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Category: Algorithm Updates

Discuss algorithm updates and impacts.

  • Inevo


    Hi ! In Moz' Whiteboard friday video Headline Writing and Title Tag SEO in a Clickbait World, Rand is talking about (among other things) best practices related to linking between search, clickbait and conversion pages. For a client of ours, a cosmetics and make-up retailer, we are planning to build content pages around related keywords, for example video, pictures and text about make-up and fashion in order to best target and capture search traffic related to make-up that is prevalent earlier in the costumer journey. Among other things, we plan to use these content pages to link directly to some of the products. For example a content piece about how to achieve full lashes will to link to particular mascaras and/or the mascara category) Things is, in the Whiteboard video Rand Says:
    _"..So your click-bait piece, a lot of times with click-bait pieces they're going to perform worse if you go over and try and link directly to your conversion page, because it looks like you're trying to sell people something. That's not what plays on Facebook, on Twitter, on social media in general. What plays is, "Hey, this is just entertainment, and I can just visit this piece and it's fun and funny and interesting." _ Does this mean linking directly to products pages (or category pages) from content pages is bad? Will Google think that, since we are also trying to sell something with the same piece of content, we do not deserve to rank that well on the content, and won't be considered that relevant for a search query where people are looking for make-up tips and make-up guides? Also.. is there any difference between linking from content to categories vs. products? ..I mean, a category page is not a conversion page the same way a products page is. Looking forward to your answers 🙂  

    | Inevo
    0
  • ozil


    Looking for some  Best Strategies in SEO for International Expansion . We were based in a single country till one year back and then decided to expand to other English speaking countries as well. Traffic from SEO for us is around 1.3 million users only from the single country and we rank in top#3 for 90% of our targeted keyword bank of 45000+ keywords. We just launched in some new countries like singapore , philippines  and few other English speaking countries  with really unique content and I wanted to check whether I can use my mother domain or use any other strategies  for growing SEO faster in other countries. Any inputs on scaling up SEO  traffic internationally will be appreciated

    | ozil
    1
  • RikkiD22


    Hey Mozzers, I am doing some research and wonder if you can help me out? Before Moz, Hubspot, Majestic, Screaming Frog and all the other awesome SEO tools we use today what were the SEO tools / software / websites that were used for aiding SEO? I guess we can add the recently closed Yahoo! Directory for starters! Thanks!

    | RikkiD22
    0
  • BetterAnalytics


    Hi All, I am working with a bank that would like to rank as many parts of the company site as possible for the company name.  This includes the home page, a page on careers and a page on company reviews. The question is, it is better to structure the careers and reviews content on a subfolder, subdomain or new domain. Using subfolders to retain equity of the root domain site.americanbank.comamernicanbank.com/careersamericanbank.com/reviews or  (use subdomains - you lose some of the main domain equity and it is counter to the Moz research) americanbank.comcareers.americanbank.comreviews.americanbank.com or set up new domains to overcome Google bias not to rank the same root domain in the top 7 to 10 results multiple times when displaying results for a company name. americanbank.comhttp://americanbankcareers.comhttp://americanbankreviews.com Thanks for your perspective.

    | BetterAnalytics
    0
  • micromano


    I have a law office and we handle four different practice areas. I used to have multiple websites (one for each practice area) with keywords in the actual domain name, but based on the recommendation of SEO "experts" a few years ago, I consolidated all the webpages into one single webpage (based on the rumors at the time that Google was going to be focusing on authorship and branding in the future, rather than keywords in URLs or titles). Needless to say, Google authorship was dropped a year or two later and "branding" never took off. Overall, having one webpage is convenient and generally makes SEO easier, but there's been a huge drawback: When my page comes up in SERPs after searching for "attorney" or "lawyer" combined with a specific practice area, the practice area landing pages don't typically come up in the SERPs, only the front page comes up. It's as if Google recognizes that I have some decent content, and Google knows that I specialize in multiple practice areas, but it directs everyone to the front page only. Prospective clients don't like this and it causes my bounce rate to be high. They like to land on a page focusing on the practice area they searched for. Two questions: (1) Would using parent pages (e.g. http://lawfirm.com/divorce/anytown-usa-attorney-lawyer/ vs. http://lawfirm.com/anytown-usa-divorce-attorney-lawyer/) be better for SEO? The research I've done up to this point appears to indicate "no." It doesn't make much difference as long as the keywords are in the domain name and/or URL. But I'd be interested to hear contrary opinions. (2) Would using parent pages (e.g. http://lawfirm.com/divorce/anytown-usa-attorney-lawyer/ vs. http://lawfirm.com/anytown-usa-divorce-attorney-lawyer/) be better for indexing in Google SERPs? For example, would it make it more likely that someone searching for "anytown usa divorce attorney" would actually end up in the divorce section of the website rather than the front page?

