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Category: Algorithm Updates

Discuss algorithm updates and impacts.

  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi I would like to know if Bing is an important search engine for traffic. I have submitted my site to bing http://www.chesterhypnotherapy.com which is currently off line as i have just transfered it to a new hosting company and i have found in the past that i get very little traffic from it. On average i would say i get around five a day where as with google i gets lots of traffic. I have submitted a site map to bing but that has not increased traffic. Can anyone let me know for bing is an important search engine if you are targeting customers from the UK and if it is, does anyone have any ideas of how to increase traffic through bing

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • mhare777


    Hi! Question... How do you maintain silo site architecture while working with very large inventories/huge selection of products? I am trying to keep things somewhat close to the root domain name but with all the products I find myself building sub-folders sometimes 4 off the root. For instance, I am working on a motorcycle niche and my structure planning is coming out a little like this... www.motorcyclesite.com/honda/cbr1000rr/2004-2005/product1.html This is as far as it goes, but I've always been under the opinion that the further google has to crawl to finally get the product is a major no-no. Keep it organized, siloed, and as close to the root as possible. (ie...motorcyclesite.com/honda/product1.html) Any suggestion for larger inventories like my own? Thanks for all that you do! Mike

    | mhare777
    0
  • joshfialkoff-77863


    Does anyone have authoritative information on how Google determines which links to use as sitelinks? I thought I saw that Top Landing Pages was a metric Google used (in part).

    | joshfialkoff-77863
    0
  • MichaelWeisbaum


    How come links sometimes show up in OSE or Yahoo Site Explorer and then when you go to the page, they're not there anymore?  Why is a link indexed or considered active but is no longer on the page?

    | MichaelWeisbaum
    0
  • ojkingston


    I have several situations where one of my sites rank organically in 4th or 5th place for a specific search term relating to a 'big brand' .. I usually fall in behind the brands main website .. commercially this is very good for me. Let me give you an example .. in google.co.uk type in 'thomas cook exchange rates'. I rank position 4 (comparecurrency.co.uk). Position 1-3 are thomas cook's own pages. Naturally. However, my question is .. could I outrank them and how could I initially measure the effort involved in getting to position 1? I noticed Google recently put me into position 1 for this term and then quickly (within a few days) pulled me back down to position 4. Does anyone have any experience of this type of search positioning and have any information that may help me? My gut feel is that I have maybe maxed out the economically viable potential of these keywords and that I should invest my SEO $s into other phrases? Thanks in advance Olly

    | ojkingston
    0
  • MichaelWeisbaum


    I made some on-site changes to a site last week, in particular their page titles.  This was all done on the same day at the same time.  Now, one of those pages, got re-indexed  on August 8th and has my updated changes, which also helped with my ranking.  The other page I made changes to still shows a cached version from July 27th, which is before I made the changes.  Why wouldn't google have an updated page from August 8th for both pages, not just one?

    | MichaelWeisbaum
    0
  • DiamondJewelryEmpire


    Just as topic states, how important do you think domain age is? Do you think getting old domain for the new website will do any difference? Lets say website A used to sell apples... went out of business after 5 years of business. If I would get that domain and will star selling apples again can I expect some extra boost because of the age? Cheers

    | DiamondJewelryEmpire
    0
  • dbuckles


    .

    | dbuckles
    0
  • SamanthaRiggien


    Hello fellow Mozzers, first of please go easy on me as this is my first ever post ! I have a question regarding Sitelinks. Obviously I am pleased to have 8 Sitelinks now appearing in my GWT account. However one of my sitelinks has an obscure title of 'FIRST' which to the person searching will mean nothing - the actual link to one of my site pages is a good one and i dont really want to 'block' it in GWT and just wondered if anyone had any ideas what might be driving Google to 'auto-detect' the word 'First' for the link in question. The following 'google search example' link will show you what i mean http://www.google.com/search?q=where2stay&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a My result is the first one on the list. Any help from fellow mozzers is much appreciated. Many thanks

    | SamanthaRiggien
    0
  • JetBookMike


    Hi guys, just a quick query this one. For one of our keywords, the rankings are fluctuating wildly. One week we went up 32 spots, then the next friday we were down 28. Nothing dramatic was being done to the site, I have not been trying to "force" any rankings instead focusing on just making our content better. It just seems odd that one week we're on page one, then a few days later we're down on page four. It seems impossible to actually maintain a reliable ranking. I know to expect some fluctuation but every week it's up 20/30, then down 20/30 the next. How can we try to give this keyword some stability? Ideas?

