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I would like to know is it possible to track a keywords past ranking history? We would like to check the ranking history of some potential vendors, but only get data from the point I add them to Alabs, moz etc. Id like to go back a year to see the trend in their rankings. Is this possible and what tool or process can be used to achieve this. Thanks in advance.
Im not sure the inbound links in GWT is ever accurate. Ive worked with several sites that had links removed over a year ago and they still show up in GWT. Even when linked site no longer existed. I guess such is the penalty for sites that once violated Googles TOS.
I think this would also delay the fixing of an algorythmic penalty if GWT hasnt recognized the newly revised or more accurate inbound links.
Ive been tasked to work on several sites from a client that had some shady past seo work done for them. Weak content, tons of useless links all pointing to home page, etc. Ive gone through site and given a total re-write and worked on removing and dissavowing links.
Majority of the sites home page ranked high on first page google. Now the sites are closer to 100 rank than first page, and the odd thing is that home page cant be found but pages like terms and conditions or disclaimer are ranking. These pages have hardly no content compared to home pages, and while they are still ranked 80 to 100 positions back they are ranking while the home page cant be found.
We have tried changing anchor text to "click here", and "for more info" instead of keyword and nothing much changed yet. Competition still has pretty much keyword anchor text and worthless links and they still rank well.
Am I wasting time with rewrites and link dissavows or should I continue and eventually get the sites home page to come back on the radar? We have added social media presence and a blog that we post to regularly and for 6 months of work have hardly seen a dent for improved rankings.
Am I on the right page or spinning my wheels? Any advise is appreciated.
We have a client that came to us and they recently did a site makeover. Previously they had all their pages in root directory including 75+ spammy article pages. On their makeover, they moved all the article pages into a directory and added 301 redirects. In going over their site we noticed they have redundant articles, like an article on blue-marble-article.htm and blue-marbles-article.htm Playing on singular and plural with dulpicate content for most part with exception to making it plural.
If they have 75 articles, Id say 1/3 are actually somewhat original content. I would like to 301 redirect 2/3's of the articles to better re-written article pages but that would add a whole lot more 301 redirects.
We would then have a 301 redirect from root directory to article directory, then another 301 redirect from spam article to new re-written article.
Id hate to lose 50-75 pages but I think its in fact those spammy pages that could be why the site fell from top of first page google to third page and now 10th page in a years time.
I know, Im confused just typing this out. Hope it makes sense for some good feedback and advise. Thanks.
My main site has htaccess rewrite condition to force www.
I just added a blog on sub domain and have it www.blog.domain.com
Is this setup correctly or should it be http://blog.domain.com or does it make a difference? A colleague just pointed that out and said it should be non www for blog or any sub domains.
Thanks for any clarification.
I know this individual does this with several sites and then offers them for sale to his competitors. Obviously spammy thru and thru, but how can google reward a site thats not even two months old, with 1900 + links with a ranking of #3 for a highly competitive keyword?
Please dont post the actual name or url of the website as we dont want to give him any more credit but this blows my mind as he has done this several times with other sites and never gets penalized.
Any ideas as to how he can accomplish this besides almost 2000 links in less than 2 months? How is that even remotely natural?
I know his other sites have been reported to google but they never did anything about it.
Thanks for any feedback.
Thanks for the replies. Think we have the http fixed and will work on footer area next. Thanks again for the heads up.
We have a site that was ranking well and recently dropped in traffic and ranking. The whole site is https and and not just the shopping pages. Thats the way the server is setup, they make whole site https.
My manager thinks the drop in ranking is due to google not crawling https. I think contrary, but would like some feedback on this. Site is here
Thanks Matt,
The seo agency came into play post penguin / panda. Flags and bells are going off in my head like a four alarm fire in reviewing their monthly reports.All links are using main keyword phrase and linking to home page. There is no variety in phrase or landing page, and I suspect thats why the client is not ranking well and got a seo agency involved.
Said agency claims to do white hat practices but I just cant find any, as stated above.
Before I post my findings Id like to make sure my approach and suspicions are valid and backed up by others in this fine community.
Looking over a clients site and they have a bunch of link directory links that seem very skeptical to me, but the mozrank and authority seem to be ok on the home page.
One directory is addlinkzfree and they have the same template and layout as a few other directories this client has. Link page has no juice whatsover, but home page has PA 54, MR 5.04 and root domain is DA 45.
At first glance this would appear to be respectable numbers right? But the title of the directory and multitude of links lead me to think its nothing but a link farm.