    | micromano
    0
  • Investis_Digital


    **Does anyone have stats for domain authority distribution across the entire web? E.G., what percentage of websites fall in the DA range of 0-25, 26-50, 51-75, 76-100. **

    | Investis_Digital
    2
  • Christy-Correll


    Today's YouMoz post, Accidental SEO Tests: When On-Page Optimization Ceases to Matter, explores the theory that there is an on-page optimization saturation point, "beyond which further on-page optimization no longer improves your ability to rank" for the keywords/keyword topics you are targeting. In other words, you can optimize your page for search to the point that it is 100% topically relevant to query and intent. Do you believe there exists such a thing as a page that is 100% topically relevant? What are your thoughts regarding there being an on-page optimization saturation point, beyond which further on-page optimization no longer improves your ability to rank? Let's discuss!

    | Christy-Correll
    1
  • piazza


    Hi there, Our website www.porcelainsuperstore.co.uk has been ranking on pages 1 and 2 of Google for the past 12 - 18 months for a number of our key search terms. There has been the odd fluctuation but nothing major. On Wednesday of this week (2 days ago), we purchased the domain www.porcelainsuperstore.com and without thinking I enabled Domain Forwarding on this domain to go to www.porcelainsuperstore.co.uk
    Today our rankings have shown quite dramatic drops, e.g Wood effect tiles position 1 to position 3 Metro tiles position 9 to position 12 Quartz tiles position 4 to position 9 Floor tiles position 14 to position 25 Can anyone advise on this? Do you think the domain forward could have created this sudden drop?
    I have now disabled the domain forwarding but am worried that this might be irreversible in Googles eyes? I have now disabled the domain forward - I assume this is the right thing to do?
    Any help much appreciated. Thanks Ben

    | piazza
    0
  • Laughingbird


    Hi everybody. I have a question ... I'm totally stumped. This question is being asked today (November 16th, 2015) just after Google updated something in their algorithm. Nobody seems to know what they did. and it has something to do with the new "Rank Brain" system they're now using. My niche is Logo Design Software (https://www.thelogocreator.com). I had the keywords "logo creator" on the page roughly 7 times. After Google updated, I lost about 10 spots and as of this writing, I've dropped to #15. So, maybe I over optimized. fine. Noticing that for the keyword "logo creator" ... NONE of the top 14 spots actually have "logo creator" in their page title and NONE of them have more that 2 instances (if any) of the keyword "logo creator" on the actual page. So I removed ALL instances of my keyword "logo creator" from my home page - used the Webmaster's Fetch Tool and moved up a few spots instantly. So what the heck? And the #2 spot for that keyword is www.logomakr.com - they have NO words at all on their pages, no blog, no sitemap and far fewer links than anybody in the top 10. Can anybody reading this shed some light? Marc Marc Sylvester
    Laughingbird Software

    | Laughingbird
    0
  • lunavista-comm


    I am stumped. I have been researching for over two days now. Our homepage organic traffic YoY is down approx. 25%. However, rank has not changed according to Conductor, Bing and Google WMT. Impressions have gone up according to both search engines and we rank now for more keywords in top 3 than we did last year. Both WMTs' present a pretty healthy picture. No insignificant indexing issues, Error URLs & blocked resources are down, daily page crawls are higher than ever, etc. I drilled into Google Analytics from a few different view points. The closest I got to an answer was I saw huge out-liars YoY in browsers and browser versions.  We saw significant differences in organic traffic YoY from IE 11, 9 ,10, 8 and 7.  Android Browser 31, 32 and Safari 6 and 7.  I tested our homepage and search results in all of these, and found no issues.  Yet, GA reports 50K+ differences  YoY. My only thought is it is perhaps a GA attribution error? And/or browsers defaulting organic traffic to direct or other?  Yet, our direct traffic is up but does not correlate with as much as we are down.  Any tips on where to look next would be extremely helpful!

