Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I agree its not a great topic for a WBF but a page on the website would be great.

Look forward to meeting you at SearchLove London.

Thanks

Andy

PRO membership you are getting a lot more tools, not just OSE. The moz community is probably worth the $99 on its own in my opinion.

OSE limitation - I will let an employee tell you the official definition but they do a great job crawling as much as the web as feasibility possible on there servers - but they do crawl a huge % of the web and expanding this each month.

Hi

I've answered this question a few times, wish Rand would do a whiteboard friday on this and explain once and for all.

Google is huge and have a vast amount of severs that crawl the entire web (and they don't pick up on every link), moz even though its great, is relatively small and can only crawl a proportion of the web (usually the bigger sites and the most visited sites) and rand has said before that they keep growing there servers and can crawl further and further, but for what you pay for moz $99 a month for them to backwards engineer Google and go as deep as they do, you would probably need to paying a lot more, so I would happily take missing out on a few of the lower domain links for the relatively low price I pay each month.

So if Rank, can do a WBF on this subject that would be great - then I wouldnt have to keep typing the same answer I could just link to his video (Google doesnt like duplicate content).

Also mention above, if you really want to know all your links I use ahrefs and Webmaster tools, but even these aren't great.

If a new websites gets built today and links to you - you still have to wait for Google, Ahrefs to find this website - if this website doesn't get links from else where then it might take these sites a while to find the new website, so even these services aren't perfect.

I will wait and see what your opinion is from an agency point of view and see if it differs. Be interesting to see - but from client side I would always push the agency to use my domain name emails.

Hi

When we have used agencies in the past, we have always created some at the agency (we shall call him John smith) his own email with our domain so john.smith@mycompanydomain.com

Just seems more professional and the person on the other ends thinks that the person works for the company and not an agency. Some manufacturer websites will only deal with peoples who's emails end with @mycompanydomain.com but I know some companies re reluctant to give out email address to none staff.

If the client gives you the opportunity to have the email address use it, at the end of the day your trying to grow your clients brand and not your own.

Thanks

Andy

if i understand the question correctly and you are changing manufacturer. You have the potential to lose traffic as your page will no longer contain the text 'old manufacture name', so therefore wont rank for it this term.

If your urls aren't changing you shouldn't lose to as much visibility as any links etc pointing here will still be valid.

The only area where you could lose visibility is in the old manufacturers name if this had more search volume that the new manufacturer.

If I am reading the question correctly, then its more of a maths questions rather than an SEO question.

You simply can't average % as some figures have more weighting than others, pages with more page views will have a higher weighting to the total average %, than the pages with 1 page view and 100% bounce rate. So simply using the average formula in Excel wouldn't take into account the weighting and assume they all have equal weighting (which unless ever page had the exact same number of page views, isn't the case).

Here is probably a better explanation: http://www.ehow.co.uk/how_6437936_calculate-averages-percentages.html

Hope this is useful.

Thanks

Andy

there could be several reasons.

Has Moz found new sites pointing to your domain.

Check out this link explaining the basics of Domain authority, http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

but as they look at links and Moz Trust it could be a case of you getting a few good links, and removing a few bad links.

Also note that a drop is not always a bad thing and really you should compare your score against your competitors.

Your DA has increased by 3, but if all your competitors has increased by 4 then in theory you are worse off, but this also applies, if you drop by 1 and ur competitors drop by 2 then you have gained even though you have dropped so I would always recommend benchmarking yourself against your competitors and not using it as a stand alone number.

Hi

We use a company called Awin (Affiliate Window) in the UK and they are very good.

As far as I am aware there is no two way affiliates, but the easiest way round it is, to set your self up as a publisher and advertiser.

Its quite easy to do, and you could be up and running as an a publisher in minutes.

Thanks

Andy

simple as everyone else has stated, there is no relationship.

The day a website goes live and can start being indexed, having content added, gaining links etc will start improving the DA, not the day it was purchased.

But older website's can also have a lot of bad links pointing to them from previous poor agencies / in-house staff, building bad links so in theory old domains could rank lower by previous black hat techniques to improve rankings.

