Category: Search Behavior
Learn more about search behavior and search trends.
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How to optimize website for several US locations we service?
Hi, Our business has a few brick-and-mortar business locations, but it is servicing multiple big cities in the US, where we do not have a location, but we do business in though our independent agents (and we cannot use their locations).
| SCLTeamShip
I have inherited the website, which has duplicate content for all the locations (cities and states), and I am worried about possible penalties. Every major city and state in the US has been targeted so far, but it seems pretty spammy to me- duplicate content, pages for all major US cities, pages for all states, etc. This is a B2C services website, and we can service anyone in the US. Example of pages: domain.com/services/service-from-x-city
and domain.com/services/service-from-x-state The goal is to rank locally for all the cities we are targeting. What on-page optimization should I work on besides unique content for each one? Should I consolidate some pages, and if yes, what do you recommend?
What overall strategies should I follow so I do not lose the traffic for the targeted cities?
Off-page, I am working on building local citations for these cities. Thank you.0 -
2 websites for 2 dealer locations or one website for both locations - Thoughts?
I'm trying to decide what would be the best option for my client. They are a car dealership group who own 2 dealerships about a half hour away from each other. The dealerships have the same name but are just located in different locations. One dealership is in a small city in competition with several other dealerships within the city. "Dealership name city name" The other dealership they own (Same dealership name) is located in a small town close to an even larger city. "Same dealership name small town name" My options are: 1. Creating 1 authoritative website optimized for all 3 locations. The 2 cities both dealerships are located in as well as the large city close to the small town. This option would be less time consuming, we would only have to earn links, citations & blog for one website. However we'd still need to have citations using both dealership addresses. So that's still double the work. This site would probably be more authoritative and we could have a page promoting each dealership & have shared vehicle inventory. We'd attach 2 Google+ pages using the different addresses & have both location addresses prominently in the footer of the site. 2. Create 2 separate websites for each dealership & target the surrounding towns/cities in their respective areas (even though both dealerships are only a half hour apart). This option is more time consuming as we'd have to earn double the amount of links. Work on citation building, blog for 2 websites etc. But we wouldn't be diluting our SEO by trying to rank for all 3 locations. We'd have a better chance if we focused on each locations separately on 2 sites. BUT the 2 sites would have less authority. What is everyone's thoughts? What would you recommend to be the best option. Money isn't an issue. Thanks so much for any help.
| DCochrane0 -
Meta description of homepage, changing to latest post
Here's something strange I noticed. The meta description for Engadget when doing a Google search is their latest blog entry. However, if you land on the homepage and view source the page, the meta description is a standard one for their homepage. My first impressions : Wha? How? and Wha? Could it be because it is a "news" site, Google goes "go on, have custom meta descriptions of your latest entry.." Thoughts?
| Bio-RadAbs0 -
Visual Website Optimizer vs. Optimizely vs. Conductrics
I've always done my own A/B testing and haven't used a software package. I've heard a lot of good about Visual Website Optimizer. However, I like that Conductrics uses statistical modeling where the others don't. So what do you see as being the really big pluses? Note: I need to find a platform so that we can do testing faster and for more clients at a time... I just don't have the time to hand build and track each client's multivariation test. Thus the need for software. Therefore, ease of use, quick integration, and good analytics are important in my decision making process. Thanks in advance!
| SteveTheWoodsman2 -
Keyword order on location searches
If someone is trying to find a service in a certain area they might use Google to search for "London plumber", "Plumber London" or "Plumber in London". Is there any research to show which of these tends to be used most, or are they all roughly the same? Thanks!
| MagicianUK0 -
Theme influence in your SERP
Hello SeoMoz community. I'm a new member here and i took the 30 day trial to test out your tools and to check if i find a need to them. I've a situation that is bugging my mind for a few days and i wish i had more data to have more accurate information. I have a website that stayed on first in my SERP for a competitive term. I did it with a very few links because i focused a lot on the UX (mostly on site performance & layout) and the outcome was a good usability for my site. Since the latest panda my site dropped from first to fifth and then came the Google dance between 5th and the 15th position. Then i decided to change the theme because i saw loads of problems like the page titles, i fixed loads of 301's and 404's, gave it a more clean UX, removed some ads and fixed some of the url's making them shorter and more accrued. This stopped the Google dance completely! And now the site is on the 10th position. I'm not complaining about the positions or panda updates or whatever happened. I just would like some comments on this situation. And i would like to ask if a theme update making the site better (better is a very complicated word in the SEO world know) can give negative feedback to the search engines? Thank you.
| luisvestia0 -
Rankings like this mean what?