    | lunavista-comm
    0
  • KempRugeLawGroup


    For my most competitive term, the wrong page ranks (and not well either). The landing page I built for it has never shown up for that term except after I include the omitted results. The page that does rank is category page page above it. All that's fine, because neither page was all that great...BUT, I have completely re-written the content for the landing page, got local area pictures, local testimonials and a video. So here's my question: Should I put all that content on the landing page that's been omitted or tweak the page that ranks and put it there? To me it makes the most sense to put the content on the page that has been omitted, but I don't know how google treats pages that have been omitted in the past. Is it going to have some sort of bias against the page, because it was omitted so many times earlier for that keyword? Or, will it be treated just like any other page, and if the content is good enough, then it  will rank just fine. If anyone's dealt with this, then I'd love to hear all about it! Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0
  • 94501


    My client wants to build a second site to provide targeted links for SEO to his main site. He's interested in buying a TLD with some near topic authority/links and then build the second site's authority up from there. He is clear that this could get him in trouble for a link scheme, but thinks it can all be hidden from Google. Off the top of my head I was able to recall a few of the pain-in-the-neck things you'd have to do to not get caught, but he seemed unconvinced. I recall you'd have to have: Different registrar Different contact/WhoIs Different site host Different G/A, GWT Logging into second's site's G/A, GWT with different IP address not used for main domain With the exception of the last one, he didn't seem to think it would be too hard. Aren't there more difficult maneuvers required for hiding this from Google? I want to be able to point out to him how ridiculous this low integrity effort will be, without losing the client. Thanks! Best... Darcy

    | 94501
    0
  • maxbilgisayar


    I have a question for my site. Can you advice me for situation? Last 1 months my site reduced traffic from google and google news.. And i dont know why? I need your advice. Thanks. Yunus Altindag Diyarbakir/Turkey

    | maxbilgisayar
    0
  • MargotLoco2


    Because Universal Analytics (and Google Webmaster) only stores SEO data for 3 months, I've been downloading SEO data (from the Acquisition tab of Analytics) to get a record of how impressions, clicks, CTR etc are changing in the long term (our business is seasonal, so these long-term patterns are important). Today, I downloaded data for September, and found a very large increase in the number of impressions compared to previous months. I looked back at the data for August, which I've already downloaded, and found that Analytics is now reporting much higher numbers of impressions than I have in my downloaded data. The total number of impressions has roughly doubled, and the increase for individual URLs varies, with some increasing by a factor of 10. The number of clicks has also increased, by about 15% in total. Because of the 3 month cut-off, I could only look back as far as the 11th of July, but the impressions for the end of July are also much higher than in my downloaded data. I've noticed that Analytics has changed some other details in its reporting of SEO data. For example, the impressions and clicks data is no longer rounded. Could this increase in impressions be a result of those changes? Has anyone else experienced something similar? We can go ahead and use the new data but it will throw our analysis off for past months (which have the lower numbers). If others have experienced something similar it would be good to know, so that we can adjust our historical numbers accordingly.

    | MargotLoco2
    0
  • Scratch_MM


    Say my long tailed keyword has three words in it that I also consider keywords. Will I catch the searches for those short keywords, or just the long tailed keyword phrase?

    | Scratch_MM
    0
  • Parse.ly


    I was curious as to the prioritization of dateCreated / datePublished and dateModified in our microdata and how it affects google search results. I have read some entries online that say Google prioritizes dateModified in SERPs, but others that claim they prioritize datePublished or dateCreated. Do you know (or could you point me to some resources) as to whether Google uses dateModified or date Published in its SERPs? Thanks!

    | Parse.ly
    0
  • KempRugeLawGroup


    I was looking at some SERPs, and I saw one of our competitors had 279 characters displaying in their meta-description. Everyone else (including the people ranking higher than this person) were displaying the usual number. How is that possible? I didn't think google every displayed that much. Screenshot attached. Ruben P3RfYZt.jpg