And i have just had an email from Distilled covering this same topic so thought I would share the link

https://www.distilled.net/resources/6-ways-to-improve-user-experience-using-analytics-data/

firstly that is not quite true. If something is shared on twitter it will not automatically rank in Google, as Google won't use Twitter as a signal, as Twitter can cut off their service at any point (http://www.brafton.com/news/qa-with-matt-cutts-at-ses-san-francisco-social-reputability-for-seo-traffic-cannibalization-and-the-promise-of-transparency-from-google)

Posting on G+ might be different as it will tell google about the new page, however so long as your page is in the sitemap and Google can crawl your site, this is still the best way to initially get a page to rank.

Improving a page rank is a different question to getting a page rank.

Search metrics among other great sites reveal correlations that sites that rank well have (http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/knowledge-base/ranking-factors/) but this isn't a check list and just because you do them all, doesn't mean you will rank highly. Moz has one too http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors

Both of them state that pages that have more +1s tend to rank better, and while this might be the case, they usually also have great content, high DA, large user base etc

Search engine land did a great article on social ranking factors (http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389 - bit old but still relevant).

So in answer to your question - does posting a link on twitter help it rank - Nope and does it improve rankings, probably not.

pages with high bounce rate / exit rate is usually a great place to start.

If you want to go one step further look at page exit / bounce rate by device or browser and then you can start to see where problems are occurring.

These will highlight problem areas on your site for you to take a look at.

Just because you have a large screen and your site looks and works amazing, its usually not the case for your customers.

That is where I would start and this will give you the quickest and easiest wins.

I am assuming you have done the basic checks like:

• page is in your sitemap

• Google has crawled the page

• meta title and description optimised

If this has been done, does the sub pages have better content than the main page.

Like Bruce said, use Moz and see what keywords the page is ranking for or you could use something like searchmetrics to see what keywords are driving the traffic. Without knowing the url or keywords its a bit difficult to give you a bit more detail

Hi

I can't find an upto date answer to this so was wondering what people's thoughts are.

Does putting content behind 'view more' css buttons affect how Google see's and ranks the data.

The content isn't put behind 'view more' to trick Google. In actual fact if you see the source of the data its all together, but its so that products appear higher up the page.

Does anyone have insight into this.

Thanks in advance

thanks for your responses and clearing this up.

Hi All

Does having quite a few Duplicate meta descriptions hurt SEO. I am worried that I have too many and thinking this could be the reason for my recent drop in search visibility.

Thanks in Advance.

Andy

Thanks, I have sent an email and hope to get this resolved soon

Hi

I use chrome and have no issues with the Moz bar.

Is it affecting one website or do you get no data on any websites?

Hi

From an SEO point of view, Google reduce the important of keyword in the URL so having the keyword in the URL doesn't have as much of a factor as it once did. Again a lot of research and even Matt Cutts has confirmed its not as high as ranking factor as it once was.

I would never ever put a hyphen in the URL, there has been many tests show it does impact rankings (might have once been a whiteboard friday), but it not there have been multiple experiments, all showing that hypthen in the domain name is bad.

This is a must read, its a bit old (2007), but its very relevant http://moz.com/blog/how-to-choose-the-right-domain-name

Hope all this is useful

in that case, I am not receiving any alert emails.

If I go into the alerts I can see there was data, but I am not receiving the emails. Do you know of any reason why this might be.

Thanks

Andy

I believe they do, check out this old article in section 3 they talk about banners and how they can be great from an SEO point of view: http://moz.com/ugc/becoming-a-double-threat-integrating-your-seo-and-affiliate-marketing-campaigns

There isn't really a lot out there about banners and passing links, but I know normal banners pass link juice so can't see why GIFs would not be any different.

Hope this is useful.

Hi

I set up several alerts on the Fresh web explorer - however I haven't received emails and these we're set up over a month ago.

What email address do they come from - I have checked my junk folder but I am thinking I might need to whitelist the email with the developers to receive the emails.

Thanks

Andy

I am happy they are now followed, I am sure when I previously checked they we no followed, no just to get a link

its only on the .co.uk version and its a link on the Chromebook where to buy pages.

Its so difficult even my Account manager and support team at Google can't help.

