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Category: Algorithm Updates

Discuss algorithm updates and impacts.

  • HispaZone


    Hello everyone. I'm in charge of the website HispaZone.com in which apart from many other things we provide free program downloads in spanish in a similar way to softpedia, tucows, cnet, softonic and others. I'm not a great SEO but I try to do my best. Several months ago based on my most important competence (softonic.com and uptodown.com) I decided that I would give a host name under the domain hispazone.com for the landing page of each program download. For downloading Nero for example the landing page would be http://nero.hispazone.com and like this for the whole of our 800 program database. The thing is that after 5-6 months since that change and after many other improvements, the traffic coming from google to these downloads dropped dramatically. We thought it could have been related to Google Panda but we recently hired an SEO consultant and he says that it's because of not having the downloads under the same host name. That we lose the page authority and the link flow from the hostname http://www.hispazone.com. The SEO consultant seems to be great, very up to date with all new changes in google. We made many improvements thanks to him and I can say that I trust him with everything. But now comes the time for deciding if we move our program download landing pages back to the www.hispazone.com hostname. I would like some second opinion about this because the fact that the biggest ones in Spain like Softonic and Uptodown have a hostname  for each program download when these companies invest really a lot in their SEO makes me be unsure of going back into having all under the same hostname. Thanks a lot.

    | HispaZone
    0
  • ZakGottlieb71


    I know that Google prefers a varied back link profile, and so it's ideal to get both - but I wanted to know, are followed back links from blog comments, forum posts etc. (i.e. The low-hanging fruit) weighted significantly lower by Google than links appearing within the of a page, for example? If so, is it possible to quantify by how much?

    | ZakGottlieb71
    0
  • 10JQKAs


    We've all seen it before, right before a result, you see "You visited this page on ____" What effect does a single visit have? Multiple visits?

    | 10JQKAs
    0
  • catherine-279388


    Hello SEOmoz members I've got   yet another naive question for you.  RankChecker is telling me that my client has risen to pg 1 position 7.  Whilst SERPs is telling me they are still on position 14.  I know that SERPs is variable depending on many factors, but this holds true for separate searches on other computers in various far flung locations. Please give me some insight into what is happening.  I'm waiting to open the bubbly! Thanks

    | catherine-279388
    0
  • footballearnings


    A website changed its platform from the old one to magento ecommerce. In webmaster tools google says that yesterday was the last time that crawled the site, but the old rankings for keywords are gone , traffic went down big time and now i'm not sure where to start working in order to bring everything like it was. any advice ?

    | footballearnings
    0
  • TheOceanAgency


    A colleague and I are discussing the most optimal URL structure for both search engines and users. Our first disagreement comes in terms of files. So for instance if I have a small site, www.abc.com, with a service landing page and 3 specific services, which structure is preferred? www.abc.com/services/service1 www.abc.com/service1 The second issue is in terms of breaking up words in the URL. Should you use hyphens or not? Using the first example, which is preferred? www.abc.com/services/home-remodeling www.abc.com/services/homeremodeling. I'm also looking for articles/case studies that support either side.  Thank you in advance for your help!

    | TheOceanAgency
    0
  • prunarevic


    Hi i own a website for movies, http://themovies2012.info. I wanna know how much visits will i get when i am on 1st position? Now aren't many searches, but in the near future, lets say june. How much visits will i get in june, on the keyword movies 2012, 1st position.... over 5000?

    | prunarevic
    0
  • ZakGottlieb71


    I operate a stain removal website and was wondering how consistent it was worth being from title tag to title tag. To give you an example, here is a group of keyword phrases that I might wish to target: "getting out pet stains with vinegar" "how do I remove water stains from wood" "removing chocolate stains" Does the benefit to be gained (whatever that might be) from making these consistently of the form "how to remove X from Y, " or "how to remove X" outweigh simply giving articles titles based on the exact phrases above? I heard from someone that Google is getting more proficient at spotting "clumsy" title tags, although I'm not sure if any of the above examples would fall into that category, and was thinking that I should then probably proceed on the basis of directly titling articles based on the exact keywords I am uncovering... Any advice much appreciated.