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0
  • Silkstream


    According to Accuranker (https://www.accuranker.com/blog/google-october-2015-algorithm-update/), "Google has made some big changes to their algorithm". Other than that one article, I haven't noticed or even heard of any considerable fluctuations. Even Mozcast is looking pretty normal today. Has anyone noticed anything or have any other sources on this? If so, any ideas on what this update seems to be targeting?

    | Silkstream
    0
  • MRSWebSolutions


    I'm turning to the Moz Community because we're completely stumped. I actually work at a digital agency, our specialism being SEO. We've dealt with Google penalties before and have always found it fairly easy to identify the source the problem when someone comes to us with a sudden keyword/traffic drop. I'll briefly outline what we've experienced: We took on a client looking for SEO a few months ago. They had an OK site, with a small but high quality and natural link profile, but very little organic visibility. The client is an IT consultancy based in London, so there's a lot of competition for their keywords. All technical issues on the site were addressed, pages were carefully keyword targeted (obviously not in a spammy way) and on-site content, such as services pages, which were quite thin, were enriched with more user focused content. Interesting, shareable content was starting to be created and some basic outreach work had started. Things were starting to pick up. The site started showing and growing for some very relevant keywords in Google, a good range and at different levels (mostly sitting around page 3-4) depending on competition. Local keywords, particularly, were doing well, with a good number sitting on page 1-2. The keywords were starting to deliver a gentle stream of relevant traffic and user behaviour on-site looked good. Then, as of the 28th September 2015, it all went wrong. Our client's site virtually dropped from existence as far as Google was concerned. They literally lost all of their keywords. Our client even dropped hundreds of places for their own brand name. They also lost all rankings for super low competition, non-business terms they were ranking for. So, there's the problem. The keywords have not shown any sign of recovery at all yet and we're, understandably, panicking. The worst thing is that we can't identify what has caused this catastrophic drop. It looks like a Google penalty, but there's nothing we can find that would cause it. There are no messages or warnings in GWT. The link profile is small but high quality. When we started the content was a bit on the thin side, but this doesn't really look like a Panda penalty, and seems far too severe. The site is technically sound. There is no duplicate content issues or plaigarised content. The site is being indexed fine. Moz gives the site a spam score of 1 (our of 11 (i think that's right)). The site is on an ok server, which hasn't been blacklisted or anything. We've tried everything we can to identify a problem. And that's where you guys come in. Any ideas? Anyone seen anything similar around the same time? Unfortunately, we can't share our clients' site's name/URL, but feel free to ask any questions you want and we'll do our best to provide info.

    | MRSWebSolutions
    0
  • isaac663


    Hi Guys. I've noticed that google seems to be simplifying my meta titles in their SERP for some keyword searchs. Should I be worried about this?  Perhaps a sign of being a little 'spammy' in my meta titles? Or is Google just aiming to bring up the most relevant looking result? Based on that specific search? Isaac.

    | isaac663
    0
  • Dutko2385


    So, I own a car shipping company called Car Shipping Carriers ( www.carshippingcarriers.com ) and I am trying to find out if I need the SSL Cert / HTTPS for the site.  I attached a picture that shows I dropped a HUGE amount of rank back in the beginning of August 2014 and that the SSL/HTTPS update happened at nearly the exact same time. I do have a quote box on my website asking for: Name, Phone, Email, Origin, Destination, Move Date, Year/Make/Model of Vehicle, and Carrier Type. I was unsure if I needed the HTTPS because I am not asking for sensitive data, but it seems that I might need to bite the bullet and update the site to HTTPS. What do you all think?  Any expert opinion and/or advice? JWV4N1o

