Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Also depending how new the site is Moz Domain Authority score only really updates once a month (ish) next update is due on 24/7. http://moz.com/products/api/updates so you probably wont see any movement until then.

Like mentioned above welcome to the world of SEO where nothing makes sense and can drive you up the walls. Google is a cruel mistress that you won't never understand and are always trying to please.

And have to agree with Andy - never ever pay to go on directories and in honest stay well clear of them, I am trying to get old links removed from these places. A few years ago this was the thing to do to get to number 1 in google and was very simple, now it actually hurts you more in the long run than benefits you.

If you are new you might want to run read this history of SEO as a starting point http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/history-of-seo-glimpse-into-future-tl-ss

yes I get exactly the same when i search for 'windy skirt', all youtube videos. Is this something which has happened recently. Did there used to be many youtube videos. Where do you rank now. Almost all of page two is also Youtube video's as well.

The recently discovered is just that, recently discovered by Moz, its nothing to do with the date the article / link was published.

I use three bits of software, Talkwalker, Opensite explorer and Google Alerts. And if I am honest the only one I care about is Google Alerts as its Google rankings I monitor so the sooner google pick up the link the better.

In terms of time length, I am still getting alerts for links posted years ago on poor links, but get alerts within the day for links of places like Virgin.com so it all depends on when the crawler manages to crawl the page.

Have you checked the page with the link on is crawable. Can the bots find the page. If they can't find the page, it will never get indexed and you will never benefit from the link. So if its been 4 weeks check to see if the page has been indexed / can it be indexed.

If you send me the link I will do some analysis for you.

This all depends when the page with the link on it gets crawled and by who.

Would recommend using Google Alerts, these are a good way of spotting new mentions / links to your site.

Would also recommend watching White board friday from two weeks ago about using Email alerts for SEO http://moz.com/blog/8-ways-to-use-email-alerts-to-boost-seo-whiteboard-friday

But it does all depend on when the Page is crawled.

Hi

What does webmaster tools say. Is it showing any errors.

Also as Vizergy said, did you do 301 re-directs.

You might have been benefiting from long tail SEO, but these pages should have been traffic?

Has your domain Authority dropped in this time period?

Hi

I am assuming you mean organic traffic. Paid is a lot easier.

GA this week has re added a SEO report. This tells you the top 1000 keywords driving traffic, but these numbers to me seem to be aggregated.

if you have the cash or access try Hitwise. Very good data and very useful for giving competitor traffic too.

You can also use search metrics that is pretty good software for keywords and rankings.

as mentioned webmaster tools will give you this info so there are quite a few places to get this info. Just depends what you want it for and how detailed.

First thing, keep it simple and easy to use otherwise people won't use it.

probably add to your contact page as well.

If you wish to use our content or quote a piece, please email email@domain.com.

Or:

Would you like to quote or reuse our content for Free, please email: email@domain.com.

assuming you are not wanting to charge for it.

hope that's hopefully

Hi all

just wondering if anyone has ever had any experience / tips / advice.

moving from domain name a to b is well published all over the web and the practice is often discussed on here.

but my question is has anyone ever done moving the domain from a to b and then after x time move back to domain a.

i can't find any examples, notes anywhere on Google.

thanks in advance

Hi

Would always be nofollow, its the affiliate network which actually gets the benefit and not the end website. (or it is with the network we use).

Plus as mentioned above they are paid links so don't risk getting penalised by promoting paid link. Not worth taking the risk when nofollow doesnt affect any commission you can make of the link.

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

I used data from Hitwise (I am based in the UK) and can get this data. Its aggregated data so not 100% accurate but its a good estimate.

Software however is not cheap, but very very good.

thanks, got it working with the advice. Looking forward to have the issue fixed.

Hi

Not sure if it is just me, but I am seeing no data for Just discovered.

I know there should be data in there.

Is anyone else having any issues this morning.

Thanks

Hi

It says when you get over 200 moz points that you "Removal of "nofollow" from first custom URL on profile", this isn't the reason I have become more active on the network, but I was wondering do I need to do anything or does it happen automatically.

Thanks

Andy

this is the one thing I dread happening.