I have just redirected our old domain to our new domain using a sitewide 301 redirect. That was on Dec 6. Since none of the pages are showing in the serps unless you search specifically for a paragraph in quotes. But I am also very concerned because scraper sites are coming up before my site. Here are a few examples: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbo=d&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS398US398&biw=1223&bih=799&sclient=psy-ab&q="The+decision+to+choose+between+duplication+and+replication+depends+upon+the+circumstances+of+each+individual+project.+Since+the+creation+processes+for+replication+and+duplication+are+so+different%2C+the+final+products+are+also+very+different."&btnG=&pbx=1 and here is one I just took off the site and put somewhere else: https://www.google.com/search?q="Blu-Ray+players+have+really+come+in+to+their+own+in+the+past+few+years.+Blu-Ray+technology+provides+the+best+sound+and+picture+quality+of+any+media+format+on+the+market.+In+spite+of+the+great+leap+forward+that+Blu-Ray+represents,+there+are+still+a+good+number+of+people+who+haven’t+made+the+transition+from+traditional+DVD+players+to+the+Blu-Ray+format."&hl=en&tbo=d&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS398US398&ei=Gk7nUN2oMYrA8AT74IEo&start=10&sa=N&filter=0&biw=1223&bih=799 and yet another: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbo=d&rls=com.microsoft%3Aen-us%3AIE-Address&rlz=1I7GGLL_en&sclient=psy-ab&q="At+the+Windows+8+BUILD+conference+we+learned+that+Windows+8+will+allow+you+to+mount+ISO+and+VHD+files+natively.+++So+no+longer+is+there+a+need+for+a+3rd+party+ISO+file+software+such+as+Daemon+Tools+however+if+you+have+copy+protected+DVD+or+games+you+will+still"&btnG=&pbx=1 Notice the pattern, all of the results have my site (the originator of the content) at the bottom. I am very concerned with this as I'm sure this means Penalty up the ..... something. What is my best move at this point? Is there any chance of getting out of this? Just be thankful you are not in this position, it sucks. But I'm still positive I can do something with this site. Thanks Rob
| robdawg0 -
Disallow robots on a url effect?
Hello, I am using wordpress and on some of my top tag urls e.g : http://www.designzzz.com/tag/brushes/ there is an avg page rank of 4. I was reading somewhere that my huge jump in not selected count in index status in GWT is becuase of tags/categories urls. So i added disallow in my robots.txt for the url /tag What sort of effect will it have on my tag urls rankings or PR ?
| wickedsunny10 -
From #2 TO Not Found in top 100 Results, WTF?
So my website was #2 for a targeted keyword on google. (6 months ago: # 😎 (3 months ago: #6) (1 week ago: #2). As you can see, it was moving up nicely, now it's not found on the top 100 search results. Only appears #2/(B) in the local search section. Could that be the reason? Websites that appear on the local search no longer appears in the SERP?
| Droidman860 -
How do I get my report to show ranking for a location such as pittsburgh or columbus?
I am not interested in US ranking only Pittsburgh and Columbus as that's where my client's offices are located. Are there settings to help me view our rank on our areas? Thank you!!
| IEInteractiveServices0 -
Local vs Global Search Results Yield Very Different Rankings Lately
When I monitor my website's rankings, I always do it from Canada (direct connection) and from the USA (using a VPN in Arizona). I've been monitoring rankings this way for the last 3 years. Most of the time, I got similar results (-5 / +5) from both location. My website is a ".com" and targets an international audience. Lately (is it since Panda 22?), I've seen dramatic differences in rankings from both locations. Some keywords will rank in the top 10 on Google.com (from the USA) while they will appear on page 3, 4, 5 and even lower on Google.ca (from Canada). The thing is, the top 10 results on Google.ca are not even from canadian websites. Fact of the matter, there are even some results from India websites (.in) in the top 10! I understand that Google.ca will give advantage to websites from Canada (or targeting the canadian market / .ca domain name) over international / US websites but there's never been such a huge difference in rankings until lately. Has anybody else experienced this? What are your thoughts?
| sbrault740 -
Will creating sub folders for foreign versions of the website, remove rank juice from the main site?