Should I advise the client to run and try to remove links from these type sites even though home page has decent scores? Im of the mindset that anything diredctory with links, free, partners etc in title need be avoided.
Would appreciate any backup on this or am I just being paranoid?
Ive used both Bruce Clay and SeoMoz toolsets. The one thing I really liked about Bruce Clays tools is that I can punch in a url and get a full analysis report within minutes. Seomoz takes a week. That's a major drawback in my opinion.Seomoz has a great q and a forum so thats a major plus.
We have a site that has had its content copied verbatim to numerous other sites and articles. We were advised to change our content but the content is originally ours. Does google take that into account before they apply duplicate penalties?
And shouldn't copyscape be able to show this information in their reports? It just doesnt seem right that the originating author would have to change content because everyone else is stealing it.
Any clarification on this?
Thanks for your replies.
I have tried freelancer and odesk and have not had the response I was hoping for. I received applicants with one profile name, then when I ask questions another foreign name posts up. And they all seem to think seo is offering thousands of inbound links per month with just as outrageous blog posts and social media likes and tweets. All the while the main focus of content writing and blogging that we are looking for gets left on the back porch.
Gotta be a better source of qualified candidates out there.
We have multiple family lines of products. this one family line has been pretty stagnant and an seo firm pointed that out to us in trying to gain our business. I wanted to see if there is any merit to their suggestion.
We have a line of products that are all using the same template or shell for a website structure. All have different content relating to a specific product or service, but being its a line of different products under one family, we use the same colors and template structure for consistency and branding purposes.
It was just brought to my attention that using a template like this across multiple sites could raise duplicate content flags as google is reading the same template code and may not differentiate that its a family product line of sites.
Does anyone have any feedback on whether this could be true or not?
We are growing faster than expected and are in need of bloggers to keep up with updates for a multitude of websites. Where do you guys go to find reputable bloggers who are well versed in seo, social media and creative writing?
We have tried ads locally but are not getting the quality we would like. Any recommendations or suggestions would be appreciated.
We worked on a website that sells silicone wristbands. Not an exciting product anymore by any means. What we did to help create a buzz was partner with various awareness causes during a given month and posted polls and funds raised results on landing pages. Then we had the awareness cause we worked with link to those landing pages where visitors can see the amount of money raised, read more info about the cause and even place an order to support the cause.
If client has a mailing list of any significant size, you can send out email blasts offering discounts, free upgrades or other incentives that are further explained on landing pages and build traffic and possibly links to that page as well.
Im also looking forward to hearing some strategies others may have to offer.
Excellent answer Adam. Very well done.
What tools do you use for conducting a site audit? I need to do an audit on a site and the seomoz web crawler and on page optimization will takes days if not a full week to return any results.
In past Ive used other tools that I could run on the fly and they would return broken links, missing htags, keyword density, server information and more.
Curious as to what you all use and what you may recommend to use in conjunction with the moz tools.
OK we are getting closer! Im signed up for the Mozplex tour Tuesday afternoon for 4pm. Anyone else going to be on this tour? Maybe meet up for dinner, drinks and networking afterwards? Feel free to message me to swap numbers or make plans.
I think you have the right idea and are on the right track. I believe with 301 redirects to new site you will transfer most if not all link juice and page authority to new domain name. And you should see a boost in rankings having the keyword in there as well. So I think its a win win all the way around for you.
At first I was leaning to disagree. But couldn't find anything to back it up. I know some seo tools have ip address checkers to make sure your in a good ip neighborhood and block. I thought this would fall in the same line as what was originally asked.
"A clean IP address. You might think your site is squeaky clean, but did you know your IP address has a dirty secret? That’s right. Unbeknownst to you, your neighbor is into some very shady things. Check to see if you’re in a bad IP neighborhood by running an IP checker like MXToolbox.com."
The entire post can be found here: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2011/04/the-seo-bucket-list-3-things-to-do-before-your-site-dies/
So because of these tools checking your ip block I was always under assumption that a shady site on a server could in fact have some impact on your rankings. However I am hard pressed to find any evidence to support this.
Heres another post from above reference:
"About 3% of all web sites "own" a private ip number, with the remainder being on virtual, or name-based, servers. Although only 3% are dedicated ip's, we have seen that in many instances well over 90% of the top-50 results in the search engines are sites having dedicated ip numbers. This was so strange that we have repeatedly validated these findings, and have found that switching a site from a virtual ip to a dedicated ip number alone has caused significant ranking increases. Of course, the web is so dynamic that this could be coincidence, but we do not think so.