Apart from what you are doing there isn't a lot until it stops - I wish there was a button in web-master tools to tell Google that a competitor (and it usually is) is doing bad SEO to your site.

If you do try anything other, then please share. I am currently putting together an contingency plan in case it ever happens to the site I manage.

I can see this becoming more prevalent in future and a lot more companies using these tactics to get an SEO advance. I could even see some dodgy SEO agency's setting up to offer this type of service.

The only other thing we do is infographics, whether you would class that as part of a content strategy or not is a different matter, but these usually have some great results, but like every GIGO comes to mind, to actually make a infographic work, firstly you need to do the research, and get some interesting and relevant facts in there, and then spend a lot of time trying to publishing it, speaking with blog owners, news sites etc.

Our last infographic we managed to get a link of mashable.com and I believe there DA is around 94 ish so was worth all the time and investment in making it look good, have decent content within it.

If your client isnt all ready doing infographics I would recommend them

have to agree with DJ123 - just write naturally for your description, but for your video title's I would recommend thinking what someone is likely to type in Google.

If you can get any type of keyword research software (I use software called Hitwise) to find out what people are searching for then this can be very useful.

Always remember to put useful links to your website etc, while these are nofollow links (so no SEO benefit), they do drive quite a bit of traffic for us

In terms of being seen as duplicate, yes but this content is essential - you can't get away from the fact the dimension / spec is the details and you can't change them, but what you can do is add more unique content to the page.

There seems to be a lot of manufacturers content on the page and I would assume that a lot of your competitors are using the same info - so this is where the duplicate worry would come in for me.

While this is quick and easy to use, its worth spend the time to add more unique content, and higher up the page the better.

You have Reviews section, have you been contacting previous purchases and encouraging them to leave a review - this will help to create unique content. If your using a shopping platform to create your store like shopify etc there are a lot of plugins to do this for you automatically so once set up you don't need to worry about it.

On a side note, it actually took me a while to find the buy button - it wasn't where I would of expected it to be, next to the price.

Hi

I agree and a lot of work has gone into making improvements and hopefully they are all done, but its more the basics I am after to make sure something fundamental isn't missed and the improvements don't get to have an impact as the basics wasnt checked.

Hi

I am in the process of launching a new version of my site and I know I need to get my current SEO Agency to check and test certain aspects of the site so that I don't lose any rankings.

The problem is I am unsure of everything to ask them and I was wondering if someone could help me out.

I don't want to have missed something basic and therefore want to give them a checklist to confirm they are happy before go live.

Any help appreciated

without a doubt its either been hit or has changed something drastically.

From the image below - its search visibility dropped to basically zero on 16/5 last year so either has been hit (which it looks like), or changed something drastically.

http://imgur.com/QwcJC9v (UK visibility)

http://imgur.com/GGeWvGj (US Visibility)

While the visibility isn't a great factor on its own, when there has been a huge drop like that I suspect its been penalised.

From looking at the list of updates I would say it possibly got hit by Penguin 2.0 http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change or could have been a manual penalty.

But I would stay clear of the website and not pay to put anymore links on their website.

it is around 20% of the world sites are run using Wordpress (as George says), from simple blogs like you mention to some of the worlds biggest sites.

Wordpress does have its very good features some great plugins like Yoast, which helps to improve your site from an google presepective - changing meta deta, titles etc.

I do use wordpress for my sites for one reason only - I can't code and wouldn't know where to start.

If you are a competent coder and by the sounds of it you are - I would stay away from WP, for all its great benefits and there are loads, its still an out of the box solution that is trying to meet everybodys needs so is not brilliant and while you can do some wonderful themes etc in wordpress you are still working within their framework.

Starting from scratch (if you have the skills and the time) is always a much better solution. So much more can be done

I would defiantly say its something to do with Panda

Your drop as seen on the graph, is your search visibility and while its not a great indication on its own, it still pretty useful. Your drop in % terms in the same as Ebay's.

http://imgur.com/8XojR8P

Generally speaking people are saying Ebays drop is down to poor quality content, so if David is right about Matt Cutts saying its not affecting product descriptions I would take a look at your blog and add more content (however that does all seem unique).

