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Category: Algorithm Updates

Discuss algorithm updates and impacts.


  • We are looking for actionable insights about how to recover from hummingbird. I read the post that suggested checking the Google Webmaster Tools "Manual Action" tab for a notice about unnatural links. I did this and there was no notice. So what other steps can we take to troubleshoot?

    | larahill
    0

  • Hello here. When we setup our e-commerce website virtualsheetmusic.com to allow session IDs to be assigned to users back in 2001, we decided to not assign them if a bot called the page. We wanted to be sure that bots, which officially can't store cookies, wouldn't have found links containing every time different session IDs . Just to better clarify, the way session IDs are generated on our system, is the standard way: if users have cookies enabled, a cookie called PHPSESSID is created which stores the session cookie. If the cookies are not enabled, session IDs are added automatically by the system to any link URL included on the page which could potentially cause the bots to find every time different link URLs with the session ID appended to them. Now, after 12 years, we are considering if this is still a valuable solution, or can it be detrimental or negative in some way? What are your thoughts about this issue? Thank you in advance for any thoughts. Fab.

    | fablau
    0

  • ALT Tags used strategically have always been a part of my SEO recommendations (relevant, under 7 words, not keyword stuffed but focused on primary page keyword). I have been getting mixed views on updates that search engines don't use them anymore in ranking determination. The Q&A on this subject was last addressed in 2011, what is the most recent approach on this?

    | MikeSEOTruven
    0

  • On the date 3rd of October we had almost 55 Keywords up and 44 almost down, Today after 7 days there is a severe drop 90 keyword is down, 7 only are up, and that's one website. My other website had 57 words up and 175 down. Our strategy in building backlinks: Directory submissions, article submissions and some blog commenting, we keep into consideration to choose only websites with high page rank (Page Rank 2 and higher). Also we had an updated on one of our websites since 1st of June a new URL structure, content, new pages and sitemap. Both websites has tons of keywords that we worked on increasing its rank and some we haven't touch them and its ranks was decreased. Does the new Google "hummingbird" have something to do with that? is there anything wrong with our strategy? Please provide us with your feedback ASAP.

    | ali881
    0

  • Recently, a lot of pages from our website have moved from page one or ranking number one, to page ten or something. We got a manual penalty message from Google Team, we removed a lot of unnatural links pointing to our pages and disavowed the rest. This got the penalty removed and we got a message from Google confirming the same. Before the manual penalty we were getting about 140,000 visits per day, after the penalty about 80,000. However, after Hummingbird or Penguin 2.1 all our ranks have vanished. We are nowhere in Google for our primary keywords and we getting like 40,000 visits per day. Most are direct or from sources other than Google. We had another look at the links we disavowed, a list of about 11000 domains, we found about 3000 domains to be good. We fixed the disavow file about one week back, but no changes in traffic since. We checking the domains again to see if we have missed more good domains in there; yes, we have. There are still a very few good domains in there. But we are not touching the disavow list; waiting to see the change for the last submitted. We have a dedicated user base, good liking on Facebook, all the stats in Analytics speak good, about 40% repeat visits about 30% direct. About 3000 people search for the site using our brand name as reported in Analytics. I doubt the on-page optimization, the pages could be over-optimized. But the on-page factors for other pages ranking for the keywords are similar. The keyword density is similar, so are the usage of headings and stuff. We have not made any recent changes to these on-page patterns. Our team is not able to figure out what could have gone wrong.

    | Develop41
    0

  • Hi all, We have a very odd occurrence with a client of ours. It should be noted that they had a penalty recently removed about 2 months ago after much work from our company. Recently they started appearing back on Page 1 Google for a semi competitive keyword term. We were very happy with this and so was the client. The the ranking improved with our work to position 5, which was excellent. Unfortunately what has been happening is they have been dropping out of the rankings completely for this semi competitive keyword for a few days and then reappearing in the same position. The client is checking daily and has noticed. I thought this is just a 'hangover' from the Google penalty and perhaps a one off occurrence, but it has happened about 3 or 4 times now and seems to be happening every couple of weeks. Can anyone shed some light on this behavior? I have checked Webmasters Tools and everything is fine. Thanks Jon

    | Jon_bangonline
    0

  • I'm looking for some current opinions on exact-match domains when it comes to ecommerce sites. I currently own an "OK" brandable domain in a specific ecommerce niche. The opportunity has now come along to own the exact match domain for this category. For example catfood.com Is it more advisable to focus on brandables these days? I know Google doesn't give weight to exact match anymore but is there still a correlation not causation factor to consider? IE: the links back would be more targeted possibly?