Likewise, we have found that there are "dirty" ip c-blocks, ranges of ip numbers that have been tarnished by spammers and left to be reassigned to unsuspecting sites. If your site is in the range of the spammers ip, then you are equally penalized. We have likewise found instances where simply moving a site has caused the ranking to improve."
Im glad I came across this post. Learn something new everyday. Did I misunderstand the statement on the above mentioned article or is this perhaps an outdated theory?
Thanks in any event for teaching an old dog something new.
Wow! That's really sucks. Negative guy has no soul, heart or integrity. Ive often heard from other seo peeps in the industry that its not what they do to their site that makes them rank well, its what they find wrong with competition and report to google that gets them the best return.
The negative guy in forum post took this to a whole other level. Id love to hear what google has to say about that.
If they are all coming from same IP address then yes, that could be a big problem. I would suggest seeing if there is a main contact that oversees all the sites and see if they can do a bulk link removal of all links pointing to your site.
Once you have all these links removed, your going to want to go out and replace a portion of them with quality links. Hope this helps some.
You might be better off launching a few new sites or blogs and pumping them with content and then linking back to your main niche site. That combined with a good social media strategy might save you good dollars in paid publication links and over time you may end up with more than one top ranking site for your niche field.
sometimes what you call natural google calls spammy or unnatural. Just sayin. Good luck. Post back with your findings. Im interested to see how things work out for you. Best regards.
Have you tried removing the amazon data feed from those pages? Just to see if that's is in fact what is impacting your rankings? What about the thousands of natural links pointing to your site? Are they all using varied anchor text or is it just five for your five main pages? If just five that could also be affecting your ranking.
No, google does care about good quality pages. Its just if you throw in a bunch of bad pages they dilute the goodness of your good pages. Once you clean yp duplicate content then i would suggest running a report on your inbound links. Check to see if your anchor text is spammy, or concentrating on only a few choice keywords. When it comes to link building you want to spread out the keywords to there isn't one or two money keywords banking on the anchor text.
Also, I would remove any inbound links from questionable directories. Once you do that I wold think you should see some significant gains in rankings.
The trash part of your site affects the site as a whole, not specifically just the trash parts. If they did just that, then you would still benefit from using trash to promote your good pages.
Now from what I understand about penalties, there is a manual penalty and an algorythm or natural penalty.
The algo penalty can be easily fixed by addressing your penalty issue, which would be duplicate content. Clean up all duplicate content and you will be on your way to flying under the penalty radar so to speak. However, you will still need to add more quality content to make up for the removed or cleaned up duplicate content.
Once that takes place you should notice your ranking drop stabilize, and over time begin the crawl back up. This would be a good time to implement other strategies like social media and quality link building.
Now if its a manual penalty, then you need to clean up all duplicate content and ask for a manual review, and pray. Manual penalties are heard to overcome and will require much more work. Sometimes its best to just start with a new domain from scratch.
Hope this helps some.
I think if you added pages over a period of time and not all at once you should pretty much fly under the radar, providing the change in content per page is significant.
Is it at all possible to make a third site for trial purposes, then you would have three sites that could potentially rank well. Now if you can land all three on first page google you wold be doing very well.
Bilal, since you already have one at the top of google why not come up with a different strategy to try and get the second site moving up in google rankings? Sounds like it cold be a good springboard to try some experimentation in optimizing for better ranking.
Unless your simply wanting to merge the sites and concentrate solely on the one site.
You can use both php and html pages. An example would be shopping cart html site. All the cart pages would have to use some sort of php, asp, cfm etc for dynamic purposes. Another example would be quote forms. Many of our sites are html while our quote forms are php.
I think you would be fine to use both php and html. If you choose to go all html for ease of updates and maintenance purposes you can always 301 redirect php pages to new html pages.
In our industry we have noticed a lot of competitors have been creating info sites and plugging them with content, then linking back to the site they want to push higher in rankings. If you have loads of content, maybe make a couple or few wordpress info sites specific to your industry, then link back to your main site.Maybe even make one a blog, allow comments and visit and post to other blogs to gain some traffic to your blog site.
That should not be your only focus seo wise, but should be a very good compliment to it. Add in some social media and I think that would get you going in the right direction.
I don't get any pop up or options. Does this work with Firefox?
Ok, I just looked at ranking settings and did not see a refresh or daily rankings options. Can you help point it out for me? Thanks.
Are you referring to the seomoz Ranking Report? This report runs weekly and does not provide rankings on a daily basis, so there could be ranking fluctuations when comparing the ranking report to actual google rankings.
