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Category: Search Behavior

Learn more about search behavior and search trends.


  • Hi, Due to a bug in my website system, all the pages were returning an 404 default page for a period of 1 hour. Can this event impact the SERPs of this site? (the site is heavily visited, more than 500k users coming from google every day, so I assume google crawls my pages every moment)

    | lucasms
    0

  • For my blog, should I block category, "read more" and author links from being crawled by search engine robots?  Is it good for SEO? Thanks

    | uesat
    0

  • I have two campaigns one named BL and another named EBL. The one named EBL is working perfectly, and the way it should, I assume. However, BL is acting very strange, it shows 16,219 pages crawled which BL website has only 1,700 products so it's not possible for the campaign to have 16,219 pages seen by the robot. Here is what happened. We have had several issues with our server. First we received a report of the server that more than 3,000 503 errors have been noticed by Google. So we moved the website to another server, after a while for some reason our website had duplicate products. So instead of the link being /Mens-leather-vest it was /Mens-leather-vest-1020 which is a redirect of the original product. So we removed all products and redid all title tags, meta etc. However, now that when Moz crawls the website it still sees those errors, and duplicates that don't exist anymore. We finished fixing everything last week, and this Monday was a new crawl cycle for moz, and I thought that it will not show the old errors but it is still showing those old errors. Any idea what might be causing it or how I can fix this? Website - www.bikerleather.com Magento 1.7

    | Biker
    0

  • Buongiorno from 19 Degrees C partially cloudy Wetherby UK 🙂 In the SEO game I have a number of revolving door issues. The biggest of all is the C word...Content 😞 Clients reluctance to ad contnet despite the best explanation Matt Cutts could ever provide gives my my bum a migraine. After a while i start to feel like the ever frustrated primary teacher who despite his most valiant efforts just cant get the kids to do their homework. ( And no im not out sourcing content needs ) So now i have thought about a different tactic and that tactic is too demonstrate the growth or lack of content of their site over time . I do have WEB ceo which measurs pages indexed but my question is please: "How do you quantitatively measure the growth of a site in terms of page volume over time" Grazie tanto,
    David

    | Nightwing
    0

  • Cioa from 17 Degrees C cloudy Wetherby UK 🙂 In Google analytics I want to report specifically on Blackberry Mobile traffic next to hour if the day. Whilst this customised report I ripped off did the job @ http://bit.ly/hourdays I only resorted to this after battling with advanced segments thinking I could do the same thing. So my question is please how can I get this report http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/hrs-day-examplecopy_zps4f15d4a1.jpg by building it via advanced segments and not ripping off via http://bit.ly/hourdays Grazie tanto,
    David

    | Nightwing
    0

  • Hello, If no one is writing articles in your niche and articles are very scarce in the top 100 landing pages, what does that tell you about content and content marketing in your niche

    | BobGW
    0

  • Hi there, I have a Magento Enterprise store based in the UK and we have an Irish version which we created after finding an increasing amount of traffic from Ireland. One thing that I don't understand, is that if I search for one keyword on Google, the websites are displayed differently, when effectively they are identical websites. Here is how a result looks like for my UK store: http://i.imgur.com/NKSt4Qq.png And here is how a result looks like for my IE store: http://i.imgur.com/Cynv8Mz.png They both have the same Meta description, barring a few geographical words and terms. Both have on page descriptions as well as products. Yet the IE results display the description and the UK results display products and a tiny snippet of the description. Any ideas on how I can make my UK pages display like the IE one? Or, just why they are both displayed differently? Thanks

    | tomhall90
    0

  • Buongiorno from 18 Degrees sunny wetherby UK 🙂 Am i right in thinking you can track a forwarding urls via Google analytics. Put another way if a site points www.kissmymelons.co.uk to www.lickmybanana.co.uk can you measure how many referrals where generated from kissmymelons.co.uk I'm 69% sure the referral data will appear in the referral source section in Google analytics but I need to be 100% sure 😉 Grazie tanto,
    David

    | Nightwing
    0

  • Greetings Mozzers This sounds like a dumb question, but it's bothering me just the same and I would like to think what the fine community of SEO experts at MOZ thinks I have taken a look at the traffic curve for about 20 different sites in very different industries (home improvement, wedding party supplies, pet feeding systems) and it seems to me that they all show a saw tooth pattern, more or less like the one below.

    | Masoko-T
    0

  • Has anyone else noticed a huge drop in inbound links in WMT tools today?  I've seen a 50% slump overnight in 2 of my projects.  Definitely something still stirring over at the Google data centres!