    | NoClueSEO
    0

  • If I manage get a client ranked for a localised organic search term on a county level. For example: "keyword - West Midlands" or "keyword - Hertfordshire" How high will the website rank for all the cities and districts within that county? I am going to give this a go but I was wondering if anyone else has had any experience with this?

    | Adnan.Hassan.Khan
    0

  • I recently landed a client about 2 months ago. About 1 month ago organic started to go down. I'm not 100% sure it's Google hummingbird. Has anyone else looked at their GA or GWT and seen a decline?

    | Francisco_Meza
    0

  • Hey guys, One of the sites I'm looking after took a hit with their rankings (particularly for one keyword that went from 6/7 to 50+) post-Penguin in May. Although, after cleaning-up the link profile somewhat we started to see some slow and steady progression in positions. The keyword that dropped to 50+ was moving upwards in advance of 20. However, a couple of weeks back, the keyword in question took another slide towards 35-40. I therefore wondered whether it would be best to submit a reconsideration request - even though the site did not receive a manual penalty. The website has a DA of 40 which more than matches a lot of the competitor websites that are ranking on first page for the aforementioned keyword. At this stage, I would have expected the site to have returned to its original ranking - four-and-a-half months after Penguin - but it hasn't. So a reconsideration request seemed logical. That said, when I came to go through the process on Webmaster Tools I was unable to find the option! Has it now been removed for sites that don't receive manual penalties?

    | Webrevolve
    1

  • Hi, I hope this isn't a dumb question, but I was asked by a local company to have a look at their website and make any suggestions on how to strengthen and improve their rankings. After time spent researching their competitors, and analysing their own website I was able to determine that they are actually in a good position. The have a well structured site that follows the basic search rules, they add new relevant content regularly and are working on their social strategy. Most of their pages are rated A within Moz, and they spend a lot of time tweaking the site. When I presented this to them, they asked why there are sites that rank above them that don't seem to take as much care over their website. For example, one of their main competitors doesn't engage in any social networking, and rarely adds content to their site. I was just wondering if anyone could shed any light on why this happens? I appreciate there's probably no simple answer, but it would be great to hear some different input. Many thanks

    | dantemple88
    0

  • I was quite happy with google keyword tool for basic and accurate searches for keywords. Can anyone suggests a new tool that will give accurate search volume on google ( country specific ) I am not interest in info for adwords, and find a keyword planner tool way out in traffic results, compared to Keyword tool. Is the keyword tool completely gone?

    | summer300
    0

  • http://awesomescreenshot.com/08d1s6aybc hi, my robots.txt is http://wallpaperzoo.com/robots.txt google says it cant read and has postponed the crawl.. its been 10 days and no crawl.. please help me in solving this issue.. this is save with http://hdwallpaperzones.com/robots.txt

    | toxicpls
    0

  • I just don't understand how we can have a  long list of 1's and 2's in google, but in Yahoo and Bing, some are close, some are in the 20's and some are not even in the top 50. Is there something that Yahoo and Bing care about, that google doesn't? I know about the meta language being more important for Yahoo and Bing than Google, so I added that. There's nothing I can do about the domain age, which I know is important to Yahoo and Bing. Is there anything else? thanks, Ruben [URL]]([URL=http://imgur.com/Vem594l][IMG]http://i.imgur.com/Vem594l.jpg[/IMG][/URL]) [IMG]](http://i.imgur.com/Vem594l.jpg[/IMG])

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0

  • According to mozcast: http://mozcast.com/ and to my own stats, Google had a pretty strong algorithm update on September 17. Personally I have experienced a drop of about 10% of traffic coming from Google on most of my main e-commerce site virtualsheetmusic.com. Anyone know more about that update? Any ideas about what changed? Thank you in advance for any thoughts! Best, Fab.

