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Category: White Hat / Black Hat SEO

Dig into white hat and black hat SEO trends.

  • shaz_lhr


    We have come to know that one of competitors of our client is spamming Google search results on massive scale. If we search with keywords like "iphone spy apps" , "text messages spy " etc then most of results from 3rd or 4th page onwards show totally irrelevant sites but when we click on those results/pages then all redirect to either http://topspysoft.com/ OR http://www.mspy.com/ . They have been doing it on massive scale for last few months against hundreds of queries and populating hundreds of search results. If use some country specific Google site then again hundreds of results come from totally irrelevant country specific domains (au,nz,uk etc) and they all redirect to topspysoft.com or mspy.com. Can you please tell how they are doing it and how they are able to do it on such a massive scale without getting noticed by Google ? Is there any way to report this issue to Google as the current only allows one link ? Following are some of the spam urls to give you an idea www.crcincva.com/doc/20-best-iphone-spy-apps/
    chefitupkids.com/top-10-spy-apps-for-iphone/
    jarestaurant.com/text-spying-apps-iphone/
    www.lisamishler.com/qn/phone-spy-apps-uk
    tigerdenus.com/spy-apps-for-iphone-no-jailbreak
    palmhousestl.org/templates/phone-location/iphone-spy-apps-uk.html I'm also attaching couple of images which show that almost 80% of results on those pages are actually spam pages WlpJshL qtuLdHp

    | shaz_lhr
    0
  • pompero99


    Hi everybody! I have a very serius question because i have a problem with this. We run a website of voucher codes and we are looking that our rivals are putting their logos on footers of online stores with images, sometimes link to home, sometimes link to store within webpage. Should i ask for the same to online stores? I have scary to get a penalty by Google. Please help me with this and recommend me something because we are doing fair play but rivals are doing this and they get best results in SERPS. Thanks very much! Best regards!

    | pompero99
    0
  • grnside1


    So im trying to rank for O'fallon lawn care. And my competitor bought a domain lawncareofallonmo.com and now ranks number one....there is even a link to "take me to my homepage" What is going on i thought this was so 2008 not 2014.....

    | grnside1
    0
  • juicyresults


    I have a site with many many pages that have very thin content, yet they are useful for users/visitors. Those pages also have many external links pointing to them from reputable and authoritative websites. If i were to noindex/follow these pages, will the juice/value from the external links still pass through just as if the page didn't have the noindex tag? Please let me know!

    | juicyresults
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  • adqas


    Hi Moz Guys, I hope all of you are good out there. I am here to discuss remedies, cure, and precautions for 302 redirect hijacking. Although it is quite old and whenever I searched in Google, it looks like a long gone glitch of Google serps but it just happened to one of my customers' site. The site in question is www(dot)solidswiss(dot)cd. If you check the cache(cache:site) then you can see a hijacked site in the urls of the cached page. As a result all my customer's listing in the serps are replaced with this site. This hacked site then is redirecting to a competitor's site. I did many things to cop with the problem, site came back in the serps but hackers are doing this on lots of domains so when it recovered from one site then another site catches it. I am doing lots of reporting on submit spam site. I am doing lots of feedback on the serps page. I have switched to https . But seems like nothing is working. This community is full of experts and technical people. I am wondering that what are your views and suggestions to handle the problem permanently?

    | adqas
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  • dsinger


    I manage four separate websites/brands that all focus on the same topics and have the same achitecture.  I am trying to improve each site's meta title and description, page by page, that I inherited from another before me.  My question is, how different should each title/description be from one another for the same page type?  Do the search engines consider this heavily in their decision process of who to show on SERPs? Am i able to simply swap out the brand name in the metas and call it done or should each meta be unique? if unique, how unique? As you can imagine, since each page is essentially the same with the same overall content and layout targeting the same keywords, it is very difficult to rewrite metas four unique ways. I greatly appreciate any advice on how you would approach this project.

    | dsinger
    0
  • andrewwatson92


    Hi guys! we have a site that been using a theme for a year now and we decided to change to a new one, the question here is, does it affect seo? or it is possible to remain 100% for the seo? What caution tips that you guys can share for changing the theme? Does just remaining the same URL works?

    | andrewwatson92
    2
  • jackgao84


    Hi, Are there many freelancers in this community that advocates the MOZ linkbuilding philosophies? Or does anyone have references for link building freelancers at a reasonable rate? Thanks, Jack

    | jackgao84
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  • Choice


    I would like to check to see which backlink urls are indexed in Google. Is there a tool that can automate this work or will I have to do it manually?