    | FDFPres
    0

  • We have a product review website that has been showing a steady increase in organic traffic. However we seem to be having a disconnect between what happens when a visitor arrives. We essentially want a visitor coming to our website in search of a review, to LEAVE a review for another product they may have used... Any suggestions on ways we might encourage this? We are kind of newbies at this!

    | Sarah_Frantz
    0

  • Does anyone know how to fix this issue? Even though a site profile has had the website added to it Google continues to link the main "title tag" link to the G+ page and not the actual website domain. Thanks for any info in advance! https://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&q=dog+sitting+in+rockaway&oq=dog+sitting+in+rockaway&gs_l=hp.3..0i22i30l4.14871.16189.1.16397.8.8.0.0.0.0.296.2042.2-7.7.0...0.0...1c.1.15.psy-ab.Y1db0jo77V0&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.47244034,d.bmk&fp=722b460c2153b7be&biw=1920&bih=910

    | irvingw
    0

  • Last week we had three terms for a client dive out of the top 100, they all ranked against a particular page, the three terms where where core words for the clients website ...  strategic to his business. I assumed that it may have been due to the latest update by Google I assumed it was due to some poor inbound links to the pages (clients re sellers) and a slight abuse of anchor tags. The terms contained one keyword and two variations, a well know software brand. We ranked as high as number two, continually fighting the actual brands main website., but none the less outranking all other re-sellers. This week we are now back ranking higher for the main term (outranking the actual brands website) and the other two are back to where they ranked. Obviously I had organised to sit down with the client tomorrow to discus. Should I bury my head in the sand, rejoice at some fortune and hope the problem is not as bad as I thought, and hope the results stay static going forward ... or is this a chance to rectify those issues I saw with more clarity after the dive bomb of the three phrases last week. Has anyone else noticed anything similar ? Offer any advice ? Cheers John

    | Johnny4B
    0

  • Buongiorno from 12 degrees C wetherby UK 🙂 I'm interested in measuring content engagagement, things like what gets clicked on mouse tracking beahaviour etc. Google Analytics in page analytics does a good job but is there another product able to guage user interactive behaviour with content (Yes ive added event tracking). Thanks in advance,
    David

    | Nightwing
    1

  • I've heard there are some third-party software that provide greater depth of information than Google Analytics, such as mouse tracking, heat mapping, video snapshots ect. Can anyone recommend a good program to use? I've tried a basic web-search but there seems to be a great variety of different ones.

    | Justin_hannan27
    0

  • Hey guys, I'm doing a bit of detective work and I'm trying to understand why my client is ranking no.3 for the keyword "office desks" on google.ie. https://www.google.ie/search?q=office+desks&aq=f&oq=office+desks&aqs=chrome.0.59j60l2j62l3.10127j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 The strange thing about this is that 'office desks' is not in the 1. title tag 2. url 3. h1 tag 4. anchor text of the internal links 5. anchor text of the external links 'Office furniture' however is the optimised keyword here however this appearing no. 35 in SERPs for the same url. Any ideas what this might be? Regards Rob

    | daracreative
    0

  • Because I noticed when we totally remove Adsense ads on our site, the pages crawled per day on the google webmastertools suddenly dropped into noticable amount and we tested again to turn it on for a singe day, it jumped up again. So if Adsense affects crawling then, if we have adsense ad on all pages of the site the more chances it gets crawled by the bot? WS76R8w

    | CruiseControl
    0

  • our "rel= author " profile not show in Google result since last day . Before this our profile is showing in Google serp but suddenly author profile  not  show for a single page .Google serp  rank is ok. for that  and other page are working as usual please share  views..?

    | SameerBhatia
    0

  • Hello and thanks in advance The website has had a penalty on it for a while now, around 10 months, it was worked on by an agency who bought bad links to it but before then it was worked on by other agencies that may have done the same. I cleaned up as many bad link (according to many posts read) and filled for reconsideration and was told to get rid of a whole bunch of links which i did not know existed. Downloaded WMT links as instructed by Google admin person and contacted a heap of people which took a lot of man hours and cost us a fortune. Resubmitted and again was shown a handful of links by the Google admin person and told to contact and remove. The funny thing is that a few of them I disavowed in my list so they should not have pointed these out. I emailed back and showed that everything I could do was done and am happy to disavow any other link which they though violated their terms. This was not enough and I was told to show more efforts in removing links and then resubmit for reconsideration. I have done as much as I can on the website, I cannot see any more links which show violation, if there are some I am happy to remove but am now at a stage where i need direction from others to tackle this matter. Any advice would be helpful; I cannot start over from scratch as it's a brand and not a small website.

