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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.

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. My question is, would this be too many redirects for googlebot to sort through and would it be too confusing or send bad signals? Or should I create a new directory with all good articles and just redirect the entire old articles directory to the new one? Or just delete the redirects and old spammy directory and let those fall on a 404 error page. 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. http://tinyurl.com/b9jysa5 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.

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

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?

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?

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.

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.

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)?

I was always taught to place all original articles on site, let them get indexed by Google, then put out for distribution through various press release outlets. With the latest penguin update, how does this practice work out concerning duplicate content? In theory, I wrote the article so I should get credit for it on my site first, then push through various distribution outlets to get it out to my targeted audience in my niche field. Typing out loud I would tend to think if the article is on my site first then I would get credit and any others following would be hit by duplicate content if in fact google considered it a dupe violation. Any input on this? Am I on track or am I heading for a train wreck.

I am working on a website that got hit by the penguin update. Didn't get hit terribly bad, but dropped from number one to number 9. As I'm going through the pages, the theme and content is a mess. To give an example, say the site is about custom colored marbles. The main page content covers custom colored marbles, custom promotional marbles, custom glass marbles, etc. Custom colored marbles is mentioned and covered on all pages, which I am going back and trying to make each page theme specific. There is also a custom page, so I am at a cross roads on how best to employ the focus of the custom page and the home page. I am thinking the home page should emphasize colored marbles, and the custom page should emphasize custom colored marbles. My fear is that making such a drastic change will bounce the site completely off front page and that it will take time for the custom page to come up in rankings. AS it stands now I am confused as to how it even ranks on first page as there's two pages with custom colored marbles emphasis. Id like to clean this up as much as possible so there are no big hits with future google updates, but I don't want the site to drop off either as that would be hard to explain to the owner. Yeah, we are cleaning up your site and making it google compliant and in so doing you no longer rank on first page. That won't put food on the table. Thanks for any advise on this.

Being new to seomoz Im not sure if I understand the crawl test completely. You setup a campaign, enter all your info, rogerbot goes out and crawls your site and gives you results as to what your doing right and what is wrong or could use looking into. So once I get my results, I make edits to my site pages. In my case Im getting lots of duplicate content and duplicate titles. So I go back and make adjustments and then submit a crawl test to see the change results. In other tools Ive used in past I was able to re run crawl immediately and fine tune results on the fly. seomoz crawl test is still pending after three days. is this normal? or is there another way to make changes and run reports to see results instantly? If your working on many sites and making changes, having to wait 3 or more days to see how your changes were received seems like a long time.

A customer of mine has a site with lots of articles and they are all quite spammy. They have not been affected by penguin yet so they asked what to do. I suggested losing the articles directory and 301 redirect to either the home page or another important page. Would a 301 redirect on the entire directory to a single page be the way to go or add redirects from each page within the directory and spread out redirects to various pages in website? Or do you have a better suggestion?

I have a site that was recently hit by the Google penguin update and dropped a page back. When running the site through seomoz tools, I keep getting duplicate content in the reports for domain.com and domain.com/index.html, even though I have a 301 rewrite condition. When I test the site, domain.com/index.html redirects to domain.com for all directories and root. I don't understand how my index page can still get flagged as duplicate content. I also have a redirect from domain.com to www.domain.com. Is there anything else I need to do or add to my htaccess file? Appreciate any clarification on this.