    | Choice
    0
  • Mike.NW


    How do search engines respond to text that is hidden on mobile settings online. I have a

    | Mike.NW
    0
  • Eteach_Marketing


    Hi there, I'm trying to improve the templates used on our website for SEO pages aimed at popular search terms. An example of our current page template is as follows: http://www.eteach.com/teaching-jobs Our designers have come up with the following new template: http://www.eteach.com/justindaviesnovemeber I know that changing successful pages can be risky. One concern is putting links behind JQuery, where the 'More on Surrey' link is. Does anyone had any strong suggestions or observations around our new template? Especially through the eyes of Google! Thanks in advance Justin

    | Eteach_Marketing
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  • Choice


    I was surprised that I couldn't find much info on this topic, considering that Googlebot must crawl a backlink url in order to process a disavow request (ie Penguin recovery and reconsideration requests). My trouble is that we recently received a great backlink from a buried page on a .gov domain and the page has yet to be crawled after 4 months. What is the best way to nudge Googlebot into crawling the url and discovering our link?

    | Choice
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  • Poojath


    How to add more quality backlink with moz tools or any good option

    | Poojath
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  • Antony_Towle


    Moz Friends, A very close competitor have always been challenging for similar competitive keywords. We seem to have the advantage for alot of long tail keywords but on one of the higher traffic relevant keywords they seem to do well. I really struggle to understand why, particularly with the back links they use Just my thoughts and notes on the two: Our Page Better written text content (Maybe slightly written to for experienced target audience but we are working on simplifying things) Good Clear site URL structure and navigation for usability Fresh content updates Mobile optimized Reasonable page speeds Good on-page optimization Good back links from industry influences Competitor Page Negatives Site structure and URL's are inconsistent and messy Lower quality content site wide They use tried and tested on page optimization methods like Keyword spamming, Bold Keywords,Underlining Keywords (Sarcasm) Terrible back links, all directories and free article submission sites (Seriously take a look) Less focused on page optimization Not mobile optimized Most of the rest of the sites carry on the same sort of differences, Engine: www.google.co.uk Keyword: Sound level meters **Our Page: **www.cirrusresearch.co.uk/products/sound-level-meters/ **Competitor Page: **www.pulsarinstruments.com/product-information/Sound-Level-Meter.html Any feedback would be greatly appreciated please, i am really struggling to get my head around this Thanks James

    | Antony_Towle
    1
  • loudawg


    I suppose I have not much further information to add apart from ask apart from what is the difference? Both are highly optimized pages but that's where my knowledge ends!

    | loudawg
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  • Eteach_Marketing


    Hello Mozzers! I've noticed that our site has been receiving a significant amount of referral traffic from a rather suspect looking site: www.cyberonlineclicking.com   Can anyone shed any light on this beast. Stopped receiving traffic around 11th November, but was getting 20K sessions over a 4 week period. The traffic was of poor quality, but would be good to know how or why they were linking to my site (fejobs  dot com). Looks very suspicious. Thanks Justin

    | Eteach_Marketing
    0
  • ByteLaunch


    Hi Mozzers, we're hoping to get some insight from some of the technical folks out there on what seems to be malicious targeting of a client's website. We recently discovered enormous spikes in direct traffic to the website with 90% originating from the USA and the rest coming from dozens of other countries. Nearly 100% of visits are new sessions and each only lasts a few seconds - thereby driving the bounce rate over 95%! There are other possible identifiers worth noting, including: Browser - 99% use Internet Explorer Browser Version - 89% use IE 7.0 Flash Version - 80% use 14.0 r0 Operating System - 99% use Windows See the attached "Screenshot - Traffic Spikes & Inflated Bounce Rate". Whether this is a negative SEO attack or something else, we're really hoping to get the community's input and (hopefully) possible solutions. Thanks! oYKrMu6

    | ByteLaunch
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  • wspence15


    I am planning on moving my site to HTTPS. I brought an expired domain and wondering if moving to HTTPS will affects the previous backlinks? Will I need to do a redirect? Will I lose any link juice? Thanks

    | wspence15
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  • tjr


    I am wondering how the relatively new sitelinks search box impacts the SEO rankings for a specific site or keyword combination - do you guys have any experience or bechmarks on this? Obviously it should help on getting more real estate on the SERP page (due to adding the search box), but do you also get extra goodwill and improved SERP position from adding it? Also, is the impact different on different type of terms, let's say single brand or category term such as "Bestbuy" (or "coupon") or a combination term "Bestbuy Apple" (or "Dixons coupon")? Thanks in advance!

