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Category: Algorithm Updates

Discuss algorithm updates and impacts.

  • Saijo.George


    I am trying to figure out why map listings gets split up this way. Some people gets their maplisting to the right while the generic map listing block is down after a few organic listings . Didn't they at some point of time club orgainc + map together so only one shows up in SERPs ? q2Foz.png

    | Saijo.George
    0
  • breezi


    We have a website builder that creates sites in sub-domains (i.e. yoursite.breezi.com) on every site we have included a badge that has anchor text and an image. My question is given the fact that we will include this on many if not most of the sites created inside our builder how will google treat backlinks with the same anchor tag/text from non relevant sites after the penguin update? I am concerned about the backlinks from non-theme related sites and it's SEO implications. Any help is greatly appreciated.

    | breezi
    0
  • parallelseo


    what relation does CPC and Competition have? i intend to purchase some high CPC domains, so i want to know what relation exists between CPC and Competition? should i always consider high CPC domains as highly competitive domains or they does have dependance on each other?

    | parallelseo
    0
  • smashseo


    Hi there Why if PR and DA are higher is this site lower in SERPS. Example: https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ie=UTF-8#hl=en&sclient=psy-ab&q=samsung+SF-4200+cartridge&oq=samsung+SF-4200+cartridge&gs_l=hp.3...13009.13824.2.14464.2.2.0.0.0.0.72.143.2.2.0.eiatsh..0.0.l4idQl3RGWc&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=69f1c60047c60e0c&biw=1045&bih=580 Pos 1 www.inkfactory.com/ink-cartridges/samsung/sf4200-series PR:1 DA:48 Pos 3 www.internet-ink.co.uk › SAMSUNG INK PR:25 DA:60 I though is you had top DA and PR you should out rank those below you?

    | smashseo
    0
  • joncrowe


    Anyone notice the love affair of Indeed and Google lately? Indeed is cannibalizing the top 30 SERPs for job related keywords. Seeing keywords where Indeed has 10-15 of the organic listings in the top 30. Compete.com is showing a +8% increase in search volume between in April and May. But it seems as if they really started to cannibalize the SERPS since the Penguin update at end of May. Any one else noticing this?

    | joncrowe
    0
  • BrandTastic


    Anyone else noticing that Bing & Yahoo are delivering widely different results in past week. Prior to that after they started using Bing SE it seemed like they were identical, but no more. I am using RankTracker and getting this on several web sites.

    | BrandTastic
    0
  • RobertChapman


    Something tells me I know the answer to this question already but I'd always appreciate the advice of fellow professionals. So.....fresh content is big now in Google, and i've seen some great examples of this. When launching a new product or unleashing (yes unleashing) a new blog post I see our content launches itself into the rankings for some fairly competitive terms. However after 1-2 weeks these newly claimed rankings begin to fade from the lime light. So the question is, what do I need to do to retain these rankings? We're active on social media tweeting, liking, sharing and +1ing our content as well as working to create exciting and relevant content via external sources. So far all this seems to have do is slow the fall from grace. Perhaps this is natural. But i'd love to hear your thoughts, even if it is just keep up the hard work.

    | RobertChapman
    1
  • TheSEODR


    I have been following a competitor's link profile on OSE for over 8 months. Their linkbacks have remained the same (3 follow, 9 nofollow links), all from low-quality directory sites. However, my competitor continues to improve in rankings  and is now #1 for competitive keyword searches. How is this possible? Is there a way to hide your link profile or links from OSE? Any tips are appreciated - Thanks!

    | TheSEODR
    0
  • bozzie311


    Lately I am noticing multiple listings for results seem to be fading away. Example is one domain being listed twice for a search phrase The Home page for example and an Internal Page. Is anyone else seeing this? Safe to say Google wants to see 10+ individual domains per results page?