As we don't purchase direct from Google, we don't have a marketing contact and this is the person we need to get the link.

I've probably had to do double the work to get listed where I am compared to my competitors.

Hi

I have a similar issue, we are currently trying to get onto their stockist pages for some of the products we sell.

I know they are "nofollow' links, but I am thinking surely they must pass some weight to the product pages. When I last did the analysis everyone that is on the stockist page ranks above me, even if there DA is lower and all other Moz metrics is lower. (I know other factors affect rankings), but I am certain that getting a link will result in higher rankings.

Be interested to see what others think

Thanks Keri for your help. All working now. You was correct, turns out I was clicking on a button which shouldn't be there.

Again thanks for your help

I am trying to add a post to Youmoz and while it lets me save it as a draft, as soon as I go to publish, the page refreshes and I lose the entire post.

Is anybody else having an issues with posting to YouMoz.

Hi

Read this article from a few weeks ago: http://moz.com/blog/broken-art-of-blogging

This talks about % of comments on a blog.

Your traffic levels seems decent enough. I would then dig deeper and work out the themes that got the most traffic / least traffic and write more based on the areas which get the most traffic.

Shame you cant share the website so I can have a further dig around.

it would depends on the length of the articles and the engagement.

Do you get many comments, share reads.

I would rather put out 2 articles a day that got a lot of readership and interactions that 125 that get nothing.

I could only judge if it was too  much on the interactions and readership.

Also if you are only producing content for SEO purposes, I would probably stop. Create content your users want to read.

Hi

Welcome to the community,

First of all it looks like you have very few links pointing to your website so this isn't going to help rankings. I would look at doing some outreach especially on some of your blog articles as this information could be very useful.

Look at other local sites that you think the content would be useful for the web site users and contact the site owner and see if they would like to use part / all of the article. If you are going to let them use all identical content - watch this whiteboard Friday on the best practices to follow: http://moz.com/blog/syndicating-content-whiteboard-friday

The next area I would look at, is the length of the product you offer. Can you not increase the words on here, maybe by putting some tips to look out for if you suspect you have bugs etc. There was a recent whiteboard friday which suggest you need to have around 1,500 words per page.

I am sorry to say, but your 'where we serve' pages look to spammy and look like they we're written purely for SEO purposes - so if I am thinking that then so will Google. All the content is identical on each page, apart from you change the town / place name.

Could you not simply have one page explaining all the services you offer and a list of the towns. (You will have to excuse me here as I don't know US places that well), but could you not group them into larger areas and reduce the number of pages and write unique content for each page, so more places on one page but geographically towns together, maybe by state etc. Also could you include Google maps on these pages - make them more interactive - this is a must watch video http://moz.com/blog/panda-optimization-whiteboard-friday 

So basically I would:

• Work on getting more links
• Write longer blog articles
• Organise your areas where we work sections

Hope this is all useful for you.

your not the only one worried about this, and can cause some serious issues.

You are going to lose some ranking and organic traffic, but its whether the long terms benefits out wight the short term loses. Can your business afford to lose upto 12 weeks of non organic traffic, while your sites gets reindexed and ranked

Just read a good article on this, and the main section is below.

There’s a few different ways you can hurt your sites rankings through converting your site to HTTPS:

1) 301s -

Got links pointing to the http still? You NEED to 301 to your new https link, or the juice isn’t going to pass over. Alternatively do this on a forced level within the .htaccess, but GBot is dumb and often doesn’t recognize it.

2) Internal Linking -

Again, the same as changing your URLs, you need to do this on your site as well – Change any internal links to https, or Google’s crawl rate is going to be so low you’ll be feeling the heat of hell on your ballsack.

3) Canonicals -

Exact same as what I just said about internal linking, 301s etc… Setup your canconicals with https, or you’re screwed.

4) Duplicate Content -

As I mentioned above, if you haven’t got your .htaccess configured right.. You could have a http and a https version of your site – Duplicate content is a real issue.

Read more: http://godofseo.co/industry-news/https-ranking-signal/#ixzz39ml3R3K8

None of the software I use can't

Moz, will tell you where you have ranked historically, but this is after you have started monitoring it.