    | tjr
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  • Kononen


    Hi! One finnish guy is getting pretty nice Alexa ranking to his sites, even if the real traffic is not somewhere near it would lead for that cool Alexa rank. I am a bit suspisious if he is using some Low Bounce Rate High Traffic Boosters on his sites.. I will give you some examples here to look into.. Vihjepaikka(dot)com - Created on 2013-03-13 - Alexa Rank 129k!!! - PR3 - Backlinks not many qualitys.. Casinolla(dot)net - Created on 2014-10-15 - Alexa Rank 351k!!! - PR0 - Backlinks 0!!! Cashadvance777(dot)com - Created on 2014-09-04 - Alexa Rank 772k!!! - PR3 - Backlinks 0!!! Let me know your thoughts on these.. Cheers!

    | Kononen
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  • Patrick_G


    I'm trying to get rid of a Google penalty, but one of the URLS is particularly bizarre. Here's the penalized site: http://www.travelexinsurance.com. One of the external links Google cited as not being natural that links to the penalized site is: http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516 In the backlink profile of the penalized site, there are about 100 different backlinks pointing to www.travelexinsurance.com from content.onlineagency.com/... So when I visit  http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516 it actually is displaying content from http://www.starmandstravel.com/787115_6599.htm, which you can see after clicking the "Home" button. That company is a legit travel agency who I assume knows nothing about content.onlineagency.com and is not involved in whatever is going on. And that's the case for every link from content.onlineagency.com. So I'm just wondering if someone can help me understand what sort of tactic  content.onlineagency.com is using. One of my predecessors I fear used some black hat tactics. I'm wondering if this is a remnant of that effort.

    | Patrick_G
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  • Verve-Innovation


    Can any one help me. One of my website http://www.imperialcard.com.au/ suddenly started to drop in traffic and ranking. I havent done anything black hat. How do I figure out what caused this. Thanks

    | Verve-Innovation
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  • brits


    We have received a few notification from Google Webmaster Tools and Moz that our competitors have "mentioned" our page on their website. This is incredibly odd as you wouldn't think they'd want to do this. Further, when I go to the page that we are supposedly mentioned on, the link to our site is not on the page. What is going on? Thank you in advance for your insights!!

    | brits
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  • ntcma


    I want to try building an RSS feed of SEO news... but not wanting to find myself drowning in materials As such, looking for a short list of recommendations for keeping on top of SEO developments – the impetus is that I'm still discovering changes that happened 2, 3, even 5 years ago, and I want to try and catch these things as they happen. Thinking something actually from Google may be on the list, but some of these sources are pretty on top of things! Seroundtable.com also comes to mind. But what do you use to keep informed? Thanks 🙂

    | ntcma
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  • the-coopersmith


    Working on the UI of a new site and I would like to simplify the breadcrumbs so they do not take up as much space. They will still communicate the same message to user. See example below: Before:  Home > Widget Dealers > Tennessee > Nashville After:  Home > Dealers > Tennessee > Nashville The page title and/or menu item would still be "Widget Dealers". So my question is, if I remove the keyword "Widget" only from the breadcrumb could that hurt me in any way?

    | the-coopersmith
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  • jampaper


    My company was recently approached by a website dedicated to delivering information and insights about our industry. They asked us if we wanted to pay for a "company profile" where they would summarize our company, add a followed link to our site, and promote a giveaway for us. This website is very authoritative and definitely provides helpful use to its audience. How can this website get away with paid submissions like this? Doesn't that go against everything Google preaches? If I were to pay for a profile with them, would I request for a "nofollow" link back to my site?

    | jampaper
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  • DarrenX


    One of the more successful competitors in my niche has embarked on new strategy that seems to be working well for him. I noticed that many new links began to appear to my site from my competitor's stable of many websites. It appears that he has setup a link wheel to benefit a site that has been in the top Google position for several months now.  The rim of the wheel links back to authority sites, including my own main site (established 7 years, now hanging on to the lowly 10th place on the serp).  So the strategy seems to be: a) create a dozen sites that no-follow link back to authority sites including competitors, b) place links in a such a manner (bottom of page, uncolored links, from images) that a customer is unlikely to ever click on it, c.) do-follow to your own site and blast it to the top of Google. I don't think this competitor is worried about getting penalized. I've been watching this for years. When one site gets burned, he just shifts things around and brings up another one of his sites. He seems to age them for years, calling them up one by one as they are needed. Has anyone else noticed this? Is it a trend?  Because it sure seems to work. He's crowded the front page now with 4 of his sites. Would it be appropriate for me to "disavow" his links? Would it matter?

    | DarrenX
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  • ChimplyWebGroup