    | bozzie311
    0
  • NoahsDad


    I've been contacted by several sites (a few in other countries) who would like to repost some of our articles on their site. A few of these are in other countries and they would like to translate them in their language. (we have a site about raising a child with Down syndrome so they are wanting to use our info to help people...not "beat us" in rankings, or anything like that.) I didn't know what the best practice on this was. I don't want to get dinged for duplicate content or have someone rank higher than me for my own article, etc. Just curious what the best way to go about this was. I'm also assuming the articles that are translated wouldn't be an issue at all since the content will be in another language. Is this right? Thanks!

    | NoahsDad
    0
  • snorkel


    First of all i want to introduce myself. My name is Jennifer and i am a webshop owner from the Netherlands (we sell plants/herbs products) I have a very important question (and i can`t find a clear answer on the internet). So i hope someone can help me, At this moment me and 4 other friends own each a seperate webshop. We all started the webshops 5 -7 years ago and work all in the same business. (plants/herbs). We talked last week, and we want to make one big company and combine all 5 company`s. All 5 webshops have a huge pagerank, lots of organic traffic and very good incomming links. We registered new domainnames and want to redirect the 5 "old" domains to one new domain to pass over the Google juice. Our new company is a multilanguage webshop and each language has its own domain. (for example) (www. plantsandherbs example .nl)
    (www. plantsandherbs example .de)
    (www. plantsandherbs example .de)
    (www. plantsandherbs example .es)
    (www. plantsandherbs example .fr)
    (www. plantsandherbs example .com) Does it harm us if we 301 redirect all the 5 "old" websites to the new webshop? And what is the best way to redirect the "old" webshops to the new one? I am afraid of a Google penalty because it maybe looks like we bought some domains to pass the juice to the new project.

    | snorkel
    0
  • phil_golfbutler.com


    Our website (http://www.golfbutler.com) has been running since April 2010. For the first year or so, traffic from the USA counted for more than 70% of the total traffic. Then for about 6-9 months the traffic incoming from the USA slowly declined to 40-50%. For the last 2-3 months the USA traffic further reduced to about 5% of the total traffic. All the while our content focus did not change much. It is still heavily targeting USA. All in all our traffic did not change much, other countries picked up the pace, particularly Canada. We are located in Canada but our server is hosted in the USA. Anybody has an idea why our USA traffic has declined so much? Since 50% of all golfers are in USA, I would expect at least 50% of our traffic coming from there. We do not run any online advertizing so this cannot be the issue. Thanks!

    | phil_golfbutler.com
    0
  • AdamMetrix


    I have a client who ranks #1 for all her branded keywords. Other than those keywords, she doesn't really have an objective with SEO other than to get her name out there. There are articles in some high end online magazines(think Forbes, Times, etc.) that mention her, and she wants those articles to show up when people do a branded keyword search for those magazines. She also wants those articles to show up when people Google her. Usually when I do SEO for a client, they have a site and they want that site to show up for a variety of targeted keywords. Has anyone run into people wanting to 1) SEO other sites to get them in the top 10 on their branded keywords and 2) get listed under other peoples branded keywords? Is this even possible? My gut says no but I feel obliged to look into it. Do I just build links to the articles with her keywords and hope for the best? I have no idea what to do with this client.

    | AdamMetrix
    0
  • iAnalyst.com


    Hey Guys, Seems so much has changed with international SEO I'm not sure what to do with our site. We have a huge site with many country level landing pages that perform very well on google.com searches (IE; keyword + Jamaica) etc. We are not using a .co.uk version of our site and now our rankings have plummeted in the UK. Should we just make a .co.uk with similar (or the exact same content) or is there some newer strategy to follow?