Hi, We plan to create sub-folders for our german, spanish and italian language versions. If we do will this pass rank juice to the new sites, but at the same time badly effect our main site, regards link juice/serp? Or is this not such a huge factor in people's experience? Many thanks. James.
| Quime1 -
Why does my website not rank better for the keyword i am going for?
My website is www.canadafloraldelivery.com. I just can't seem to get my webpage ranked well for the keyword " Flowers Edmonton " . Also I can't seem to get my Google local listing on the map for many keywords. Is there something obvious that I am missing? Any help would be very appreciated.
| CKerr0 -
Would it be worthwhile to update URLs to include "for sale"
My team is new to the world of SEO. We were both in other departments when our last "expert" left and we became the entire department. Needless to say, we have many questions. I have a site for an existing customer - she wants to know if it is a good idea to change her URLs. She went to a webinar that suggested she include "for sale" in URL, since that is the site's primary purpose These are the current inventory URLs: http://www.dealerskinssite.com/used-inventory http://www.dealerskinssite.com/new-inventory The change would give something like: http://www.dealerskinssite.com/used-cars-for-sale
| DealerskinsSearch
http://www.dealerskinssite.com/new-cars-for-sale I did some searching and could not find a solid recommendation one way or another. If it is true that people typically search for "used cars for sale" rather than a "used inventory", then there might be benefit to including that as part of the URL... but that is as far as my knowledge got me. Please let me know your thoughts Steve0 -
Does Page Load Time Affect SEO Rankings?
I was curious about how much page load times affect rankings. Here's what I did: I put together a lot of interactive media on specific landing pages Time-on-Page from organic visitors went from 50 seconds to average of 34 minutes Bounce Rate decreased by 20% Page Load time increased from 1 second to 6 seconds and at peak times to 8 seconds (on 56KB test) In the meantime the page was re-indexed and re-cached My question is three-fold: Would the time on page give higher rankings for keyword Would decreased bounce rate enhance rankings? Would the page load time decrease rankings? Did anyone do a similar test? What were the results?
| HMCOE0 -
I need Help with Google!!!!
I am trying to have my picture on the first page just like SEOmoz when someone search just the name, I know have something to do with google plus, but I am so new doing that no luck or probably I am doing wrong, I have been looking in the internet but I haven't found anything. Is there anyone who can write a tutorial and post here. Maybe is already done and I don't know where. Please see the picture attached so you understand better what I want to do Again I want appear just like this but with my company http://www.sombras.co.uk/images/pic.jpg pic.jpg
| teksyte0 -
Keywords separated location names in footer
We have a US based website, most of the traffic come from search engines mainly Google. We have comma separated location names of all popular places / U.S states where our products are popular (about 80 comma separated location names on footer of the website). Means, these 80 (comma separated) keywords appear on all 900 pages of the website. Does these footer (comma separated) location names will prove to be comma separated keywords OR keywords stuffing on each page of website ? The reason we need these location names is because each product page is having traffic from keywords having location names in them. For example: "product1" in chicago "product1" new york "product2" IL "product3" california "product3" georgia and a lot more Location based keywords are bringing in about 20% of the traffic. Please suggest any good solution to this problem. Thanks !!!
| ZQBT0 -
How do i know if my links are being classed as spammy?
I have recently notice that a lot of my domains are dropping positions where they have been in a solid position for nearly a year which was good 🙂
| Dorzone
I am now wondering if google is dropping them due to spammy links but i don't have the first clue how i would find this out. Does anyone have a good way to figure this out or anything to help with this?0 -
Surge in Yahoo! organic traffic?
Recently a domain I manage shot up in rankings for many industry related keywords in Yahoo! It only lasted for two days, but durring that time we saw about 300% increase in organic traffic. Durring that time we were spending a lot of money in paid ads. Can anyone explain the sudden surge in Yahoo! organic traffic and rankings? Could there have been traffic from our paid ads that tracked to organic search? We use Google analytics and an in-house tracking system that both showed the same trends.
| SEOBodybuilder0 -
Two sites with different URLs
I help organize an ecommerce site for a company that is named after the state that the company was founded in (ex: Florida Pipes). Our programmer is thinking about creating a duplicate site that would have a name that was more location agnostic so people shopping on the site would not think that they may be ordering from far away hence incurring extra shipping charges. He said that the site would only have a different URLs, name and homepage but would link to all of the same stuff that is on the site that is up now. He said that there would be no way to tell (possibly for the layperson) that the two sites were related. Is this a good practice? Would we be penalized in search results for having two URLs linking to the same content? (We are a 30 year old company that ranks very high for our main keyword) Thank you for your input!
| Winoman0 -
Bounce Rate and Time on Site
What would be the best way to decrease bounce rate and increase time on site for a Real Estate Website?
| bronxpad0 -
Google Instant Search? REALLY?! Why is this the result???