    Hi Mozzers, We've recently updated a site of ours that really should be doing much better than it currently is. It's got a good backlink profile (and some spammy links recently removed), has age on it's side and has been SEO'ed a tremendous amount. (think deep-level, schema.org, site-speed and much, much more). Because of this, we assumed thin, spammy content was the issue and removed these pages, creating new, content-rich pages in the meantime. IE: We removed a link-wheel page; <a>https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Asuperted.com%2Fpopular-searches</a>, which as you can see had a **lot **of results (circa 138,000). And added relevant pages for each of our entertainment 'categories'.
    <a>http://www.superted.com/category.php/bands-musicians</a> - this page has some historical value, so the Mozbar shows some Page Authority here.
    <a>http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/wedding-bands</a> - this is an example of a page linking from the above page. These are brand new URLs and are designed to provide relevant content. The old link-wheel pages contained pure links (usually 50+ on every page), no textual content, yet were still driving small amounts of traffic to our site. 
    The new pages contain quality and relevant content (ie - our list of Wedding Bands, what else would a searcher be looking for??) but some haven't been indexed/ranked yet. So with this in mind I have a few questions: How do we drive traffic to these new pages? We've started to create industry relevant links through our own members to the top-level pages. (http://www.superted.com/category.php/bands-musicians) The link-profile here _should _flow to some degree to the lower-level pages, right? We've got almost 500 'sub-categories', getting quality links to these is just unrealistic in the short term. How long until we should be indexed? We've seen an 800% drop in Organic Search traffic since removing our spammy link-wheel page. This is to be expected to a degree as these were the only real pages driving traffic. However, we saw this drop (and got rid of the pages) almost exactly a month ago, surely we should be re-indexed and re-algo'ed by now?! **Are we still being algor****hythmically penalised? **The old spammy pages are still indexed in Google (138,000 of them!) despite returning 404's for a month. When will these drop out of the rankings? If Google believes they still exist and we were indeed being punished for them, then it makes sense as to why we're still not ranking, but how do we get rid of them? I've tried submitting a manual removal of URL via WMT, but to no avail. Should I 410 the page? Have I been too hasty? I removed the spammy pages in case they were affecting us via a penalty. There would also have been some potential of duplicate content with the old and the new pages.
    _popular-searches.php/event-services/videographer _may have clashed with _profiles.php/videographer, _for example.
    Should I have kept these pages whilst we waited for the new pages to re-index? Any help would be extremely appreciated, I'm pulling my hair out that after following 'guidelines', we seem to have been punished in some way for it. I assumed we just needed to give Google time to re-index, but a month should surely be enough for a site with historical SEO value such as ours? 
    If anyone has any clues about what might be happening here, I'd be more than happy to pay for a genuine expert to take a look. If anyone has any potential ideas, I'd love to reward you with a 'good answer'. Many, many thanks in advance. Ryan.

    | ChimplyWebGroup
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  • Bendall


    Hey Mozzers, Please can someone advise? I manage the on-line content for an estate of Gyms in the UK. We had an existing gym location in Birmingham - www.nuffieldhealth.com/gyms/birmingham and 5 months ago we opened a new location in Birmingham -  www.nuffieldhealth.com/gyms/birmingham-central. The 2 pages have different in-page content, different H1's, different title tags, different citations in page both have a few back links from different root domains, however the 2nd page (birmingham-central) does not rank in the top 50 results even though our domain is strong that the vast majority of results? Our original page (/gyms/birmingham) also slipped from page 1 in SERPs to the bottom of page 2 when the second Birmingham gym page was deployed?? I am guessing Google does not know which page to serve in SERPs, bud i am at a lose as to how to fix this issue. Can anyone please advise?? Regards Ben

    | Bendall
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  • ChimplyWebGroup