    | iAnalyst.com
    0
  • Force7


    Our site took a major fall on March 23rd, ie Panda 3.4 and then another smaller one on April 24th, ie Penguin.  I have posted a few times in here trying get help on what items to focus on. Been doing this for 13 years, white hat, never chased algos but of course learned as I went. As soon as the fall hit one expert said it was links, which I kinda doubted because we never went after them but we have some but only a handful in comparison to really good authorative links. I concentrated on cleaning up duplicate content due to tags in a blog that only had 7 posts (an add on section to the site) then focuses efforts on just going through and making content better. Had other overlapping content that I would guess would pass inspection but I cleaned it up. After 6 weeks no movement back up, another expert here said yes, he saw some bad links so I should check it out. So back to focusing on links, I actually run a report and discover questionable links, and successfully get about 25 removed. Low numbers but we have only about 50 that were questionable. No contact info on the other directories so I guess we are stuck. Here is where I just go in circles... When our site fell on March 23rd we had 13 of our main pages still ranking at number 1 and 2 on each keyword phrase. Penguin hit and they fell about 10 spots.  EXCEPT, one... This one keyword phrase and page stayed on top and ranked at #1 throught he storm. (finally fell to #4 but still remains up there). The whole site is down 90%, we only have 3 fair keyword phrases really ranking out of 250. The mystery is that the keyword phrase that was ranking was the one that supposedly had way over the % of anchor text, 7% of our links go to that page. The other pages that fell on Penguin had no pages linking back. I have been adding blog posts to our site, I post one an in a few days it gets indexed, have one of those ranking at #2 for the keyword, moved up from #4 a week after posting it in the blog. (google searches shows 80K) Just seems like the site should bounce back if new content is able to rank, why not the old? Did other people hit by Panda and Penguin see a sitewide fall or are they still ranking for some terms? I would love to see some discusson on success stories of bouncing back after Panda and Penguin. I see the WP success story but that was pretty sudden after it was brought to Google's attention.  Looking for that small business that fixed something and saw improvement. Give me hope here please.

    | Force7
    0
  • gazza777


    Hi all, I know Google will only show sitelinks if the site is deemed authoritive and if it will help the user searching a keyword, but is there anyway to order or control which links appear in the sitelinks? I know you can demote a sitelink in Webmasters, but is this not shooting yourself in the foot? If I demote a link will Google replace it with the next link it thinks is worthwhile and be doing this eventually show the links you want to appear in your sitelinks? Thanx Gary

    | gazza777
    0
  • annasusmiles


    I find addon domains really confusing. Everyone I've asked so far says that they don't affect SEO but I find that really hard to believe considering the same content is on both a subdomain and a subfolder and also has it's own unique domain. PLUS (in my case) completely different niche sites are sharing the same hosting. I really don't want to pay for hosting for all of my different sites but at the same time, if it's better/safer to do so for Panda/Penguin reasons I'm happy to do that. Thank you for your time. I look forward to your opinions/suggestions!

    | annasusmiles
    0
  • bubliki


    Hi All, Ho to add search box o the snippet, like in Openoffice.org snippet? http://goo.gl/TCv4I

    | bubliki
    0
  • vijayvasu


    Hello MOzzers, hope you are all well. Here is my question. Site : http://www.gunshotdigital.com Issue: Traffic In the past 3 days we have close to 300 Unique visitors, but today we just have 5. Totally confused as to why this might be. I know Matt Cutts hinted at algo change in 2 months. Our rankings are still steady. So could anyone help? 🙂 Thank you Mozzers, we love you and are flattered to be part of this formidable community. Vijay

    | vijayvasu
    0
  • JCDenver


    I have a theory that Google may be trying to be fair to white-hat-seo sites that are doing the right things with blogging, linking, social media, etc. [ie that deserve equal good positioning] are being cycled to and from the first page, perhaps in a weekly or monthly basis. My theory would be that they are purposefully doing it to give those sites more equal exposure. My case: I've had top rankings for http://thedogbitelawyer.com for almost all of the important terms for dog bite lawyers for a couple of years now. When Penguin came out we lost some ground across the board, and identified that perhaps there was too much duplicate content left over from when I inherited the site. I reworked the site wording and link structure a bit and gained back positioning. Since that time we are up and down like a yo-yo on the top terms! Anybody else have this suspicion? If it's true, I don't need to stress, if we are bouncing around for other reason's I'd better keep stressing!