I will still work on the product descriptions and making them more useful for the user, plus you win twice, higher ranking and more customer converting and they are getting the advice they need without leaving your site

Hi Sean

I used to have a shopify store as well and there are plenty of apps, try this one I have used previously and liked:

http://docs.shopify.com/manual/more/official-shopify-apps/product-reviews

Investing in product descriptions and unique content will pay off in the long run.

I've noticed you have got some great content on your category pages (hopefully these still rank as its the time of the year when I guess you get a lot of sales) so its just the product pages which will require work.

Hi

Yes it is possible to recover, but it wont be an overnight solution.

You are doing the right thing and tackling the issues of duplicate content. I think this update will have affected quite a few e-commerce sites as a lot I see always use the manufacturers description (duplicating content) usually for the reasons is easier and cheaper.

And good way of improving might be to ask previous people to write product reviews on the page. This is a good way of generating good unique content.

Not sure what platform you use or whether its custom built, but there is usually some good apps that will automate this process, sending emails to customers after a certain time to come and leave a review.

Hi

I would say you have done it correctly, optimising the most useful pages for the best user experience.

This key phrase that you are considering putting on your home page - instead of that, why not simply spend more time building links to that page. Instead of focusing links to your home page, focus relevant links to the specific page.

Think of a customer, do they want to land on your homepage and then have to navigate to the correct page to find the information, or do they want to land on the correct page and don't need to navigate away.

There is a really good article (sorry I can't find it), but it talks about the more steps you make a customer make to find the product the less they are likely to buy - I know your not exactly selling a physical product, but you still want the person to sign up and get in contact. So the more difficult steps you make it the less chance you have.

I hope that helps.

Hi Dan

I was about to ask the exact same question, so will keep an eye out for an answer.

I hope it is possible, but I couldn't work it out.

Hi

Sorry there is no magical number. When writing articles, product descriptions or content instead of thinking about the search engines and getting the right number of keywords in, write it naturally and it will rank.

I am not saying don't put keywords and phrases in the content, just don't make it the number one priority.

Hi

You have found the way using the Adwords interface. However are you just using the Adwords interface or have you got any other third party software like Double click etc.

Its very simple in software like that, you can add rules to say if not in position 1 -3 increase bids by 'x'% or x amount (I always go with a % increase personally).

I would check the ones you are pausing as sometimes being in position 4 - 10 on certain keywords actually convert quite well. I have one keyword that performs best in position 5 (I don't know why and can't explain it, but I am not going to change it).

Hi

I would have to agree with Andy in terms of user experience - what most sites I visit tend to do is to have a section at the top - which says download the app now, rather than taking u directly to the Apple Store - I would just bounce straight off, no way would I download an app without reviewing some of the content first.

You may also want to read: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721217 I don't think you will be seen as sneaky redirect (unless Google classify Apple.com as spammy url) as they say if you are trying to deceive Google, but it probably not helping.

Hi

On our blog, we have a section called 'Tags'. I have just noticed that these links are all "no follow" links.

The tags section does appear on every single page on the blog - is this recommend to have them as 'no follow' links or should I get our developer to change them.

Thanks

Hi

I was speaking in more general about the new TLDs and used for spammy purposes.

Are you sure, you have to be 'B) you must be a travel agent, travel associated business, airline etc. to use such a domain.' I just tried purchasing one, right upto the point of giving my credit card details and it never said anything about needing to be a travel business etc.

Have to agree go with .com, the .travel are too new and there is no real evidence yet to how these rank / how google will rank these in the future. I might be wrong, but I think alot of spammy websites will pop up with .travel .etc and I think these might get penalised as a whole by Google.

Hi

I would always recommend going with more description titles, as well as good for the bots, its also good from a user experience point of view, they can see more about the product before click 'The York' doesn't really tell the customer a great deal.

On a side note, and this is my opinion. The US is leading the way with SEO follow by the UK, but some parts of the world still don't fully grasp SEO and the impacts it can have - I don't know anything about Australia market, but it could be the fact that many website owners still don't think to much about SEO - and by you optimising you could get a great lead on your competitors.