    | JetBookMike
    0
  • Dan-Petrovic


    In May I announced test results for domain hyphenation but after a 3 month followup the results have changed and the hyphenated domain now wins on what seems to be the first link instance advantage. I was unable to discover any other factors which may have influenced this test but if anyone has any ideas I would like to hear about it. Here are the details of the SEO test and revealed URLs.

    | Dan-Petrovic
    1
  • RyanKent


    A question was previously asked about geo-location and specifically if Google crawled from other countries. I could not locate the original question but wanted to share the below information. As of earlier this year Google only crawls from US IP addresses: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7paVYBgH0Hw

    | RyanKent
    1
  • Dan-Petrovic


    Toolbar PageRank updates seem quite frequent this year. When they did the re-update in July after Twitter stuff-up I thought they were going to settle down for a while. Now in August there is a new one. From what I can see the data is refreshed and the snapshot seems to originate from at least 29th July with the calculated values as recent as 25th July. I wonder why they're doing this and what they are up to...

    | Dan-Petrovic
    0
  • danlae


    Hi cant find the right term or word for it but  google seems to personalize my search results according to my previous searches so that the rankings i get for a certain term isnt correct. Can i turn that off somehow ?

    | danlae
    0
  • James77


    Hi, I've been monitoring my referral URL's coming in and today noticed they had changed. Previously when I clicked one it would be the google search result page - however now they all seem to be like this: http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=7&sqi=2&ved=0CHEQFjAG&url=http://www.mysite.com&rct=j&q=my%20keyword&ei=Bvc3TrbgB5G0hAfvqoSvAg&usg=AFQjCNFONDCPJDl3d2PYceYvale_cL7s4Q All these URL's immediately redirect to my website pages. Do you know what they are - they seem to be tracking URL's of some sort I am thinking?? Are they trying to analyse my site with respect to certain keywords?? Thanks

    | James77
    0
  • Mediative


    If we are getting clicks from a local one box as a citation in the serps's
    would we see this as the referrer in GA?

    | Mediative
    0
  • JoeAmadon


    I've noticed some significant changes in the number and percentage of indexed URLs for the sitemaps we've been submitting to Google. I've been tracking these numbers directly from Google Webmaster Tools>Site Configuration>Sitemaps. We've made some changes that could be causing the changes we're seeing, but I want to confirm that this wasn't just a change in the way Google reports the indexation. Has anyone else noticed major changes, greater than a 30% change, in the indexation of your sitemaps in the past week? Thanks, Joe

    | JoeAmadon
    0
  • JetBookMike


    We are ranked, according to Moz (and we've tested to back it up) #3 on Google UK for the keyword "Hire a Jet". According to Google, this keyword gets 22,500 local searches per month. Yet we get about 5 hits a month for that keyword. Any ideas why this is so low? It just doesn't add up or make sense whatsoever.

    | JetBookMike
    0
  • nicole.healthline


    I'm wondering how sites break news without dedicating too much time researching. Are there any tools that you use? For example, if you wanted to be one of the first people to know when a celebrity was diagnosed with a health condition, how would you go about doing that?

    | nicole.healthline
    0
  • brianmaher


    Can i anyone suggest good SEO ipad/iphone tools?

