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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.

Thanks Vijay, its only on my windows machine (I really only use it for Server Log Analysis) and the above seems like to much work. Its working fine on the Mac - so will just install and leave it off the windows machine.

Ok, are any of the pages ranking. If not I would look if Google can easily find these new urls from your nav / internal links.

Also I would recommend checking your server logs, if Google can't / haven't crawled the pages they can't index them.

Final point, if these pages are completely off topic and the rest of the site is about toothbrushes and you add pages about cars, Google might be unsure about these new pages and how authoritative you are in the niche especially if these fall into the YMYL categories. If its the last issue you would probably need to work on link building into this section of the site from authority sites within the niche.

Your current redirects are fine and the best way is if its live to test it. Even thought I knew I had done it right recently when i went to https, I still do several random checks. They all came back as working - but no harm in testing.

Your point 2 is doable and as I am not on my laptop I don't have the code to hand. I will update in a few hours when back in the office for you, but your point 1 is correct.

Hi Mozzers

I am geting this very annoying message keeps popping up

"Confirm

Oops!

Something went wrong while trying to get your API Credentials. Please try again or check out the Help Hub if you are still experiencing issues"

Issue is I cant even read it on my screen as it gets cut off and there is no scroll so had to copy and past into word to be able to read it.

I had the issue for the last sever hours, is this my account or more general.

Thanks

Andy

Is this a brand new site or new pages added to an existing site.

Hi

Yeah, I have used quite a few tools.

My personal favourite is HP autonomy, you get the full management team, they help set up the test, do the analysis, suggest tests etc. It's a wonderful service, but it comes with a high price.

Something similar which is slightly cheaper is www.optimizely.com again these are more the enterprise end but do offer a free 30-day trial. It might be worth looking into these two, they may offer a self-service option.

Some more reasonable price platforms that target mid-size companies.

One of my clients I have just taken on uses unbounce and while I haven't yet manage to use their solution. I did get one of their reps at Mozcon to show me the platform - looking forward to using it. Seems like a very very good platform for the price.

With most of this software it's all about what you do. You have the find the test, set them up and analyse them, but so long as your putting in good tests you will get great results.

If you use the Adobe stack they offer A/B testing suite.

Also, there is Maxymiser its been a few years since I used it, but was good at the time and it's probably evolved since.
There are loads of options to choose from. If you use a platform like Shopify or Wordpress it might be worth while seeing which ones of these integrates with your current site to make your life easier.

While this article from Mashable is pretty old it does cover some good platforms and some I've never heard of but might be worth checking out: http://mashable.com/2015/01/30/ab-testing-tools/

Thanks

Andy

Sean right I would check to see if your site has been hacked, I would also click on the keywords and see which page is being shown - this will help identify the issues.

Or comments on your website, have you got comments on your articles etc. Could be comment spam?

Million dollar question - firstly does your site deserve to rank. Do you actually answer the query or is it a 50 word answer and your just hoping Google will rank you. You need to be writing 10x content (https://moz.com/blog/how-to-create-10x-content-whiteboard-friday)

Assuming you have a decent answer, the next question is. How often is Google crawling your website (the only way to find out is to look in your server logs). It could be that Google hasn't even crawled the page yet, if it hasn't crawled the page its not going to rank.

Finally assuming you wrote a great article and Google has read it, how authoritative are you in this niche. If you website is all about cars and suddenly you write an article about pens because its low competitive and you want the traffic, Google is smart enough know to understand you have probably written the article for SEO traffic and probably won't rank you high.

They don't happen to have multiple logins (different users) do they and keep creating a new user for themselves.

I would recommend changing your password, and then looking at all the other users - do you know them or can they be deleted.

At least you did it the right way and created them a login, the amount of people I know who they just sent across their own login details.

If its not the first option, please let me know I do have another idea - but the above idea is the easiest to explain and fix.

Thanks

Andy

I would do some keyword research and look at doing some mid to long tail keyword articles. The articles which aren't as competitive and easier to rank for.

I would also look to add more content on your category pages to help Google determine what the pages are about. While Google might be smart enough to work it out, but the easier you make it for them the better, plus if your leaving it to a machine they could incorrectly work out what the page is about.

I don't know if its just me, but the page takes a long time to load - if that's not just me that will be a bad signal for both Google and the users.

Links are only part of the ranking algorithm, content and technical are the other two. But if you can source high quality links back to your site this will help with rankings.

I know its early days and even the wonderful Dr Pete said it will take a few days to notice anything, but has anyone seen anything.

I've not seen any rise in traffic yet, but none of my ranking tracking tools have ran yet.

Anyone seen anything, are you expecting to see any?

Welcome to the Moz team, hope you enjoy working at Moz - they are a lovely bunch of staff. Lol

I've just joined the company to it would seem, look forward to meeting you all Monday. Does that mean I get MozPro for free?

Yeah have to agree sounds like 'doorway' pages that are there to generate search traffic which Google doesn't like.

You either need more content on these pages, getting UGC would be one way of adding more relevant content to the pages

Your asking the million dollar question.

