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Hello fellow mozrs!
Been working on a few Property (Real Estate for our American friends)  websites recently and and two questions that constantly come up as we spec the site are:

1. What schema (schema.org) should the website use (throughout all pages as well as individual pages). Did anyone found that schema actually helped with their ranking/CTR?
2. Whilst setting up the sitemaps (usually Yaost is our preferred plugin for the job), what page would you EXCLUDE from the site map?

Looking forward to some interesting comments.
Dan.

Hi guys,

it seems that now days it is almost impossible to achieve 0 (Zero) Errors when testing a site via (The W3C Markup Validation Service - https://validator.w3.org). With analytic codes, pixels and all kind of tracking and social media scripts gunning it seems to be an unachievable task.

My questions to you fellow SEO'rs out there are 2:

1. How important and to what degree of effort do you go when you technically review a site and make the decision as to what needs to be fixed and what you shouldn't bother with.

2. How do you argue your corner when explaining to your clients that its impossible to active 100% validation.

*As a note i will say that i mostly refer to Wordpress driven sites.

would love ot hear your take.

Daniel.

Thanks for that John. You were lucky to actually get through to semrush support. i tried a few times and all i get is an answering machine. :(.

Are you saying that they actually told you that the data they collect has an error with it that is pending a fix?

Hi there mozzers..Been struggling with what seems as a simple question:
Whilst using semrush to estimate competitors spend on Paid PPC it seems that the numbers they provide are way off from what reality is.

For example, i have a client who spend approx £2,000 per month on Google PPC (so i know exactly the figure) however, the SEMRUSH indicates a monthly spend of $41 (yes USD).

I7StmZG

Brilliant question. Its a shame we only got two replies. We are at the same situation trying to decide which tool to go with.

We did a month with Searchmetrics (fully paid - no trial version or anything). When you purchase the basic account ($69) it is really basic which many features removed. The next level up is for $2000! (yes you read it right), so unless you are a large company its out of the question. If that's not enough, the Searchmetrics support sucks! and there is hardly any supporting videos and tutorials on the other hand, they have just lunched a "Mobile" position tracker which shows you Mobile SERP results alongside the Desktop results, this is something (and please correct me if i'm wrong) i haven't seen anywhere yet. That said, we were able to get some proper data about competitors and their viability and rankings.

SEMRUSH on the other hand seems to be much more engaging with their customers (paying  customers and the community). Their pricing start at $69.95, $149.95 and $549.95 and from data point view i cant really see any downside with the exception of the nice mobile SERP feature that Searchmetrics have.

I would love to see what other experienced companies has to say about those two competitors.

Dan.

Hi Monica,
Although i appricate your comment and although it was Staff Endorsed here on Moz i think it was a very general answer that doesn't touch the core of my question.

and i will explain, whilst i agree with you 100% regarding the fact that one should add Schema markups to the things that are important on your site it didn't answer the dipper question of combining the front end and back end when it comes to Schema. In other words, by defining schema for sidebards, top menus, footer etc. (all of which which are only visible to search engines bots on a code level) are we helping our SEO efforts? is Google going to award us for taking the time and specifying schema throughout elements that are not your usual suspects (Review, Ratings, Products etc.)?

I hope i get my point/question across, as we both share the same principles it is not clear from your comment what level of technical code level schema should be implemented.

Dan.

Hey everyone,
As you all probably has seen Google has changed their structure testing tool and alongside that has also changed what is considered as valid and not valid.

I have been struggling with this question for quite a while now where opinions are really split.

**1. How important is Schema for SEO? **
2. How far should you go Schema'ing your website pages?

From the one hand i can see how it can be easier for a BOT to read a code that has proper "road signs" (our schemas markups), on the other hands, Google is already extremely clever is working out what is the header, sidebar or footer as well as review and or a blog posts (especially for those of us who use Wordpress.

Would love to know if someone has seen a "Like to Like" show case with schemas and/or have some factual information regarding what should or shouldn't be done when it comes ot Schema.