    | ZakGottlieb71
    0
  • mou


    Hi Having recently started with SeoMoz tools, I've started a link building project with a guest post strategy. One of the terms I've been working on 'property in spain' has been making steady progress.  From nowhere to mid page 2 on google.co.uk I checked today and our homepage masainternational.com (where the links were pointing to) has disappeared completely  from the results. Just not sure what's up.  Could we have been penalised?  I've not bought any links or done anything shady. Any ideas? Thanks guys

    | mou
    0
  • NeilTompkins


    Over the last 24 hours we've seen a drop in traffic to our website from Google.   Basically since Satursday 19th Nov the traffic has drop about 50% normal levels. The strange thing I noticed is that when you search Google for a search phrase the snippet Google is showing as the title is not the same as we have in a meta title tag on the page and this is across many pages, not just 1 or two. Anyone know why this is and what is happening ? Thanks

    | NeilTompkins
    0
  • SteveOllington


    I mean, like the complete opposite of what Panda is supposed to be doing... We've just had a discussion here and each went through a bunch of examples of sites that have sprung up and are ranking with the worst, spammiest backlink profiles ever, and poor content with little to zero on-page SEO. It's not accross the board by any means, and certainly there is no obvious pattern but there were a fair few examples we just looked at (I best not provide them for ethical reasons). It just "feels" like there's something going on...

    | SteveOllington
    0
  • DanDeceuster


    Over the weekend we learned Google co-founder Sergey Brin donated $500,000 to Wikimedia, the parent company of Wikipedia.com. Last year I believe Google donated $2 million to Wikimedia. I now ask, is this suspicious in anyway, seeing that Wikipedia ranks so well in Google for so many terms? There are several blog posts about it online here and there throughout the years, but what does everyone think?

    | DanDeceuster
    0
  • aran088


    The attached screenshot shows all. Panda update hit us hard = we lost half our traffic. Three months later, Panda tweak gave us traffic back. Now, this past Tuesday we lost half our traffic again and ALL our top ranking Keywords/phrases on Google (all other search engines keywords holding rank fine). Did they tweak their algorithm again? What are we doing wrong?? eartheasy.com wtf.jpg

    | aran088
    0
  • pbhatt


    An article (http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2011/11/18/step-up-your-e-commerce-seo-game-with-product-microdata.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter) is claiming that using this product micro data (http://schema.org/Product) might help product pages rank better. Do you have any experience using these tags and would it be worth the time to implement these on a site with 1000's of products? Would it make sense to selectively implement them on specific products that actually have a good chance of ranking high instead?

    | pbhatt
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi i am wanting my site to come up in the search engines under certain search words such as Hypno Band but i do not want the words displayed on my site. I would like to know if there is a way to let the search engines know that the page is relevant to the chosen keywords without having them on my site. I have been reading about anchor text and would like to know the best way to use these and the best way to let the search engines know that the page is rellevant to the keywords. any help would be great

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • AndrewSEO


    Does this mean that exact keyword phrase anchor text is not the dominating ranking factor anymore for serps?  http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/ten-recent-algorithm-changes.html If so what is the new most important factor?

    | AndrewSEO
    0
  • WhiteHat12


    A site I work on is ranked number 1 for a few keywords. To see how much a keyword is searched per month I rely on Google Adwords Keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). Using this tool I see that the keyword receives 880 local monthly searches and another keyword they rank #1 for receives 1300 local monthly searches. To me these keywords are not the biggest as far as traffic but they are not small by any means. Now here is the issue. Like mentioned above, the site nmber 1 for multiple keywords. They have been ranked number 1 for these keywords for months. Looking in analytics the other day I notice that on a month to month basis both of these keywords are getting 1, or 2 visits. This past month (October) one of the keywords did not receive ANY visits, and that is being ranked #1 for a 1300 monthly searched keyword. It just doesn’t make sense. I would imagine getting at least 100 or so visits a month from these search terms. Could someone please help me understand this a little bit better?

    | WhiteHat12
    0
  • Mike-i


    At our agency, we work with many local small business owners who often want to come up in multiple towns that are near to their business where they do not have a physical address. We explain to them again and again that with the recent changes that Google in particular has made to their algorithms, it is very difficult to come up in the new "blended" organic and Places results in a town that you don't have a physical address in. However, many of these towns are within 2 or 3 miles of the physical location and well within driving distance for potential new clients.  Google, in it's infinite wisdom doesn't seem to account for areas of the country, such as New Jersey, where these limitations can seriously affect a business' bottom line. What we would like to know is what are other SEOs doing to help their clients come up in neighboring towns that is both organic and white hat?

