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Category: Algorithm Updates

Discuss algorithm updates and impacts.


  • Hello, I have one website (Migration Lawyers) and I have an extra 8 domains Parked so they are basically cloning the content of the site. so if the main site is:  migrationlawyers.co.za and I have an addon domain  migration-lawyers.com  is that good or bad? is there a proper way to redirect the sites, will redirecting (301) subdomains be more effective? Thanks for your Input 🙂 0i8VXqr.png

    | thealika
    0

  • My question is, how does google personalize the search results for non logged in users and incoqnito searches? I already know about the location personalization  whether you're logged in or not and auto complete. But, is personalization still helping in the other cases. Does for example Google keep track of your I.P and then match suggestions that way? Additionally, any other resources would be great.

    | PeterRota
    0

  • So I just read an interesting Tweet: #SEO Tip: #Google takes into account the location of the server (the IP) when projecting the search results #web This is something I had not thought of. I suppose my question then is HOW does it factor this information into it's results? For some reason, one of our sites is hosted on a Canadian server. We are a cloud hosting company and we serve all of NA with data centers in the US and Canada... For whatever reason we've used the Canadian server farm for our web server. Could this possibly be hurting our NA google SERPs? Anyone have any thoughts on this?

    | jesse-landry
    0

  • Is it worth the time and money to invest in .co?

    | DGM
    0

  • There is a plethora of choice today for aggregating customer reviews. BBB wants to collect ratings from our customers; there a commercial options that put me in more control; yelp wants to rate me locally.  Google... Given that I have some ability to steer customers toward my preferred review site, which one should I use?  From an SEO perspective, have you noticed whether some these sites carry more weight or credibility than others? I realize it may depend on the type of business we are. In this case I represent a software company and their customers are USA/global, rather than local.

    | DarrenX
    0

  • There are a number of pages on our website where Bands upload their latest tracks so visitors can listen to them. It occurred to me that maybe I am missing a trick and should submit an audio-sitemap.xml to Google. However I can't seem to find any articles about it on Google Help, but know that video and image sitemaps are used. Does anyone know if audio sitemaps can be submitted and if they are of SEO value? Website: http://goo.gl/CN0e5

    | Ubique
    0

  • hi, I was trying to locate resources on the topics regarding how much the google bot indexes in order to qualify a 'good' site on their engine. For example, our site has many pages that are associated with logged in users and not available to the public until they acquire a login username and password. Although those pages show up in google analytics, they should not be made public in the google index which is what happens. In light of Google trying to qualify a site according to how 'engaged' a user is on the site, I would feel that the activities on those member pages are very important. Can anyone offer suggestions on how Google treats those pages since we are planning to do further SEO optimization of those pages. Thanks

    | jumpdates
    0

  • Hi girls + guys, a site of us were hit by a google update or a google penalty. We have lost 50% google traffic in one day (25th april, 2012). (Total visitors in average per day: 6k, yesterday: 3k) It's a german website, so I think google.de (germany) was updated. Our rankings in google.at (austria) are also affected, but it's not that bad as in google.de. We have not done any specific on page seo activities in the last two months. GWT doesn't have any message for us (no critical errors). After my first analyse I can say this: google has indexed 17k pages (thats fine) we are on 1st place with our domain name the last three days, the google traffic went up (+20%), but yesterday it was 50% below average (so -70%) last week we had a very good day, we had twice the traffic than normal, but this calmed down the following days we have lost number no. 1 places at two high traffic keywords. We had these no 1 rankings for years. We have been outranked by two of our competitors, but they have not done any onpage changes. We have lost a lot of positions at a lot of keywords. But there are also keywords which moved up. We have good content, useres are visiting 5 pages in average. No virus, no hacker (no hidden cloaking page) it's an old domain (2002) Lot of (good) inbound links Lot's of likes, g+. Good twitter activty. So, all in all I think it's more likely a ranking algo change than a penalty (a penalty for what reason?) My specific question(s): Is there any "check list" which could help me to find out the reason for this mess? What is the best strategy to regain the positions? New HTML code? New On page seo? (seomoz grades most of our important pages an A) Any idea would be appreciated! Best wishes,
    Georg.

    | GeorgFranz
    1

  • Just wondering from an seo perspective is it better to build a large site that covers many verticals or build out many sites one for each vertical?

    | tlhseo
    0

  • What is the frequency at which your homepage (for example) would have to update and what percentage of the page's content would need to be updated to get cached every day? What are your opinions on other factors.