    | Benbug
    0

  • Given that the Panda algorithm includes engagement and user experience, when would you consider deleting a page that has poor engagement and conversion metrics? For example, consider a page that ranks well organically and receives (relatively) decent traffic from search. However, this page has poor engagement metrics compared to other pages on the site, does not convert visitors as well as other pages on the site, and doesn't have any external links. Would you consider deleting this page? Which metrics do you use when auditing a site and considering a web page from removal (bounce rate, average time on site, pages per visit, linking root domains, visits, revenue per visit, etc.)? Are some metrics weighed more than others? What kind of thresholds do you use? Finally, is there a situation when you would choose NOT to delete pages, even considering the above?

    | SAMarketing
    0

  • Hey guys, I've recently noticed that a series of EMDs have been setup to completely spam an extensive set of keywords - and it seems to be working. All of the URLs are keyword targeted with tons of keyword variations. And they're getting massive ranking preference over a number of more established websites. These are just an example of some of the domains; diykitchens1.co.uk fittedkitchens1.co.uk cheapkitchens1.co.uk kitchenunits1.co.uk And then there's loads of local targeted domains such as; kitchensglasgow1.co.uk kitchensedinburgh1.co.uk Again, all of these are getting high ranking with what seems to be duplicated websites. It's pretty bizarre. Will Google penalise these sites? Surely they will?

    | Webrevolve
    0

  • Hi everyone, I am new to SEOmoz and SEO but learning fast.  Is there a way within SEOmoz to find out how many people are searching for specific keywords?  It is a question I ask myself, "how many people are using the keywords I think I would use to find my products or services"?  I've seen other SEO professionals produce reports showing how many searches happen for certain keywords. Thanks James

    | avecsys
    0

  • Where I work we use Cogix to do in-depth surveys and I'd like to do as much indepth tracking of the survey as possible. My code experience in Analytics setting up code and tracking events is limited but my IT department could help if I knew which direction to go in. Basically what I want to do is on a survey we have like this http://surveys.apqc.org/ViewsFlash2/servlet/viewsflash?cmd=page&pollid=OSBC!HCM_Recruiting_2013 What is the best way to set up tracking so I could know where they abandon survey? Would it be event tracking or something else?

    | inhouseninja
    0

  • So, I have a project that has 10,000+ page of unique editorial content in a specific industry. They currently get about 500,000 pageviews a month and average just under 2 pages per visit. It has a 66 domain authority and has been doing "the basics" for SEO for about 7 years (headline is an H1, URL is custom while the headline is more "reader friendly", description is a snippet of the body copy a little into the first paragraph, nofollow in the comments). The crux is that it's an editorial publication so they're not targeting specific keywords, but a wide swath of keywords. Would it be best to just dive in and figure out some of the less competitive keywords for some of the articles that they could tailor some content to rank better for, then just move onto more and more? What are some ways to approach this if they just want to raise their general traffic and relevancy to the next level?

    | jpea
    0

  • Hello, We work heavily on E-commerce SEO and recently Google has started to index PDF pages (Datasheets) added to the product pages instead of the actual product pages. Has anyone else noticed this at all? Seems to have got worse over the last month or so. Thanks

    | voipme
    0

  • Hi there, I have a site www.nut-job.com and I am currently getting more traffic from the USA than uk.  Is there anyway of not getting listed in the USA and telling google that the site is a UK site?

    | nutjobshell
    0

  • Hello, Quick question. How much data should be available within Google Analytics within the Search Engine Optimisation Reports? I was always of the impression it was 6 months, however the data available as of this date only extends back to January 1st 2013. Thanks,

    | HelloAlba
    0

  • I have some keywords ranking in pages 2 and 3 in the US but for instance, in Canada, the same keywords rank somewhere between pages 15 and 25. When I check my US rankings, I use a Windows VPS located in the US. When I check my rankings in Canada, I use a computer physically located in Canada. Basically, about 80% of my rankings have gone away for countries other than the US. I have not set any geographical target for my website in GWT. How come there is such a big difference in search results across different countries?