Hi

We had the same issue here, before Business pages was around we created a user. But when we could create a business page (why Google didn't think you wouldn't want to do this, every business wants to promote themselves, i dont know), but after speaking with Google it was advised to us to create a new account and close the old one.

This was a while ago and things might have change, but we was told we couldn't even transfer followers, we could just do post saying we have a new page and to follow the new page, but they couldn't help us a lot.

As far as I know, nothing has changed, so your going to have to create a business page and start all over again, getting followers - would highly recommend running both in parallel for a time before closing the current one and keep posting about your new page, it did help for us.

I guess a combination of both, I always find phone is more personal and has a better success rate, but takes a lot longer and requires more work.

I would suggest try both methods and keep trying, you will get a lot more no's then yeses, but keep going. If it was easy everyone would do it.

I don't personally do the work, I just manage a team to do the outreach, so the actual work involved I am not too knowledgeable, but from speaking with them this morning, a combination of the two and don't give up.

It does get easier - the more your known, but to get known you have to spend time contacting these websites and getting rejected.

Hi

What description are you seeing, are you able to send an screenshot.

Also when did you set up your meta description etc, is it a recent change or has it been there a while.

I can see that you have set up Meta descriptions etc correctly.

that is great - at least you havent done any Black hat.

page 3 isn't too bad, but why do you have to wait for these people to find you. Why don't you take your content to these other blogs, new sites and show it off to them.

If it is good ( and I am assuming it is) they will naturally want to link to you, quote you in their articles.

This will then boost the articles page authority and also your domain authority meaning future posts rank higher, but even then - don't stop the out reach. Don't wait for people to find you - go out and shout about your great article.

If your waiting for people to naturally find your article and link to it, you will be waiting ages and it may never happen. The moment may have past, however go to news sites, tech blogs and share them your article and knowledge.

"So how to get backlinks than ?" - this bugged me, what have you been doing upto now to get links, if you have been performing black hat techniques (http://www.pushon.co.uk/articles/top-5-white-hat-and-black-hat-search-optimisation-techniques/) then it might be worth giving up on your domain, and starting with a new domain (especially if you have a penalty) or trying to remove the penalty before you start doing any of the below.

there are many ways to get good quality links without guess blogging. Ive never done guest blogging and wouldn't do it on low quality sites, writing a great article on youmoz is different and can get you some links, but that is a different debate (see here http://moz.com/community/q/could-posting-on-youmoz-get-your-penalized-for-guest-blogging

I could spend days writing a huge articles about ways of getting links without guest blogging, but I will keep it relatively short.

1. How about writing and producing great content on your website that people want to link to.

2. If you sell products, send them out to some influential people in your niche and ask them to review (not guaranteed to get a link, but usually works)

3. Out reach, contact people in your niche and offer advice to help their articles and see if they can quote you.

Below is some great articles on helping you, I would also recommend watching Rands WhiteBoard Friday and subscribing to Matt Cutts on Youtube

http://moz.com/blog/google-traffic-links 

http://moz.com/blog/earn-higher-rankings-without-content-creation-whiteboard-friday

http://moz.com/blog/filthy-linking-rich-how-to-passively-attract-valuable-links

in theory nope they don't affect homepage rankings, however as you are aware of these issues is there a reason for not fixing, just because your home page ranks nicely, you would get a lot more long tail traffic if you can get your other pages to rank as well.

Very few transactions on websites happen on a home page, its usually product pages (if ecommerce site), or contact us pages (if its a service page) - so while home page ranking is nice, get the pages that convert to rank as well.

Hi

If your users are clicking on the links then yes keep them, but make them no follow, however if they are not driving traffic to your other sites and don't add any real value I would recommend removing them.

However this article is very similar to a question that was asked last year and instead of duplicating everything that was said here I thought I would just post so that you can read the comments http://moz.com/community/q/are-sitewide-links-bad-for-seo (we know Google doesn't like duplicate content)

Hi

As far as I know there is only two types of account (Free), which you don't get that many of the services or Pro ($99 a month).

http://moz.com/products

I used to have the free account, but since upgrading to the paid account about 18 months ago I wish I had done it sooner, has so much information and tools that are really useful.