Searchmetrics - tells you where you was the previous week

There will be some software out there, and I would love to know find some, but the ones I currently pay for don't

Short answer yes.

Google will only read 'x' number of links on a page anyway so too many and they wont even be read by Google. Too many internal links, like a link farm and this will be penalised.

Also I would avoid keyword stuffing in your anchor text, as this will look spammy.

Great article here on internal link building http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/05/14/how-to-avoid-getting-slaughtered-by-penguin-3-0/

Internal links is great way of helping your users navigate around the site, but use internal links to help people navigate your site and not purely for SEO. If you do it naturally and forget about the search engines you will be fine, its when you try and cheat them it will look spammy and you have the potential to be penalised.

When adding a link, ask yourself: Does the user need this link, will it help them on their journey.

Very good question. Lets think for one minute that Google and SEO doesn't exist - which option would you go for, I would personally say the first option as they offer a better user experience.

From an SEO point of view having anchor text help to tell the search engine what your page is about is still very useful, especially if there are not many pages around linking to them pages.

If you feel the pages can rank well without the anchor text, have good PA, rank naturally currently I would go with option 1, but if the site is new, or the pages aren't easily discovered in SERPs option 2 has to be the best option.

Sorry I can't be more helpful without knowing the URL you are talking about.

Some good advice can be found here:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/anchor-text

http://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link

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.

Hi

Here are a few example of best practices:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/url

http://moz.com/blog/11-best-practices-for-urls

But in summary keep it short, the shorter the better so I would go with: mywebsite.com/browse/birmingham/restaurants

First of all, all comment sections I have ever seen on blogs are nofollow links so they are really a waste of time in terms of SEO, in terms of driving traffic they are ok.

Spend time writing quality over quantity content, but more importantly when writing it have a list of news sites / blogs / contacts in mind who you are planning on outreaching the article too.

The hardest part is the outreach, anyone can write a great article, but you need to get it picked up and distributed. In an ideal world, you would all ready have made contact with the journalists before hand and see what articles they want.

IMO journalist are very busy and if you can provide them with a great article which happens to include a link to your site, if they are rushing to hit a deadline, then you have a higher % chance of it being accepted on their site.

Social media the way to go: depends on what industry you operate in some industries this could be a complete waste of time. Especially if you are a B2B company. Plus with Facebook's latest algorithm update its actually quite hard to get a social media post in front of your audience.

Biggest tip would be, quality articles over quantity and spend as much if not more time on outreach to relevant blogs, websites to get your content picked upto and linked to.

I don't know if this is possible, but couldn't you offer 5% off your next order if you complete your profile.

This way you get a second order and a complete profile of your customer.

This way you are not reducing the chance of people not completing, increasing the number of repeat purchases and get the information and potentially more information that just sector.

I would be willing to complete my profile if there was an incentive, but as don't know the platform you are using, I don't know if this is possible in your case.

I would agree less is better, I've seen numerous reports over the years which say the more you ask, the higher the drop off.

Couldn't you get the customer to complete this field after purchase. Either at the end of the checkout, or follow up email.

Why not on the confirmation email ask them then, or in their account section. Anyone who doesn't complete it, leave it as general, and for everyone else you can target specifically.

I would highly recommend, putting the absolute minimal on the sign up form.

There are many factors which could influence it, but someone actually asked Matt Cutts the same question, so while I am good at SEO I might as well let him answer your question

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STpCM-3K3KY

Some of the key things are:

• Domain age, does influence rankings, you basically have to start again when you start a new domain

There are also some very good answers on these similar questions:

http://moz.com/community/q/seo-s-done-301s-in-place-old-site-still-outranks-new-site-what-to-do

http://moz.com/community/q/outranking-a-crappy-outdated-site-with-domain-age-keywords-in-url

Would the business owner be willing to do a 301 from the old site to the new site - this is the best thing I can suggest, but it will take time for the new site to rank and appearing the SERPs where the old site currently ranks.

Hi

I use some software called Gorkana - its not free, but has a huge database of contact details and is just not blogs.

You can target this down to a postcode region.