    | sbrault74
    0

  • hi i am new here http://www.constructionhelpline.com/ last 2 year we are in no 2 in these keyword in google.co.uk cscs cscs card cscs test from last 3 - 4 months our ranking is down i don't know why this happen can anyone expert can guide us please Thanks

    | constructionhelpline
    0

  • Hi, Can some one have a look and see why out of 400+ pages we only have 11 being crawled on here?? http://www.lifetimelegal.co.uk Kind Regards Elissa

    | Chris__Chris
    0

  • I'm curious about synonymous key phrases and competitive key term analysis. I have a few methods for conducting research to find what phrases Google considers synonymous but they are very time consuming. What are some ways to figure this out? An example would be livestock and cattle. Are there any good ways to figure out user intent related key phrases? For example in our niche if someone is looking to purchase something Google often delivers pages with title tags that include the term supplies. Would it be advantageous to optimize for these types of key phrases if the competition is less or should I assume that Google groups exact match and synonym and intent match together when calculating relevancy. Eg I can choose to target livestock or cattle on page. Livestock gets a quarter the search volume cattle gets but has half the competition. Will I be competing against the cattle sites too? If so should I just bite the bullet and target cattle?

    | Punkaj
    0

  • Hi I have a client, who focus is on Commercial property leasing in Johannesburg and surrounding area's. We find that people search for "area"& "property type" The client  bought 50 exact match domains for keywords that we currently run in Google Adwords for example:We advertise on keywords: "Midrand offices to let" and bought Midrandofficestolet.com, now the group wants to make small micro sites with unique article about commercial property in that area "Midrand" with a link to the main site where the "midrand properties" are listed . The feeder or micro sites will also have contact details of main site. the domains will all be hosted on the same server, registered to the same owner est. Is this typical link farming? or should we rather build the articles on the main website and park the domains on the area categories? The clients main-set is that he will same money on adwords by owning the EMD and from that link to his main site Your guidance will be much appriciated

    | Zooka
    0

  • Last Year I re-named a catergory on my site because it had bad backlinks, the new catergory is coming up the search engines nicely, in webmaster tools it shows the old catergory as a 404, would it be wise to put a 301 re-direct on to my new catergory, if not what is the best way to deal with it?

    | Palmbourne
    0

  • Our shopping cart automatically generates the URL for each product using keywords from the product titles, because of this EVERY TIME we change titles etc. the URL changes and a 301 is automatically generated. On a site with only about 550 pages in our sitemap and for indexing we have about 550 301 redirects. Does anyone know how google handles this? This seems like a terrible ratio of 301's to indexed pages. But I don't know if Google cares about this or not.

    | absoauto
    0

  • I've spoken to 2 people in the past few weeks, who have clients who search for their keywords every day, and then click on their own links, but not others, in the belief that this is good for their website ranking. Google does track clicks with redirects, so I can understand that they would know someone searched for a term, and they clicked on a result. I could understand if it was once per month, but doing it every day? And if they keep coming back, to search for other keywords and click on those results too. Looks like they would just paint a very large target on themselves. What's your opinion?

    | loopyal
    0

  • We define SEO, as search engine optimization. Though it is more of an art. A web developer is not necessarily a SEO and vice versa. In my job as a web developer I wear many hats, and often asked what exactly SEO is. Before panda the seo industry seemed to follow "tricks" to get sites ranked. This practice lead to many seo company's thinking that spamming links, using link exchanges, link rings etc.. was actually the way to "SEO". So now it seams SEO is simply a short word as to how to get your site in top results, thusly ignoring the actual definition. As a web developer I always viewed SEO as a way to help the search engines understand what my web page is about. What do you think SEO means to you and your company?

    | donford
    0

  • my website www.funktiongolf.co.uk had been ranking well until January and i'm nearly sure its due to low quality links and poor back-link profile i.e over-optimized money keywords can someone guide me? thanks for anyone that replies. I really do appreciate the
     help.

    | funktiongolf
    0

  • I am the Webmaster of this site http://muslim-academy.com/ Do not tell me some key files blocked by robots.It happened yesterday and applied the fix. My traffic always goes down on Thursday/Friday but it starts getting better from Saturday.Is it some EMD update or what the hell is it coming back and hitting me every week on these two days. Impressions with clicks also goes down.

