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I can personally recommend DeepCrawl, its an amazing tool. Use it almost every day.

Hi

I was just looking at a competitors new site in OSE and it had a DA and PA of 1 which I would expect and also no links, which again I would expect, basically the guy used to design stuff for me and thinks he can do a better job so he is giving it ago.

But he has a spam score of 9/17 but no links - how is this even possible.

Thanks

Andy

yeah i was going to suggest searching the code of the page for a link - just because you cant see it, it doesnt mean its not there. I have links from full stops before etc.

I wouldn't recommend changing the url structures, however what you could do is create specific landing page about boutique apartments or flat and list all the relevant products.

Also you could use this space to really sell the experience, why you should pick a boutique hotel over a normal standardize hotel.

I am personally not a fan of changing url structures on websites once indexed by Google.

On all 1500 hotel pages, you would need a way of linking back to the main "category" page.

This is just from experience over the years of changing urls and expecting to get the same traffic etc. During a redirect you lose link juice so the hotels might not rank as highly etc.

Thanks

Andy

I am not a huge fan of changing urls once Google has indexed them, to make them more appealing you could appealing so it look something like:

https://www.thisismyurl.co.uk/ > spacehoppers > special-spacehopper - this is a pretty easy fix and something I would recommend on all eccomerce sites.

Also there is so much more you can do with Rich Snippets that would make a difference  https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/products

Meta descriptions are what you request Google to display, these are a request and Google does sometimes use other information if it feels its more relevant.

This isn't new and I've seen it numerous times over the last 5 or so years.

Dr Pete even did a blog article on this (very old 2011 - https://moz.com/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description but its still relevant.

Also the question has been asked and answered on here before: https://moz.com/community/q/google-not-pulling-the-right-title-tag-meta-description - I could cover the same answers in this post, but we all know Google hates duplicate content.

Yes this is a bad idea, you want the blog on the main domain.

You could put a wordpress blog within a folder on your server and just use one instance of wordpress for the blog away from the main site.

It does require a bit of set up, but it would be much better than having a blog on a different url (does require keeping it up to date etc, users having two logins. One of the main site and one for the blog) - it's not an ideal solution but much better than having the blog on a separate domain.

Hi

Firstly it seems like you did all the right steps to resolve the issue. A while back I had a similar issue with my site and later a client's site that got hacked. They were both WordPress sites so now always recommend Wordfence plugin (premium) to stop the hack in the first place.

I wouldn't worry too much about the drop in DA, DA goes up and down all the time - it's only relative to your competitors. If your competitors go up and you go down that's when I would worry.

You are right in wanting the disavow file - its needs an audit and updating. I would just keep chasing and explaining you are potentially losing revenue and profit (they probably don't get the impact of rankings, but if you explain it in something which they do they will respond quicker). Once you have the file it's up to you to audit and amend as necessary, but this won't affect your Moz DA.

I would also ask them what processes they have put in place to stop getting hacked again if your doing all this work and the client hasn't changed how they operate, it could be a lot of time spent for nothing.

Thanks

Andy

In theory yes it shouldn't make a difference to your international rankings. It's just making sure Googlebot (which does come from the US) is able to crawl your website.

For every other country, because it's for legal reason I would suggest just block them, but you need Googlebot (and other bots like Roger) to crawl your website.

Instead of completely blocking traffic from the US, would it be possible (and I don't know the legal requirements) to detect if the visitor is from the US and show them a different page? "Sorry, we can't help you but here are some great resources" and link to some American sites. Hopefully, Google would still crawl your website as would be able to see your sitemap.

Sometimes if it's a legal requirement you have to do it, even though it may potentially harm your rankings (I have a similar issue with a finance client, where some of the legal requirements go against Google / UX best practices but they have to be done to trade).

What I would do is once you have blocked US visitors, is monitor Search Console and your server logs to make sure Googlebot is still crawling your website as frequently and as deeply.

I want a tweet from Roger too!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe he is busy crawling your website to give you some useful tips and tricks.

I think he will be in touch soon on twitter.

Nope, they don't.

Good article here explaining it in more detail: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2325343/matt-cutts-facebook-twitter-social-signals-not-part-of-google-search-ranking-algorithms but basically any link from Facebook or twitter does not help your rankings.

Would be way to easy to manipulate to get rankings.

If your new to link building, then this is a great beginners guide to it: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

Thanks

Andy

As mentioned above, if I had just bought your domain, I wouldn't leave any 301s in place and would probably be the first thing I removed, so unless you have it in the contract that they have to leave any 301s in place, its basically a brand new domain.

What you could do is contact the web masters who are linking to your old domain, explain that you have changed domain names and would they like to update their site. Explain to them, this will help their users otherwise they the user could get a bad experience of getting a 404 page and could hurt the web masters brand, if they are seen to be linking off to dead pages.

I would also recommend doing a lot of social messages, same great website just a new name, otherwise people will still be searching for your old name.

But the bad news is, you have a new domain and you are basically starting from scratch, (with the little help of being able to contact previous web masters and changing links). You will suffer a drop in rankings and will take a while to recover.

While moz is a great company, Google has hundreds more servers than Moz so is able to dig further and deeper into the internet to see more links.

