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Google ranking factors are increasingly more complex and less universal. Google is emphasizing different ranking factors for different scenarios. What tools are available that can help identify which ranking factors Google may be weighting for a given query or industry? For example, are there any tools that provide correlative analysis of Google's rankings for a given keyword?

I agree that Google's machine learning/AI means that Google is using a more dynamic set of factors to match searcher intent to content, but this claim feels like an overstatement: Let’s be quite clear: Except for important technical standards, there are no longer any specifc factors
or benchmark values that are universally valid for all online marketers and SEOs. Instead, there
are different ranking factors for every single industry, or even every single search query. And these
now change continuously. Keyword-relevant content, backlinks, etc. still seem to be ranking factors across pretty much all queries/industries. For example, I can't think of a single industry where it would be a good idea to try to rank for [keyword] without including [keyword] in the visible text of the page. Also, websites that rank without any backlinks are incredibly rare (unheard of for competitive terms). Doubtless some factors change (eg Google may favor webpages with images for a query like "best hairstyle for men" but not for another query), but other factors still seem to apply to all queries (or at least 95%+). Thoughts?

I've seen a variety of services on the fringe of the SEO world that send a flow of (fake) traffic to your website via Google, to drive up your SERP CTR and site engagement. Seems gray hat, but I'm curious as to whether it actually works. The latest data I've seen from trustworthy sources (example and example 2) seems mixed on whether CTR has a direct impact on search rankings. Google claims it doesn't. I think it's possible it directly impacts rankings, or its possible Google is using some other metric to reward high engagement pages and CTR correlates with that. Any insight on whether CTR manipulation services actually work?

A client of mine has a large website with multiple sections (shop, forums, articles, etc.) that apparently had a significant reduction in rankings, traffic, and sales in the past. However, historic Google Analytics data is not available for the site, and I'm having troubles identifying anything concrete about the traffic drop, such as when it happened, what pages/sections it happened to, etc. The shop traffic drives most of the revenue, but it's a small number compared to the forums traffic, so it's hard to pick anything out of top-line trends like SEMrush offers. What tools or strategies might help in this situation?

In Moz's domain recommendations, they recommend subdirectories instead of subdomains (which agrees with my experience), but make an exception for language-specific websites: Since search engines keep different metrics for domains than they do subdomains, it is recommended that webmasters place link-worthy content like blogs in subfolders rather than subdomains. (i.e. www.example.com/blog/ rather than blog.example.com) The notable exceptions to this are language-specific websites. (i.e., en.example.com for the English version of the website). Why are language-specific websites excepted from this advice? Why are subdomains preferable for language-specific websites? Google's advice says subdirectories are fine for language-specific websites, and GSC allows geographic settings at the subdirectory level (which may or may not even be needed, since language-specific sites may not be geographic-specific), so I'm unsure why Moz would suggest using subdirectories in this case.

I just tried to create a Google+ listing for a client. It's a brand new company. As soon as I submit the listing, I get an error message: "Google has suspended your page due to quality issues." There is no content on the listing, no website, etc. Just their NAP. All I can guess is their business address or phone number is on a blacklist due to some previous tenant/owner. Does Google keep a blacklist of addresses and/or phone numbers? Any other ideas?

Let's say I want to find blog posts posted in the past week or so about "key west". These posts could be on a personal blog, travel blog, etc. Google News is mostly news sites (not blogs) and Google blog search doesn't work any more. What other good options are there? So far Open site Explorer Just Discovered is the best option I've found, but there is a lot of other stuff mixed in with a few blog posts.

What good/bad experiences have people had trying to optimize a single URL for multiple locations in different states? eg optimizing a page of the site for "dentist atlanta", "dentist orlando", and "dentist miami" (the client has offices in all these locations). Has anyone found that Google has an algorithm that get's suspicious if you try to optimize a given URL for either too many locations and/or for locations that are too far apart?