There is no right / wrong answer for the number of pieces, if you say there is no real competition you might get away with the 1 piece a week.

In terms of rankings, this shouldn't take as 6 months, I've usually found a few weeks to get indexed and ranked.

What you need to do is work out how much the content is going to cost to produce - if its going to cost you $2k to get $5k worth of sales is it worth it. Also if its costing you $2k then you probably worth only creating 1 a month as the maths wouldn't justify it. (costing you more than what it generates in sales).

Also the content alone wont help you rank, you will still need links to help boost its rankings and also a technically sound website.

Have you made some changes on your website, like adding noindex to the certain sections of your site or have you removed an internal link to a section meaning Google can't access that section. I would investigate firstly what changes have been made on the site.

Might also be worth checking your server logs to see which pages google are crawling - this might also help find out which pages they aren't indexing.

Reason why you might be seeing more pages when you do a site search is because it might take a few days to disappear from search.

Hi

Does your client have a trademark / copyright on the business name - that would be my first place to start.

See if legally you can get them to take down the website for trademark / copyright infringement.

If not then have to agree with Vijay - its going to be hard work but you have to be better than them - build up the brand.

Thanks

Andy

Hi

While I haven't done it yet, I do have a client which I am looking at this issue for. I came across this plugin which looks decent and will do the job.

https://store.plumrocket.com/magento-extensions/accelerated-mobile-pages-magento-extension.html

My client has some other issues which needs fixing first before we start looking into making their site AMP.

Thanks

Andy

Yes,  it doesn't tell them which pages not to crawl - just not to index them

rel=canonical is not really an robots instruction file - rel=canonical is to help with duplicate copy where you have the same or similar pages and your telling search engines which pages is the preferred page.

If you don't want pages crawling you have to tell Search engines in the robots file

If you dont have access to the logs that could be an issue - not really any automated tools out there as it would need to crawl every website and find 404 errors.

I haven't tried this - so its just an idea. Go into GSC download all the links pointing to your site (and from places like Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic) and then chuck that list of urls into Screaming Frog or URL Profiler and look at external links and see if any are returning a 404. Not sure if this would work - its just an idea.

Thanks

Andy

Hi

Have to agree with the above, Rogerbot does listen to robot.txt file, unlike Bing - while they are getting better Bing ignores the robots.txt file frequently.

Ive analysed quite a few server logs over the years and Roger has always listened to the file - its usually a mistake the in the robots file.

There is an option to test your robots.txt file in GCS - while this is testing to see if Google will crawl the page - usually Roger has the same instructions as Google.

However if you are still pretty certain that Roger is ignoring robots.txt please DM your Server Logs and your website and I will take a look and analyse it for you (free of course).

Thanks

Andy

Hi

The best way I have found is to look in your server logs, its the only true place to find out what Google is doing on your site.

Download the logs and look at all the 404 errors - quite simple and depending on size of your logs can take you around 5 minutes worth a work - the longer time period you can analyse in your logs the better.

Thanks

Andy

Hi

While I have never used the service - it seems pretty expensive to me. For one link on a site with DA30+ its going to cost £80.

Especially as from the looks of it you can't decide which sector the link is on - seems very grey / black hat to me, where its all about having a link. So you could sell car parts and get a link on a site that's about kitchens, might be DA30+ but not very relevant. Google knows where users click and will be putting more weight behind those metrics rather than website scoring metrics.

We usually look to get links for our clients where potential customers are that can drive traffic and sales as well as a ranking benefits.

While its probably more hard work than buying a link, its more natural, will give you greater benefits and you don't risk the chance of a Google penalty.

Thanks

Andy

Hi

The search Analytics in Search Console is now the only true way of finding out what key terms are driving traffic to your site.

The big differences between the two:

• you used to be able to drill down and see which keywords we're converting
• you could see which pages the users was landing on

You can have an educated guess about the second issue - but can't do the first.

In terms of how reliable the data is - its pretty accurate I would say its as accurate as the data was in GA, do I trust it 100% nope - but i never trusted the data 100% in GA. I use it to inform decision but don't use it as my only source of information.

Other ways to see what your ranking for is to use third party tools such as SearchMetrics and while this might give you which page ranks, it estimates CTR and traffic so is less reliable that Search Console.

Hope this is useful for you, if not feel free to get in touch.

Thanks

Andy

Hi

Is there any issues with the campaign section?

https://analytics.moz.com/manage-campaigns

I keep getting a 404 error page.

Thanks

Andy

Hi Lee

I've just done the same search in Bradford and getting same results. While its unusual its not unheard of.

Its a bit difficult to say what you need to do to appear without looking at your site.

PM your site and I will take a look for you.

Thanks

Andy

The first question I would be asking myself - is this useful for the customer. If the answer is yes I wouldn't worry so much about Google so long as you offer good user experience.

However if the answer is no and your doing it more for search engines then I wouldn't recommend having the link in the first place.

But what ever you do, don't put nofollow on the links, you want Google to freely crawl your site.

