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Hi guys, Had a quick question that I wanted to verify here. After reviewing a Moz report we received some redirect chain error on all of our sites hosted with WPEngine. We noticed that the redirect chain appears to be coming from how the domains are configured in their control panel. Essentially, there is a redirect: from staging/temp -> to live from non-www -> to www SSL redirect from http -> https The issue here is that the non-www is redirecting to www and then redirected again to https://www According to support the only way to get rid of this error is to drop the www version of the domain and to host everything under https://domain.com. To me it seems very odd that you cannot just go from http://non-www to https://www in just 1 301 redirect. Has anyone else experienced this or am I just not looking at the situation correctly?

Howdy Moz, Just received a message in Google Webmaster Tools about a CMS update: "Joomla Update Available As of the last crawl of your website, you appear to be running Joomla 1.5. One or more of the URLs found were: http://www.website/custom-url/article5034 Google recommends that you update to the latest release. Older or unpatched software may be vulnerable to hacking or malware that can hurt your users. To download the latest release, visit the Joomla download page. If you have already updated to the latest version of Joomla, please disregard this message. If you have any additional questions about why you are receiving this message, Google has provided more background information in a blog post about this subject." Read through the associated blog post. According to the post a generator meta tag is created in Joomla that notes the CMS version. Here's the oddity: The site was on Joomla 1.5 over 2 years ago. 1 Year ago it was updated to Joomla 2.5. About a week ago it was converted completely to Wordpress. According to GWT the last date the Google bot accessed the site was the day before (5/1/14) the email. I went through the code, css/html, and the database and found no reference of Joomla 1.5. Has anyone seen this message? If so, how did you rectify it? Were there any adverse effects on rankings?

Howdy Moz, Still kind lost of review markup and the best way to get it implemented into a Wordpress site. Any suggestions on a good tutorial that walks you through the process?

Any thoughts on how schema markup should properly implemented on service base businesses? Let's say a plumber in Washington has a few locations. Obviously you would use schema mark up on their physical location information, but what about service areas? Are there ramifications to using the for service areas? It seems like you could potentially confuse the search engines. We are noticing a competitor use this on a newly developed website. We haven't seen any improvement in their rankings per say, but it may be a bit early to tell.

While I was doing research on UK Flower companies I noticed that one particular domain had great rankings (top 3), but has slid quite a bit down to page two. After investigating further I noticed that they had a drastic loss of referring pages, but an increase in total referring domains. See this screenshot from ahrefs. I took a look at their historical rankings (got them from the original SEO provider's portfolio) and compared it to the Wayback Machine. There did not seem to be any drastic changes in the site structure. My question is what would cause such a dramatic loss in total referring pages while showing a dramatic increase in referring domains? It appears that the SEO company was trying rebound from the loss of links though. Any thoughts on why this might happen? 56VD5jD

Google is increasing cracking down on bad local results. However, in many regions of the US there are twin cities or cities that reside next to each other, like Minneapolis-Saint Paul or Kansas City. According to Google guidelines your business should only be listed in the city in which your business is physically located. However, we've noticed that results just outside of the local map pack will still rank, especially for businesses that service the home. For example, let's say you have a ACME Plumbing in Saint Paul, MN. If you were to perform a search for "Plumbing Minneapolis" you typically see local Minneapolis plumbers, then Saint Paul outliers. Usually the outliers are in the next city or just outside of the Google map centroid. Are there any successful strategies to increase rank on these "Saint Paul outliers" that compete with local Minneapolis results or are the results always going lag behind in lieu of perceived accuracy? We're having to compete against some local competitors that are using some very blackhat techniques to rank multiple sites locally (in the map results). They rank multiple sites for the same company, under different company names and UPS store addresses. Its pretty obvious, especially when you see a UPS store on the street view of the address! We're not looking to bend the rules, but rather compete safely. Can anything be done in this service based scenario?

Howdy Moz! Let's say we have a client out of Washington called "Acme Plumbing".  Of course they rank #1 for their own brand, but the trouble we found is directly above in the PPC section. It appears that a competitor is targeting the brand by including some of the branding in the ad itself.  Specifically, it has the following format: Acme Plumbing - Quality and Affordable Plumbing Service
acme.contractorreferral.net/plumbing
Submit zip code for free estimate Clicking on the link takes you directly to a lead generation form.  Considering the protection on the name (™), is this ethical or even legal?  Or do we just have competitor that found a sneaky way to try to divert traffic? Google's guidelines are clear about ™ violations.  What about general branding, especially with established companies and regional brands?