    | Mike-i
    0
  • qubesys


    I was just reading this, http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/220662 We have our official site, which has 200+ service pages, which we wrote once and we keep doing SEO for them, so they rank high all the time. Now my question is, how does Google handle the site freshness ? Service static pages or if we are adding blog items, then also they consider them as fresh site, right ? So, we dont have to update those service pages, right ?

    | qubesys
    0
  • onlinemediadirect


    the real time news feed style in which we all use the internet these days. How do you think this new change is going to effect things ? “This is the result of them saying we need to find a way to more effectively get fresh content up,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land and an industry expert. “It does help with the issue of people thinking, ‘Wow, if I need to find out about something breaking, I’ll go to Facebook or Twitter for that.’ ” Is google reacting to a massive loss of traffic volume from Facebook and Twitter ? I also ask the question would Facebook benifit from some form of built in search engine or would this never happen ??

    | onlinemediadirect
    0
  • MarloSchneider


    I would like to look at data or sources to get the most accurate measure I can on search engine market share. Does anyone have reliable sources on search engine volume/market share etc?

    | MarloSchneider
    0
  • babble


    mid august, i went from averaging about 7 million kb/day but since have been at about 800 thousand. time spent downloading each page went up maybe 30% but pages crawled stayed the same. apart from the speed issue, don't think we've done anything to trigger this (none of the usual suspects like link structure, errors, sitemap, or new code). any other ideas? and is this disastrous for my indexing or am i over-reacting. thanks for your help

    | babble
    0
  • syount


    I notice for certain site (ex: mint.com) that when I search, the top result has a very detailed view with options to click to different subsections of the site. However for my site, even though we're consistently the top result for our branded terms, the result is still only a single line item. How do I adjust this?

    | syount
    1
  • eVenuesSEO


    Hi all, I work for evenues, a directory website that provides listings of meeting rooms and event spaces. Things seemed to be chugging along nicely with our link building effort (mostly through guest blogging using a variety of anchor text). Woke up on Monday morning to find that our City pages have been de-indexed. This page: http://www.evenues.com/Meeting-Spaces/Seattle/Washington used to be at the top of page #2 in the SERPs for the keyword "Meeting Rooms in Seattle" I doubt that we got de-indexed because of our link building efforts, as it was only a few blog posts and links from profile pages on community websites. My guess is that when we did a recent 2.0 release of the site, there are now several "filters" or subcategory pages with latitude and longitude parameters in the URL + different page titles based on the categories like: "Meeting Rooms and Event Spaces in Seattle" --Main Page "Meeting Rooms in Seattle" "Classroom Venues in Seattle" "Party Venues in Seattle" There was a bit of pushback when I suggested that we do a rel="canonical" on these babies because ideally we'd like to rank for all 4 queries (Meeting Rooms, Party Venues, Classrooms, in City). These are new changes, and I have a sneaking suspicion this is why we got de-indexed. We're presenting generally the same content. Thoughts?

    | eVenuesSEO
    0
  • AndrewSEO


    My client is in the competitive Private jet charter space.  Why is my client's website, ranking higher for serps on bing and yahoo for competitive keywords phrases?  like Private jet charter as an example. http://www.jetcharter.com/

    | AndrewSEO
    0
  • SEOCM


    I previously had a domain with good ranking, but had to redirect this to a new domain for branding purposing and has only been around for 1 year instead 10 years like the previous. Does the weight of the entire pagerank from the old domain get transferred to the new domain?  How does Google handle this?  The old domain had a good keyword in the name, which help rank that keyword...does that keyword also get transferred to the new domain with Google?

    | SEOCM
    0
  • Olivier_Lambert


    Really interesting post by Search Engine Land about this "issue" for tracking conversion, especially for long tail keyword research. I suppose this change will be also applied on all google search pages (.ca, .fr etc.). I Really don't think Webmaster tools is a serious compensation in Analytics for this.

    | Olivier_Lambert
    0
  • Switch_Digital


    If a user searches using Google.com but is based in the UK, is it classed as a Google UK search or a Google US search in terms of monthly search volumes? Most of my clients are targeting UK consumers and often rank well on Google UK but outside the top fifty for Google US. I have mentioned that that is fine unless a client happens to use google.com. Am I talking rubbish?

    | Switch_Digital
    0
  • casper434


    I have heard a variety of thoughts on the importance of directories such as DMOZ. Any thoughts on this subject from the perspective of google search rankings?