I have also noticed alot of ranking fluctuations in google lately as well. Hope this helps some.
Google GeoIP and you should get lots of info and resources. Maxmind, countryipblock, etc.
Keep in mind, that by doing this you could also block those from India you are farming work out to.
Off topic question.
Who's going to Mozcon next month and whats on the agenda for the Tuesday evening before the event starts?
Anyone interested in having a meet and greet and talking shop over drinks or dinner the Tuesday before (July 24th)?
My pleasure Gerald. Isn't this a great community for help and answers to our seo problems? Im looking forward to mozcon next month. All the best.
I think it would depend on the rest of the links pointing to your site. If you have nothing but relevant sites pointing to your site and this one pharmacy site is only oddball linking to you, then I would think you would be fine as far as penguin is concerned.
However, if you show a history of other non relevant sites linking to yours, then penguin might think your engaging in paid spam links and penalize you for it.
The problem your having is that you have duplicate title, description and keyword tags in your source coding. If your using a CMS application, check your template meta settings. I think the template meta data is being added to every page and then you are making each unique on page, but both are being added.
<title>Hearts Pest Control Service of Rancho Bernardo</title>
................................
........................................
I think it is always a better practice to try to keep the desired keyword in your domain name. However, if they are set on center, you can always make a silo for care and still do plenty well in ranking for both keyword phrases.
In thinking this out loud, I might suggest keeping "eye center" as there domain and use "eye care" as the blog that supports the domain. This way you would be covering more ground and have a two pronged strategy to hit both choice key word phrases.
I don't mean to go off topic, but squidoo and article directories took a big hit with the latest google updates to penguin. The return you would get from squidoo inbound links, if any, would be very minimal and most likely not worth all the effort that was put into it.
Instead of squidoo, why not concentrate on guest blogging or spreading those squidoo articles out across many other social media sites to build a rich social environment that relates to your site as opposed to one social site?
I agree in theory with Charlotte, however in real world dynamics, I'm seeing a lot of our competitors using the same PR tactics you describe to inflate inbound links. Clearly this must be a better choice than using the over abundant link directories that are spam saturated.
I would think using PR services in moderation to distribute decent content would be more helpful than relying entirely on them for linking purposes.
"... Is my only option is to create a parallel web page with no MLS so I can have the right keywords in the URL?"
Yes, I wold think making a new page with keywords in url would be the best way to go.Once PR and link equity has been established you can always at that time 301 redirect to the wordpress mls query page.
But if you have to optimize the wordpress site page with MLS query, not having keywords in the url is not the end of the world. You can sstill do alot to optimize that page as is with good content, quality links and a social media blitz.
Ok, if I understand correctly, your are getting an MLS listing posted on MLS website. Then adding a link to that listing fro your site, www.jimmymolloy.com. Your then wanting to change the MLS listing url to search engine friendly keywords?
If the answer to above is yes, then I don't think you could unless you own the MLS site and changed its query strings to SEF (Search Engine Friendly)
Now if your wanting to simply create a page on your wordpress site there is an option in wordpress to make url's SEF. You can make one according to the keywords you want, then link from within your page to the MLS listing page. This would pass any link juice from your page to the MLS page.
Would it be plausible to make a page like http://jimmymolloy.com/rosedale-toronto-house-for-sale.htm
Link to the MLS listing from that page, then work on your content, links and social media. Once you see progress and rewards apply a 301 redirect to the MLS listing to pass link juice to it. ???
+1 what safor web design said. When using a long tail keyword, you covering a multitude of short keyword phrases that you could eventually end up ranking well for.
Long tail keyword phrase Ex: Plus size clothing New York City
Shorter keyword phrase ex: Plus size clothing, plus size clothing New York, Clothing New York, City Clothing, Plus size city clothing, plus clothing, size clothing, clothing
Obviously, some of the short keyword phrases may not have much ranking power like size clothing, but nevertheless, look at all the possibilities you can have for ranking off just one long tail keyword phrase?
I think its win win situation.
Ok, on your current articles page, make sure you don't exceed 100 links on that page including all other site navigation.If you do, create a second articles page and start listing articles on that page to balance the load out for the regular articles section. If your getting likes and good feedback i would change that. If you ever had to, simply 301 redirect so you pass all the link juice to new page.
I think I would then create a new top level link under articles called buying guide and have that link to a buying-guide articles page where you can layout your buying guide articles in like fashion to your original articles landing page.
Hope that makes sense. I can see it in my mind but sometimes that's hard to put in type.