Dan.

x1aw

Hi guys,
When working with advanced modern websites it many times means that in order to achieve the look and feel we end up with pages that has almost 1000 lines of code or more. In some cases it is impossible to avoid it if we are to reach the Client's visual and technical specifications.

Say the page is 1000 lines of code, and our content only starts at line 450 onwards, will that have an impact from a Google crawlability, hence affect our SEO making it harder to rank?

Thoughts?

Dan.

Hi Tom, thanks for that.

Not sure where i read (or heard) a great metaphor exactly about that. Specifically speaking of hosting and treating your hosting company and server as the "Neighbourhood" of which your website resides in.

I'm confident that Google is cleaver in assessing your "Neighbourhood". Now, lets say that Google is the Police in our case, when the police is called out to visit a bad neighbourhood its already have pre-conceptions when it arrives (assuming high crime rate etc.) and it will be much harder for a resident in the "bad neighbourhood"  to argue he is innocent (im not taking sides, but simply say it as it is).

So, based on the above analogy if you host your website in a bad neighbourhood rather than a gated high end community (i.e. Dedicated server on a reputable host) there is a good chance you will also be treated more preferably by the "police".

Well, that's my take anyhow, and i strongly believe it has an impact (as small as it might be).

Dan.

Well pointed Thomas. This is a thing of the past with Genesis if you ensure to use Yoast. Generally speak Yoast and Genesis works extremely well together.

I will also note, although i cant prove it, that when Google crawl the code and notice Genesis frame work it is identifiable and i think adds value (same as noticing if a site is on a dedicated server or on a shared environment) which i believe give you (or deduct) brownie points for your ranking.

Dan.

Thanks Thomas,

This was very helpful. I would love to see a few more comments making a solid case for Genesis framework over the traditional way of themes.

Dan.

Hi everyone, i know this subject has been raised few times in the past, but i wanted to reach out to the community and find out what is your take on the advantages and disadvantage (if any) for using the Genesis Framework when building a new websites for Clients.

I know for fact that many developers are complaining that they find it harder to manage the Genesis Framework, which i do appreciate has a bit more of comparability issues when it comes to plugins and modifications, but i always looked at it as a positive rather then a negative.

My personal opinion is that Genesis framework is more of a stable Skeleton that is better read by Search Engine (from a technical SEO point view) and is harder for hackers to penetrate.

Would have love to hear the community experts opinion pros and cons.

Cheers.

Dan

Hi Linda,

Now this starts to make sense. Based on your assumption that the DA is calculated based on the entire site (i.e. all pages) and the PA is based on a single page it will make sense. i guess it is the difference of evaluating your "House" as a whole or just the "Front Door" when you stand in-front of it.

I think that has satisfy (for now...) my curiosity.

YG.

Hi Linda,

Thanks for the reply. What you are mentioning above is correct. i mean, this is what we are experiencing but feel it is not right, therefore wanted to understand why is that happening? and why the two metrics do not match? How can it be that the same page (i.e. homepage and root domain) give different metrics they have the exact same data.

and assuming there will be an argument that explain that strange behaviour, which of the two metrics should we take in consideration?

YG.

i will be waiting in anticipation for one of the MoZ's to share some light on this.

Cheers.

Hi Ryan,

Yes, im talking about the MoZ Pro bar (PA, mR, DA). "Page authority" and "Domain Authority" are both MoZ metrics, and whilst on the root of my site (i.e. my homepage) they should both provide the same metric.

Thanks,
YG

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the reply. Let me try and be more specific. When i visit my homepage (root domain) the PA and DA are exactly the same. So my www.rootdomain.com (which is also the homepage) should give the exactly same Page authority and Domain authority metrics.

am i missing something?

Hi guys, is it normal that when looking at my homepage with the mozbar i get the same DA and PA? It seems that it should provide the same results.

Thankss

As you already pointed out, every time you upload a disavow file it replaces the old one. That being said if your new file contains a bunch of new links only and not the links you included in your original file then Google will take into consideration the new file and ignore the first one.