    | bozzie311
    0

  • I have been using Google Analytics and SEOMoz tools for a while now. I know which are my top landing pages and some of the keywords which bring me traffic. But I don't know which are the top searched keywords for my website as these are "not provided" by Google Analytics. More importantly, I want to know which keywords are directing traffic to a particular page on my website. Can anyone help ?

    | EricMoore
    0

  • Hi, I was wondering: we work in an extremely competitive market. There are 6 companies, offering the same service in my country: price comparison in a niche market. The competitors have hundreds of different websites, using iframe-techniques. Would it be helpful for me to link to those 6 competitors, in a piece of content about our company strategies, USP's and overview of the market? From a transparency point of view, i would prefer telling my visitors there are other competitors, which are undoubtedly performing very well, but we perform better on several aspects of the price comparison. On the other hand, my competitors benefit from the backlinks as well. Is my gain bigger than the gain of my competitors do you think? Has anyone tested this once?

    | Beekhuizen
    1

  • Hello Moz Members, I just want to clarify that, We do directory submission in 50 of sites. For Example: I have to target 10 keyword's, and i am doing directory submission. I have 10 Unique titles and 10 unique description. I just need to submit these 10 keywords in 50 directory's 10 keywords * 50 directory = 500 submission. I will just submit the same 10 Unique titles and 10 unique description to these 500 directory. So it wont be count as duplicate content and duplicate title in every directory. Or Every time i do directory submission i have to submit unique description and unique title. Please help me with these question, I am really confused how shall i proceed to directory submission. If any one have fast approval directory sites list then please share the information with me. Regards & Thanks, Chhatarpal Singh

    | chhatarpal
    0

  • Hello, In previous posts, I was speaking about how we were penalized by Google for unnatural links. Basically 50,000 our of our 58,000 links were coming from 4-5 sites with the same exact anchor text and img alt tags. This obviously was causing our issues. Needless to say, I wen through the complete link profile to determine that all of the links besides this were of natrural origins. My question here is what is the accepted protocol of submitting a reinclusion request; For example, how long should it be? Should I disclose that I was in fact using paid links, and now that I removed (or at least nofollowed) them? I want to make sure that the request as good as it should so I can get our rankings up in a timely manner. Also, how long until the request is typically aknowledged? Thanks

    | BestOdds
    0

  • Hi Experts We did a 301 redirect from an old site to a new site to get rid of any bad link juice. We recently found a big drop in rankings and traffic after google last indexed the new web pages. We did 301 using asp at page level coding. The website had 4000 approx. pages and we did 301 section by section. This is how we did as per one of the blog post in seomoz. Create a sitemap for your old domain. Create content (contact information, description of your company, indication of future plans) and something link worthy for the new domain. (You should start trying to build links early) Setup the new domain and make it live. Register and verify your old domain and new domain with Google Webmaster Tools. Create a custom 404 page for old domain which suggests visiting new domain. Old Domain error checking and fixing In a development environment, test the redirects from the old domain to the new domain. Ideally, this will be a 1:1 redirect. (www.example-old-site.com/category/sexy-mustaches.html to www.example-new-site.com/category/sexy-mustaches.html) 301 redirect your old domain to your new domain. Submit your old sitemap to Google and Bing. The submission pages are within Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Center (This step will make the engines crawl your old URLs, see that they are 301 redirects and change their index accordingly.) Fill out the Change of Address form in Google Webmaster Tools. Create a new sitemap and submit it to the engines. (This will tell them about any new URLs that were not present on the old domain) Wait until Google Webmaster Tools updates and fix any errors it is indicated in the Diagnostics section. Monitor search engine results to make sure new domain is being properly indexed. We also did a press release with prweb to announce the new launch. We followed the steps recommended in one of the I am not sure what to do next. Can anyone suggest if its normal to see a drop and we should wait for some time or if we did something wrong? We are loosing business with every single day. Please help !

    | ITRIX
    0

  • When should you use a KMZ file? What are the benefits to using a KMZ file as opposed to just a standalone KML file?