    | csfarnsworth
    0

  • I am seeing alot of 404 erros recently but all seem to be pages like http://www.finalduties.co.uk/2011/06/21/legal-services-board-to-investigate-will-writers/feed/ (FEED) at the end of the URL also http://www.finalduties.co.uk/2011/06/23/rules-are-complex-when-it-comes-to-dying-intestate/?wpmp_switcher=desktop ( I know this wpmp_switcher is from a mobile ready plugin we used a while back which has since been removed after duplicating many pages. also ?wpmp_switcher=desktop is in my robots txt file to help block the robots from crawling these pages and displaying 404's but its still happening, Ihave 700+ 404 errors most ending in feed /tag and ?wpmp_switcher=desktop Any Ideas I know that 404's aren't that bad but seeing so many this morning I need to figure out why these are coming up all of a sudden. We have been getting these since our site was accidently taken down a while back, trying to figure out why we have lost so many rankings. we seem to have SERPS like YOYO's from 1 day to the next one keyword goes up but 150 and then next day drops same the next day???any ideas? Seems SEO posr penguin is one big contadiction, some seo experts give you one bit of advice another gives you another very confsuing. Thanks Elissa 🙂

    | Chris__Chris
    0

  • Please forgive me if this is a silly question but I am an online retailer not an SEO man, If I was to upload a file with all the links I thought were spam links on and some weeks later I thought some of them were good links, if I uploaded another file with all of what I thought were good links removed would Google start taking these into account?

    | Palmbourne
    0

  • I have seen a few "lucky"(?) companies dominate spots 1-5 of search results. When I see that, I generally go to #6, 7, or even 10 before clicking. My gut reaction is that the company with 1-5 has manipulated content just to pull me in - much like the guys on the streets of NYC or Vegas shoving handbills at you. Is there any evidence/research/poll about the consumer/user reaction when this occurs?

    | AMSVansSEOTeam
    0

  • Hello, Is it possible to know if visitors are arriving at a web page via organic search? Background: We have a section of job description pages to explain typical tasks. These have very high bounce rate (some 100%), and I think people are confusing them with actual jobs. For example "stage designer". Many of those keyword we have very high rankings. I am thinking of having a small notice at the top of those page to say something like "if you are stage designer job, check out our job section". Thanks

    | CreativeChoices
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, Just wondering if someone could point me in the direction of some useful industry benchmarks stats. I'm currently looking at a healthy active living website but trying to find out some average benchmark stats (things like av bounce rate, av time on site, pages per visit etc) for this sector so I can compare this with the site analytics. Having had a look around I can't find a great deal out there relating to average benchmark stats for this sector. Your help greatly appreciated. Thanks Simon

    | simon_realbuzz
    0

  • Hi, I would like to hear how people work their billing for SEO work. I have previously been charging month in arrears to my clients but now have had a couple of companies run into financial difficulties and not be able to pay there bills. I would like to know how many of you choose to charge clients up front for work or send them a bill after a month etc. Thanks

    | markseouk
    0

  • I find this hard to believe but it looks to me as though Safari has jumped ahead as our top browser in the month of January. At first glance I would think it was combining mobile safari with desktop safari numbers but then on the 5th spot I see Safari(in-app) which after looking into could be multiple things from safari mobile, bookmarked pages, or Chrome for ios. Just looking for thoughts on this, are others seeing a large uptick in Safari traffic for desktops?

    | sknott
    0

  • Hi SEOmoz community I'm sure this question has been asked numerous times before. At the same time there must be plenty of people out there wondering about the same thing: Why are Google ranking changes so drastic? It's like the diva of search engines. When checking the SEOmoz ranking reports, sometimes lots of keywords improve, the next week it's vice versa. Mind though that the ranking changes are not in proportion. While improving keywords climb up by approx. 1 - 10 positions, declining keywords always get a smack with a 15 - 25 position drop, even though these very same keywords are being targeted onsite through new content. It seems to make no difference after all 😉 Is it possible, that keyword fluctuations are stronger for younger sites? The site I am talking about is about a year old. Is it possible that more competitive keywords see more drastic fluctuations? Would be interested to hear your thoughts. Thanks!!

    | Hermski
    0

  • We have been undertaking some website work recently and have identified that within our own geographical location of Hull, the www.styletech.co.uk website is first on page one. However, when moving approximately 30 miles away we are on Googles fourth page. We are in an independent network area e.g. Kingston Communications rather than BT, would this have an impact on how Google responds?

    | StyleTech
    0

  • I've run a few keyword ranking updates today and I've noticed that Bing UK and Yahoo UK results are almost exactly the same? This is unusual, the results for these two engines rarely tally with one another. Is anyone seeing the same?

    | MiroAsh
    0

  • I was just looking in my analytics and I saw something I have never seen before. Maybe its old news but its new to me. I have attached a screen shot. I have 2 keywords listed which are the same but are capitalized different scrabble dictionary Scrabble dictionary Does Google really consider these different? PlstfwR

    | cbielich
    0

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