If you want to keep the old file and add the new links you found then download the old file add the new links and re-upload. That is the best way to do it

Ofcourse if google has already taken into consideration the old file then it doesnt matter as the links are gone, but better to play safe.

Very constructive reply, I am sure you made him wiser for coming over our Q&A.

I will give it a go though:

There isnt a ratio which can be classified as standard SEO practise. All this is theory.

It makes sense that a company which run an active blog with loads of content, will NOT have an 100% homepage ratio cause that way you exclude your deep content from the link value and you wouldnt want to do that.

Assuming this is a ranking factor or a signal for identifying legit link profiles you would be looking for something natural such as 60-40 or so but that would depend on the domains that link to you.

For example I would expect web2.0 such as blogger and wordpress or article sites to link more often your articles than your home page while a donour page or a sponsored seminar page etc to link your main page than an article. I would expect the same in blog comments. Naked URLS of your articles.

See how many things come to acquisition?

Just to everything naturally and you will be ok. What I like to do is get high PR 5+ links for my articles and then pass link juice to my money pages via internal linking.

Thats not necessary an industry practise., Just what works for me and the niche I am into

hi Scott,

Is it possible to grab a screenshot of that note? Is it from Google? Or some other SEO agency/advertiser you got that message?

Hi Jane,

I can argue this article with more than 100 examples & proofs but that will be off-topic. All I can say is: Don;t have that much faith in what Google or Search Engine Land says, instead run your own tests.

What is low quality EMD? Who defines low quality?

Once you realise that the answers to the above 2 questions are subjective (mainly based on individual POV of what "quality" is) then you realise that google must have some sort metrics that judge that and those aint similar to mine or yours. Once you realise how they do it or what those metrics are, you will be one step closer in making your clients' rankings happy.

So as you already pointed out correctly, the debate is ongoing...since 2006

Robert you are absolutely right and you nailed it really, only my boss knows me that well. Got carried away by my passion.

I keep this "But, if I have a site that is producing revenue for a client of $100K per year and 50% profit, I would never suggest they buy a $10K EMD and that will change their outcomes (I really doubt you would either). " and you are right, I wouldn't 100%.

One case is different to the other! +1

Agree with Robert that it is not a good SEO approach, however disagree on the 1% factor. EMDs (especially .com and .net) still DO work but it comes down to keyword competitiveness and keyword research. Its an awful approach but the easiest way to rank products with low competition hence you see them everywhere when it comes to location marketing (for example pest control XYZ) or Micro Niche sites (bestknifeguide.com etc). I ranked 2 web sites with EMD this year as part of my annual SEO tests which help me understand Google better and to my surprirse they do the job just fine. People will say "yes but not for long" but I;ve been hearing "not for long" for lots of techniques similar to EMD since 2006 so in general I lost my faith a bit when it comes to articles from people who replicate all day what Matt Cutts says. To me the biggest advantage of an EMD is that you can do anchor text link building by simply using the domain name, keeping yourself away from penalties since the url serves as an exact anchor.

Apologies if the article I shared was not clear but in sort NO there is no SEO benefit in using the new domain over a .com EMD nor a disadvantage. At the moment 40-60% is related to your link building so it doesnt really matter if the industry you are going after is hard compettitive industry.  However if you do want to do it and buy the exactkeyword.company domain and want to redirect it allow me to suggest to set an iframe to the new domain than redirect. it works better with rankings at the moment and I can prove it as I set an iframe and a micro niche page of the same product with the same content and EMD on both and the iframe destroyed the proper page by 20+ rankings.

Hi Alfredo,

Here is in detail a post I wrote about this topic. Hope it helps

http://www.artdivision.co.uk/new-gtlds-seo

I used it recently and managed to remove a manual penalty removal with the first attempt by using Link Detox. I can say that 80% of the efforts were put into reviewing "moderate" toxic links and manually removing those who we think are bad for our site.

A software tool can be as good as you tbh. I do not think that submitting a disavow file will lift a penalty in 3 days. Manual removal of links on the other hand can help a lot so they need to make clear that part tbh.