We have a client site (a dentist) that has 10 locations and 20+ services (braces, teeth whitening, cosmetic dentistry, etc, etc.). We're trying to figure out the ideal approach to optimally cover all their locations and services, but each option we consider has drawbacks: Optimize service pages for service name + each location name (or at least the biggest location names), with service name and location names in the title tag. That results in a too long title tag, plus possible user confusion, since they are searching for "braces richmond" but the title tag lists other cities, some of which are in a different state. Optimize service pages for service name + each location name, but don't include the locations in the page title. This is the current option being used, but it appears to be hurting the rankings at least a bit not having the location name in the page title. Create a page for each service + location combo. That will be 200+ pages, which will mean the pages will be deeper in the site, with less link juice. Create new domains for each location/state covered. But then we have to start over building link juice. How have other sites dealt with this? What has worked best and what hasn't worked?

One of our clients has a separate mobile site, and we've setup the rel="alternate" on the main site homepage, but https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ still fails the site (it checks the main site, instead of the mobile site) when we put in the main site URL. Is there any way to check that we've got everything setup correctly? (We have a lot of experience with mobile responsive sites, but not so much with separate URLs.)

Search for keywords like criminal defense lawyer detroit or criminal defense lawyer detroit mi and Google knowledge graph is highlighting one competitor. No maps results are shown. How have others dealt with this situation? I know others have noticed this too: http://www.webpronews.com/sometimes-googles-knowledge-graph-highlights-brands-for-generic-queries-2013-10

If you search for locksmith Phoenix, this Google+ page is ranked #3 in the local results: https://plus.google.com/117543374216451236579/about?hl=en The phone number is a VOIP number, they don't appear to have many/any citations, no reviews, etc. They've listed the Yelp search results page as their website. Strange. How are they ranking so well? Is Google ranking them well because it's associating them with Yelp.com? Any thoughts?

Have a client (ecommerce site with 1,000+ pages) who recently switched to OpenCart from another cart. Their organic search traffic (from Google, Yahoo, and Bing) dropped roughly 40%. Unfortunately, we weren't involved with the site before, so we can only rely on the wayback machine to compare previous to present. I've checked all the common causes of traffic drops and so far I mostly know what's probably not causing the issue. Any suggestions? Some URLs are the same and the rest 301 redirect (note that many of the pages were 404 until a couple weeks after the switch when the client implemented more 301 redirects) They've got an XML sitemap and are well-indexed. The traffic drops hit pretty much across the site, they are not specific to a few pages. The traffic drops are not specific to any one country or language. Traffic drops hit mobile, tablet, and desktop I've done a full site crawl, only 1 404 page and no other significant issues. Site crawl didn't find any pages blocked by nofollow, no index, robots.txt Canonical URLs are good Site has about 20K pages indexed They have some bad backlinks, but I don't think it's backlink-related because Google, Yahoo, and Bing have all dropped. I'm comparing on-page optimization for select pages before and after, and not finding a lot of differences. It does appear that they implemented Schema.org when they launched the new site. Page load speed is good I feel there must be a pretty basic issue here for Google, Yahoo, and Bing to all drop off, but so far I haven't found it. What am I missing?

With keyword data from Google on its way out, we're losing our ability to discover what keywords a website is ranking for (you can do ranking checks, but only if you already know what keywords the site is ranking for). What are some good SERP visibility tools? (i.e. you enter the domain name, and the tool lists which keywords the site ranks for organically, etc.) I know SpyFu offers this, but they seem to be PPC focused and perhaps not very accurate. I know other companies offer it, but I'm blanking on which ones.

So, I was reading Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Battle of the Labyrinth tonight, and found a description of a graffiti tag in the Labyrinth that says "MOZ RULZ". What do you think? Is one of the Mozzers a demigod who has explored and survived the Labyrinth? 🙂 (See attachment for book quote.) F1WmT5r

Is it just me, or is it getting harder to sell SEO services? SEO costs more now and takes longer to achieve results There seem to be more good SEO agencies out there (gone are the days where the primary competition was offshore outsourcers and web design agencies) It seems that the number of agencies is growing faster than the number of companies buying services As online competition heats up, it takes more and more budget to really "win" in a market, but so few companies are willing to invest enough Any others notice similar trends? What will the future look like?