    | fablau
    1

  • Hi, all. Anyone else seen a massive increase in the Not Provided keywords in their analytics in the past couple of weeks. Probably related to this (source:http://searchengineland.com/post-prism-google-secure-searches-172487) _In the past month, Google quietly made a change aimed at encrypting all search activity — except for clicks on ads. Google says this has been done to provide “extra protection” for searchers, and the company may be aiming to block NSA spying activity. _ Other than the unreliable stats from WMT, there doesn't seem too many ways which we can now find out what is sending traffic to our sites!

    | GrumpyCarl
    0

  • Hi all, I see that a new wave of domains are to be released soon. We are not talking or 1 or 2 new extensions, but more like 700 new extensions on a TLD level. What's your views on their SEO value? thanks!

    | bjs2010
    0

  • Hi, I'm endeavouring to see what the Moz community thinks of the current situation I'm finding one of my domains in. This issue for me tends to span most of this year so it is not impulsive in nature and I'm hoping community member(s) may good solid insights into the issue that I may have not considered. My issue relates to the geo-location of a domain and the what the current level of priority this may be this year due to all the algorithm updates from Google. I have a domain located in the UK with pretty much a consistently high DA, PA and root level domain links profile higher than our competitors for our target keyword phrases. Our domain is also made up of more .edu and .gov links than the others and its Moz Trust is higher. This being the case we are ranked No.1 in the UK for that phrase - great! The problem: many of the competitors can be seen in Google.com and they outrank us. We outrank the same competitors with the No.1 UK slot in Google.co.uk but no where near in the US. none of the competitors in the Google.com have a higher DA/PA etc. many are not US companies Moz give's us an 'A' grade for the keyword phrase and there are no internal 'nofollows' only 'nofollows' to our social media sites on the home page. There is one H1 on the page that includes the phrase. We have many No1 US slots for our landing pages e.g. 'election mapping software', 'data presentation software','cancer mapping software'. Ironically the 2nd one we moved the site away from last year and now the home page makes no on page references to 'data presentation software'. Our rank for our target KW phrase fluctuates between 19-21 in Google.com. It moves up every so often, then along comes an algo change flagged in mozcast/algoroo and it gets knocked back down again! The issue seems to be around the home page of the site no other pages have this type of issue. Our page indexation with Google is at a healthy 87%. So is this a domain geo-location problem? If our domain was hosted in the US would that change things? How can these same competitors who we out rank in the UK outrank us in the US if domain location is not a major algorithm factor? If it is a factor then it screams online digital protectionism to me - I don't think that's right but it's an frustrated emotional response (for now). Please note, I am well aware of discussions in the past about the benefits of having your domain located in your target country. However I came to understand that these days that is less of an issue and that valued content, site authority, social signals etc. play a far more significant role in determining a site's SERPs. Just to add I do monitor the social signals of competitors and there is nothing that I would say is of a major difference to our own efforts. Any thoughts that I should consider or ideas are welcome. Many thanks in advance. David

    | David-E-Carey
    0

  • I am curious how brands that have implemented Google Sign in dealing with the organic encryption keywords. Have encrypted keywords increased after applying Google Sign-in?
    How are you dealing with the missing keyword information?

    | LNEseo
    0

  • Our website sells tickets for various events across the UK, we do have a LOT of old event pages on our website which simply say SOLD OUT. What is the best practice? Should these event pages be removed and a 301 redirect added to redirect to the home page? Or should these pages remain in tact with simply SOLD OUT on the page?

    | Alexogilvie
    0

  • I'm not sure what my client means by this question. I assume he's talking about "not provided" traffic. Is there something I'm missing? Thanks for reading!

    | DA2013
    0

  • For many localized search terms (City + Profession), I'm noticing that OpenSiteExplorer is reporting high numbers of backlinks for anchortext from Absolute internal links from that same domain. Now, I'm familiar with the difference in relative and absolute internal links but am wondering if this type of linking may be carrying a lot of weight for rankings. It may be a correlation over causation situation if it's more that those companies that are including absolute internal links for terminology are just doing a better job (generally) with internal linking... but I feel like this may be something worth digging into. Everything I have read says that search engines view absolute and relative internal links essentially equally but does anybody have their own insight on the effectiveness for these two types of internal links in regards to small local businesses who otherwise are getting basically no links at all?