    | casper434
    0
  • laidlawseo


    We have been updating page titles and meta descriptions for a client (not changing ANY links and the content we are replacing is "fluff," no major keywords or any relevant information) yet in the past few weeks, rankings have plummeted. I used the SEOMoz grader to check and make sure we have the keywords in there, in the right places for the updated page source info, and we're getting A's yet for those same keywords, the website is nowhere to be found. For example for the phrase "organic t shirts," we get an A for this page: http://greenpromotionalitems.com/organic-t-shirts.htm but when searching organic t shirts, no Green Promotional Items... Ideas?

    | laidlawseo
    0
  • jjwelu


    just launched a new site edenprairieexperts.com. The site jumped to the first page on yahoo and bing within a couple of days then fell off a cliff and isnt in the top 10 pages. Any reason for this? seems really strange for me. The only think I can think of is I got some really poor quality back links from someone screwing with me. If someone could take a glance at the site or give me some general direction I would appreciate it.

    | jjwelu
    0
  • Mariannag7282


    Is there a way to check the percentage of clicks on specific websites based on searches that people do?  For example, say I searched "sneakers", what percentage of viewers clicked on a particular site.

    | Mariannag7282
    0
  • JasonHegarty


    Hi everyone First off for local seraches I rank very well pretty much all on first page and high up too. I am also attempting to rank well for the search term 'independent mortgage advice' I currently rank third on page 2 for the above search term. I am happy with this progress as the site is only 3 months old. I am UK based, have a .co.uk domain and although my site server is located in Germany (1and1) I have changed the geographical location in webmaster tools. My competitive domain analysis gives me the follwing results: Domain Authority: 14 Domain MozRank: 2.44 Total Links: 110 Ext. Followed Links: 19 Linking root Domains: 13 Followed Linking Root Domains:9 Linking C-Blocks: 8 Compared to my competitors around me these figures are terrible so why am I doing relatively well and how can I increase some of these figures such as Domain Authority & Domain Mozrank? The page I'm referring to is http://www.keystonemortgages.co.uk I am a novice so please don't mind calling me a numpty if it appears obvious to you Jason PS is it frowned upon to post links with title keywords here?

    | JasonHegarty
    0
  • 9Studios


    We're investigating a mobile version of our e-commerce site.  Is it worth the investment regarding search engine optimization, or is this something that wouldn't have a big effect?

    | 9Studios
    0
  • znotes


    One of our big natural search competitors for gift keywords is Gifts.com. We are competing for many keywords like "teen gifts",  "gifts for him", "gifts for her". For many of these, the Google SERP has multiple Gifts.com pages on the first page. I have never seen more than one of our pages (uncommongoods.com) on  a SERP page. Any clue how/why Gifts.com has multiple pages in search results ? Thanks!

    | znotes
    0
  • PeterSEO


    Hello I am reading SEO ranking factor (very good informations) and I want to ask: what does it mean: of linking C bloks to page I think that: how many(#) links from the same server (C block) links to your homepage or some pages of your web... of linking IP adresses to page how many web links are going to my web and every links are from another server. if I understand it good, it is no different between, if you have links from webpages in one server (one C block) or from webpages on another servers as your web is,  because both correlation is  0.25... THX Could anybody expalin me, what does it mean:  # of External Links w/ Partial Match Anchor Text http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-5 The number of external links and all these external links contain partial match anchor text from my query: (I am finding in Google "tennis" and see in SERP domain www.usta.com. # of External Links w/ Partial Match Anchor Text: tells me the number how many external links contain partial match anchor text "play tennis, tennis school, tennis info..."? )

    | PeterSEO
    0
  • GravitateOnline


    We have a client who has occupied the top spot on Google for the past several months. According to the Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool, this keyword should generate around 5,000 Global and Local Monthly average visits. Trends show this keyword has consistent month over month traffic. The keyword search type is broad match. When we look at analytics, they're only getting 5 visits per month. Shouldn't the top spot get the lion's share of traffic? We've noticed this trend on several of our clients whose traffic doesn't really increase proportionate to the estimated search volume that Google returns in the Adwords tool. Ideas? We see the estimated traffic and tell clients, "Once we get you in that top organic slot, you'll get most of that traffic," but it's not correlating. Thanks so much.

    | GravitateOnline
    0
  • apo11o177


    Any downsides to having multiple (similar) eCommerce sites linked to the same Google Analytics account? Traffic splitting or other penalties? I've heard a range of answers from "Yes, traffic was split between my two first-page ranked sites, it was awful" to "no, Google couldn't care less/ they'd be able to tell if your sites were related outside of having them in the same account anyways" Any info would be much apprecaited 🙂 Thanks!