    | JCDenver
    0
  • jessefriedman


    Is there any data on the implications of removing everything google from a site; analytics, adsense, webmaster tools, sitemaps,  etc. Obviously they still have their search data and they say they dont use these other sources of data for ranking information but has anyone actually tried this or is there any existing data on this?

    | jessefriedman
    0
  • inhouseseo


    I know that within the past couple of months, Google as made algo updates so that freshness of content is used as more of an indicator for relevancy, and hence, rankings. see: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/06/search-quality-highlights-39-changes.html I understand that freshness is important across the board, but it is obviously more of a factor for certain search terms. My questions is, how can you determine if your product category (ecommerce) is one where freshness is  becoming more of a factor? Is there any way to know which terms are considered to require fresher results? Any input is appreciated.

    | inhouseseo
    1
  • seoppc2012


    Hi everyone, I'm pretty new to SEOMoz, so my apologies if this is a very obvious question. I'm trying to find out how to do a report that shows both the ranking of my keywords as well as the monthly searches in Google or the other search engines. Is there an option for this? Thanks in advance!

    | seoppc2012
    0
  • DougRoberts


    Maybe I've been living under a rock, but I was surprised to see that Google had algorithmically modified my page titles in the search results by adding the company name to the end of the (short) title. <title>About Us</title> became  About Us - Company Name Interestingly, this wasn't consistent - sometimes it was "company name Limited" and sometimes just "company name. Anyone else notice this or is this a recent change?

    | DougRoberts
    0
  • TheGrid


    As you know, Google tracks CTR on keywords for your website visible through google Webmaster Tools. How much if at all do you believe this affects your rankings on the tracked keywords?

    | TheGrid
    0
  • luwhosjack


    Does anyone know if the new google ove optimisation penalties would be actioned for similar post titles? We have a back catalouge of our magazines online and each title is very simliar ie magazine name - issue number - month. These have been flagged up by the SEO Moz pro service as being duplicate content but although each post is laid out the same each has different content with int it. the titles however are all very simliar - is this a bad idea and also if so what would be a better way of grouping the posts so that the titles are different enough - would the main subject of each magazine included be enough? Thanks

    | luwhosjack
    0
  • BrianCC


    It looks like the change took place approx. 1-2 weeks ago. Example: A search for "business credit cards" with search settings at "never show instant results" and "50 results per page", the SERP has a total of 5 different domains in the top 10 (4 domains have multiple results). With the slider set at "10 results per page", there are 9 different domains with only 1 having multiple results. I haven't seen any mention of this change, did I just miss it? Are they becoming that blatant about forcing as many page views as possible for the sake of serving more ads?

    | BrianCC
    0
  • StreetwiseReports


    I have a client who came to me wanting to know what's next for her as she already ranks in the top 5 for hundreds of keywords. She is right, her rankings for her niche are excellent and there are no relevant keywords for her to try and go after. What would be next to generate traffic? p.s She also has links from just about everyone in the industry that's relevant There has to be more "tricks" to seo besides keywords and link building

    | StreetwiseReports
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  • Gordian


    I have been seeing some ranking and traffic drops on sites I monitor corresponding with the update Dr Pete wrote about with less domain diversity in SERPs (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-bigfoot-update-aka-dr-pete-goes-crazy). Does anyone have any practical advice as to dealing with this type of update. It seems like a lot of relying on Google to change the way the domain diversity falls and obviously trying to turn your site into more of the "big brand" that Google is favoring with updates like this. Anyways, would love to hear what people think. Thanks!

    | Gordian
    0
  • optimalwebinc


    One of our clients is in the top 3 spots on high volume keywords that get 20-70k hits in the US each month (per adWords keyword tool), but their daily traffic is in the low hundreds.  What's going on?

    | optimalwebinc
    0
  • bronxpad


    With search engines using adaptive search in their algo, what's the best way to reset? Currently I go to my browser which primarily is Safari second Firefox third Chrome, I empty the cache, clear history and remove all cookies and data. I also disable customerzation based on search history. Is this the best way of starting from scratch so my search results won't incorporate adaptive search tech? I also make sure I'm not signed into my gmail account since that can impact SERPS as well. What else should I be doing to make sure my search is not customized?