    | RezStream8
    0

  • I run a niche website (www.picnic-basket.com) that is approaching 10 years old.  I have consistently added new content, performed redesigns, etc and WAS rewarded with a #1 placement on Google for my main keyword phrase for quite a long time. All our links are natural, no link-farms and I don't  do exchanges either. I blog, write articles about our niche, have free cookbooks, delicious recipes and are always finding cool new products. FB & Twitter are also maintained. After Panda I'm now below the fold with amazon.com, bedbathandbeyond.com, worldmarket.com, overstock.com and brookstone.com all above me. These sites don't have anything to do with my niche other than just selling some items. ROI is horrible for me with PPC on this keyword phrase. I'm sure Googles' revenue has increased quite a bit in this category because users only see relevant websites up in the paid area. Through years of hard work I was finally able to beat my old niche competitors but I'm left wondering,  How do I beat the "Big Boys"? Any advice for someone like me?

    | sunriseb
    0

  • Hi guys, I have an ecommerce site selling eco-friendly items online. I ran some on-page optimisation reports from SEOMoz PRO and discovered that I have at least 120 internal links per page. 32 of these are in the footer, designed in part to aid user navigation but perhaps also to have a positive impact on SERPs and SEO in general for the ecommerce site. Will removing these links be beneficial to my search engine rankings, as I will have less than 100 internal links per page? Or is it a major change which may be dangerous for my site rankings? Please help as I'm not sure about this! I've attached an image of the footer links below. I won't be removing the Facebook/Twitter links, just the 3 columns on the left. Thank you, Pravin MAvLe.jpg

    | goforgreen
    0

  • Is there a way to tell if an image is indexed in Google Images?

    | CPollock
    0

  • We do a lot of local SEO, and we're wondering if it's better to target "keyword location" or "location keyword"? Does it affect ranking and keyword difficulty if we're trying to rank for "plumbing appleton" or "appleton plumbing"? Any insight would be great.

    | optimalwebinc
    0

  • I don't want results based on my geographic location. When I am in India, I don't want local search results. In fact, I want results which are not dependent on my current location. Also, can I change my current location to some other city and will it affect the results ? For eg: While I am in London, can my search results be modified as if I am sitting in New York ?

    | EricMoore
    0

  • I launched my website about 6 weeks ago. It was indexed fairly quickly. But it is not showing up in the Google SERP. I did do the on page SEO and followed the best practise's for my website. I have also been checking webmaster tools and it tells me that there is no errors with my site. I also ran it through the seomoz on page seo analyzer  and again no real big issues. According to seomoz I had 1 duplicate content issue with my blog posts, which i corrected. I understand it takes some time, but any ideas of how much time? And f.y.i it's a Canadian website. So it should be a lot easier to rank as well. Could my site be caught in the Google 'sandbox effect' ? Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.

    | CurtCarroll
    0

  • I have a client who shares the same address and suite number with multiple business. What should be done to optimize their website and citations for local SEO? Is this a huge issue? What should we do so our rankings aren't affected. Will changes take a long time to take place? Thanks

    | caeevans
    0

  • We have a vanity URL that as recommended is using 301 http code, however it has been discovered the destination URL needs to be updated which creates a problem since most browsers and search engines cache 301 redirects. Is there a good way to figure out when a vanity should be a 301 vs 302/307? If all vanity URL's should use 301, what is the proper way of updating the destination URL? Is it a good rule of thumb that if the vanity URL is only going to be temporary and down the road could have a new destination URL to use 302, and all others 301? Cheers,

    | Shawn_Huber
    0

  • Hi Mozers, I have a  ecommerce furniture website, and I have been wondering for some time if showing the product descriptions on the sub/category page helps the website. If there is more content displayed on the subcategory, it should be more relevant, right? OR does it not matter, as it is duplicate content from the product page. I think showing the product descriptions on non-product pages is hurting my design/flow, but i worry that if I am to hide product content on sub/category pages my traffic will be hurt. Despite my searches I have not found an answer yet. Please take a look at my site and share your thoughts: http://www.ecustomfinishes.com/ Chris 27eVz

    | longdenc_gmail.com
    0

  • Hi.  I was wondering if others have had this happen to them.  Lately, I've noticed that on a couple of my sites the homepage no longer appears in the Google SERP.  Instead, a Facebook page I've created appears in the position the homepage used to get. My subpages still get listed in Google--just not the homepage.  Obviously, I'd prefer that both the homepage and Facebook page appear. Any thoughts on what's going on? Thanks for your help!