    | Kirch
    0

  • Good day, I'm really struggling to get a client to appear in the Google Local map snapshot (on the right of the SERPs), even when their company name is Googled. I've tried everything including getting the main Google Local account verified, had some reviews put up, all the required and relevant info has been completed, yet their location and the map never appear. Any help out there as to how I can remedy this? Thanks

    | Martin_S
    1

  • I really would like to know if someone tested the importance of Social Media for Google rankings.
    Are there some sites who build authority only by doing good social media? 
    Ofcourse, I know it is all about the mix (content, linkbuilding, social media, etc.) but how important is it?  
    I know many sites who rank good without any form of social media, but I do not know any sites who do only social media and rank high. I hope there are some good cases which give good insight. ps. I know it becomes more and more important...

    | Seeders
    0

  • I have a relatively uncompetitive niche ranking around number 6 for my keywords.  Would getting a few links from some Moz  DA 80-90 and DA 90-100  sites help my rankings a lot? Some of the pages linking to me  from these sites might be deep in the site pretty far away from the home page with pagerank of "unranked" or a grayed out bar and these pages linking to me might not have many links at all other than from the internal links of the site itself and would have a Moz PA of 10 or 20.  Would these pass much pagerank or authority to my site or would they not be worth going after? These links to my site would be in context on a blog. Thanks mozzers!

    | Ron10
    0

  • We have a keyword that we show up in the #1 position for organically. However that number one position is a Maps blended search result and we are the first listing with link, address and phone number. This is a high volume keyword but we receive little traffic from it. Looking in Web Master Tools this is corroborated in showing that for this keyword our average position is 1.7, high volume of impressions but click through rate is 0.04%! Is it possible that people scroll past the first result when it is a Maps blended search result to go to the first "true" organic listing? Has anyone else seen this? Is there anything a website owner can do in this situation to increase CTR for your listing?

    | IrvCo_Interactive
    0

  • Example: http://www.domain.com.ph/property-for-sale/city/area/ (3 folders) Would it be great if we'll just use http://www.domain.com.ph/property-for-sale-area-city/ (All pages will be under 1 folder)? Thanks in advance! 🙂

    | esiow2013
    0

  • If I search for "hiking boots" and scan down the SERPs I see the following... Google reports "483 items" for the Zappos.com page. Google reports "Results 1 - 36 of 85" for the Shoebuy.com page (and that does not appear in their code). So, Google is obviously paying attention to the depth of your information or the number of items that you are showing.   If they think that is important enough to count and report in the SERPs, might they also be using that information as a ranking factor?? PRACTICAL APPLICATION FOR SEO:  If google is using this information, perhaps people should list all of their color, size, etc variants on a single page.  For example if you sell widgets in five colors, instead of making one page for each color, list all five on the same page.

    | EGOL
    1

  • I have not done any detailed studies on this but it seems that Google might be using low retail prices for specific items as a ranking factor in their organic SERPs. Does anyone else suspect this? Just askin' to hear your thoughts. Thanks!

    | EGOL
    0

  • Other than having a ccTLD domain and assigning your target country in Google Webmaster Tools' "geotargeting" feature, how big is the effect of having your site hosted in the country you're targeting? Is it really necessary? or it is just a small signal? Thanks in advance! 🙂

    | esiow2013
    1

  • Hello Mozzers! I've just been trawling through a website and noticed all of the images had their own URLs. There's a bespoke CMS and that's how it works with images... So out of 1447 urls, 1314 are images. Firstly, is this an issue / problem from an SEO perspective. If it is, how should I deal with it? Thanks in advance, Luke

    | McTaggart
    0

  • My site dropped from 1st to 5th Pagna google br mented in the key word, how can I find out why at and what to do to get back? He fell after he put the google analytic code on all pages of the site, it may have acid? Meu site caiu da 1º para a 5º Pagna do google br em tadas as palavra chaves, como posso descobrir o motivo e oque fazer para voltar ? Ele caiu depois que coloquei o codigo do google analytic em todas as paginas do site, pode ter cido isso ?