First, this is one I thought I would never ask, but: Could this be true? I had noticed my MacBook Pro was eating some power and wanted to see if I could optimize my settings so to take advantage what battery life was available. (I swear that is the truth). So, I am at a Starbucks on someone and typed into Google search bar the following query - Best way to conserve - and, received the following instant search results before I could type - power on a macbook pro I am not putting it here as I want you to ask yourself what came up. I have attached a screenshot. My colleague arrived and without prompting she retried and got the same. So I am curious: Do you get the same result and why do you think that result is so predominant? This is funny. efuts.png
| RobertFisher2 -
Gathering Data on Link Removal and Disavow Tool
Hi, There is so much opinion out there about Link Removal and Google's Disavow Tool, but it's really hard to get hold of reliable data about what people are actually doing in this area. Through my involvement in rmoov, I've become really interested in participation and cleanup rates when it comes to Link Removal campaigns. So, I've put together a quick survey aimed at getting a real indication of what is happening out there. The survey is here The recent introduction of Google's Disavow Tool has opened up another area I'd really like to understand more, so there is a question on this included. I'd love to pull together a blog post with a decent snapshot of participation, success or failure for those trying to remove links and hope Moz Members might help out by answering this quick survey. Sha P.S. I'll update this post once results are available for those that are interested.
| ShaMenz1 -
Seller rating in Serps
Hello everyone, I saw something weird today with my own site in Google: http://www.google.nl/webhp?hl=nl&tab=ww#hl=nl&sclient=psy-ab&q=xenon+h4&fp=534989fd828f8f2e&pws=0 The site you see position one is my site (HIDxenonverlichting.nl), you see the seller rating with the stars, but also nearly 2 rules of price information: ''Prijsklasse: Normale prijs: € 79,99 Tijdelijke prijs € 74,99 Inclusief 21% BTW & Gratis verzending!' At this site i don't even have MicroData installed for the reviews or prices, and i've never seen such a long price description in Google. So i was wondering, how could this happen, because i want this much information also at other product pages of course. But then first need to know how this happened? Regards, Yannick
| iwebdevnl0 -
Mechanical turk, should I use USA workers?
I have testing out MT to try to influence Bings auto suggestions. Should I only use USA workers, or will world wide workers have the same effect?
| KristopherWho0 -
Product Descriptions for eCommerce - Paragraphs or Bullet Points (or both)?
Hey all, We've seen quite a large recent increase in traffic on our site (we sell travel experiences such as tours, tickets to theme parks etc.) but not much in the way of increased conversions as a result, so we are looking into further ways to optimise conversions. I'd like to know what thoughts people have on making product descriptions either bullet points or paragraphs, or some combination of both. We currently have paragraphs of information not just to explain the product but for on-page SEO purposes as well which seems to work well for drawing people to the site, and we have information further down the page on inclusions/exclusions etc. but it is well "below the fold". Do you think it's worth moving at least the "highlights" of the product up to the top of the page so that customers can instantly see what's on offer "at a glance"? Any answers or research people can direct me to would be greatly appreciated, cheers.
| ExperienceOz0 -
Better click through rate in 2nd position?
I'm digging through my Google Webmaster tools and found something really odd. On one particular keyword phrase Google is reporting a higher CTR on the 2nd position over the first. A lot higher. Per Google the 2nd position is getting a 31% CTR. Has anyone else seen this?
| Thos0030 -
Blog posts not getting indexed and being outranked by scrapper sites.