    | TuxedoCat
    0

  • Hello guys, So far I have found this Q&A to be very helpful. I have a couple of product pages on my website which rank very low in the search results. This was because in the past they were not at all optimized in terms of title, description, etc. I would like to now optimize these pages, get some inbound links to them, etc. I'm not sure whether to do this with the existing product pages or create new ones. I'm afraid that if I optimize the current pages, the low ranking from before will carry over. Would it be better to start fresh? Thank you, Pravin

    | goforgreen
    0

  • Hi guys, After looking on the Internet and reading the Learn SEO section on this site, I've realised that Google doesn't like duplicate content and penalises it, whether that's duplication on your own site or of another site's content. We are an online retailer currently selling on different platforms including Amazon, eBay and our own ecommerce webstore. Is it okay to have the same item description (i.e. main page copy) on each of these sites, or will our search rankings get negatively impacted? Thank you in advance, I have researched on this issue also but I couldn't find a concrete answer. Tanay

    | goforgreen
    0

  • We are launching a new site with a non traditional top level domain . We were looking at either .ca or .in as we are not able to get the traditional .com or .co or .net etc . I was wondering if this has any SEO effect ? Does Google/Bing treat this domain differently .Will it be penalized ? Note : My site is a US based site targeting US audience

    | Chaits
    0

  • Hi, Over the past year, I have seen a huge change in the distribution of our organic keyword traffic. I'm trying to research why our branded keywords have gone down.  Google analytics only shows me impressions for the past three months. Does anyone have ideas on how to explain this change in traffic? Please see the attached chart. Thanks! branded-v-nonbranded-organic-search.jpg

    | netdiva_amy
    0

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Has there been any tests or studies that associate writing in the first person or using "emotional" feeling phrases to higher rankings.  More specifically to a blog structure. I'm trying a blog option with a  local telecommunications company, however I'm having flashbacks of writing those 5 paragraph essays when taking the SATs.  The owner decided he should take on the responsibility and it's like he just can't bring himself to write from a personal perspective. He's a bit stuck in the "professional" mindset and worried about appearing unprofessional.  I empathize with his perspective, but I know it's not going to work..or maybe it will? it's just not going to be interesting to readers, but perhaps google will appreciate the fresh content.  I don't think letting an employee takeover will be an option as he's very protective of the company's image. So would you ditch the blog? or continue with the dull posts?

    | squareplug
    0

  • I'm comparing our best search traffic month in 2011 (March) with our current traffic (April)and have seen significant declines in traffic, despite no change in our rankings or even improved rankings for the same terms.  Trying to sort out an explanation. We have been a white-hat SEO site since our inception over 10 years ago.  Our SEO consultant doesn't think we've been affected by any algo changes, at least not to any significant degree. My only explanation for this possibly anomaly is: decrease in the use of the KW terms in search over time (how to determine?) generalized increase in PPC instead of organic search driving traffic possibility that Adv Web Rankings is no longer accurately collecting SERP rankings Does anyone have any other thoughts or considerations that might explain the decline in traffic, despite maintenance or improvement in rankings? Thanks.

    | ahw
    0

  • With the new update to google focusing on link spam and multiple anchor text ? If you have incoming links that you would like to block or make no follow?

    | HelpingHandNetwork
    1

  • Greetings, Im a new SEO and really knew nothing until signing up to SEOMoz. After reading the SEO101 and gathering as much information in a short period of time things started  to become a little clearer. So I started my first campaign used my new SEO knowledge and input all of my meta information. Then I waited a few days to see what happened with my search result. We had never ranked for a single keyword before mind you. So a couple/few of days go by and I started punching in my keywords and looking through the pages. There I was page three. I was SO happy. I read the entire SEO101 again, realized a little more about what I had to do. So I started changing everything up, adding pictures, I found out what a IMG ALT Attributes were in the HTML editor, bolded text and all the other things I missed the first time around. Three days go by and I move up again. I start to notice my traffic is increasing and I am actually getting organic hits through search traffic. This has never happened before. I am over the moon. But I realize that I have my main focus keyword as the second key word in my title tag. So I switch the two words around, wait a few more days. Here's why I ask my question. The original title tag was still showing up and I was on the first page for both keywords, and I could see both title tags when searching for either keyword. So; Is changing your meta titles frequently good SEO Practice ? Warmest regards, Michael S&M Warning: adult site, NSFW

    | Sexandmetal
    0

  • Hi, I've just checked the number of keywords appearing on my website's pages. On some of them the keyword density was way too high (7-10%) if you included the meta tags, but all under 3.5% if I didn't include the keywords and description meta tags. So my question is - when looking at number of keywords used per page, do I have to worry about what's in those meta tags? Do the keywords in there count towards keyword density / number of keywords per page? Thanks, Luke