    | bronxpad
    1
  • biomat


    Hey, Before penguin, I had a #9 rank for the term "yoga poses".  So as many of us are doing, I started looking at my link profile... and yes, there were around 300 links from an old yoga news website (anchor: yoga poses)... that lead to the page on my site optimized for this term.  The problem is they took the site down, but not properly... I.E. they generate a "not available" message for browsers, but underneath, I guess the bots can still index all the pages... so I guess they were interpreting these links as coming from a cloaked site. So, I was able to get them to remove the links... webmaster tools reports half of them gone now. What I don't get though... is how Google can give this garbage page a #5 spot for a competitive term like "yoga poses"... Check out http://www.ebmyoga.com/beginyoga.html and compare it to my page...  http://www.yogaclassplan.com/yoga-poses/ This page leads to highly quality 100% unique yoga pose articles... in my mind we deliver so much more value than the site with a #5 rank. I don't understand.  Any insight? Thanks,

    | biomat
    0
  • luwhosjack


    After running a site analysis on here it has come up and said that I have a lot o pages with too many on page links and that this might be why the site is being penalized. Thing is I am not sure how to remedy this as one page that says it has 116 links is this one : http://www.whosjack.org/10-films-with-some-crazy-bitches/ Although there is only one link in the body Then again our home page has 165 http://www.whosjack.org which again it says is too many. The thing is is that surely it doesn't count on links all over the page as other wise every news homepage would be penalised? For example what would happen here on this home page? : http://www.dazeddigital.com/ Can anyone help me see what I am missing? Are there possible hidden links anywhere I should be looking for etc? Thanks

    | luwhosjack
    0
  • casper434


    Over the years I have head things like where a web host is located can affect local SERP and things like site load times can also have an impact. Looking for a new webhost company in Canada has been a frustrating experience. Far too much marketing and not enough objective assessment. Does anyone know where such objective advice can be found on the net? thanks

    | casper434
    0
  • Tz_Seo


    I own an EMD which was hit by google penguin. I lost my #1 position to Google US SERP and went to #5 for the keyword which applies to the EMD. What I have tried so far is deleting the exact anchor text links from the footers of my c-block sites. That did not seem to help because i did not gain any position from that change. I also altered my meta title, description and keywords because they were spamming a bit. Things did not improved. My  Links w/ Exact Anchor Text is at 5%, Linking Root Domains w/ Exact Anchor Text at 3% The web pages that are above me are to 0% to both categories because they are not showing up with their main page. What is going on? The thing that confuses me the most is that i am also targeting for two other markets, Australia and Canada. In Canada I have maintained my #1 and to Australia I lost my first position falling to #2. I did not receive any message to my webmaster tools account and never made any black hat link building. Is the EMD fact the problem, but why not for other markets except US? Penguin has run to other markets(CA, AU) as well becuase i have seen a drop to other keywords and also to my traffic. Really what do you think?

    | Tz_Seo
    0
  • Axis41


    I've demoted several sitelinks for one of our clients, but they are still showing up. They were demoted several weeks ago, so I would think that they would have been removed by now. I know that these demotions are merely suggestions for Google to follow, but they are usually good at honoring demotions. The issue is that our client hosts several job portals for clients on subdomains of their site and still need traffic going to these pages. Redirect workarounds have been suggested on the Google WM forums, but this is a unique situation. Personally, I think that because our client is an HR software company, Google sees the client job portal sites on their subdomain as still being relevant to the overall site, and won't honor the demotions because of that. Does anyone have any suggestions or experience with subdomains and sitelinks? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