    | apo11o177
    0
  • APICDA


    So, There are no stupid questions right? I am thinking about adding my website to a number of business directories and websites. I have added it to several sites which do not charge a listing fee. There are several sites out there which  charge anywhere from 10 dollars to hundreds of dollars. My question is: Is there a way to figure out ahead of  time the cost/benefit relationship between the price paid for several listings....... and the likely increase in page rank due to the increase of links to the website. Or what number and quality of links I may need to aquire in order to increase my page rank? I appreciate all the help this community has provided in the past.  While my website is not ranking the best.........  its a solid contender! Thanks for your time and consideration in this matter.

    | APICDA
    0
  • BostonWright


    Can someone point me to a list or just tell me specific search bots that use referrers?

    | BostonWright
    0
  • Understudy


    Anyone know what can be done about this when it happens to one of your own domains? On the Google SERPS page, underneath the Title, next to the Description, Google has added "Block all results from this domain?". I understand that this is a new "feature", aimed at allowing users to filter out results from low quality, pornograhphic or offensive sites. But the site in question is none of the above - any ideas how to tackle? Couldn't find anything yet by searching.

    | Understudy
    0
  • fleetway


    I'm just wandering is there any difference when we use "Cheap Holidays to Egypt" or "Cheap holidays to Egypt". It is easier for users to read first option but would the second be more relevant for crawls?

    | fleetway
    0
  • jleanv24


    I'm trying to compete regarding keyword X. Currently, I'm on first page, 7-8th position. If, for each one of the urls listed in first page for such keyword, I search for related:[url], I get similar results for all of them, but mine. Mine shows inconsistent results, none of which related to the same topic as the other 9 in the top 10. Looking at them, the only hypothesis I am able to formulate is that, somehow, google is linking the url to its paid banners in big media. However, such banners go through an adserver and/or are declared as nofollow. Is there any obvious reason that could be causing this? I wonder if we are on page 1 even though we're considered pretty-much 'off-topic' regarding the keyword.

    | jleanv24
    0
  • Assembla


    robots.txt is forbidden - I have read up on what the robots.txt file does and how to configure it but what about if it is not able to be accessed at all?

    | Assembla
    0
  • Mariannag7282


    I made a few changes to my website which bumped it up to 3rd place for the main keyword and brought it up to the first page for some of the other keywords.  I saw a spike in traffic and conversions for 2 days, but now it went down significantly again. How can I research the cause of this?

    | Mariannag7282
    0
  • bonnierSEO


    Is there any data out there that tells the % of CTRs sites get on mobile SERPs? Thanks!

    | bonnierSEO
    0
  • POSNation


    Yesterday at about 5pm I switched our site to a new server and accidentally blocked our site from google for the evening. our domain is posnation.com and we are ranked in the top 3 in almost all pos related keywords. When i got in this morning i realized the mistake and went to google web tools and noticed the site was blocked so i went to  fetch as google bot and corrected that. Now the message says: Check to see that your robots.txt is working as expected. (Any changes you make to the robots.txt content below will not be saved.)
    robots.txt file    Downloaded    Status
    http://www.posnation.com/robots.txt    1 hours ago    200 (Success) When you go to google and type "pos systems" we are still #2 so i assume all is still ok. My question is will this potentially hurt our rankings and should i be worried and is there anything else I can do.

    | POSNation
    0
  • tatermarketing


    80% of my site's organic traffic is coming through a resource that is only somewhat related. Does Google think the main topic of my site is terms this resource targets thus bumping the terms I care about to a sub-topic level of sorts? If this is the case, would putting the resource information into a sub-domain help to solve the problem?

    | tatermarketing
    0
  • daizar


    what is the ideal range of keyword density?

    | daizar
    0
  • MichaelWeisbaum


    I know that's vague, so let me specify.  I recently got a client on the second page for a relatively difficult 2 word keyword.  That is when the location is set to Chicago, Il in Google and private browsing in Chrome (so I'm not logged in).  This is great because Chicago is the more important location (the client is located there and that's what his location is when he searches in Google).  But when he goes home to the suburbs and searches, the ranking completely disappears.  Why would he rank in a much more desired location such as Chicago vs a suburb way out of the city?  Is that something you can control or target in terms of optimization?  It's difficult trying to explain why this is happening to clients.

    | MichaelWeisbaum
    0

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