Howdy Moz, Over and over we hear of folks using microsites in addition to their main brand for targeting keyword specific niches.  The main point of concern most folks have is either in duplicate content or being penalized by Google, which is also our concern.  However, in one of our niches we notice a lot of competitors have set up secondary websites to rank in addition to the main website (basically take up more room on the SERPS).  They are currently utilizing different domains, on different IPs, on different servers, etc.  We verified because we called and they all rang to the same competitors. So our thought was why not take the fight to them (so to speak) but with a branding and content strategy.  The company has many good content pieces that we can utilize, like company mottos, missions statements, special projects, community outreach that can be turned into microsites with unique content. Our strategy idea is the take a company called "ACME Plumbing" and brand for specific keywords with locations like sacramentoplumberwarranty.com where the site's content revolves around plumber warranty info, measures of a good warranty, plumbing warranty news (newsworthy issues), blogs, RCS - you get the idea...and send both referral traffic and link to the main site. The ideal is to then repeat the process with another company aspect like napaplumbingprojects.com where the content of the site is focused on cool projects, images, RCS, etc. Again, referring traffic and link juice to the main site. We realize that this adds the amount of RCS that needs to be done, but that's exactly why we're here.  Also, any thoughts of intentionally tying in the brand to the location so you get urls like acmeplumbingsacarmento.com?

SEO has really moved away from the nitty gritty analysis of backlinking factors, link wheels, and the like and has shifted to a more holistic marketing approach.  That approach is best described around MOZ as “Real Company S#it”.  RCS is a great way to think about what we really do because it is so much more than just SEO or just Social Media. However, our clients and business owners do want to see results and want it quantified in some way.  The way most of our clients understand SEO is by ranking high on specific terms or online avenues they have a better possibility of generating traffic/sales/revenue.  They understand this more from the light of traditional marketing, where you pay for a TV ad and then measure to see how much revenue that ad generated. In the light of RCS and the need to target a large number of keywords for a given client, how do most PROs handle this situation; where you have a large number of keywords to target but with RCS? Many I’ve asked tend to use the traditional approach of creating a single content piece that is geared towards a given target keyword.  However, that approach can get daunting if you have say 25 keywords that a small business wants to target.  In this case is not really a case of scaling down the client expectations? What if the client wants all of the keywords and has the budget?  Do you just ramp your RCS content creation efforts?  It seems that you can do overkill and quickly run out of RCS content to produce.

We found a particular client that was using a 3rd party backlinker to build links (they were outsourced).  The backlinks appeared to be low quality, just basic text and no substantial content surrounding it, usually like a forum profile.  The backlinker was swapped out. However, we've been suffering from a big loss of links.  We anticipated that quite a few of the links the previous crew were managing would be lost, however, we've lost over 1500.  Some of that is due to the former SEO company using sitesays.com as part of their strategy. That site has since removed all listings/links because they were hit by recent algorithm changes.  Every week GWT has fewer and fewer links coming from that site.  We expect this to continue until GWT has removed all links from that site.  We are also losing ground (quickly) on local rankings too.  We believe this is due to the high number of links lost. What is best practice when building links to counter this issue?  Is there anything that can be done to stem the link purge and, if possible, gain ground on rankings again?

Hi, We're working with a local service provider with a location specific keyword (not a real example: "orlando plumbing contractors"). Background:
In recent history the client updated a new site design and upgraded from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5.  Of course there were duplicate content issues which have been resolved with the help of AceSEF. Duplicate content, title tags, and other content issues are handled as soon as they appear in GWT or MOZ. Additionally, a high number of backlinks were lost when the latest Google update hit.  Many of these sites were of sites that no longer existed or were spammy and flushed out.  Some were lost due to the previous SEO firm literally removing backlinks and switching them to their new client (seo firm was putting all of the work the client paid for under their name to control everything). Current Situation: The backlink loss seems to have been stopped (hopefully) because we are using a new strategy that relies solely on the quality of the links, surrounding text, varied anchor text, relevancy, etc.)  However, we tried an experiment on just one of the clients keywords.  That experiment seems to have blown up in our faces evidently. The landing page for the location specific keyword  has dropped from the index completely (it seems), but only when searching broad.  When using exact match with quotes like the example quoted above ("orlando plumbing contractors") the landing page appears, but several ranks lower.  We were ranked yesterday 6/23/13, but as of today 6/24/13 are no longer ranked. On broad matches, non-relevant sites and even a site that shows only a broken server configuration is outranking the client (they appear for the broad search, but the client does not). What Was Done
We recently created a press release for and posted it on a press release site.  We then created a link back to the landing page (exact match anchor text).  We posted the PR article to several social sites (Google plus, folkd, delicious, twitter, stumble upon, diigo). We also created a blog article (on-site) on site for that, creating links back to the landing page (the links all had exact anchor text).  We posted that blog article to social news sites (facebook, stumble, delicious) and included a ping.  The PR article was manually rewritten and posted to the PR site (we had to make 2 versions of the PR; one for the blog and one for the PR site). The Result
The client ending up dropping off the broad search rankings, but only slipped a few for "exact match" (with quotes).  The PR article that was created is now ranked on page 3 for the board keyword and is still beat by non working sites. We suspect that the exact anchor text could be causing this problem.  Anyone else have an idea (we're scratching our heads and trying not to freak out at the same time).