How important is it that you gain backlinks from websites in the same country you're targeting? Scenario: You have a website targeting users in Japan. How important is it that backlinks to your website are from Japanese websites? Do you need a majority of links from Japanese websites to rank well, or will you do OK with 25% Japanese links and 75% links from other countries? According to Majestic, sites for popular Japanese brands like tsutaya.co.jp and seiyu.co.jp get more links from US sites than from Japanese sites.

Love the fresh data sources SEOmoz is building for us. However, I'm frustrated by the lack of scale the tools offer. Let's say I have 30 competitors I want to watch (which is pretty conservative - if we're targeting 100 keywords on a site, we could easily have 100's of top 20 ranked competitors). If I have to run individual reports for each using OSE and Fresh Web Explorer, that would be hours of work every day/week. Ideally, I'd like to see a campaign feature where you could add 2-200 competitors to view in one report. You could view recent links (from FWE and JDL) for all competitors on one handy report, and sort by various metrics. So for example, if you wanted to view the top 10 links your competitors have gotten in the past week, you could see that in 30 seconds of work, vs many hours of work. Any others who think this would be useful? Any ideas for how we can use the data in such a way without this feature?

Looking for a great freelance writer to assist in creating linkbait and viral content pieces. Please contact me if you are, or know of, such a person. 🙂

After you calculate how many hours you need to complete a marketing project for a client, how much extra do you add for project management, communication, all the little things that come up, unexpected problems, client questions, etc.? One resource I read said to add 10% to 20% for project management, then add 25% to 33% more for fluctuations, then state a +/-15% margin of error on the estimate. I was wondering what percentages others use when estimating client projects.

This subpage gained a PR4 (was PR5) from external links. http://tinyurl.com/a24ghh9 It only has 5 links, including 2 links to the site's homepage. The homepage was PR2 before this subpage was published, and still is even after 2 PR updates. I'm surprised the PageRank that should be flowing from this subpage to the homepage hasn't increased the homepage PR to at least 3. Assuming each level of toolbar PR is 10x the one before, a PR4 subpage with 5 links should pass more than enough PR to the homepage to bump it from PR2 to PR3, right? Any ideas? Does Google have a really strong decay on how much PR gets passed from subpages to homepages? This is somewhat troubling to me, as it poses a problem for the "attract links to your content pages and your homepage and money pages will rise with the tide" approach.

Would like to get some thoughts on whether navigation menus or in-content links are best for internal linking, from an SEO standpoint. A few thoughts to get started with: For sites with a lot of content, you can have a navigation menu linking to your higher-level pages, then in-content links to deeper pages on your site. For smaller sites, this is not an option, as the navigation menu will probably link to all your important pages. You could add in-content links, but Google only counts the first link on the page, so the in-content links would be ignored if you'd already linked yp the page in your top nav menu. I can think of several possible reasons navigation menu links could be less desirable than in content links from a Google perspective. (They are sitewide boilerplate content without context.) If you setup your navigation structure based on what is best for the user, small sites don't have much wiggle room to optimize internal link structure, as all their money pages will be linked to from the top nav menu. Do you think Google prefers in content links to navigation menu links? If so, how do you get around the fact that for many sites, all their money pages are being linked to from their main navigation menu?

If you create pages about "try keyword1 not keyword2" will there be any barriers to getting the pages ranked for keyword2? Example: You have furnished rental units in a small town, and you offer nightly/weekly rentals. You want to rank for "town hotel" since you offer the same service as a hotel. Since you're not really a hotel, you create a page called "Better than a hotel: Town nightly rental units". Anyone know if Google has an algorithm to detect this (they would have to detect the meaning of the words you were using and know that you were promoting something other than a hotel) and determine you're not really relevant to "town hotel" and not rank you well? I think they probably do not, as I've seen things like Google Adsense Alternatives articles ranking well for the term Google Adsense, or Boycott Godaddy sites ranking well for the term godaddy. But I would like to hear any evidence or facts others know of.