    | Dutko2385
    0
  • Shineband


    I've run a live wedding band in Boston for almost 30 years, that used to rank very well in organic search. I was hit by the Panda Updates August of 2014, and rankings literally vanished. I hired an SEO company to rectify the situation and create a new WordPress website -which launched January 15, 2015. Kept my old domain: www.shineband.com   Rankings remained pretty much non-existent. I was then told that 10% of my links were bad. After lots of grunt work, I sent in a disavow request in early June via Google Wemaster Tools. It's now mid October, rankings have remained pretty much non-existent. Without much experience, I got Moz Pro to help take control of my own SEO and help identify some problems  (over 60 pages of medium priority issues: title tag character length and meta description). Also some helpful reports by www.siteliner.com and www.feinternational.com  both mentioned a Duplicate Content issue. I had old blog posts from a different domain (now 301 redirecting to the main site) migrated to my new website's internal blog, http://www.shineband.com/best-boston-wedding-band-blog/  as suggested by the SEO company I hired. It appears that by doing that -the the older blog posts show as pages in the back end of WordPress with the poor meta and tile issues AS WELL AS probably creating a primary reason for duplicate content issues (with links back to the site). Could this most likely be viewed as spamming or (unofficial) SEO penalty? As SEO companies far and wide daily try to  persuade me to hire them to fix my ranking -can't say I trust much. My plan: put most of the old blog posts into the Trash, via WordPress -rather than try and optimize each page (over 60) adjusting tagging, titles and duplicate content. Nobody really reads a quick post from 2009... I believe this could be beneficial and that those pages are more hurtful than helpful. Is that a bad idea, not knowing if those pages carry much juice? Realize my domain authority not great. No grand expectations, but is this a good move? What would be my next step afterwards, some kind of resubmitting of the site, then? This has been painful, business has fallen, can't through more dough at this. THANK YOU!

    | Shineband
    1
  • JimLynch


    I help manage SEO for a number of large retail websites and we've seen a significant drop in organic traffic (upwards of 30%) since around May 2015. It's likely we were hit my Google's Phantom Quality update, but I don't understand why it had such a big impact. Can anyone explain that Google update in more depth and advise on steps to take to recover from it? Thank you.

    | JimLynch
    0
  • EvolveCreative


    We're doing research on image optimization and wanted to ask the MOZ community if you think having titles on images are still important for SEO if you have descriptive ALT text.

    | EvolveCreative
    0
  • isaac663


    I've noticed with the last few pages i've built that there's a delay between them being indexed and them actually ranking.  Anyone else finding that?  And why is it like that? Not much of an issue as they tend to pop up after a week or so, but I am curious. Isaac.

    | isaac663
    0
  • QubaSEO


    I'm currently researching this area in order to show to a client that social shares aren't as valuable for SEO as they might think. Can anyone point me in the direction of the best studies done on this topic? Thanks in advance!

    | QubaSEO
    0
  • danta


    We have a travel website that has been ranked in Google for 12-14years. The site produces original images with branding on them and have been for years ranking well. There's been no site changes. We have a Moz spamscore 1/17 and Domain Authority 59. Sep 17th all our images just disappeared from Google Image Search. Even searching for our domain with keyword photo results in nothing. I've checked our Search console and no email from Google and I see no postings on Moz and others relating to search algo changes with Images. I'm at a loss here.. does anyone have some advice?

    | danta
    2
  • InternetRep


    Hello! When I google "Justin Timberlake"  I see web search results and a sidebar.  See image below: http://screencast.com/t/qwYeiFZQRzT How does one get their results to display like this? Is this something that Google creates automatically or is it something the celebrity initiates/creates on their behalf.  Does the celebrity have any options to choose from as to what displays on this sidebar? What is this called? I look forward to your response. qwYeiFZQRzT

    | InternetRep
    0
  • chewythedog


    Hi MoZ Community, Key word inclusion in URL has been discussed a fair bit on here and curious for some feedback on two options on URL structure. Ran’s #3 tip from his recent ‘15 SEO Best Practices for Structuring URLs’ states that key word inclusion still has some value but I’m not too sure if we’re going too far with the below examples. We sell footwear and only footwear for Women, Men & Kids and use those words as our key menu headings at the top. Under each of the main headings within a mega menu the users then has the choice to ‘shop by style’, ‘shop by brand’ etc… The key question or feedback is about including the word ‘shoes’ in my URLs as many of the top ranking competitors do it. e.g. /women-shoes-heels, womens-shoes-sandals or womens-shoes/heels, womens-shoes/sandals I think Google is smart enough to determine we have a shoe store and not sure of the value from a SEO or user experience perspective of adding the additional word. Thoughts on going with option A or B would be valued.... Option A - http://shopname.com/womens/sandals, http://shopname.com/womens/heels   OR Option B - http://shopname.com/womens-shoes/sandals, http://shopname.com/womens-shoes/heels Thanks, |   |   |
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    | chewythedog
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  • WhiteboardCreations