A couple of things I did and I think Google liked:

1. 20% manual link removal of rich text anchor texts
2. Uploaded backlink files from Majestic SEO, Open site Explorer AND Webmaster tools and connected all accounts to link detox. That way you make sure you do not miss anything.
3. Built fresh branded and compound links at the same time

Hope this helps

HI,

Just to add my 2 cents. As already mentioned, links are THE most important factor in rankings. You only have to see who and what Google is after with penalties to make that conclusion or run your own tests. Having said that your SEO company is right but it also means that if they dont do it properly or abuse it or focus too much only on building links and doing nothing else, you will probably end up with a bunch of links from their netword (or some rented) and that wont do any good to you.

Hope it helps

here is a guess (jsut a guess though). I think this is happening due to your code and your side bars. If you CNTR+U on Chrome you will see that code wise everything is the same  and your content on the 2 examples is very thin (100 words or so) thus it might see it as duplicate.

I wouldnt worry much for something like that though as "duplciate content" normally are pages that target the same product for a different location with people being lazy changing anything but a post code and a city name, or some errors in your database that automatically create similar pages with different url variations.

Hope this helps

You mention in your title "some content" and then on your text that you move a whole page. Are you moving the whole content? if so what is the point moving it to a new page and not optimising the old page around the additional content?

If you move "some content" 301 is not the best solution as you eliminate the original page with the other half content. 
If you move page A to page B and page B has already its own content with Page A content being a nice complimentary addition to the whole then do what Whittie says and set a 301.

Good luck!

In theory yes. Great quality content will pay off in the long run, people will find it and share it and some of them will convert but thats mainly down to your overal marketing mix.

There are many reasons you dont get traffic some of which i can think of right now;

1. Your content is not optimised for searches thus it is not ranking for anything
2. The content myth - Content is great for marketing but will not rank you for any commercial term (which is why white hat appraisal posts and Matt Cutt's worshippers never have examples of commercial terms ranking without links - cause they cant rank without links). You need to use it as a "sticky marketing" weapon rather a ranking/SEO for primary keywords weapon. People will find it, like it, bookmark it, come back for more, then when decide to buy a service they will remember you and you will be one of the people they get a quote from.
3. You have optimised your content but use wordpress with default settings which is an overoptimsied nightmare and need to amend some settings to make it rank higher.
4. you have a poor social media presence or not aware of other online properties where people will be looking for this kind of content. Posting it on your site is one thing, distributing it where people are looking for it, another.
5. you dont have rel=author set up.

Thats from the top of my head, I need more info to provide a more sufficient answer. In order to check the overoptimisation problem try and google the exact title of your post. If you are not in top 200 3 days after your initial post then you are over-optimised and you need to do more onpage work.

i have but i was hoping to know if this is solved by adding rel=canonical to the original content landing page? http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses

all page have same content but the text content for some reason appears only on http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses page and on http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=1 page

Hello,

I am looking for some help here with an estate agent property web site. I recently finished the MoZ crawling report and noticed that MoZ sees some pages as duplicate, mainly from pages which list properties as page 1,2,3 etc. Here is an example:

http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=2
http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=3 etc etc

Now I know that the best practise says I should set a canonical url to this page:
http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=all

but here is where my problem is.

http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=1 contains good written content (around 750 words) before the listed properties are displayed while the "page=all" page do not have that content, only the properties listed.

Also http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=1 is similar with the originally designed landing page http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses

I would like yoru advise as to what is the best way to can url this and sort the problem. My original thoughts were to can=url to this page http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses instead of the "page=all" version but your opinion will be highly appreciated.

You can do this on a mass scale so that you can extract all outbound links, just did it yesterday

Yup, they go where the market is. from one hand I am extremely annoyed by this (and by the horrible ranking track tool), from the other they are a business and they got data which tells them where to invest and why shrug

Not a problem mate, happy i helped.

