - fall into these 2 categories. 1) Super sites that have little or nothing to do with the service I am offering.  Now it is not the homepages that are beating me.  In almost all cases they are simply pages hidden in their forums where somebody in passing mentioned something relating to what I do. 2) Nobodies.  Sites that have absolutely no links back to them, and look like they were made by a 5 year old. Has anybody else noticed this?  I am just wondering if what I see only apply to my sites or if this is a pattern across the web.  Does this mean that for small sites to rank, it is now all about on-page SEO? If it all about on-page, well that is great... much easier than link building.  But I want to make sure others see the same thing before dedicating a lot of time to overhaul my sites and create new content.| Thanks!

    | rayvensoft
    0

  • Hey all, I've noticed that, in most cases, when we have an article that gets the top spot in Google News results for a given keyword, the search result for that same article will appear in position #11 (the first result on the second page for standard SERP viewing). This is nearly always the case, which suggests its built into Google's algorithm to prevent overlap. Has anyone else experienced this? I haven't seen it discussed previously on Moz or other SEO forums, but it makes sense. Or if you haven't experienced this, I'd love to hear about what you're seeing.

    | dangaul
    0

  • Hello, I'm considering strategic change in my site's formation.
    301 redirecting some of the pages is not a problem but the question remains - what will happen with all of my social signals? These pages have Likes, plus ones, and tweets. Thanks

    | BeytzNet
    0

  • Hi We have a set of reviewed products (in this case restaurants) that total an average rating of 4.0/5.0 from 800 odd  reviews. We know to use schema/restaurant for individual restaurants we promote but what about for a list of cities, say restaurants in boston for example. For the product page containing all of Boston restaurants - should we use schema.org/restaurant (but its not 1 physical restaurant) or schema.org - product + agg review score? What do you do for your product listing pages? If we get it wrong, is there a penalty? Or this just simply up to us?

    | xoffie
    1

  • I just came up with my new blog, its not live yet but the 1<sup>st</sup> landing page is ready, up and running… all is fine but here is the only problem is its not getting indexed in Google and I am not really sure why? .xml sitemap is there Google webmaster and analytics are there Website contain at least that much real social shares that it should get indexed in Google Few Links may be coming from Famous Bloggers and SEOmoz (both sites are very authentic in their respective domains) It’s the 4 day the website is up I don’t think website is not getting indexed in Google just because it contains 1 landing page and a thank you page! Any clue or help will be appreciated. www.setalks.com is the domain

    | MoosaHemani
    0

  • site in question: http://bit.ly/Lcspfp Some people have recently suggested my homepage is giving out to much PR. Do I need to no-follow the "about us", "Customer Service" and "contact us" pages?

    | RichardTaylor
    0

  • Can anybody give me an example of 2-4 sites that have lower PR on the homepage and a higher PR on secondary pages (about us, etc)? And is there a way to search for such sites in Google? Thanks

    | VinceWicks
    0

  • Site in question: http://bit.ly/Lcspfp Does anyone have any suggestions for any on-site SEO that would benefit my website? Any recommendations, big or small are appreciated.

    | RichardTaylor
    1

  • I updated meta tags on website 2/3 months ago and saw a significant improvements in rankings for keyowrds, however since then I have been dropping back down. I am wondering if this is because of low domain authoriyty. it is currentyly 20. www.babskibay.com

    | babski
    0

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