Our Google traffic has dropped significantly over the last year and now we're struggling to even get our blog posts indexed. It's been extremely discouraging and we're trying to do what ever we can to fix it. I've included a screenshot of our Google traffic as well as Pages Indexed according to WebmasterTools. http://i.imgur.com/Wu1D8.jpg The Problem Our blog posts are frequently not getting indexed. Many times they are outranked by low authority scraper sites, our Twitter/FB account, etc. Sometimes our homepage will rank instead of the blog post. Sometimes we'll break a news story, get tons of quality backlinks, and still be nowhere in Google. Pretty much the only Google traffic we see is from existing posts. Still 3,200 pages indexed when we have only 1,600 posts. I guess this isn't really a problem... just waiting for the meta noindex to take effect. More details We've seen no duplicate content or other warnings from WebmasterTools. We've been constantly acquiring quality backlinks from credible sites. We deleted the useless content and fixed the canonical issues that were a result of switching servers. History Our site is a news/entertainment blog. The traffic usually has spikes depending on what's going on in the news. Nov 1, 2011 - Site kept maxing out at 30k+ visits so we switched servers. Jan 30, 2012 - Hired a writer so we could focus on other aspects of the site. Apr 19, 2012 - Noticed our posts weren't getting indexed like they used to. Suspected our writer was spinning articles but couldn't find any evidence. 90% of our blog posts were nowhere to be found in Google. Scrapper sites would outrank us for our own stories... even our Twitter account was ranking ahead of us. IF our story would show up in Google it would usually be the home page instead of the blog post. Sep 2012 - Finally got more serious about addressing the problem. Noticed a couple potentially big problems and started making changes. Canonical Issues non-www site didn't redirect to www. It showed 2 different link profiles according to OpenSiteExplorer and 0 backlinks according to Webmaster Tools. Wordpress shortlinks weren't redirecting to the actual permalink. For instance http://www.domain.com/?p=123 and http://www.domain.com/post-example were both getting indexed. For every post there were 4 different versions that Google had to choose from. http://domain.com/?p=123, http://www.domain.com/?p=123, http://domain.com/post-example, and http://www.domain.com/post-example I figured the canonical issues must have happened when we switched servers which was the reason for the drop in WebmasterTools indexed pages and increase in Not Selected pages. FIXED (Sep 15): One we fixed the canonical issue the Indexed Pages went back up however the Not Selected is still the same. Duplicate Content When we first created our site we wanted to have tons of images for each musician/athlete/actor/etc. so we uploaded about 5-10 for each person. We created a blog post for each image with no writing and the exact same post titles. As a result there were TONS of low-quality, similar posts, with virtually identical permalinks. e.g. http://www.domain.com/james-smith1, http://www.domain.com/james-smith2, http://www.domain.com/james-smith3, etc. A crawl on Sep 26 showed over 550 duplicate content warnings. FIXED (Oct 1): We deleted/301 redirected the useless pages (they weren't getting traffic anyways) and by the next crawl the number was almost to 0... which it's at now. We also had TONS of tags (since there're constantly new names in the media) that were getting indexed so we had meta robots noindex them. Questions: Why aren't a majority of our posts getting indexed? Were we penalized or just stuck because of a filter? How long should it take for meta robots to noindex the tags pages? (I did it on Sep 25 but they are still there) If a site is scraping our content (same title, image, excert) but linking to us, should we contact them and tell them to remove it? Is there anything else we need to do start getting our blog posts indexed like they used to? Should we try contacting Google to re-evaluate our site? Sorry, that was a LOT of writing. If anyone wants the URL please let me know so I can PM it to you. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Wu1D8.jpg
| gfreeman230 -
Recovering from the Penguin update finally w00t!
Since there is so little information out there for people who have recovered from the Google Penguin Update I thought I would share my recent recovery and what I did, and what worked for me. First let me say that I don't necessarily believe that you have to wait for a Penguin update to recover from it, unless there has been an update in the last few weeks that I am not aware of. When I got hit I got hit with penguin on April 24th 2012. The reason I know is because 90% percent of all my major keywords I completely fell of the map with rankings, luckily I did not lose my main cash cow keyword which kept me alive (thank goodness) but I did lose rankings on many other keywords. Here is an example http://goo.gl/nZYAu What I did When the hit first came like many others I went into panic mode. For many months I tried all sorts of things. Redesign of my site Changed to friendly URL's Rewrote Content Got rid of low quality content Added more images to pages Less ads to the page Redesigned internal link structure Removed links from other sites I owned and more None of which seemed to work for me, even with all these changes my rankings remained the same. I was scratching my head as to why Google thought my site was considered spammy. I finally decided to dig as deep as I could and literally start over from scratch in my research. The first thing I did was go to my godaddy account and first see every domain I had owned. I was surprised to see that I had owned 73 domains. After a while you forget what you buy I guess :). Some of these domains I bought