You are in a good shape and do not need to do anything, Google will noindex those pages sooner or later. Just carry on with your onpage/off page SEO

HI mate, sorry for the late response.

It should and I agree with you but Open Source was never perfect Drupal is more time consuming and complicated than Wordpress and there is a reason it refers to more "Geeky" people if I may say than the average WP user.

However the end sites are 20.000 times cleaner than any wordpress site and definitely worth the effort and time put into it!

Sorry for the late response, got hooked up with work

Try the 3rd option please which you delete old alias once you create a new one. Select the desirable URL as the new one and save.

Let me know if that solves the problem.

ps. If the old url is indexed and ranked you might want to set a 301 redirect just in case

Again check this with your developers as its been a while but I think it has to do with your setting on Pathauto (I cant log in to be 100% sure of what you've selected there). Did you install Pathauto after you manualy changed the url? or were both generated via pathauto? Also both pages have canonical urls set on those 2 different urls. Is this intended?

Sorry for blasting you with questions but as I cant see your dashbaord I am trying to get a clear picture

Hello,

Yes it does hurt your SEO in terms of creating an authoritive web site. Wordpress is an over-optimisation nightmare if you leave the default setting on. It is a small issue you can solve by changing some of the setting in Yoast SEO plug in. have you installed this plug in? If not, do it and once you have done this do the following:

On the general setting: Tick the box "Noindex" on the sitewide meta setting 
On the post type setting: tick noindex/follow on the Meta Robots under the MEDIA section
On the taxonomy setting: tick noindex/follow  on the meta robots under the TAGS section
On the author archive: tick noindex/follow and Disable author archives under the author archive section. Tick ONLY the noindex/follow under the data archive section

On the XML SITEMAP setting:

tick media on "Exclude post types" - tick tags and format under the Exclude  Taxonomies section.

You should be ok after that!

ps. by tick I mean select

Hope this helps!

It's been a VERY long time since I did a web site on Drupal but I  will give this a go. To start with can you please list me the modules you use on your web site? Most importantly do you use "Pathauto"? If yes I think there might be a conflict with your URL aliases. Let me know. Also is this Drupal 6 or 7?

Woa! Well apologies for trying to be helpful Jeremy.

I wanted to make sure that you have checked some of the guides here in case it would be helpful to you and your team and save you some money. Checking best practise guides doesnt mean you are getting "trained in seo".

I can not be in your mind, or know what resources you have already taken into consideration, I made an assumption based on your budget that by "SEO" you  mean some on-page tasks that can be sorted with a bit of studying or by following some of the great guides you can find here. After all you are offering a budget which is close to the monthly MoZ subscription so blaming me for not being helpful is kind of unfair.Clearly I shouldnt have made that assumption.

If you want more helpful "advises" in the future maybe try to list what kind of services you are looking for based on your budget instead of posting a price and bashing someone who was trying to be helpful to you and spent some time to reply to you. whatever.

Good luck

Hi Jeremy,

Firstly, I suggest you read some of our guides found here on moZ in regards to onpage optimisation and fundamental rules of SEO. Having a small team sorting out the thing you mention can be extremely useful when run tight budgets.

Then I would recommend to browse through relevant topics here on Q&A and find a professional who you are pleased with his/her responses and approach directly by introducing yourself.

Moz is a large community full of capable professionals and I am sure each one of us could help you but its best if you start from bottom to top rather vise versa

Best of luck!

I am pretty sure it is not a manual penalty, 2 of my link practise test sites got both hit on the same date losing 8-12 ranking spots (not as massive as yours) and I practises poor link building on both of them (which had them on page one rank one for 3 months) so I am pretty sure it has to do with your incoming links and OBL.

I had a quick look at your link profile and 95% of your referal domains are 0 when it comes to both citiation and trust flow same as with my 2 test sites.

You simply need good quality links as the old ones provide now 0 value.