    | Axis41
    0
  • rdominey


    I believe that Google sees our website: www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/
    as being guilty of keyword stuffing. I don’t see any specific tools on SEOmoz
    that will evaluate Keyword Density as viewed by Google. Just to be clear; I have not attempted to use KWS as a SEO tactic. I feel that the
    content of each page is written for the customer. I do realize that Google may
    see it differently. I think that I am being penalized for the use of the words
    Photo and Canvas. My domain name is “GetYourPhotosonCanvas.com” The business
    name is “Get Your Photos on Canvas”, the website title is “Get Your Photos on Canvas”, and each page of our website talks about Photos and Canvas. I have tried to
    vary the use of Photo with Pictures, Photographs, Prints, Digital Images and so
    on. It is difficult to vary the word Canvas.  I guess according to Google this paragraph
    would be guilt of Keyword Stuffing! I have conducted some tests on other SEO site tools and some indicate that KWS is
    a problem on my website. If you search a specific page title that contains either Photo or Canvas it does
    not rank in the top 200 on Google, although it is #1 or #2 on Yahoo or Bing.  Drop those two Keywords and the page shows up
    as #2 on Google. I think that is a good indication that we are being penalized
    for KWS. Pease take a look at our website and give me your opinion/advice regarding the Key
    Word Stuffing Issue. Do I need to rewrite my site content for Google?

    | rdominey
    0
  • Indexxess


    Hi, Did anyone see changes in their serps? There are more youtube videos appearing in the organic results?

    | Indexxess
    0
  • Craig210


    My site, graciousbridal.com was hit pretty hard by google at the end of April. I actually noticed our traffic decreasing around February, then towards the end of April, it got really bad. Our sales this may were half of what they were in may 2011. We have never done any black or gray hat seo, wouldn't even know how to. I know in the past we did blog commenting, but changed up our keywords so it wasn't all the same, maybe we didn't change it enough?? We have another very similar site that I'm now wondering if we were penalized because they are too similar. We always have changed up the copy, but they have most of the same products. This second site barely gets traffic or sales and has about half of the items graciousbridal does. But, I'm wondering now if it's to similar and that is why we were penalized. I can't figure out what we did wrong to have this big of a drop. I really need help with this as this is supposed to be our busiest season of the year. Any advice or direction is greatly appreciated..

    | Craig210
    0
  • Fuad_YK


    With hind site I understand that this could have been avoided if robots.txt was configured properly. My website is www.clearvisas.com, and is indexed with both the www subdomain and with out. When I run site:clearvisas.com in Google I get 1,330 - All junk from the development days. But when I run site:www.clearvisas.com in Google I get 66 - these results all post development and more in line with what I wanted to be indexed. Will 1,330 junk pages hurt my seo? Is it possible to de-index them and should I? If the answer is yes to any of the questions how should I proceed? Kind regards, Fuad

    | Fuad_YK
    0
  • Thos003


    I have a blog post I created and added a canonical to that page, yet the blog post is the one showing in Google's results and not the canonical version. Why is this?

    | Thos003
    0
  • FFTCOUK


    We have had a page which until recently was ranked first or second by Google UK and also worldwide for the term "Snowbee".  It is now no longer in the top 50. I ran a page optimization report on the url and had a very good score.  The only criticism was that I had used an atypical character in the url.  The only unusual character was an underscore "_"    We use the underscore in most file names without apparent problems with search engines. In fact they are automatically created in html files by our ecommerce software, and other pages do not seem to have been so adversely affected. Should we discontinue this practice?  It will be difficult but I'm sure we can overcome this if this is the reason why Google has marked us down. I attach images of the SEO Report pages 8fDPi.jpg AdLIn.jpg

    | FFTCOUK
    0
  • syndicate


    I just looked at a report for one of my sites in moz pro and Improvement: 35 slots 35/75 keywords just dropped on google, I didn't make any changes recently Ranking Changes Improvement: 12 slots 12 Improved Improvement: 35 slots 35 Declined Many dropping 5 - 22 places! Any ideas on whats up, thank fully it didn't effect traffic, its pretty low anyways, but it has stayed the same...  But still dropped to page 5 for lots of stuff. Strange. Did google just update or something? Thanks for any ideas.

    | syndicate
    0
  • comforteagle


    My URLs include dates: example.com/2009-05/post-about-something.html I know this isn't the 'best', but is there any reason to be concerned?  Some panda, duplicate content, google hates date in URLs, I should know about?

