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I've noticed a decrease in brand-focused searches for our site, but for our actual terms, no, no changes. Entry pages have definitely switched up, however.

Did your ranks end up getting negatively effected by the recent switch-ups, or are different pages literally being switched out at the same ranks?

That's pretty much what I'm seeing. Definitely a mixed bag.

In my case, links to the deeper pages did exist, though certainly not in the same numbers as to the homepage.

I'm doing a bit of research now to see if there's anything else that might have influenced Google's decision. Looking at some of the backlinks on majestic, I'm beginning to suspect it's a partly because they're pages that are better targeted to the keywords, and have more closely matching anchor text.

Thanks for the responses Dejan and davegr,

Are you finding that the rank of the newly indexed page is similar to the old page, exactly the same, or different?

Over the past two weeks I've noticed that Google has decided to change which pages on our site rank for specific keywords. The thing is, this is for keywords that the homepage was already ranking for. Due to our workload, we've made no changes to the site, and I'm not tracking any additional backlinks. Certainly there are no new deep links to these pages.

In SEOmoz dashboard (and via tools/manual checking with a proxy) of the 24 terms we have first page ranking for, 9 of them are marked "new to top 50". These are terms we were already ranking for. Google just appears to have switched out the homepage for other pages.

I've noticed this across a couple of client sites, too, though none to the extent that I'm seeing on our own.

Certainly this isn't a bad thing, as the deeper pages ranking means that they're landing on the content they want first, and I can work to up the conversion rates. It's just caught me by surprise.

Anyone else noticing similar changes?

In addition to the resources already listed, I'd also recommend checking out the learning center at http://getlisted.org/resources/

Specific to the, "Any surefire ways to get more citations there?" question...

Check out your competitors places listings, too. See if they're getting any citations from local sites, resources, or lists. If Google is indexing these citations for your competitors and adding them to place pages, it will probably tie them to your places page too, if you can get listed.

Thanks. Somehow I missed it in the original post.

Hi Felicity,

Are you using a plugin, such as all in one SEO pack, for your site?

Thanks, Ryan.

Seems like Rand concurred back in 2009:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-using-the-hash

Useful stuff. About halfway down the comments on the above link Rand mentions needing specific analytics code to track things accurately. Anyone have experience with Google Analytics and # symbols?

By the way, Ryan, that link you posted is being flagged by Avast as containing malware. No idea if it's real or not.

I agree with Dignan99's initial thoughts about the ability of SE's to connect the dots.

I've also found the on-page targeting of the geographic terms to be crucial. I've found a lot of value in getting a link for, say, "IT Services" and pointing it deeper into the site to a page that targets "IT Services Boston".

In terms of actual places to get links, I've always felt that getting links that are not only topically relevant, but also geographically relevant is important in that sort of campaign. I tend to go for good quality regional or local sites.

I agree that the answer lies in how many people take it up.

I think that one of the biggest deciding factors is going to be how easy the most popular CMS's make integrating this. If WordPress can get this done natively, for instance, a way to write a post and, via dropdown, select what type of data each line/paragraph is? I think that'd be huge, and it would explode.

Personally, I've always been interested in getting Google's rich snippets to appear. I think it can have a huge influence on clickthroughs. And, I think that schema.org indicates that such content will become more and more commonplace. I've managed to get it to happen for one site, which had the majority of its content focused on recipes. We definitely saw an uptick in traffic without a ranking change.

I'll be continuing to keep my eye on it, at first glance it seems like a huge task. In the end, I think it will definitely be something that we add into our work. The big search engine's partnering on this is too hard to ignore.

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the response!

My interest isn't so much about visitors being able to follow the backlink or not, but how the SE's will index them. When a SE crawls a site with URL fragments, my experience has been that they do a good job discarding them.

What I'm seeing is two possibilities:

1. The SE's will discard the fragment when they crawl, and simply index the page as if it didn't have a fragment on the end, meaning a backlink with a fragment is identical to one without. Or,

2. They won't discard the fragment, and we'll end up with duplicates in the SERP's, which would, in part, be dealt with via a canonical tag.

It's great that you've used a similar service with TYNT.com Do you have any experience in how the SE's behave when crawling a link from TYNT and indexing that page?

Cheers.

So, AddThis just added a cool feature that attempts to track when people share URL's via cutting and pasting the address from the browser.

It appears to do so by adding a URL fragment on the end of the URL, hoping that the person sharing will cut and paste the entire thing. That seems like a reasonable assumption to me.

Unless I misunderstand, it seems like it will add a fragment to every URL (since it's trying to track all of 'em). Probably not a huge issue for the search engines when they crawl, as they'll, hopefully, discard the fragment, or discard the JS that appends the fragment.

But what about backlinks? Natural backlinks that someone might post to say, their blog, by doing exactly what AddThis is attempting to track - cutting and pasting the link.

What are people's thoughts on what will happen when this occurs, and the search engines crawl that link, fragment included?

According to the FAQ's, No.

http://www.seomoz.org/dp/webapp-faq

Unfortunately I can't speak for how SEOmoz handles rewrites like this if it's already crawled the page.

The rewrite rule you're using looks like it's only rewriting the www portion of the URL, not index.html. So alone it wouldn't do anything to solve dupe content issues. (someone please correct me if I'm misreading the rewrite rule)

Here's a link to what I used to write a redirect for index.html on another site.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum92/6375.htm

I think it is a fairly safe assumption to make that SEOmoz is smart enough to realize if you're got a redirect in there (providing that its working). I'd still recommend taking a look to see if Google has cached or indexed an index.html version, though.

Edit: my personal, highly technical, acid-test for an index.html redirect is just going there and manually entering the url with index.html on the end, rather than waiting for a recrawl to see if you're heading in the right direction.

As you did, I'd normally handle this with a 301 from index.html to the root domain. When you say that it's "not had an impact" do you mean that the SEOmoz dashboard continues to show an error after it re-crawls, or that the search engines are not picking up the redirect?

SEOmoz dashboard does a great job, but I'd check to see how the search engines are actually indexing yourdomain.com/index.html vs. yourdomain.com also. If the search engines are indexing it as you want them to, then I'd be inclined to ignore the dashboard error.

I apologize if this is a stupid question, but I assume you manually checked that the redirect worked?

I'm working on a site that is throwing off a -lot- of duplicate content for its size. A lot of it appears to be coming from bad links within the site itself, which were caused when it was ported over from static HTML to Expression Engine (by someone else).

I'm finding EE an incredibly frustrating platform to work with, as it appears to be directing 404's on sub-pages to the page directly above that subpage, without actually providing a 404 response. It's very weird.

Does anyone have any recommendations on software to clearly map out a site's internal link structure so that I can find what bad links are pointing to the wrong pages?