    I can't help but feel this is a somewhat untapped resource with a distinct lack of information.
    There is a massive amount of information around on how to rank a new website, or techniques in order to increase SEO effectiveness, but to rank a whole new set of pages or indeed to 're-build' a site that may have suffered an algorithmic penalty is a harder nut to crack in terms of information and resources. To start I'll provide my situation; SuperTED is an entertainment directory SEO project.
    It seems likely we may have suffered an algorithmic penalty at some point around Penguin 2.0 (May 22nd) as traffic dropped steadily since then, but wasn't too aggressive really. Then to coincide with the newest Panda 27 (According to Moz) in late September this year we decided it was time to re-assess tactics to keep in line with Google's guidelines over the two years. We've slowly built a natural link-profile over this time but it's likely thin content was also an issue. So beginning of September up to end of October we took these steps; Contacted webmasters (and unfortunately there was some 'paid' link-building before I arrived) to remove links 'Disavowed' the rest of the unnatural links that we couldn't have removed manually. Worked on pagespeed as per Google guidelines until we received high-scores in the majority of 'speed testing' tools (e.g WebPageTest) Redesigned the entire site with speed, simplicity and accessibility in mind. Htaccessed 'fancy' URLs to remove file extensions and simplify the link structure. Completely removed two or three pages that were quite clearly just trying to 'trick' Google. Think a large page of links that simply said 'Entertainers in London', 'Entertainers in Scotland', etc. 404'ed, asked for URL removal via WMT, thinking of 410'ing? Added new content and pages that seem to follow Google's guidelines as far as I can tell, e.g;
    Main Category Page Sub-category Pages Started to build new links to our now 'content-driven' pages naturally by asking our members to link to us via their personal profiles. We offered a reward system internally for this so we've seen a fairly good turnout. Many other 'possible' ranking factors; such as adding Schema data, optimising for mobile devices as best we can, added a blog and began to blog original content, utilise and expand our social media reach, custom 404 pages, removed duplicate content, utilised Moz and much more. It's been a fairly exhaustive process but we were happy to do so to be within Google guidelines. Unfortunately, some of those link-wheel pages mentioned previously were the only pages driving organic traffic, so once we were rid of these traffic has dropped to not even 10% of what it was previously. Equally with the changes (htaccess) to the link structure and the creation of brand new pages, we've lost many of the pages that previously held Page Authority.
    We've 301'ed those pages that have been 'replaced' with much better content and a different URL structure - http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/bands-musicians/wedding-bands to simply http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/wedding-bands, for example. Therefore, with the loss of the 'spammy' pages and the creation of brand new 'content-driven' pages, we've probably lost up to 75% of the old website, including those that were driving any traffic at all (even with potential thin-content algorithmic penalties). Because of the loss of entire pages, the changes of URLs and the rest discussed above, it's likely the site looks very new and probably very updated in a short period of time. What I need to work out is a campaign to drive traffic to the 'new' site.
    We're naturally building links through our own customerbase, so they will likely be seen as quality, natural link-building.
    Perhaps the sudden occurrence of a large amount of 404's and 'lost' pages are affecting us?
    Perhaps we're yet to really be indexed properly, but it has been almost a month since most of the changes are made and we'd often be re-indexed 3 or 4 times a week previous to the changes.
    Our events page is the only one without the new design left to update, could this be affecting us? It potentially may look like two sites in one.
    Perhaps we need to wait until the next Google 'link' update to feel the benefits of our link audit.
    Perhaps simply getting rid of many of the 'spammy' links has done us no favours - I should point out we've never been issued with a manual penalty. Was I perhaps too hasty in following the rules? Would appreciate some professional opinion or from anyone who may have experience with a similar process before. It does seem fairly odd that following guidelines and general white-hat SEO advice could cripple a domain, especially one with age (10 years+ the domain has been established) and relatively good domain authority within the industry. Many, many thanks in advance. Ryan.

    | ChimplyWebGroup
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  • APFM


    Hi, So I recently found a site (actually just one page) that has scraped my homepage.  All the links to my site have been removed except the canonical tag, should this be disavowed through WMT or reported through WMT's Spam Report? Thanks in advance for any feedback.

    | APFM
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  • Modi


    Pl suggest, some pages having some spam links pointed to those pages are been redirected to 404 error page (through 301 redirect) - as removing them manually was not possible due to part of core component of cms and many other coding issue, the only way as advised by developer was making 301 redirect to 404 page. Does by redirecting these pages to 404 page using 301 redirect, will nullify all negative or spam links pointing to them and eventually will remove the resulting spam impact on the site too. Many Thanks

    | Modi
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  • jfeitlinger


    I oversee content for a client and this past month there was a 70% decrease in traffic. We noticed the hit start on September 29th, and has never rebounded. Any suggestions what this could be (i..e latest Google algorithm update) and or tools I should use to look into it? Nothing is showing up as an alert on Moz analytics and need to address with my client asap.