We all know that a thinly-veiled ad masquerading as a press release is not a good link building tactic. Of course, if the press release is newsworthy, then it can generate some real publicity and honest backlinks. My question is a bit more specific - are press releases an effective way to promote linkbait to niche websites/bloggers? Has anyone had success using press releases to promote linkbait to relevant bloggers and websites in their niche? My gut tells me that most niche bloggers are not reading press releases on a daily basis to find story ideas. I know that outlets like the Huffington Post and TechCrunch pay attention to press releases, but I'm guessing most blogs not run by professional journalists do not. Anyone know if this is a generally true assumption? Anyone know of a way to get a better feel for the type of bloggers that are signed up to get press releases from PRNewswire or similar services? (In other words, how do you figure out if bloggers in your target groups are signed up to get press releases?)

We have created a tool that provides "at a glance social metrics" for the URLs listed in an RSS feed. Its intended purposes are: Monitor the social success of your recent blog posts Spy on the social success of your competitors' recent blog posts Quickly analyze a blog for social sharing metrics to determine whether it is a good outreach prospect or guest post opportunity Check out the tool at http://www.rypmarketing.com/tools/rss-social-analyzer.php I've attached a report run on the YouMoz RSS feed. Would love to hear some feedback on the tool... Do you think the tool is useful? Nice, but not worthwhile? What could be done to improve it? What ways do you think it will be most useful? Thanks! RSSSocialAnalyzer-YouMoz.png

Have a client who has a bunch of links from spammy sites that aren't even indexed by Google. Will Google penalize (i.e. Penguin) for backlinks from spammy sites that aren't indexed? I'm guessing "Yes, Google still crawls non-indexed sites and may penalize the sites linked to from the banned site." Anyone have any data or experience with this? Anyone have a non-indexed or banned site? Does Google still crawl it?

We've got content marketing and other great tactics for getting links to content pages, but what are your favorite tactics for getting links to your money pages (i.e. product pages, landing pages, devices pages, sales letters, etc.) For example: For certain sites (especially some ecommerce sites), one can get a few backlinks by doing giveaways, contests, or events Some sites can give their product to bloggers to review If you're selling an exciting product and/or a product that appeals to a passionate user base, such tactics can work great. There are some sites that such tactics won't work very well for, though. For example, if you sell a boring or highly specialized product that bloggers won't want to review or giveaway as a contest prize - such as valves used in a specific commercial application, or an expensive B2B product that you can't really giveaway. Creativity is of course important, but sometimes it can only take you so far. What are your favorite strategies for getting quality backlinks to your "money pages" especially for sites that don't fit into the "ecommerce site selling cool stuff" category?

The SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty tool is great, but the 5 keyword limit is too small. I need a tool that will allow checking the organic competition level of 100's of keywords (to help in selecting blog topics). Anyone know of such a tool?

I keep seeing multiple (2-3 per search) car insurance ads when I search for "link building" on Bing. I made a blog post that shows a screenshot and has more details. I'm not aware of any retargeting or other targeting options Bing offers that would show nonrelevant ads on a search like this. Or is there such a feature that I don't know about? My best theories are that it is a bug, or that Bing is testing something new. Any ideas?

Not a complaint, but a question to understand how the research tool operates: When I run backlink checks on websites, often the reported link is not only not on the page, but it's not found anywhere on the site. I use several tools to search for the link url as well as for the keyword.   Why does the tool report a link is there, but I cannot find the links in some cases?   Is there a lag in the information the tool is using, making it not quite up to date, or is it something else? Thanks much!

I'm doing some link profile analysis and need examples of sites hit by Penguin (not Panda). If you have a site that was hit and are willing to share, please PM me: Your site homepage URL Main keyword(s) you lost rankings for (preferably keywords your homepage was ranked for but no longer is) I will keep your information strictly confidential and will not share it. (I will publish the results of my findings, but will not mention any of the sites used for research.) Thanks.

Somebody has been building spam pharmacy links to one of our client sites. I presume they hacked the site and were trying to get their injected pages to rank for pharmacy keywords. The hack appears to be gone now, but we will check more code to be sure. However, we're still left with a bunch of really spammy links, with pharmacy related anchor texts. Anyone had any experience dealing with this? Did the links hurt your rankings? How did you get rid of or mitigate them?

Anyone have insight into what specific factors penguin is targeting and how it works? Matt Cutts seemed to infer that the site was targeting things such as spun content, keyword stuffing, etc. but most of the sites that have been hit that I've seen aren't doing any obvious content spamming like that. For example: Is penguin looking primarily at onsite or backlink factors? Does Penguin just discount spammy backlinks, or does it apply an additional penalty to sites that have poor quality backlinks? Anyone noticing specific onsite or offsite factors that correlate with whether a site has been hit or not?