    | brianmaher
    0
  • RiceMedia


    This seems pretty odd to me.  HTML 5 is not validating lots of the typical META content - including, amongst others, the META title.  This is typically seen as a standard 'must-have' for many SEOs, including the check-list on SEOmoz. Has anybody else had this issue?  And of course, did you find a solution? Thanks, Mark

    | RiceMedia
    0
  • Jordanrg


    I am having a problem developing a sitemap because I have long URLs that are made by zend.  They go like this: http://myagingfolks.com/professionals/20661/social-workers/pennsylvania-civi-stanger Because these URL's are long and are fed by Zend when I try to call them all up, to put on the sitemap, the system runs out of memory and crashes. Do you know what part of a search result, in google, say, comes from the URL?  Would it be fine for me to submit to google only www.myagingfolks.com/professionals/20661.  Does the crawler find that the URL is indeed http://myagingfolks.com/professionals/20661/social-workers/pennsylvania-civi-stanger or does it go with just what the sitemap tells it?

    | Jordanrg
    0
  • clickangel


    I'm not sure if anyone has tested this properly but i'm begining to suspect that google is using site usage statistics as a site quality guide and ultimately as a ranking variable. The this what i've seen so far on one of my sites (site A) Week 1= bounce rate (83.88%), Avg time on site (0:0:57), Pages/visit (1.28) no changes made to the site apart from the usual link building. Week 2:  Traffic drops by 30%, Keywords generating traffic drops by 39%. Bounce rate (87.25%), Avg time on site (0:0:43), pages/visit (1.21). I replaced all affiliate links on my homepage to internal pages where the chunk of the content is and did a reconsideration request. Week 3: Traffic goes up by 30%, keywords generating traffic goes up by 65%, Bounce rate (30.41%), Avg time on site (0:3:02), Pages/visit (3.74). This is not the most scientific test but surely google must be using these variables and a ranking factor? Anyone seen something along these lines or have thoughts on it?

    | clickangel
    0
  • Stinkyink


    I'm trying to get to the bottom of the bounce rates of a few of the keyword results on my site. I think I'm getting traffic to an informative page and visitors are reading it then hopping back to Google to search for the terms I've just given them and I'm getting high bounce rates for this. I'll use an example to make it clear. A Google search for "hp 3050 ink" gets my HP 3050 printer page (A page that lists all the cartridges that will work in a HP 3050 printer) as a pretty good result. So far so good, right? My problem comes when I look in analytics and see that this page has a massive 80% bounce rate. The only reason I can think of is that people are using my site to find out what cartridge a printer will take and then using that information to refine their search. Am I over looking something? Is there anything I can do? Does it even matter? If it does is it really fair that my site is being punished for being a useful resource? Thanks in advance

    | Stinkyink
    0
  • BrandonC-269887


    What is the difference between the Google Directory and the DMOZ if any?

    | BrandonC-269887
    0
  • Qasim_IMG


    Hello fellow SEO's, I'm working with a new client who owns a property related website in the UK.
    Recently (May onwards) they have experienced significant drops in nearly all non domain/brand related rankings. From page 1 to +5 or worse. Please see the attached webmaster tools traffic graph.
    The 13th of June seemed to have the biggest drop (UK Panda update???) When we copy and paste individual +20 word sentences from within top level content Google does bring up exact results, the content is indexed but the clients site nearly always appears at the bottom of SERP's. Even very new or small, 3-4 page domains that have clearly all copied all of their content are out ranking the original content on the clients site. As I'm sure know, this is very annoying for the client! And this even happens when Google’s cache date (that appears next to the results) for the clients content is clearly older then the other results! The only major activity was the client utilising Google optimiser which redirects traffic to various test pages. These tests finished in June. Details about the clients website: Domain has been around for 4+ years The website doesn't have a huge amount of content, around 40 pages. I would consider 50% original, 20% thin and 30% duplicate (working on fixing this) There haven’t been any signicant sitewide or page changes. Webmaster tools show nothing abnormal or any errors messages (some duplicate meta/title tags that are being fixed) All the pages of the site are indexed by Google Domain/page authority is above average for the niche (around 45 in for the domain in OSE) There are no ads of any kind on the site There are no special scripts or anything fancy that could cause problems I can't seem to figure it out, I know the site can be improved but such a severe drop where even very weak domains are out ranking suggests a penalty of some sort? Can anyone help me out here? hxuSn.jpg