    | McTaggart
    0

  • Just when I thought I'd seen it all, google hits me with another nasty surprise! I have a CDN to deliver images, js and css  to visitors around the world. I have no links to static HTML pages on the site, as far as I can tell, but someone else may have - perhaps a scraper site? Google has decided the static pages they were able to access through the CDN have more value than my real pages, and they seem to be slowly replacing my pages in the index with the static pages. Anyone got an idea on how to stop that? Obviously, I have no access to the static area, because it is in the CDN, so there is no way I know of that I can have a robots file there. It could be that I have to trash the CDN and change it to only allow the image directory, and maybe set up a separate CDN subdomain for content that only contains the JS and CSS? Have you seen this problem and beat it? (Of course the next thing is Roger might look at google results and start crawling them too, LOL) P.S. The reason I am not asking this question in the google forums is that others have asked this question many times and nobody at google has bothered to answer, over the past 5 months, and nobody who did try, gave an answer that was remotely useful. So I'm not really hopeful of anyone here having a solution either, but I expect this is my best bet because you guys are always willing to try.

    | loopyal
    0

  • I would like to know if you can modify (or suggest) the sub-links under an organic listing.  For Example: Main Link/Title = COMPANY NAME - What We Do.... Sub-Links (popular pages within site) currently include links like: Locations / Catalog Request / Bestsellers Is it possible to suggest other pages as sub-links or do the search engines determine these? Please advise, and thanks in advance....

    | WhiteCap
    0

  • I am optimizing a site which uses underscores rather than hyphens as word separators (such_as_this.php vs. such-as-this.php). Most of these pages have been around since 2007, and I am hesitant to just redirect to a new page because I am worried it will cause the rankings to slip. Would you recommend changing the file names to be in hyphenated format and place 301 redirects on the pages with underscores, or stick with the existing pages? Is there anything else that would work better? Thanks!

    | BluespaceCreative
    1

  • I'm sure this question has been answered and asked a 1,000 different ways but what would be the best domain name to use in the long term (2 years +)? The plural versions (examples.com) which has a decent domain authority and is ranking 1st in Google search results yet has less search volume or the singular version (example.com) that has no current SEO value for the search term that we'd like to target however the singular version of the keyword has a much higher search volume? so basically will it be better to have the exact match that has more volume or the plural form that has better rankings after 2 years of doing SEO for each domain? My guess is that using (examples.com) with the better domain authority and tightening the grip on its dominance in Google will still be more effective than having the exact match domain with more search volume for that keyword while performing the same amount of SEO even after two years. Any suggestions?

    | ydop
    0

  • What's better .NET or a hyphenated .COM domain I know this is simple but in selecting a domain for my current project and I only have two options. firstname-lastname.COM or 
    firstnamelastname.NET I'm leaning to the .COM as after reading the how to choose a domain name post. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-choose-the-right-domain-name Thanks

    | RonSparks
    1

  • Hello, I've been using open site explorer, dabbled with seo spy glass, and other back linking sites, but I was wondering if there was a manual way of searching for back links? Such as site.www.widgets.com +keyword -widgets.com to show me results of all the sites pointing to www.widgets.com, or pointing to the keywords linking to widgets.com. I do enjoy Open Site Explorer, but it takes a few months index the back links ive done.

    | Modbargains
    0

  • Hi everyone, Something weird has happened to one of our client's site. First of all I want to explain that the client's name is something like a Person Name plus another generic keyword, for example Truxy Lawyers. Before when you searched for the brand keyword (in my example Truxy), Google would show in the SERPs the client's site as first result with six sitelinks below. Now when searching for the same branded keyword (for example Truxy), Google doesn't show the sitelink anymore, but the first result is the home page and the second and third results are subdomain pages. Does anybody know why Google all of the sudden decided to stop showing the site link? Things get more weird when you search the complete brand name "Truxy Lawers" for example, because in this case Google shows the site link. Does anybody know what has caused this? Thank you!

    | Aviatech
    0

  • Is it a good practice to append our brand name at the end of every page title?  We have a very strong brand name but it is also long.  Right now what we are doing is saying: Product Name | Long brand name here Product Category | Long brand name here Is this the right way to do it or should we just be going with ONLY the product and category names in our page titles? Right now we often exceed the 70 character recommendation limit.

    | mlentner
    1

  • Anyone seen these before? Small stars representing 'votes'? What's all this about?

    | MirandaP
    0

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