    | Guedes
    0

  • As the questions says. I've had some conversations with colleagues of mine and they definitely feel that search query volumes are being heavily affected by localised results - and even more so recently. So, for instance, you may have a Google UK rank of 3 for a keyword yet be hardly visible in other parts of the UK because of the localised-based results. Thoughts?

    | Webrevolve
    0

  • Hi, we have an old site hosted by company A. We rank for certain terms in google for certain brands and products. Now we have developed a new website on a new domain hosted by Company B. If we are 301'ing at brand/product/page level from old to new, who is it that should perform this job? Is it Company A or B, old or new? And does the physical website need to remain hosted for the 301 to work and for our SEO ranks on the old site to not fall apart? Company A think we can do an excel mapping doc for each link from old site to new. Hand file to Company A and they host this file (not the actual website) then we transfer old domain to Company A as well. Then the 301s will work fine. Yet Company B think we should continue hosting with Company A, keep the old physical site live and put the 301s in place. They say if the 301 link has content behind it then it will help or not take the chance of having the SEO affected? Who is right? Do you need the old website to remain live once 301s in place or can this 301 config file hosted on a domain be all we need to do? Any other ideas welcomed. Thanks

    | YNWA
    0

  • hi as i have mentioned in title.. my website images are not getting indexed in google image search engine.. out of 360 images only 5 got indexed from 3 days.. please help me out.. thanks

    | toxicpls
    0

  • So I noticed on a few of my clients wordpress tags (via moz) that there are canonical tags on URLs, pointing to that same URL. What is the point of that, and is it harming the website? Is this being done automatically via a plugin? Should I remove the canonical tags or leave as is?

    | WebServiceConsulting.com
    0

  • Hi, For example, some of the HTML improvements notices from GWT, says dupe meta descriptions or titles, for pages that have since been 301 redirected or had a canonical tag added. So, my idea is to force google to read it using "Fetch as Google" - hoping that it will now see 301 redirection or the fix we have implemented. Does this work? How long does it take? Lastly, should I just click the "fetch as google" or should I also click on the "Submit to index" button? Thanks!

    | bjs2010
    0

  • Hi guys, How often does Google Webmaster Tools refresh? Thanks, Ben

    | bjs2010
    0

  • Hello! We've been successful with over 40 clients and getting them to great results in our industry, insurance. We recently acquired a new client who had an existing website with prior SEO results a very spammy blog and many spammy links. We've removed many of the blog articles and links using the Google Disavow Tool We've been monitoring this site in a campaign on Moz, but we're seeing zero improvement week to week. Can someone put another set of eyes on this and see if we're simply just missing something? Results for all 30 of our tracked keywords, zero are in the top 50! I would guess this was an algorithm penalty, but it has been 3 months now since we've made the changes and nothing is changing... not even a little bit! Any help/suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated. Thank you and enjoy Labor Day weekend!

    | Tosten
    0

  • Hi all The root domain for our site, roadtrippers.com, has been disappearing from Google's search results. Subfolders and subdomains still appear, but our root domain isn't found at all. I believe I've verified this by searching "-inurl:trips -inurl:byways -inurl:support -inurl:blog -inurl:places -inurl:guides -inurl:destinations site:https://roadtrippers.com/" in Google and our root domain is nowhere to be found. This may or may not be related to another issue we've had, where the root domain is appearing with a seemingly rotating set of parameters. Sometimes it'll be ?mod=, sometimes it'll be ?tag=translation. Originally they appeared to simply displace our ranking root domain, but now they and our root domain are completely disappearing. Our dev team believes they fixed the problem with recent 301 tags to any unapproved parameter being added to the root domain, but this hasn't fixed the original problem. Any insight into this is greatly appreciated! Brandon

    | brandonRT
    0

  • Hello! I have a few URLs all related to  the same business sector. Can I point them all at my home domain or should I point them to different relevant content within it? Ioan

    | IoanSaid
    1

  • Seems like our Google rankings are improving on most sites, but BING took a big hit this month for many of the sites we working on.  I have never seen them drop like this before.  Anyone else seeing the same thing? I am wondering if it is because we are building a lot of brand links vs. keyword links and Bing still wants to see the keyword links. What have you seen?