but never did anything with, some I bought and copied one of my other sites just to get something up with the hopes to redesigned it and others I had completed sites with unique content. Obvious there are issues with copying an entire site over dealing with duplicate content. Honestly most of these sites I had forgotten I even owned and that even had content on them. Back when I did all these things (about 2 years ago) I really did not know what I was doing from a SEO standpoint. I have learned since then which is why I needed to go through all these and clean them up. One of the main things I used to do with my sites (Pre SEO) was I would take my big traffic sites and link to my other sites from either a footer or somewhere on a page that would have a ton of indexing (dynamic pages) Usually somewhere in the 90,000k+ in pages generated. I honestly did this not with the intent to manipulate rankings, but with the idea of sending traffic to those pages. I thought that was a great idea 🙂 As I started going through my domains one by one with a fine tooth and comb there were many sites which I had totally forgotten about that contained links to my other sites. Especially my main cash cow site. It took me about 2 weeks to get through all my domains and clean everything up. The things I did was Removed all duplicate sites Removed URL's I was not doing anything with (I know this had no effect, just wanted to clean my domains up) Removed all links that pointed to any of my other sites Now What About 1 week later (and as those links started to go away in Google webmaster tools) keywords I have not ranked for since April 24th started to gain rank. While many are still not raking and the ones that are have low rankings. They are ranking again. I know for sure now this made a difference for me. These are keywords that tanked from Penguin that all of a sudden I have ranks in them again. While I know the practices I did where obviously bad SEO much of what I did was done before I actually knew what I was doing. What worked for me was checking every domain I owned and looking at every page I had on those sites. Most of my problems came from sites I totally forgot I even had, which is what was hurting me. Finally going back to those sites and either removing the links/domains is what I believe is making the difference. Just thought I would share 🙂
| cbielich2 -
E-commerce SEO when products are shared between sites
We have a couple of e-commerce sites that sell the same product. One focuses more on a niche category of the products, while the others contains a wide variety of products. Will we be hit with a penalty from google if the product descriptions are the same? If so, how much of a difference in content does there need to be? There are only so many ways to describe the product and it is usually done in a couple sentences. The rest of the product description contains bullet points of the products and is the same for each product. We are also looking for a SEO company to work with and wondered if there are companies out there that specialize in e-commerce seo that can work with a small ($500 month) budget. I've looked through the recommended companies directory here, but it seems most have minimum retainers around $1000 a month. Also, what should I look for in an SEO company?
| toomeycustoms0 -
Google Local
I am new to Google Local and just bagged a project. Can somebody guide me how to go about it. Is Google Local all about listing the business in Directory and Classified sites with complete address and profile? Any help will be highly appreciated.
| KS__0 -
Massive Google Drop on two sites!
Hi All, We have experienced a massive Google drop on Two of our eCommerce websites in the past week. From Feb - July we were ranked 2 for various key words In Aug we dropped to 8 In September to 96 if not lower. We pay for monthly link building and add unique product info each week (but not much new content such as articles or blogs). My SEO guys has not been that helpful and just sent me a link to the Panda update blog, which doesn't mean a great deal to me. Obviously this has had a massive effect on business, and ideally i need to diagnose the problem and find a new startegy on moving forward, so most likely looking for a for a new SEO guy/company as well. I need someone is proactive, communicates well and make constant suggestions about moving forward not just link building. One thing I would like to add is these two site have a different homepage, category and range structure, but do share some if the 2000 product database. Can anyone help? Any advice on sorting this would be gratefully appreciated. Thanks M
| etsgroup0 -
How long til meta robots noindex takes effect?
I have a wordpress site with about 3,000 posts and over 1,000 tags. All of the tag archives are currently indexed in Google and I don't want them to be. I just set the meta robots to no-index all the tag archives and was wondering how long it will take til they're out of the search engines? Since there are close to 1,500 of these and they are duplicate content it would be nice to have them gone asap. I noticed Webmaster Tools allows me to resubmit my site to index if my site has changed significantly... should I try that?? Any other advice would be greatly appreciated!
| gfreeman230 -
Internal Site Search Analysis
Hi Folks, I have about 6,000 internal site search phrases that I want to analyze. There are many variations and duplicates that have similar intent within the data, e.g. Employment, Employment Opportunities, Employment Application. Does anyone have any thoughts on how I can aggregate the data to get an idea of user intent. There's a lot of long-tail in there. The data does not come from Google's site search tool. I just have a spreadsheet of the terms and the number of times they were searched. Cheers!
| BedeFahey0 -
Best way to remove worthless/thin content?