    | Qasim_IMG
    0
  • AdamThompson


    I have a website that I'm working with that has had the misfortune of gaining rankings/traffic on Google, then having the rankings/traffic removed...3 times! (Very little was changed on the site to gain or lose "favor" with Google, either.) Notes: Site is a mixture of high quality original content and duplicate content (vacation rental listings) When traffic crashes, we lose nearly all rankings and traffic (90+%) When traffic crashes, we lose all rankings sitewide, including those gained by our high quality, unique pages None of the "crash" dates appear to coincide with any Panda update dates We are working on adding unique content to our pages with duplicate content, but it's a long process and so far doesn't seem to have made any difference I'm confounded why Google keeps "changing its mind" about our site We have an XML sitemap, and Google keeps our site indexed pretty well, even when we lose our rankings Due to the drastic and sitewide loss of rankings, I'm assuming we are dealing with some sort of algorithmic penalty Timeline: Traffic steadily grows starting in Jan 2011 Traffic crashes on Feb 19, 2011. We assumed it was due to a pre-panda anti-scraper update, but don't know. Google sends traffic to our site on March 1, then none the next day On June 16th, I block part of the site using robots.txt (most of the section wasn't indexed anyway) On June 17th, Google starts ranking our site again. I thought it might be due to the robots.txt change, but I had just made the change a few hours ago, and Google wasn't even indexing the part of the site I blocked Traffic/rankings crash again on July 6th. No theory why. Site URL: http://www.floridaisbest.com Traffic Stats: Attached I know that we need more backlinks and less duplicate content, but I can't explain why our Google rankings are "on again, off again". I have never seen a site gain and lose all of its rankings/traffic so drastically multiple times, for no apparent reason. Any thoughts or ideas would be welcome. Thanks! t8IqB

    | AdamThompson
    0
  • BobGW


    What's the best way to determine the age of a site? Where by it's beginning I mean when it went through the Google Sandbox and has been a functioning site every since. Thanks!

    | BobGW
    0
  • DanDeceuster


    I just went to my campaign to check on rankings, and my Bing rankings are wildly different from my Yahoo rankings. None of the keywords are even close, every one is very different. Anyone know what is happening here? Shouldn't they still be the same?

    | DanDeceuster
    0
  • sarenausa


    Hello to everybody, We'are thinking about launching a massive amount of satellite websites in order to promote our website. Is it really efficient in terms of link building? Or is the ROI really small due to the amount of time and money needed to create and manage these websites? Thanks a lot!!! Update: Thanks to all of you for all these interesting answers!

    | sarenausa
    1
  • GenericTrade1


    How does SEOmoz help in increasing my page rank on google?

    | GenericTrade1
    0
  • gbssinc


    Hi all, After Panda update our website lost about 45% of it's traffic from Google. It wasn't an instant drop mostly it happened gradually over the last 5 months. Our keywords (all of them except the domain name) started to lose positions from top #10 to now 40+ and all recovery attempts we have done so far didn't really help. At this moment it would be great to get some advice from the top experts like you here. What we have done so far is that We have gone through the all pages and removed the duplicate / redundant ones. We have refresh the content on the main pages and also all pages now have an canonical tags. Our website is www.PrintCountry.com. Thank you very much in advance for your time.