    | jfeitlinger
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  • Boogily


    Hi there. We inherited a client who didn't receive a manual penalty, but holy cow they have a good sized algorithmic penalty on their site. Here is what we have done since receiving the client: Client arrived with a bad backlink profile and an algorithmic penalty. We knew this, but underestimated the effort in removing it. We researched great forum posts like http://moz.com/community/q/google-penguin-2-0-how-to-recover http://moz.com/community/q/penguin-2-1-how-to-recover The researched great blog posts like http://moz.com/ugc/what-a-penguin-recovery-looks-like http://moz.com/ugc/recovery-from-google-penguin-tips-from-the-trenches http://moz.com/ugc/a-theory-for-preventing-recovering-from-a-google-penguin-penalty Outside of Moz, we researched a lot as well. We felt armed that we needed to do 3 major things. Remove all of the bad backlinks Create good content within the site Fix any unnatural on page SEO tactics (keyword stuffing, etc) Here is how we tackled it step by step Step 1: For step 1, we contacted over 100 of the bad backlinks. Many of them wanted a fee for removing the backlinks. They were from sites that were literally like "freeseobacklinks.org". Crazy bad ones. But we only got a few removed. The rest either ignored us or wanted some money. Hence our round(s) of disavow. Our SEO manager at the time of the first disavow only did 50 domains on the disavow. She was extremely thorough, followed the guidelines to a T, and performed it. We actually fell back in ranking afterward, even though I didn't think it was possible. With nothing to lose, besides lots of time and budget, we went through thousands of links and manually compiled an extravagant spreadsheet for our next round of disavow. Again, limited to no response from site owners. So we went ahead and pushed forth with nearly 300 domains for the disavow. By this time, the site was in the abyss, so it couldn't hurt anymore. We kept all of the great links, which surprisingly there were a fair amount. Step 2:
    Our SEO manager and our content writer began to write for the website. Our graphic design created an awesome infographic, and a good slideshare too. We've been putting 3-4 articles / posts on the site monthly. Typical word range is 750+ Step 3:
    We did a full site analysis and removed all unnatural location based keywords. There wasn't a ton of unnatural on page SEO going on. The bulk of the damage must have came from the bad backlinks. Summary:
    On top of this we have been doing this for at least 6 months. All of the pages that are hit by the penalty are just gone. Nowhere to be found on Google, unless you search with the site operator or search for that exact page. We seem to make zero headway with all of this. I'm not sure what else we can be doing. We even optimized for conversions and longer time on site, as well as page speed. We've confirmed that there is no manual penalty. I'm starting to feel as if the site is permanently deemed bad or something. I also don't want to keep wasting our writers and manager's time on this one. Any ideas on next steps? Can anyone restore my confidence in this site? Thanks for the long read and any response, Have a great day,

    | Boogily
    1
  • JimmyFritz


    Since February of 2013 our organic traffic at http://www.weddingshoppeinc.com had been declining. We were able to get traffic back up to par with numbers from the previous year by December of 2013. In March of 2014 our direct traffic took a major hit and hasn’t improved. We know our mobile traffic is part of the problem, but the issue has affected traffic from desktop and mobile devices. Is this an organic traffic problem, or is our decrease in direct traffic coming from somewhere else? Has anyone else seen this issue, or does anyone have advice? Here is what we’ve already looked into and updates to note: Before this issue, when we compared organic and direct traffic, direct was usually half of what organic was (i.e., if organic was at 10 visitors, direct was at 5). However organic traffic has followed normal trends and direct has dropped. In August we updated our .net code to MVC to drop our first byte from 1,700 to 300 milliseconds. However, if you look at our m. site, it’s around 1,000 milliseconds. We changed our SEO strategy in May to follow best practices. We’ve been rewriting old content. We haven’t ever done any black hat SEO, just have some old blogs from 2010-2012 that have too many keywords. These are getting edited. In March we moved our images to a CDN for our images. We’re currently working on server errors and broken links, but nothing significant changed around March to affect our traffic. Very recently, our web developers said that they believed our direct traffic had been getting tracked wrong in Google Analytics prior to March 2014. However they think they fixed the issue in a March push. We've taken this theory into account, but we also see a drop in revenue at the time of their push that correlates with the drop in traffic, so we know there’s a bigger issue. Any input you can provide would be greatly appreciated!

    | JimmyFritz
    1
  • JamesT


    I have two urls that are almost the same for example: www.mysite.co.uk/motoring/car_fuel www.mysite.co.uk/motoring/car-fuel both pages are very different, but on the same topic. How does google view the use of _ and - in urls? Will it see my urls as different? Please advise if you know the answer. Thank You.

    | JamesT
    0
  • FCRMediaLietuva


    Delete this one 🙂

    | FCRMediaLietuva
    0
  • Brandon_Patton


    I have been an active rain member for a long time. When I check my web site I can not find any links from Active Rain. I just updated my Active Rain profile and upgraded to their paid subscription. Can you tell me if this blog is creating a follow link back to my web site at www.RealEstatemarketLeaders.com the blog on active rain is here. at http://activerain.trulia.com/blogsview/4529309/hud-homes-for-sale-in-tri-cities-wa

    | Brandon_Patton
    0
  • rflores


    For main job categories: We manage several career pages for several clients but the competition for the main keywords (even several long tail) is from big names like Indeed and similar job boards?
    What would you recommend? For job posts: Since the job posts that our clients post are short lived (80% live less than a month) would it still be incorrect to purchase backlinks? or is it always a big no Thanks for your help. And if a similar question has been asked I would appreciate if you could point me to it. I could not find one.

    | rflores
    0
  • mrodriguez1440


    One of my clients got hit with negative SEO in the past few days.  Check it out in ahrefs.  The site is www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com. Any advice on what, if anything, I should do?  Google disavow? Thanks.

