Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

What's new with SEO in last 6 months?

Intermediate & Advanced SEO

812

LoveChicken last edited by

Hi, I've been away from the SEO scene for about 6 months now. I was wondering if anyone could summerise what the big changes are and how one needs to approach an SEO strategy now compared to last year before this Penguine (?) update.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
igor.pinchevskiy last edited by

Hi Mark,

Well one big change in the last 6 months, is MYSELF joining the game (LOL). I would strongly recommend reading SEOMOZ's Beginners guide to SEO, it was updated on May 22nd which is fairly recent and will refresh your knowledge and updated on the latest http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

Ranking 1st for a keyword - but when 's' is added to the end we are ranking on the second page

Hi everyone - hope you are well. I can't get my head around why we are ranking 1st for a specific keyword, but then when 's' is added to the end of the keyword - we are ranking on the second page. What could be the cause of this? I thought that Google would class both of the keywords the same, in this case, let's say the keyword was 'button'. We would be ranking 1st for 'button', but 'buttons' we are ranking on the second page. Any ideas? - I appreciate every comment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S

0
Local SEO - Do I need it if I don't do business locally?

Super confused about this. Our office is located in Los Angeles, but it is not a storefront, and our clients are from all over the country... and our business involves travel to other countries. So there is nothing "local" about us. But everything I read seems to say we should be doing local SEO. How to approach this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benenjerry

1
Duplicate content when changing a site's URL due to algorithm penalty

Greetings A client was hit by penguin 2.1, my guess is that this was due to linkbuilding using directories. Google webmaster tools has detected about 117 links to the site and they are all from directories. Furthermore, the anchor texts are a bit too "perfect" to be natural, so I guess this two factors have earned the client's site an algorithm penalty (no manual penalty warning has been received in GWT). I have started to clean some of the backlinks, on Oct the 11th. Some of the webmasters I asked complied with my request to eliminate backlinks, some didn´t, I disavowed the links from the later. I saw some improvements on mid october for the most important KW (see graph) but ever since then the rankings have been falling steadily. I'm thinking about giving up on the domain name and just migrating the site to a new URL. So FINALLY MY QUESTION IS: if I migrate this 6-page site to a new URL, should I change the content completely ? I mean, if I just copy paste the content of the curent site into a new URL I will incur in dpolicate content, correct?. Is there some of the content I can copy ? or should I just start from scratch? Cheers hRggeNE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Masoko-T

0
301's, Mixed-Case URLs, and Site Migration Disaster

Hello Moz Community, After placing trust in a developer to build & migrate our site, the site launched 9 weeks ago and has been one disaster after another. Sadly, after 16 months of development, we are building again, this time we are leveled-up and doing it in-house with our people. I have 1 topic I need advice on, and that is 301s. Here's the deal. The newbie developer used a mixed-case version for our URL structure. So what should have been /example-url became /Example-Url on all URLs. Awesome right? It was a duplicate content nightmare upon launch (among other things). We are re-building now. My question is this, do we bite the bullet for all URLs and 301 them to a proper lower-case URL structure? We've already lost a lot of link equity from 301ing the site the first time around. We were a PR 4 for the last 5 years on our homepage, now we are a PR 3. That is a substantial loss. For our primary keywords, we were on the first page for the big ones, for the last decade. Now, we are just barely cleaving to the second page, and many are 3rd page. I am afraid if we 301 all the URLs again, a 15% reduction in link equity per page is really going to hurt us, again. However, keeping the mixed-case URL structure is also a whammy. Building a brand new site, again, it seems like we should do it correctly and right all the previous wrongs. But on the other hand, another PR demotion and we'll be in line at the soup kitchen. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yogitrout1

0
Mystery 404's

I have a large number of 404's that all have a similar structure: www.kempruge.com/example/kemprugelaw. kemprugelaw keeps getting stuck on the end of url's. While I created www.kempruge.com/example/ I never created the www.kempruge.com/example/kemprugelaw page or edited permalinks to have kemprugelaw at the end of the url. Any idea how this happens? And what I can do to make it stop? Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup

0
My New(ish) Site Isn't Ranking Well And Recently Fell

I launched my site (jesfamilylaw.com) at the beginning of January. Since then, I've been trying to build high quality back links. I have a few back links with keyword targeted anchor text from some guest posts I've published (maybe 3 or so) and I have otherwise signed up for business directories and industry-specific directories. I have a few social media profiles and some likes on Facebook, both for the company page and some posts. Despite this, I've had a lot of trouble cracking Google's top ten for any term, long or tall tail. I was starting to climb for Evanston Family Law, which is the key term I believe I am best optimized for, but took a dive yesterday. I fell from maybe the 14th result to somewhere on the 4th page. For all my other target terms, I don't know if I've gotten into the 20s yet. To further complicate matters, my Google Places listing isn't showing and is on the second page of results for Places searches, after businesses that aren't located in the same city. The night before I fell, I resubmitted my site to Google because Webmaster tools was showing duplicate title tags when I had none. I had also made a couple changes to some internal links and title tags, but only for a small fraction of the site. Long story short, I don't know what's going on. I don't know why I fell in the rankings and why my site isn't competitive for some of my target key phrases. I've read so many horror stories about Penguin that I fear my onsite optimization may be hurting my rankings or my back links are insufficient. I've done plenty of competitor research and the sites that are beating me have very aggressive onsite optimization and few back links. In short, I am very confused. Any help would be immensely appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JESFamilyLaw

0
Is there any negative SEO effect of having comma's in URL's?

Hello, I have a client who has a large ecommerce website. Some category names have been created with comma's in - which has meant that their software has automatically generated URL's with comma's in for every page that comes beneath the category in the site hierarchy. eg. 1 : http://shop.deliaonline.com/store/music,-dvd-and-games/dvds-and-blu_rays/ eg. 2 : http://shop.deliaonline.com/store/music,-dvd-and-games/dvds-and-blu_rays/action-and-adventure/ etc... I know that URL's with comma's in look a bit ugly! But is there 'any' SEO reason why URL's with comma's in are any less effective? Kind Regs, RB
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichBestSEO

0
We've just bought a new domain - need advice on the exact procedure to follow...

Hi guys, We've just bought a 3 letter .co.uk domain to replace our current 20 character old domain. Our existing domain is PR5 with quite a few links (that we can modify no problem) We're currently .301 redirecting the new domain to the old domain. I was looking at the procedure in one of the guides but as it's slightly different - is this the correct procedure? 1. prep the duplicate site on new domain and prep the individual htaccess .301 redirects 2. Add new the domain to google webmaster tools bing Webmaster centre 2. On the switchover date - modify all possible incoming links from external sites 3. On the switchover date - apply the .301 redirects and make the new site live 4. On the switchover date - apply the new sitemaps to google & bing 5. on the switchover date - fill out the change of address form in webmaster tools 6. Do the happy dance? many thanks in advance, Tony.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | posh_tiger

0