    | gbssinc
    0
  • blahblahblah2015


    Hey all, So I heard Rand  Fishkin speak the other day at an event in Palo Alto and I tokk anyway an interesting little concept from the day. He mentioned that there might be some overall ranking benefits to having people search for your company's brand and hence arrive at your home page root URL. I was thinking and I'm going to put into place a little test to check this out, does anyone know if search results as a whole are positively affected by having a large number of searches for your company's brand name? I've referred to this in the past as "Branded Search" but perhaps there's another term... I'm interested in running a test whereby I actually remove our URL from the web almost entirely. From social media profile and potentially even from our business cards and instead replace this with "Google Us" or "Google: Junction Marketing". 25907011

    | blahblahblah2015
    0
  • Entrusteddev


    Hi Mozzers, Has anyone noticed a Google update on the 6th July? A price comparison site I optimise has fallen off the SERPs for most generic terms, however still getting traffic for longer tail phrases. Cheers Aran

    | Entrusteddev
    0
  • Thos003


    If your URL string shows up in a search and they +1 the URL with the coding in it will the +1 transfer to the canonical page? Example: site.com/locations/arizona/?utm_source=go gets a Google +1 from a user. The page itself has a canonical for site.com/locations/arizona/ Does google credit the canonical with the +1 or do they then have dup pages with separate +1 scores?

    | Thos003
    0
  • CIEEwebTeam


    I have several keywords ranking top 5 for Google and Yahoo but nothing from Bing. Any ideas?

    | CIEEwebTeam
    0
  • Braumueller


    Hello, anyone have current data, how many new visitors in average drive nowadays search engines? My source of Peter Kent´s book SEO for Dummies from 2006, says around about 50% in the USA. I guess nowadays the percentage is much less, because of the social media? Have anyone data to split this in organic and paid search driven visits also? Do you know also how many new visitors in average drive nowadays social media like Facebook, Twitter & Co ? Thanks,

    | Braumueller
    0
  • BrianYork-AIM


    Hi there, after getting hit by the Panda bear (30% loss in traffic) I've been researching ways to get rid of low quality content.  From what I could find the best advise seemed to be a recommendation to use google analytics to find your worst performing pages (go to traffic sources - google organic - view by landing page).  Any page that hasn't been viewed more than 100 times in 18 months should be a candidate for a deletion. Out of over 5000 pages and using this report we identified over 3000 low quality pages which I've begun exporting to excel for further examination. However, starting with the worst pages (according to analytics) I'm noticing some of our most popular pages are showing up here.  For example: /countries/Panama is showing up as zero views but the correct version (with the end slash) countries/Panama/ is showing up as having over 600 views.  I'm not sure how google even found the former version of the link but I'm even less sure how to proceed now (the webmaster was going to put a no-follow on any crap pages but this is now making him nervous about the whole process). Some advise on how to proceed from here would be fantastico and danke <colgroup><col width="493"></colgroup>

    | BrianYork-AIM
    0
  • EricPacifico


    Referencing this article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/06/google_cans_11m_dot_co_dot_cc_sites/ Curious what the ramifications of this to SEO (improve rankings over spammy results, etc) and to hear thoughts on this.

    | EricPacifico
    0
  • jack86


    We have a page rank 5 website and we launched a new site 6 months ago in February. Initially we had horrible urls with a bunch of numbers and stuff and we since changed them to lovely human readable urls. This had an excellent effect across the site except on one section of the site: http://www.allaboutcareers.com/careers/graduate-employers Although Google has indexed these pages and several have a PR 2 they do not appear in Google when previously they were on page 1 when we had the old urls. We figured we just needed some time for Google to get used to it, but it hasn't done anything. It is also worth mentioning we changed the page titles from: FIRM NAME | DOMAIN NAME then... FIRM NAME | Graduate Scheme, Jobs, Internships & Apprenticeships | DOMAIN NAME then.. FIRM NAME | Graduate Scheme, Jobs, Internships & Apprenticeships Do you think these are being penalised? There are two types of page: Example A: http://www.allaboutcareers.com/careers/graduates/addleshaw-goddard.htm Example B: http://www.allaboutcareers.com/careers/graduates/accenture.htm

    | jack86
    0
  • noeltock


    Since its release, I've seen Google +1 being used across an entire domain but only reference the root href in the code snippet. At the same time, you see other sites use +1 more naturally with the button being specific to the page you're on. What's your take on this? To clarfiy, do you add: or .. on each page.