    | mrodriguez1440
    1
  • ClayPotCreative


    Hi everyone. Thanks in advance for the assistance. We are reformatting the URL structure of our very content rich website (thousands of pages) into a cleaner stovepipe model. So our pages will have a URL structure something like http://oursite.com/topic-name/category-name/subcategory-name/title.html etc. My question is… is there any additional benefit to having the path /topic-name/category-name/subcategory-name/title.html literally exist on our server as a real directory? Our plan was to just use HTACCESS to point that URL to a single script that parses the URL structure and makes the page appropriately. Do search engine spiders know the difference between these two models and prefer one over the other? From our standpoint, managing a single HTACCESS file and a handful of page building scripts would be infinitely easier than a huge, complicated directory structure of real files. And while this makes sense to us, the HTACCESS model wouldn't be considered some kind of black hat scheme, would it? Thank you again for the help and looking forward to your thoughts!

    | ClayPotCreative
    0
  • A_Q


    Hi Mozzers, Would appreciate your input on this, as many people have differing views on this when asked... We manage 2 websites for the same company (very different domains) - both sites are targeting the same primary keyword phrase, however, the user journey should incorporate both websites, and therefore the sites are very heavily cross linked - so we can easily pass a user from one site to another. Whilst site 1 is performing well for the target keyword phrase, site 2 isn't. Site 1 is always around 2 to 3 rank, however we've only seen site 2 reach the top of page 2 in SERPs at best, despite a great deal of white hat optimisation, and is now on the decline. There's also a trend (all be it minimal) of when site 1 improves in rank, site 2 drops. Because the 2 sites are so heavily inter-linked could Google be treating them as one site, and therefore dropping site 2 in the SERPs, as it is in Google's interests to show different, relevant sites?

    | A_Q
    0
  • emerald


    Hi Mozzers,
    Our site has suddenly been de-indexed from Google and we don't know why. All pages are de-indexed in Google Webmaster Tools (except for the homepage and sitemap), starting after 7 September: Please see screenshot attached to show this: 7 Sept 2014 - 76 pages indexed in Google Webmaster Tools 28 Sept until current - 3-4 pages indexed in Google Webmaster Tools including homepage and sitemaps. Site is: (removed) As a result all rankings for child pages have also disappeared in Moz Pro Rankings Tracker. Only homepage is still indexed and ranking. It seems like a technical issue blocking the site. I checked for robots.txt, noindex, nofollow, canonical and site crawl for any 404 errors but can't find anything. The site is online and accessible. No warnings or errors appear in Google Webmaster Tools. Some recent issues were that we moved from Shared to Dedicated Server around 7 Sept (using same host and location). Prior to the move our preferred domain was www.domain.com WITH www. However during the move, they set our domain as domain.tld WITHOUT the www. Running a site:domain.tld vs site:www.domain.tld command now finds pages indexed under non-www version, but no longer as www. version. Could this be a cause of de-indexing? Yesterday we had our host reset the domain to use www. again and we resubmitted our sitemap, but there is no change yet to the indexing. What else could be wrong? Any suggestions appeciated. Thanks. hDmSHN9.gif

    | emerald
    0
  • CommT


    Hi, I am in a little bit of a pickle, and hope that you clever people can help me... A little background: In April this year we relaunched one of our brands as a standalone business. I set up page to page 301 redirects from the old website to the new branded domain. From an SEO perspective this relaunch went amazingly smoothly - we only lost around 10% of traffic and that was just for a couple of months. We now get more traffic than ever before. Basically it's all going swimmingly. I noticed yesterday that the SSL certificate on the old domain has expired, so I asked IT to repurchase one for us to maintain the 301 redirects. IT are saying that they would prefer to do a name server redirect instead, which would remove all the page to page 301s.  They are saying that this would maintain the SEO. As far as I am aware this wouldn't. Please can someone help me put together a polite but firm response to basically say no? Thanks, I really welcome and appreciate your help on this! Amelia

    | CommT
    0
  • joony


    We have a Wordpress site and hope to force everything to HTTPS. We change the site name (in wordpress settings) to https://mydomain.com In the htaccess code = http://moz.com/blog/htaccess-file-snippets-for-seos Ensure we are using HTTPS version of the site. RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] but some blogs http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19168489/https-force-redirect-not-working-in-wordpress say RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] Which one is right? 🙂 and are we missing anything?

    | joony
    0
  • alecfwilson


    I've put together a glossary of terms related to my industry that have SEO value and am planning on building out a section on our site with unique pages for each term. However, most of these terms have synonyms or are highly similar to other valuable terms. If I were to make a glossary, and on each page (that will have high-quality, valuable, and accurate definitions and more), wrote something like "{term}, also commonly referred to as {synonym}, {synonym}," would I run the risk of keyword stuffing penalties? My only other idea beyond creating a glossary with separate pages defining each synonym is to use schema.org markup to add synonyms to the HTML of the page, but that could be seen as even more grey-hat type keyword stuffing. I guess one other option would be to work the synonyms into the definition so that the presence of the keyword reads more organically. Thanks!