I have a Wordpress site with about 3,000 pages and 1,000 of those are no value/duplicate content and drive no traffic. They are blog posts each with a single image and permalinks like example.com/post1, example.com/post2 etc. I've started by deleting pages and 301 redirecting to relevant pages that actually have content. Is deleting and 301 redirecting the best route? Is 1,000 to many 301 redirects? Should I just delete the pages that aren't really relevant to anything else? Anything else I should know about deleting all of these pages? Any help would be great!
| gfreeman230 -
Can you track "Add to home screen" for ios devices?
I was curious to know if there was a way to track in analytics users "adding to home screen" on ios devices. With the new ios map not receiving so much love and google maps "web app" process getting more attention, I feel knowing this stat would help us decide if we really need a native app or not. Our customers don't normally return within the year and when they do its about 2-3 (normally on a desk top), To us it does not completely justify the idea of making a native app with the world being so app heavy now a days. Any thoughts are always appreciated.
| sknott0 -
Google Places rankings go away, but organic rankings stay the same / get better?
Hello, I hope you all can help me out here with the information I could provide. Anyways, the past number of months I have had 1 of our clients rank extremely high organically and on Google places. For example: My client is a law firm so if you search “CLIENTS-TOWN Attorney” they would come up organically on the first page and if you were in that town and search “CLIENTS-TOWN Attorney” or even just “Attorney” they would also come up in the Google Places list. Now for some reason starting a week ago I noticed they have completely disappeared from Google Places. No changes have been done to their site and everything is the same as it was. Their organic searches are the same if not better than before. Do you guys have any clue as to why this happened and how I could possibly turn this around? Thanks for your help in advance!
| WhiteHat120 -
.co domain
How google treats .co domain? I mean google treats .co domain as global or for columbia only?
| Alick3000 -
Recovering from a Hack: How long until Google reindexes changes?
In a previous post I made, I was able to determine that one of my sites; http://pokeronamac.com/ was hacked and was feeding spam perscription drug content to search engines, then redirecting to another site when clicked on Google. I then contacted my web host, and, after they did a scan of our files, they determined that something within the wp-includes directory was compromised and malicious. They removed the file, though they weren't able to determine the source of the attack, or how they god in (should we be scared?). Anyway, its been several days now ~5 and if I do a site search the spam pages still show up, but the redirect is no longer working. At this point, I am at a standstill, because i'm loosing traffic on my site by about 90%, and google hasn't sent us any warnings of malaware or the like. I know I was recommended against this before, but should I attempt to submit a reconsideration request, or should I just wait it out? Thanks for your help, Zach
| Zachary_Russell0 -
HELP! 75% Drop in Traffic with no Explaination
Hello Everyone, After looking at one of my websites, http://pokeronamac.com/ I noticed that there is a significant drop in all traffic to my site. I cannot figure out what the exact source is, as we received no warnings in WMT, and as far as I know there are no major updates released in the last week or so by Google. I took a look at the content section of GA and I saw that virtually all of my content was seeing a decrease in traffic, meaning that it isn't specific to a few pages, which leads me to believe that it is an algorithmic penalty. My confusion was that there was no changes made to the website in the past few months, although, on September 10th (5 days after traffic dropped) I updated the meta descriptions and titles site wide. I don't believe that the penalty is from Panda or Penguin because we actually experienced a positive influx in traffic during the week of April 25th. I'd appreciate any insights into helping me recover from this so I can get the visits again that I had before. If any other metrics are required, i'd gladly provide them. Thanks Zach Russell 8NBwn.png
| Zachary_Russell0 -
Best way to check the number of backlinks?
I know everyone is going to say opensiteexplorer (for obvious reasons) however why is there such a diffference in numbers between the following resources: 1. Open Site Explorer - 23 ref. domains & 939 links 2. Majestic SEO - 49 ref. domains & 599 links (fresh) / 111 ref. domains & 2332 links (historic) 3. Google Webmaster Tools - 6001 I understand the difference between fresh/historic in Majestic, it's the vast difference in numbers between the three services?!
| seanjohnson0 -
Https & www
Hi, I've looked all over for this, maybe I am searching for the wrong thing but here is my question. My site is https://mysite.com yet I want it to display as www.mysite.com in the SERP. Is this possible? I realise people like secure but I would rather display it as www because I believe people are going to skip over a result (sometimes) if it they are not sure what the https is. My SSL certificate is for mysite.com, would my issue be resolved if I bought it for www.mysite.com instead? Thanks in advance!
| Hughescov0 -
2 gallerys showing the same images on the one website
Hi, I was Just looking through some of our website and noticed that we have a slide show gallery and when you click on the image it loads onto a light box gallery. would this act a duplicate content as it shows in two different types of displays in the one place. Thanks again
| Feily0 -
Google Penalisation - Any help would be appreciated!