I once saw a tool (from Distilled, I think?) where you would input your blog post or page URL, and it would give you a table showing how many Facebook likes, Tweets, etc that page has gotten. Does anyone have the URL for this or a similar tool?

When searching for site:myclient.com their homepage doesn't appear first. I know some SEOs have reported this was a warning sign that there was a penalty. Here is what I've checked/found: Toolbar pagerank remains strong. Homepage is indexed. SEO traffic is falling, but its been gradually falling for a year now, mainly due to the client neglecting any type of marketing campaigns or link building, I believe. There was not a specific drop that could be tied to a penalty. Site remains well indexed. 62,742 of 63,021 URLs in the sitemap are indexed. Site is a large ecommerce site, so many pages are duplicate content (product descriptions). Homepage does rank #1 when searching for string of text present on the homepage. Nothing unusual in Google Webmaster Tools Search for myclient.com returns homepage with 6 expanded sitelinks under it. Google safe browsing check shows no malware. Anything else I should check?

We're getting ready to release a free tool to the SEO community that we hope will help marketers better create and optimize/market great video content. Hint: the tool has features built in to help you analyze video rankings in universal search results. 🙂 We'd like to get feedback from a few beta users first, though. If you'd be willing to give us your honest feedback in return for getting to use the tool early (and getting to suggest features you'd like), please PM me. Thanks in advance!

Some sites (including 1 or two I work with) have a legitimate reason to have duplicate content, such as product descriptions. One way to deal with duplicate content is to add other unique content to the page. It would be helpful to have guidelines regarding what percentage of the content on a page should be unique. For example, if you have a page with 1,000 words of duplicate content, how many words of unique content should you add for the page to be considered OK? I realize that a) Google will never reveal this and b) it probably varies a fair bit based on the particular website. However... Does anyone have any experience in this area? (Example: You added 300 words of unique content to all 250 pages on your site, that each had 100 words of duplicate content before, and that worked to improve your rankings.) Any input would be appreciated! Note: Just to be clear, I am NOT talking about "spinning" duplicate content to make it "unique". I am talking about adding unique content to a page that has legitimate duplicate content.

I added noindex tags to a bunch (1,000+) of paginated category pages on my site. I want Google to recrawl the pages so they will de-index them. Any ideas to speed up the process?

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

I know many social and article sites (hubpages, ezinearticles, many low quality article sites, etc.) were hit by Panda. Many higher quality sites that accept user-submitted content were not hit. High quality blogs that accept guest posts is one example. I believe Squidoo fared pretty well. Any other sites that accept user-generated content (with links) that still rank well?

We have a summer intern we need to give a handbook/guide on social media strategies, best practices, etc. Any recommendations? It can be free or paid, as long as it is accurate and up-to-date!

A friend pointed out to me that a University site had been hacked and used to gain top Google rankings. But it was cloaked so that most users wouldn't notice the hack. Only Googlebot and visitors from Google SERPs for the spam keywords would see a hacked version. See http://www.rypmarketing.com/blog/122-how-hackers-gained-an-easy-1-google-ranking-using-a-university-website.whtml (my blog) for screenshot and specifics. I've dealt with hacks before, but nothing this evil and sneaky. Ever seen anything like this? This is not our client, but was just curious if others had seen a hack like this before.

What's your favorite 100% white hat link building tactic? Well, maybe you don't want to reveal your favorite...just a good one...

Is there something you find yourself needing to do, but there is no tool to help you do it? A task you do all the time you're sure could be done easier with a nice app? I'd love to hear about it! If we like your idea, we'll create it and make it 100% free (for linkbait, of course!).

(No, I am not posting this thread to help me create linkbait. grin) Great seminar! Just got back from the drinks and networking at Muriel's (was that a cool location or what!?) and thought I'd start a discussion thread on here, since I don't see one yet. What was the biggest thing you learned/got from this seminar? For me, it was all the tips and tactics to create and promote linkbait.