    | alecfwilson
    0
  • smartcow


    So with the update to penguin 3.0 last week we notice that some clients have been significantly hit by the update. How do we rectify the situation for the poor links that are on the site. We have used open site explorer and Google webmaster to try and identify which are the bad links to try and remove. Now we can spot that some inbound links are from directories that may be perceived as low value/spam, but could not be sure what is affecting the ranking. The vast majority of these links are historical prior to inheriting this client recently and so do not have any logins to remove the links (if there are logins). These appear to be placed by teams outsourced in India. We would suspect that no site owner would spend the time removing links from the site any way. How do we recover from the penguin hit. Is it just a case of trying to identify ones that we suspect could be perceived as spam and ask for these to be disavowed by Google? Do we contact all the sites to ask them to be removed and/or do we just push ahead with more engaging white hat methods of social SEO? Are we likely to recover in the short term or be permanently hit. The site is for a small business with no more than 800 monthly hits so this fall from grace off very good front page positions is going to hit our client very hard even if the sins are from a previous business. Any thoughts and suggestions PLEASE HELP

    | smartcow
    0
  • WhitbyHolidayCottages


    Something very strange has happened regarding my website traffic when making a comparison to the first six months of 2012 and then 2014. Anybody got any ideas? From my Google analytics from 1 January 2014 to 1 July in other words six months my total traffic on my website was 30,209. Not provided source ( what does this mean ? ) was very high at 23,141 but two of the my main short tail keywords I've targeted in the past "Whitby holiday cottages “only equal 254 and "Whitby cottages" was only 176. When I made a comparison with the same time period below in 2012 the website traffic this year as gone up greatly by almost 20000, but the two of my money short tail keywords as gone down greatly! If I compare the same time frame for 2012 the overall traffic was only 13,380. Not provided source was nowhere near as high at only 1836 which is also much less than above in 2014 but the short tail keywords I targeted "Whitby holiday cottages was almost 10 times higher at 2005 and "Whitby cottages “much higher at 613. I ran the questionnaire on http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/quiz/  regarding Panda and particularly Penguin and its association with back links. The article says that Penguin didn't hit the overall keywords, but only specific ones if they been targeted on the following dates the time points of April 24, 2012 and May 25, 2012 which are known Penguin rollout dates. So when I checked the two short tail keywords above for those two dates the figures did seem to drop from 10 hits a day to 5 but then went back up immediately to approximately 10 hits a day during the two-month period which suggested to me that I'd not been hit by Penguin on those dates. So when you look at the comparison the first six months of 2012 and then 2014 there is no doubt that money  short tail keywords of dropped off dramatically for me but the overall website traffic has gone up dramatically. Some of the increase in traffic will be  down to time and more articles/pages etc.
    The two short tail keywords I mention above I know I've dropped in Google rankings I used to be position three page one and the site is now position 10 so I would assume that's why I've dropped in traffic for those phrases.
    Has anybody got any idea what's happened? I can honestly say that I've not noticed it in bookings on the website business seems about the same overall.

    | WhitbyHolidayCottages
    0
  • veed23


    How long would it take to get a 1 page ranking for a new site after Penguin? Thinking about starting fresh. New site would have fresh content and keyword in the domain.

    | veed23
    0
  • DemiGR


    Back in July I had posted here that I thought someone was doing negative SEO against us.  We monitor our links on a daily basis, and a lot of toxic links came in quickly within a few days.  So we were pro-active and ended up disavowing those links soon after we saw them.  Shortly after that our ranking start to drop and we lost a good amount of traffic, though I do not know if its really connected since we only disavowed those toxic links and we weren't ranking FROM those links since they were disavowed so quickly. Now, its happening again.  20 new inbound domains linking to us from complete crap websites with crap content and not done by us.  I want to disavow them, but I am thinking that maybe the first time we disavowed the links, it hurt us, and maybe disavowing now will hurt us further?  I think Google should be able to filter out this crap but who knows, too much depends on this being handled correctly. Here are some of the crappy links: http://optibike.com/?home.php=page/loans/student-loan-without-a-cosigner-2.html
    http://designsbynickthegeek.com/?index.php=finance/loans/loan-for-you-3.html
    http://www.nuvivaweightloss.com/?index.php=article/loans/300-loan-today.html
    http://ecommercesalesmultipliersystem.com/?home.php=board/loans/fast-loan-with-monthly-payments-2.html They are mostly duplicate content across a network of sites. How would you guys handle this?

    | DemiGR
    0

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