Hi,
| ChrisHolgate
We’ve recently received a Google notification of unnatural linking along with a confirmation that we're being penalised. There were a few other sites that we owned that perhaps had too many links pointing to our main domain so we trimmed them down and submitted a reconsideration request and got the following back: "Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team" I want to stress that we have never in the past and do not currently buy any backlinks. The problem that we face now is that our site has been online for best part of a decade, there are thousands of people linking to us and I have absolutely no idea where to start. We don’t use an SEO Company but in the past few months have been using SEOmoz to improve our on-page optimisation. I know it’s a massive ask but if could a member of the SEOmoz community or a staff member quickly take a gander and let us know if anything in particular sticks out like a sore thumb it would mean a great deal to me. Of course, if needed we’ll employ the services of an SEO company but I’m hoping one of you guys will see something immediately obvious that could really help us out! Thanks in advance. Kind regards Chris0 -
What is a Achievable SEO Growth Rate?
Hi Mozzers, I have a question for you today. What is the achievable SEO growth rate (non branded SEO) for a typical job portal style site if you are also taking into consideration there is a blog with a lot of useful content being produced on a daily basis? How has your SEO growth rate been? Is it normal to think that the non branded traffic can grow by 1000 visitors or more a day each month? if I hit 1000 visitors per day this month, then 2000 visitors per day next month, 3500 visitors per day the month after that and so on? I know it's difficult to give numbers like this. Assuming it's a 1000 visitor growth, that mean it's a 50% or more SEO growth each month. it will be interesting to know how your growth rate has been. Thank you.
| jombay0 -
Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to our website
Hi, We have been using SEOmoz for a good few months now and have found it incredibly useful. Unfortunately however I think we may have slipped up a little bit as we have just received the following message in our Google Webmaster Tools: Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to http://www.refreshcartridges.co.uk/ I have a funny feeling I might know what the problem is but I'd like a confirmation before I potentially go off on a wild goose chase. We also own the domain name www.computerarticles.co.uk and recently started introducing the author at the bottom of the post along with both a link to the website homepage and a link to a deep, popular page on our website. For example, check out http://www.computerarticles.co.uk/twitter-time-saving-tools/ We genuinely didn't realise this was a bad thing and thought it would just provide Google with a way of deep linking straight in to popular areas of our site. I would really appreciate advice as to whether you think it might be these links that are causing the problem or whether there is something else that could be causing the problem. In the event it is these links that are causing the issue would you recommend removing the entire 'about the author' page (as we have published around 500 pages on that site) and simply put a link in the blog roll or simplify it to just link to the homepage. I appreciate in advance any help you could give. Regards Chris
| ChrisHolgate0 -
Irratic page rank results - why?
Hi, Hi- I've changed the title and reposted this question as I didn't get any insight. I really am going around in circles for this; so any help that can be given would be really appreciated.I know that you guys have the knowledge so really hoping you can share it! Thanks - background: I run two sites: www.ragsmetals.com and www.yourgoldfund.com: They offer similar products but to different markets: one is predominently trade, one predominently customer focused. They vie for the same keywords.e.g. Buy Gold My Issue: I have been trying to build www.yourgoldfund.com up from an SEO point of view; it is FALLING in the rankings; I am doing NOTHING with www.ragsmetals.com and it is rising in the rankings. I checked webmaster to see if there were any warnings as a result of penguin (found out how to do this on here - thanks for that!) there are none. I have optimized the pages a lot. I have put time into getting in bound traffic, and even more excitingly some experts (from reputable domains) have just linked to our site because they like our content! So to me things should be improving . NOTE: My OSE listed inbound links are incredibly diferent from google Webmaster. What can I do. I am a scientific person so I love the fact that I have 2 sites to compare...interested to hear your thoughts. Many thanks in advance
| girlie0 -
Visitors via Android App in Google Analytics
Hey there Mozzers! For one of our clients, we've developed an application on both Android and iOS. In the app, there is a link to the regular website. Can I see these visitors from the IOS/Android app in Google Analytics? Can I find them via Refferals? Thanks a lot in advance! Partouter
| Partouter0
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