    Hey Mozzers!
    We're going to be moving are main company site from http://whiteboardcreations.com > https://whiteboardcreations.com and wanted to get some of your quick tips for items we need to consider. We are working on a new web redesign now and keeping in WordPress. A couple facts for your info... We have read a lot about it, but wanted to get some quick tips we need to take into account from your points of view. 1. March 2010 domain age
    2. Ranks very well locally for our targeted keywords around web design, WordPress, SEO, social media, blog writing, web maintenance
    3. Not many of our competitors, especially the SEO competitors, have moved to HTTPS
    4. Site is hosted at WP Engine
    5. Going to be purchasing a Domain Validated SSL... Is there any advantage to an Extended Validated SSL in Google's eye/mind?
    6. Should we expect rank decrease or increase?
    7. Anything else we should expect or prepare for from your experiences? Thank you!
    Patrick

    | WhiteboardCreations
    0
  • prashanth123


    Hi guys, I have been brainstorming regarding a very unique SERP that i figured out while navigating search, the serp looks some thing like this http://postimg.org/image/phkol0d97/. i checked the site in structured testing tool but the only thing that i found is some PMR meta tags nothing except that. Can any one help me understand this and i would be more helpful if some one can guide me for the same. #peace

    | prashanth123
    0
  • Bevelwise


    I do SEO in an agency and have many clients. I always get the question, "Will that hurt my SEO?". When it comes to Meta Title and even Meta Description Length, I understand Google will truncate it which may result in a lower CTR, but does it actually hurt your ranking? I see in many cases Google will find keywords within a long meta description and display those and then in other cases it will simply truncate it. Is Google doing whatever they want willy-nilly or is there data behind this? Thank you!

    | Bevelwise
    0
  • ReunionMarketing


    We just got this attached image from one of our partners - has anyone seen Google putting 'missing' keywords in SERPs like this before? They said that it was not a plugin or anything and this is a screenshot of their organic search results. google%20screenshot_zpsgmwaf9e2.png

    | ReunionMarketing
    0
  • AshShep1


    Hi we have excellent Trustpilot reviews & want to know if we can include these in schema markup in order for the results to show in SERPs? The Trustpilot results show in PPC but not SERPs. A competitor looks to have no Trustpilot or other independent reviews but is showing 5 stars in SERPs, i also cant find any customer reviews on their site, it looks to be just coding that is driving the SERPs view? Their site is goldencharter.co.uk Any thoughts much appreciated Thanks Ash

    | AshShep1
    1
  • GrouchyKids


    I have read that it is unsafe to change more than 20% of your site’s content in any update. The rationale is that "Changing too much at once can flag your site within the Google algorithm as having something suspicious going on." Is this true, has anyone had any direct experiences of this or similar?

    | GrouchyKids
    0
  • Happy-SEO


    Hi Guy's I have a question about Google asking me to translate the page when i search on brandname. It's in the Dutch Google and the searchquery is: "rotomshop" I can find why Google wants to translate the page because all our settings are Dutch. Does anyone have a suggestion? Thanks!

    | Happy-SEO
    1
  • SB_Marketing


    Does anyone have any more information about this shift in the search rankings. For us it seemed to affect few SERPs but those it did impact were highly competitive. I have heard speculation that it had to to with whether your site was mobile friendly or not. I don't believe this to be the case however since it impacted us nagatively and we have been mobile friendly (per google's test) since a year before this update. https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change Our website has clean backlinks and all original content.