    | comforteagle
    0
  • Dave_Whitty


    We just overhauled our site and as I was auditing the overhaul I noticed that there were no h1's on any of the pages. I asked the company that does our programming why and he responded that h1's are spammed so much so he doesn't want to put them in. Instead he put in h2's. I can't find anything to back this up. I can find that h1's are over-optimized but nothing that says to skip them altogether. I think he's crazy. Anyone have anything to back him up?

    | Dave_Whitty
    0
  • Draftfcb


    Seems to me that this list should exist out there somewhere, but I can't seem to find it.  Am I just not as good of a Googler as I thought I was?

    | Draftfcb
    0
  • DanDeceuster


    At SMX during the You&A with Matt Cutts, Danny asked why the algo update was called Penguin. Matt said: "We thought the codename actually might give too much info about how it works so the lead engineer got to choose." Last night Google released their 39 updates for the month of May. Among them was this: "Improvements to Penguin. [launch codename "twref2", project codename "Page Quality"] This month we rolled out a couple minor tweaks to improve signals and refresh the data used by the penguin algorithm." Whoa, codename twref2 for Penguin improvement? Is this giving us an insight about how it works? I would guess the ref2 means second refresh perhaps. But tw I am not sure about. What do you think? Is there a hidden insight here?

    | DanDeceuster
    1
  • edu-SEO


    I'm trying to keep this a generic example, so apologies if this is too vague. On my main website, we've always had a duplicate content issue. The main focus of our site is breaking down to specific, brick and mortar locations. We have to duplicate the description of product/service for every geographic location (this is a legal requirement). So for example, you might have the parent "product/service" page targeting the term, and then 100's of sub pages with "product/service San Francisco", "product/service Austin", etc. These pages have identical content except for the geographic location is dynamically swapped out. There is also additional useful content like google map of area, local resources, etc. As I said this was always seen as an SEO issue, specifically you could see in the way that googlebot would crawl pages and how pagerank flowed through the site that having 100's of pages with identical copy and just swapping out the geographic location wasn't seen as good content, however we still always received traffic and conversions for the long tail geographic terms so we left it. Las year, with Panda, we noticed a drop in traffic and thought it was due to this duplicate issue so I added canonical tags to all our geographic specific product/service pages that pointed back to the parent page, that seemed to be received well by google and traffic was back to normal in short order. However, recently what I notice a LOT in our SERP pages is if I type in a geographic specific term, i.e. "product/service san francisco", our deep page with the canonical tag is what google is ranking. Google inserts its own title tag on the SERP page and leaves the description blank as it doesn't index the page due to the canonical tag on the page. Essentially what I think it is rewarding is the site architecture which organizes the content to the specific geo in the URL: site.com/service/location/san-francisco. Other than that there is no reason for it to rank that page. Sorry if this is lengthy, thanks for reading all of that! Essentially my question is, should I keep the canonical tags on the site or take them off since Google insists on ranking the page? If I am ranking already then the potential upside to doing that is ranking higher (we're usually in the 3-6 spot on the result page) and also higher CTR because we can get a description back on our resulting page. The counter argument is I'm already ranking so leave it and focus on other things. Appreciate your thoughts on this!

    | edu-SEO
    0
  • Webpresence


    Having just done a search on Google.co.uk for 'payday loans' I am baffled as to why the top two organic results (image attached) are even associated to the keyword. The KW isn't present in the title, metas, or content. Nor do any backlinks use relevant anchor text. I'm guessing this is an algorithmic 'f*ck up', do you agree? uGdk7Cw92Rme

    | Webpresence
    0
  • NeilTompkins


    Why do certain sites for example TripAdvisor rank for their multiple international sites e.g TripAdvisor.co.uk, TripAdvisor.com, TripAdvisor.fr, TripAdvisor.de etc for a English search phrase ? From my view point they are just spamming the index with the same content.  These searches are performed on google.co.uk

    | NeilTompkins
    0

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