The best thing to do would be to contact Moz directly, but I don't believe you can.

I have a database of around 10,000 business I want to list on my directory.

My problem has been that my people have been adding to the database for over a year, but due to my hosting limitations adding them, caused my site to crash.

I have now got this sorted, would going from 1,000 urls listed to over 11,000 may Google think I am trying to spam them.

Would it be worth while dripping them in over time, or just adding them all at once.

Any advice appreciated, Thanks

Hi

Yes I would defiantly get a new number, but if you can afford to keep your old number as some of your old customers / contacts may try and contact you on it - if you can just purchase a number to divert you to your old number this would be do.

On your new website you don't want Google to take the chance of linking the two businesses as I am assuming they will be doing a lot of black hat SEO and use the domain as a churn and burn site - if as you say SEO success of your new site is important don't take the risk of getting linked to your old domain by 1 telephone number.

Its not a huge amount to spend on a new number, but could stop you being penalised by Google, which could cost you more in the long run.

this shouldn't have any impact from a SERP point of view, however this seems a very easy thing to get around, especially if your customers twig on - simply change their IP location until they get a price they are happy with, why not simply have one price and charge different shipping rates.

The only time Google may have a problem is in PPC land. PLA's you have to show the price the customer is going to pay and as you wont know the location of the person at the time of them searching you are probably going to show them a cheaper price on the advert and then a higher price on the Ads (you will either get complaints or a high bounce rate) both of which Google wont like.

Too many complaints and you could in theory have your account suspended.

Organic - not really many issues

Paid - Google wont like, and this will affect your QS meaning you have to pay more to get more of your adverts shown, which will have a high bounce rate further driving down your QS score meaning you pay more to get your adverts shown.

Oleg is correct, the crawlers have to be able to spider the page in order for them to find it.

There are a couple of ways round this but these are nasty, not fool proof and I wouldn't recommend them and as Oleg said the page probably doesn't have to much power anyway.

If your purely after this site for a link to pass juice don't waste your time, however if your after a link to generate sales, leads and revenue then still get the link.

Not all links should be about Google and ranking, obviously when link building don't break any of the SEO rules, but don't turn down the opportunity to generate sales, just because you won't get any link juice from the site doesn't make the link irrelevant.

Hi

I was wondering if someone can give me a bit of advice - outside of my full time job I run three websites - all in the same area, but all do three different things

1. Directory (DA19)

2. Blog (DA 23)

3. Products (DA35)

I want to merger all three website into one and all be on one website (rather do it now than keep working on three websites). I have included the DAs of each site (  I know they are not amazing, but i've only recently started working on two of them), but I want to place all three websites under the Blog url.

Regarding 301's of the pages, would I be better doing at the top level and 301 all the pages to the home page, or spending the time and 301 the old product page for instance to the new product page - this is a much bigger project, but what are the potential gains.

Is there anything else I should consider when switching the sites - all three are wordpress sites (I know it has its limitations but they are easy to create).

Thanks in Advance

Andy

My answer is simple - as much as you feel your time is worth.

Thing about things like:

• how much time am I going to have to spend to research
• how much work is involved
• Is this a one off / or continual (you  may wanna charge less for more work)

Give them a price you would be happy to work for and see what happens, if they say no either negotiate or find another client.

Sorry to say, but this is how more of a personal question on how much you think your time is worth / how much you need the additional income, there is not a correct answer.

It depends on what your after, direct sales or brand awareness.

If you after direct sales than I personally would paid $3,600 on Google Adwords - at least you can target the correct audience at the time they need a lawyer (when there searching on Google).

However if your wanting to build a brand that people remember in the time they need a lawyer then possibly advertising on Yelp might work. I am not a huge advocate of adverting on these sites, it might work in certain industries advertising on here, but think like a potential customer. If you wanted a lawyer in Chicago (or any other service), what would you do, go on Yelp or Google (or one of the other search engines).

Go where the customers are.

Hi

Did you get this resolved, if not did you remember to put in the forward slash '' after the first three sections of the IP address. It turns out thats the reason it wasn't working for me.

Thanks

Andy