    | SB_Marketing
    0
  • FPD_NYC


    Hi all, So I have a question about "best practices" when you have two unique, but highly similar keywords you are targeting. Let's use the examples of "raincoats for women," which gets 9,900 searches a month, and "rain jackets for women," which gets 4,400. I am in the process of selecting keywords for my client's "keyword portfolio" and need to come up with a strategy when faced with two similar keywords that use different terminology. I'm well aware that there should only be one page for "women's raincoats" but there is no doubt in my mind that Google will give preferential treatment to whichever version of the keyword (raincoats/rain jackets) I include in my title tag, meta description, content, etc. I know that the modern philosophy is that Google is sophisticated enough to understand that the two words are essentially synonymous. That said, would you A) only pick "raincoats for women" for your client's keyword portfolio and focus exclusively on that term in your optimizations? b) pick both terms and try to strike an even balance between both in your optimizations? c) pick both terms and only optimize for "raincoats for women" and hope that "rain jackets for women" gets some peripheral benefit from your optimizations via Google's understanding of synonyms? Thanks!

    | FPD_NYC
    0
  • Emily_A


    We just launched a new site that is starting to be indexed well in Google, but Bing and Yahoo are lagging a bit.  I understand that the search engines are different algorithms and will take different lengths of time to index, rank, etc. What I'm curious about is are there any other tips / advice / things to keep in mind when trying to rank on the different search engines? Thanks!!

    | Emily_A
    0
  • ReunionMarketing


    I was wondering if anyone had a NON-SCHEMA MARK-UP solution for the following... I ran my Wordpress homepage HTML (after I implemented schema mark-up) in the structured data testing tool and received an error parsing the JSON-LD... it came at the beginning of the code and I know it is from the slider banner plugin... We are trying to see if there as an alternative to implementing schema with in the js... also does anyone know if the actual Google search will simply skip over the code and parse the rest of HTML? Thank you for your help.

    | ReunionMarketing
    0
  • TVape


    We have redirected everything on our blog from http to https. Our blog is in a subfolder so that now it looks like this: https://ourdomain/blog; But everything else i.e. our shop continues to be on http at http://ourdomain We are wondering: 1- Does the domain authority for SEO purposes have different values for the http and the https version of a domain? 2- If yes, is there a way to check the difference in authority between the http and the https version? 3- If we do have a higher authority on our http version (as historically we have been mostly on our http), would it make sense to go back to the http for the blog to enjoy that authority too? 4- Would changing our mind and going back to http after a few months of just having moved to https from http send any negative signals to Google? Would Google care if we do a back and forth essentially? Many thanks!

    | TVape
    0
  • accpar


    A client has a high-volume keyword that is rendering different results, whether it is on page one or page two of Google SERPs. If the keyword is on page one, ONLY the category page is ranking. When the keyword bumps off to page two, BOTH the category AND the homepage are ranking. This is happening on our IP and theirs, incognito and personalized searches. This has been happening since February. Any thought/insights would be greatly appreciated, thank you!!!!

    | accpar
    0
  • GourmetDirect


    Hi Back in December we shifted my web domain from a gourmetdirect.com to gourmetdirect.co.nz as part of a site-wide revamp.  Everything was going along fine until recently when my Linking domains plummeted and external links fell from 6000 approx to 600.  We still have the .com live for loads of disfunctional reasons.  Can anyone help?  I have gone from a top ranker to a no show and my contractors are all shaking their heads.

    | GourmetDirect
    0
  • adnan1101


    Hello I have read all articles about internal pages with or without Trailing Slashes but what if suppose I have a website that is http://abc.com when i search in google like site:abc.com I see result as http://abc.com/ in the google search so my question is should I make backlinks to http://abc.com or to http://abc.com or it does not effect SEO if we build any backlinks to any version of home page?

    | adnan1101
    0
  • ATShock


    We're working on a redesign and are wondering if we should condense some of the content (as recommended by an agency), and if so, how that will affect our organic efforts. Currently a few topics have individual pages for each section, such as (1) Overview (2) Symptoms and (3) Treatment. For reference, the site has a similar structure to  http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/guide/heart-disease-overview-fact. Our agency has sent us over mock-ups which show these topics being condensed into one and using a script/AJAX to display only the content that is clicked on. Knowing this, if we were to choose this option, that would result in us having to implement redirects because only one page would exist, instead of all three. Can anyone provide insight into whether we should keep the topic structure as is, or if we should take the agency's advice and merge all the topic content? *Note: The reason the agency is pushing for the merging option is because they say it helps with page load time. Thank you in advance for any insight! Tcd5Wo1.jpg

    | ATShock
    1
  • adnan1101


    Hello all if we use  http://schema-creator.org for structured html will it increase our ranking too. has it any benefit for SEO?