    | netviper
    0

  • In GWT impressions are down 17%, clicks are up 57%.  Is it safe to assume that pages are ranking better for my site? We have earned a couple great links in the past month.. 5lDZEUJ

    | Theskimonster
    0

  • Hello, I know that Google says that you are supposed to make anchored text links nofollow on press releases, but what about just putting the site url itself (example.com) and making it dofollow? Is that okay?

    | WebServiceConsulting.com
    0

  • Is it bad to utilize a custom codebase for multiple websites? Does that play a factor within Google? Also, what about hosting sites with the same custom codebase on the same dedicated server?

    | WebServiceConsulting.com
    0

  • Was there a new Google update in the past couple of days.  Traffic on my test site has gone from ~ 1,000 per day to over 4,000 per day for no particular reason.  Most of the traffic is still coming from Google and is not the result of any new major links.  My keyword rankings also appear to be the same ...

    | Humanovation
    0

  • Buongiorno from 18 degrees C Wetherby UK... Client asks -  "My swedish site is http://www2.kingspanpanels.se/ how important is having the swedish suffix in the url with regards to rankings in Sweden?" I find these questions really challenging, its like the Hey if i change this url my SEO problems will be fixed, as if its that easy. So my question is - "How weighted is the url suffix / ccTLD in terms of SEO success for a territory / country" Put another way "If the swedish suffix .se was removed would it impact rankings in any way in Sweden?" Grazie tanto,
    David

    | Nightwing
    0

  • We own a site that lends itself extremely well to getting boat loads of links, only down side is that those on the boat are all bloggers. We are selling a product that retails for $6.89 per unit.  They are for women.  Our target market is any woman/girl who is between 14 and 50.  Even better, our cost per unit is only about $0.40.  So what we've been doing is sending them out by the hundreds to legit fashion blogs all the way down to blogspot mommy bloggers and the reviews have poured in, literally all of them positive. Moral of the story, we have a good product, and no shortage of bloggers that would be willing to write us up a legit, human written (by a red-blooded American none-the-less) on almost exclusively legit blogs.  We're not trying to manipulate what they say, how they link to us, what anchor text they use or anything.  We're just sending them product, asking that they do a review and give us a link and that's it. Our worry is that given the nature of the site and the product offering, it's going to be easy to get these legit blog links, but more difficult to get links that "aren't on blogs". Is this going to hurt us, or will Big Google be kind and realize this isn't shady manipulation.  It's legit part of our ongoing effort to get the word out. Further evidence that our campaign isn't to manipulate (although we all know we're in it for the links) is that so far 75% of our sales have been driven by these reviews.  A few of the bigger sites that have done reviews have each directly resulted in 10+ sales from that single review. So what are all ya'll's thoughts?  I suspect we'll be OK, but wanted some others to provide their views.

    | AarcMediaGroup
    0

  • Hi Mozzers, Second time poster here and still a major rookie with SEO. I run the website http://OrangeOctop.us/, it provides winning tips for video games such as FIFA, NBA 2K, NHL. All of the tips are written by experts and professional gamers. The site has been trying to rank for the term "NHL 14 Tips". To give you some more background info, the actual game, NHL 14, does not come out for another two weeks. I was just being proactive with trying to rank for a term that will be popular in the future. My Wordpress category page, http://orangeoctop.us/nhl14-tips/, ranked as high as #5 for "NHL 14 Tips", but it seems that as it gets closer to the game's release date, I get pushed further down the google rankings. In the most recent Moz crawl, my site just dropped 11 spots. Any recommendations would be appreciated.

    | orangeoctop.us
    0

  • Dear all, What is the best SEO solution for pagination? for example, what code do I need to put on these individual pages? /page-1 /page-2 /page-3 (final page) Thanks!

    | HMK-NL
    0

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