I am getting error messages from OSE - it just keeps saying 'loading data' and then after a while 'there was a problem getting your data'.

Any ideas what wrong, I really need this for a meeting this afternoon in 1.5 hours.

Thanks

Andy

Agree if the link is a nofollow then consider it, if its followed I would be to nervous about it.

If its nofollow find out how much traffic does the site generate, where does the site rank for the key terms.

If the site ranks number 1 (or top three) for 'window tinting' or what ever your targeted keywords are then go for it, however if you rank above them - whats the point potential customers would of all ready either seen your site and discounted it or been to your site and don't like you.

However that being said, if they rank below you but spend a lot on paid advertising, have a large email database and drive traffic that way it could be worth investing. The site might get a lot of direct traffic.

Forget SEO and put yourself in a potential customers head. Which site are you likely to see first the directory or your clients. Whats the customer journey.

Forget Google here - think of potential customers, they in the long run drive sales and Google second. I've never known Google by tinted windows before.

Ireland a bit tricky in registering a country domain - you have to prove you have a business in the country, even in the UK it can be difficult to get a domain.

Having different sites means doubling, tripping your SEO efforts, whereas if you have the one site you can use the existing links to boost your initial ranking in a country.

There a pro and cons for either method, but I always prefer 1 domain, then your content strategy is for one site so a blog post can be useful to multiple countries and you don't need to re-write the content.

It would affect all your mobile / tablet rankings and wouldn't affect your desktop rankings as much.

Like I said it could be your competitors have improved theirs, rather than yours getting worse, if you can work out when roughly the decline started to happen - ask your devs what they rolled.

You don't need to do another crawl - go into WMT and go to Robots.txt tester.

Get the live robots file (if it doesn't pull it in, copy and paste it).

Find a URL you wanted blocking and see if Google crawls it and you should get a warning message

Assuming your mobile is mobile friendly, have you added anything to the site recently to affect page load speed.

Page load is a much bigger ranking factor compared to desktop traffic.

Or it could be your competitors have improved their page load speed or improve their content. Ask yourself honestly - does your content deserve to rank number 1. If the answer is no - then start producing 10x content and the rankings will follow.

First place to check is the page load speed in WMT.

Thanks

Andy

Nope you need to add the wildcard onto the end of the product line so it looks like this

User-agent: *

Disallow: /index.php?route=checkout/cart
Disallow: /index.php?route=account/return/insert
Disallow: /index.php?route=product/*

Otherwise it will just exclude that specific url.

Let me know if this works.

Thanks

Andy

Hi

Yes its worth fixing.

Could you not add Disallow: ?route=product/* to your robots file?

Can you edit the robots file.

Thanks

Andy

Just because Moz says you have the same score, it doesn't mean you have links in Googles eyes. I am a big fan of Moz so this isn't me knocking their software - buts its pretty easy to manipulate DA and PA either to show your site has higher metrics / or lower metrics.

Google also crawls more of the web than Moz, so Google could of found more useful links that Moz hence why they might rank above you.

It could also be that they have better user metrics or more people searching for 'brand name + query'

SEO isn't as easy as it was 5 years ago for working out why your competitors rank above you - there isn't a crazy formula anymore. Its softer metrics which are pretty hard to measure.

Concentrate less on them and more on your own site, can you get the site to load that little bit quicker, is your content '10x content' if not, make it 10x content.

Is your site super mobile friendly and I don't mean just "passing the google mobile friendly test" - that's the bare minimum, get real user feedback and try and improve it.

Is there anyway of keeping people on the site longer, could you produce a video.

Thanks

Andy

yeah have to agree with Logan - there isn't 1 metric to analyse - its a combination of factors.

Google have publicly stated that there are over 200 ranking signals, so even if you 'win' in one metric you could be losing out on all the rest.

Sorry there isn't a one metric to determine your SEO score vs your competitors.

Edit your existing ones change to:

Redirect 301 /article1.htm http://mysite.net/article1/
Redirect 301 /article2.htm http://mysite.net/article2/
Redirect 301 /article3.htm http://mysite.net/article3/

but also add in:

Redirect 301 /wordpress/article1/ http://mysite.net/article1/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article2/ http://mysite.net/article2/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article3/ http://mysite.net/article3/

There is a plugin in wordpress for 301 redirects and it tells you how many times the urls have been hit, if say after 6 months nothing has hit the old urls and there are no links pointing to them, feel free to delete.

Thanks

Andy

Google pagerank is probably still a ranking factor (not as important as it once was) however the public version of Page Rank, what you and me sees will never be updated again, last update if memory serves me well Dec 2013, but they will still be updating their version of pagerank - but as AI becomes more and more intelligent, traditional signals will disappear.

Moz DA and PA would be a better metric to use these days as thats still updated (monthly) and you can see whats impacting the score.

Yeah I can happily recommend Kerboo (formally Linkrisk) - great set of guys who run it and also a great software set.

They have a huge database of bad / toxic links which they check against when doing analysis.

You can even pay them to do your initial audit as well if you havent got the time - very reasonable price as well.