Hope this helps

Glad you found my info useful. If you need anything else send me a PM

On the General Settings

• Make sure you tick the box of the SiteWide Meta settings. Untick the rest

On the post type settings

• Leave everything unticked apart the META ROBOTS no the Media section where you should tick it (turn on noindex, follow)

On the Taxonomies

• Noindex, follow the Meta Robots on the tag section

On the XML sitemap settings

• Tick Ping yahoo and ask
• Exclude post types: tick media
  Exclude taxinomies: tick tags and format

That should do the trick

General advises

1. If you plan to do posts aiming all the time your main keyword, rename the blog to something else
2. Remove the keyword from you categories. For example if you have categories like "band hire lewisham", "band hire london", band hire croydon" etc change them to "lewisham", "London", "Croydon" etc.
3. Remove the recent post widget

Thats all I can think of now.

Will try to give you an example.

Consider for a moment that you start a blog about "local bands whatever" and "band hire whatever". You have 3 categories including hire and LSI similar keyphrases. You name your blog "band for hire bla bla bla". Your tagline name and description got it as well". You write articles that all have the keyword with it and are all similar named. You've got a recent posts widget on the bottom of the post which names each article by name. Every article has a tag of your keyword in it or something similar anyway.

Lets assume that you start a fresh post right now. Before you even start writing:

Every page has "local band" "band hire" once as blog name in title, plus articles all have "local band, nind hire etc" ... meaning each title has the term twice in it.

There is the "band hire" in the blog title H1 tag.
There is a "band hire" in the blog byline.
There are 2-3 categories with "band hire" in it.
There are 5 articles in recent posts with "local hire" in it.
You had a few tags on every page showing the keyword but you have now removed it.
Your url already got it another 2 local-band-hire-surrey-hire-local-bands-surrey/

• I am not even toughing img alt tags, RSS etc

Count them up, that's roughly 15 "band hire/local hire" keywords on every page, before you even start writing. You would need a 2250 word article that will not mention your keyword ONCE to balance that and still might lose.

Hope that helps.

Your pages are overoptimised, good move to remove the tag. I will assume you havent edited wordpress at all and left it by default. Wordpress is an overoptimised nightmare unless you edit it the right way. Your site is constructed in a very "keyword specific" way and all your landing pages/blog include the same keyword with location variations. That makes your page start with a 1%-1.5% optimisation on the main keyprhase thus your page will not rank.

If you write a blog article and you dont rank for its title within 2 days you have over-optimised and need to bring down the % a bit. Also try to add more content, aim for 700words at least instead of just pushing internal pages with blog titles that cross link with each other.

My £0.02

I can bring you in touch with a good one tbh. Is there a contact number/form to send more details?

Hello,
Firstly, no submission of disavow file doesn't mean that you will get a manual review. it doesn't even mean that Google will indeed ignore those links. If you know what you are doing, filter the domains correctly and disavow low quality links you can only gain from this.

The second part i want to refer to is to the good quality content. Good quality content is an amazing marketing tool but not a replacement for keyword rankings as most people think. For example an article about "5 easy tips to design the perfect email marketing campaign" will definitely drive few visitors per month on the site (lets say 100) but you wont substitute the 5000 you will get if you rank for "email marketing services" (this is just an example with random numbers). Keep always in mind at all times that Google doesnt want to make web sites popular, they want to rank popular sites.

Lastly you mention Yost SEO which means you use wordpress and also onpage optimisation. Yoast tells you that your onpage optimisation is top notch based on the content your write but doesnt take into account the fact that wordpress by default is an on-page nightmare. make sure you take care of tags, categories and always consider them in case you use your targeted keyword onpage.

Hello mate,

The answer is fairly easy tbh, your backlink profile is completely empty, you have in total 4 domains linking to your site and thats it. It will take some time for your site to take off and building links is something you will have to do if  you wish to rank. You will need to pay attention to your onpage optimisation vs anchor texts, make sure that 1% of your anchors are referring to the exact keywords you wish to rank (Increase that to 2-3% if you dont have 100% onpage optimisation).

If I were you, i would start by driving traffic to my web site via other channels (relevant to caviar blogs, comments, forums about food and recipes, social media) and links will come naturally.

best of luck