Moz last month crawled and indexed 166 billion pages  http://moz.com/products/api/updates so this means there is still a large part of the net which hasn't been crawled by moz. They tend to crawl the larger more reputable sites and follow those links, rather than the smaller / black hat sites. They also can't crawl every site in every country so do tend to focus more where they have more demand from their customers (US etc), but your in Australia so I wouldn't have thought this would be an issue.

It actually took 4 months for my link from my Moz profile to show in Opensiteexplorer so even they don't crawl their own site that often.

Where are most of your current links from (that are appearing in webmaster tools). Have you checked these urls in Opensiteexplorer to see if these have been found by moz.

Google obviously has to crawl the entire web (or as much as they can) to offer the best user experience for when searching, plus people want their sites to appear in Google so submit sitemaps etc to them. Whereas and I don't know if this is techncially possible but I am assuming it is, the sites where you have got links could potentially stop moz from crawling their sites. In that case, your links would never appear.

If you could let me know a couple of the links that are appearing in WMTs I will take a look for you.

On one URL.

How I have always tried to explain it to people before.

If you have two urls and a person is searching in google, you are leaving it upto Google to pick the correct page to display. Google isn't perfect and may show the user the wrong URL and not help the user. However if all the information is on one url, then you don't need to worry about this. Plus you don't need to build links into two pages, just one page (hopefully getting you a better page authority and ranking). Plus it adds fresh unqiue content onto otherwise product pages, which can be similar across the web

If you worried about not ranking because of the word review missing from the URL, this is only a small issue but the benefits of the above IMO out weight the slight disadvantage.

Great article by Econsultancy on benefits of Reviews on product pages: https://econsultancy.com/blog/9366-ecommerce-consumer-reviews-why-you-need-them-and-how-to-use-them#i.1mpjwvuml2epzz

Very good question and this has been covered in this great moz article: http://moz.com/blog/after-penalty-removed-will-traffic-increase

Will it help, maybe not in the short term - but if you do nothing you are running the risks of being penalised further down the line and losing all your rankings. Thats the worse case, the best case is by removing the old links your rankings increase. I would never really leave bad links, as you will always be looking over your shoulder waiting for Google to strike.

Remove them and then concentrate on getting some quality links to your site to help boost rankings.

With Google you can never really predict anything any more and you won't really know the outcome till you have removed the bad links.

Worse case: you remove the bad links and your rankings don't improve - but your no longer looking over your shoulder waiting to see if you have been hit by the next update.

Best case: You suddenly jump up in the rankings and you no longer care about the next update, you actually look forward to them, to see which off your competition has been hit.

You will probably get neither of these by removing them, you will probably see a little improvement but nothing massive and you won't have to look over your shoulder.

I know I haven't really answered your question - but even if Google was to answer this question, they would only be guessing as they can't 100% accurately say what will happen as its all machine learnt.

Andy

Hi Moz

Can we please have a new feature to moz when answering questions please, the ability to save as a draft. I am currently on the train from London back home and I was trying to answer a few questions and give my opinion and after writing a really long and detailed response to an area I actually have quite a lot to say on, my internet froze and the page refreshed losing all the content. It doesn’t help that my Mac I am working on isn’t the fastest, but my new one isn’t quite ready yet.

But if there was a simple save draft feature, it would be really great as I wasn’t ready to post my answer as it wasn’t finished and without checking wouldn’t have made sense. Yes I know I could of done it in word and pasted it across, but usually when I am travelling and answering questions I do it on my Ipad which isn’t great for multitasking.

While I understand you don’t want lots of ‘draft answers’ all over the place as this would take storage space up on your servers and doesn’t actually help the person answering the question, your system could purge all draft answers which have not been edited in the last 24 hours.

Just a little suggestion to help make this great forum even better.

Thanks

Andy

I have just been to first major conference - Searchlove. It was amazing and I would highly recommend them. Will be back next year

cover a wide range of topics and have some great speakers ( including moz speakers)

no its not being unreasonable - what happens if the SEO guy changed something and broke the website - would would the client ring up and moan at the SEO guy or the web design agency.

If the guy was willing to take responsibility for his changes, then they would be unreasonable, but why would they allow someone to edit their work and potentially break the site - only for them to get moaned at.

SEO is 'secret' anymore - so I don't get what they guy has from not willing to work with the agency. To me it sounds like he will be doing stuff he isn't willing to share so either black hat techniques or doesn't actually knows what he is talking about so was going to bluff it until the client clicked on that the guy was b*ll shitting.

Hi

I was going to write a in-depth answer, but this previous blog article is my bible for link auditing. I would only be duplicating everything that is mentioned and as we know duplicate content isn't good for SEO.

http://moz.com/blog/link-audit-guide-for-effective-link-removals-risk-mitigation

Thanks

Andy

Don't rebrand. Would try everything to get them not to re-brand there are numerous examples where you don't get your visibility back after months / years.

Appliances Online changed to AO.com and have done a huge TV campaign in the UK, but they have never recovered there search visibility (info from Searchmetrics).

I would advise stay away from at all costs.

If the client defiantly wants to, my web designer simply put in a few lines of code onto the old domain, and if a customer types in an oldurl.com/webpage25 it redirects to newurl.com/webpage25 so that you don't have to 301 every page.

He has just left for the day, but if no one else can give the answer by the morning I will let you know how he has done it.

But my advice stay away from rebranding.