Depends when you did the update, but Moz does it update roughly once a month the next update is done on 24th July

http://moz.com/products/api

The last one was done on 20th June. Did you make your changes prior to this. Do you have new links pointing to the new domain, or just the 301.

I can't see any in opensite explorer, but you might be aware of some that Moz hasn't indexed yet. Might be worth trying to get some of the actual links pointing the new domain.

Directories are a bit of a grey area. I tend to stay well clear of them as they can be seen as spammy by Google, but good honest directories can actually drive you a lot of traffic and sales - rule of them, if the directory is in your niche area and its where you customers would expect you to be listed, its worth appearing or forget your website. Would you be willing to list your site on the directory to help improve sales and leads, if either of them if yes I would be tempted to add yourself to the directory as its probably not spammy.

However if your only adding yourself to the directory for the sake of getting a link, or the directory seems poor, irrelevant etc stay well away.

For PR related issues, there are plenty of useful companies which can help get your info in front of the relevant bloggers, journos etc. Also can be done by doing a lot of research and hard work (depends how much time / money you have). This OLd articles on PR might be worth a read if you haven't done any PR related work previously http://moz.com/blog/an-introduction-to-pr-strategy-for-seos.

Also think like your customers, work out where they like to hang out, what information they like to know etc and once you have worked out where your target customers are, reach out to these sites and work with them. If you have got any great insights into the industry, great information share it with them, help them write articles and in return they may mention you and drive traffic and brand awareness.

Again for social make sure the content is easy to share (looks like you have done this), but maybe add a blog section and start sharing some useful insight, infographics etc and spread your brand online.

All of the above is difficult and takes time and practice. You are right to worry about Google, but seem as though you have a new domain, with no historical bad practices associated with it, just stay away from buying links. SEO is hard work and is only paid off in the long run. Try cheating Google and they will catch you eventually and penalised you and then all your work was a waste of time.

Getting to number 1 used to be easy, but  now it requires creating good quality content that people want to interact with.

I agree but lets see to get 100% (and not even Google has 100% of your links, I use three sources for monitoring links, Google Alerts / Webmaster Tools, TalkWalker / Moz / Opensiteexplorer). But lets say you want Moz to go from 3% to 100%.

This would required extra resources on Moz end so we would end up paying higher monthly fee.

We currently pay $99 a month. Lets hope my maths is good. So $99 for 3% or $33 for 1%, to get that to 100% that is $33 * 100 that would be $3,300 a month. I can show the benefits to my MD who pays the invoice each month of the benefits for $99. Convincing him to pay $3,300 I couldn't justify that.

Also it would depend where all your links are. If they are from highly reputation sites like Mashable, BBC, et al then you are more likely to have a higher % than if your links are all from domains which are less well know and less likely to be found by the Moz crawlers.

Regarding Moz telling you in advance about the % - I will leave that to a Moz employee to explain but I guess the % would be different for everyone so would be quite hard to explain.

Hi

The very basics would be http://seoservices.dotsquares.com/blog/daily-seo-checklist/ they are my must every day, but it all depends on how much time you can spend on SEO.

If you are really new to SEO try reading this blog on the moz site: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

Regarding conversion rates, I don't like FB advertising I have never been able to get it to work, so if you can get 2% from FB well done.

2% from Adwords, thats still quite impressive. I would like to get that as a basic level on all my campaigns, however I run campaigns that are far better than 2% to compensate for the ones that under perform, but are essential to long term business plans.

Hope they are useful links for you.

Thanks

Andy

This question has all ready been asked previously and you can find the answer here:

http://moz.com/community/q/google-webmaster-tools-and-open-site-explorer-s-links-not-matching-up

But to sum it up. Google has far more servers than Moz, even though Moz is a great company there is a big difference in the size of the companies so Google has far more reach to crawl even more websites.

Google isn't perfect and will also miss links so its good to use multiple sources for seeing link data.

Hi

Adsense doesn't affect ranking in either a positive or negative way, Google freely admits they keep them completely separate (otherwise everyone would just chuck Adsense on theirs sites to get number one in Google).

https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9717?hl=en-GB

Having three ads on a page doesn't seem to excessive IMO, but without seeing the page its a bit hard to tell.

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.