    | noeltock
    0
  • AlanMosley


    What do we know about googles +1's, are they used as a signal? i noticed that they have some reports on them in google web master tools.

    | AlanMosley
    0
  • Dan-Petrovic


    I was always curious about this so we did a test and the results are as follows: Over a sample of 1000 domains: PageRank average = 2.71 MozRank average = 2.34 Quite close. Does this render MozRank near-useless, especially since recent downplay of PageRank by Google? What is your favorite metric at SEOMoz? Mine is PA/DA combo.

    | Dan-Petrovic
    2
  • SKE


    Bounce rate is defined as 'single page visits to a site divided by total visits to the site' as I understand it. It could be argued that a well designed site might vector people on to other sites effectively (I generally use Wikipedia this way for instance). On the other hand a site that bounces people back to where they came from may be genuinely poor. So the questions: Is the bounce rate really calculated in the stated way by Google? Is it used, as far as we know, as a metric for the search engine? What should we do to mitigate the effects of this poor metric?! thanks, Mike

    | SKE
    0
  • findachristianjob


    Hello. My name is Justin.  And I am an addict. I have recently starting dabbling around with SEO about five months ago.  And I have found myself wanting more and more. I feel like I needed to come to this group of other addicts and admit it to you.  I am constantly checking my ranking in Google.  I am obsessed with my keywords.  And I will sell my soul for a PR8 in-bound link. I desperately want my site:  www.findahealthcarejob.com to be the best in the universe and it has been a wonderful drug for me. This must stop. Please help me. What are some steps of your own 12-steps that help you detox from this addicting lifestyle? Thank you.

    | findachristianjob
    0
  • bigpond


    Hi all, Whilst I know why breadcrumbs are recommended for a site in terms of usability and helping define the structure of a site to search engines, are there any statistics to support the implementation of the benefits of implementing them? Therefore what I'm after is statistics that state that there was an increase in traffic or rankings from the implementation of breadcrumbs on the site and in terms of usability was there an increase in conversions (can be sales, emails, subscriptions, etc) or metrics such as average pages viewed or time spent on site? Any assistance would be much appreciated. Thanks, James

    | bigpond
    0
  • eldoradoseo


    Does anyone have empirical data regarding the pattern in which a consumer shops for an item? I would like to find some information regarding whether consumers search for a product first then find a place that sells it or the opposite. I tend to see the organic SEO net focusing more upon company name visibility and not, say for example, the top ten products they sell. It is not always the case but I see with bigger and bigger companies that they seem to rely more heavily upon company name recognition. Any thoughts?

    | eldoradoseo
    1
  • getbigyadig


    Is google still updating the algo on a daily basis or for the most part are you other mozzers seeing your rankings stick?  I ask because the rank tracking software I use locally on my laptop shows me inaccurate rankings, as well as the SEOMOZ tool (which was just updates yesterday). I am not sure why this is happening, but as of yesterday I lost four page one rankings, which I didn't deserve anyway, and was apparently a fluke until they did the PR update.  So I dont mind, but I am curious if they are still tweaking on a daily basis or if its safe to continue link building.  I dont want them to make another change and have it affect my rankings in a negative way.

    | getbigyadig
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    First of all i would like to say how amazing this forum is, i have learnt a lot with all the great help. I am launching a new site mainly to allow me to learn seo and to understand what is involved in building a new site and get it to the search engines. the site is here which i have started today which is a lifestyle magazine  is http://www.womenlifestylemagazine.com/ What i am trying to understand is, what are the first most important steps when trying to get google and traffic to your site. the site will be complete in the next week or so but in the meantime i want to use this site to learn more about seo and how you get the site discovered by visitors and search engines and the time scale behind it. I am hoping that other people who are new to seo and are building a new site will be able to use this post to learn about what is involved and learn like me. Would be great to hear from people who have started their own site so we can all understand what are the important steps to make and which things we should do in which order. thank you everyone

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • Dan-Petrovic


    Just reporting that there has been a public toolbar PageRank update. What did Santa give you this round?

    | Dan-Petrovic
    1

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