    | adnan1101
    0
  • pac-cooper


    I am in the middle of changing a website from targeting just a single keyword on all pages to instead having each page target its own keyword/phrase. However, I'm a little conflicted on whether or not plural forms and other suffix (-ing) variations are different enough to get their own pages. SERP show different results for each keyword searched. Also, relevancy reports for the keywords score some differently and some the same. Is it best to instead use these as secondary and third level keywords on the same page as the main keyword for a page? See example below: OPTION A (Use each for different pages): Page 1 - Construction Fence Page 2 - Construction Fences Page 3 - Construction Fencing Page 4 - Construction Site Fence Page 5 - Construction Site Fences Page 6 - Construction Site Fencing ... OPTION B (Use as variations on same page): Page 1 - Construction Fence, Construction Fences, Construction Fencing Page 2 - Construction Site Fence, Construction Site Fences, Site Construction Fencing ... Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

    | pac-cooper
    0
  • mozexpone


    How effective did it prove for anyone with the latest algorithmic change google search engine made for being mobile friendly and using https (valid ssl certificate). I see a good change being made under the ecommerce category for sites being used for online shopping. Let me know if anyone observes a major difference.

    | mozexpone
    0
  • EricFish


    Two of our clients have experienced a huge dip in organic rankings during the past week or so and we haven't done anything that would cause this. Have there been any major Google changes reported lately? I'm not seeing anything reported here: https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change. Thanks for your input. Eric

    | EricFish
    0
  • get4it


    Hi Team - I really need some expert level advice on an issue I'm seeing with our site in Google. Here's the current status. We launched our website and app on the last week of November in 2014 (soft launch): http://goo.gl/Wnrqrq When we launched we were not showing up for any targeted keywords, long tailed included, even the title of our site in quotes. We ranked for our name only, and even that wasn't #1. Over time we were able to build up some rankings, although they were very low (120 - 140). Yesterday, we're back to not ranking for any keywords. Here's the history: While developing our app, and before I took over the site, the developer used a thin affiliate site to gather data and run a beta app over the course of 1 - 2 years. Upon taking on the site and moving to launch the new website/app I discovered what had been run under the domain. Since than the old site has been completely removed and rebuild, with all associated urls (.uk, .net, etc...) and subdomains shutdown. I've allowed all the old spammy pages (thousands of them to 404). We've disavowed the old domains (.net, .uk that were sending a ton of links to this), along with some links that seemed a little spammy that were pointing to our domain. There are no manual actions or messaged in Google Webmaster Tools. The new website uses (SSL) https for the entire site, it scores a 98 / 100 for a mobile usability (we beat our competitors on Google's PageSpeed Tool), it has been moved to a business level hosting service, 301's are correctly setup, added terms and conditions, have all our social profiles linked, linked WMT/Analytics/YouTube, started some Adwords, use rel="canonical", all the SEO 101 stuff ++. When I run the page through the moz tool for a specific keyword we score an A. When I did a crawl test everything came back looking good. We also pass using other tools. Google WMT, shows no html issues. We rank well on Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. However, for some reason Google will not rank the site, and since there is no manual action I have no course of action to submit a reconsideration request. From an advanced stance, should we bail on this domain, and move to the .co domain (that we own, but hasn't been used before)? If we 301 this domain over, since all our marketing is pointed to .com will this issue follow us? I see a lot of conflicting information on algorithmic issues following domains. Some say they do, some say they don't, some say they do since a lot of times people don't fix the issue. However, this is a brand new site, and we're following all of Google's rules. I suspect there is an algorithmic penalty (action) against the domain because of the old thin affiliate site that was used for the beta and data gathering app. Are we stuck till Google does an update? What's the deal with moving us up, than removing again? Thoughts, suggestions??? I purposely, did a short url to leave out the company name, please respect that, since I don't want our issues to popup on a web search. 🙂

    | get4it
    0

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