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It should be noted that individuals searching long tail keywords are likely farther down an acquisition funnel and more apt to perform an action.

Example: "shoes" gets millions of searches a month, is very competitive, but broad/vague. "Women's red Nike running shoes size 6" is a specific, low competition, long tail search. This individual knows exactly what they are looking for and are more apt to purchase.

While this isn't always the case, many companies have become successful by leveraging long tail queries. Amazon being the biggest! Chris Anderson's The Long Tail better describes this phenomenon. There are more long tail searches than there are fat head (short tail) searches. So if you can invest some keyword research muscle into understanding where your long tail keyword opportunities are, and then provide the best resources/content to deliver that information to users, you'll site will be better set up for success.

Hi Chris,

Are you still using ColdFusion?

It sounds like you're on a Windows server, yeah? If so, adding this to your web.config file should do the trick:

<match url="(.*)"><conditions><add matchtype="IsFile" negate="true"><add matchtype="IsDirectory" negate="true"></add></add></conditions>
    <action type="Rewrite" url="{R:1}.cfm"></action></match>

Otherwise, adding the following to your web.config for WordPress should work:

 <rulename="company cfm"=""><matchurl="^company (.*)$"=""><conditionslogicalgrouping="matchall"><addinput="{request_filename}"matchtype="isfile"negate="true"><addinput="{request_filename}"matchtype="isdirectory"negate="true"><actiontype="rewrite"url="{r:1}.cfm"></actiontype="rewrite"url="{r:1}.cfm"></addinput="{request_filename}"matchtype="isdirectory"negate="true"></addinput="{request_filename}"matchtype="isfile"negate="true"></conditionslogicalgrouping="matchall"></matchurl="^company></rulename="company> 

Are you using webtrends.com?

?WT.srch=1 means that it was coming from paid search.

Here are some resources on those parameters (which you should customize to your campaign for more accurate tracking data):

https://producthelp.webtrends.com/streams/webtrends-basic-parameters/

https://help.webtrends.com/en/analytics9admin/visitor_tracking_parameters-sdc.html

Hope that helps!

Thanks for your great question!

Schema.org has stated that using either is fine. Here is their longer form answer from their FAQ page on which to use:

"There is a general trend towards using 'https' more widely, and you can already write 'https://schema.org' in your structured data. Over time we will migrate the schema.org site itself towards using https: as the default version of the site and our preferred form in examples. However 'http://schema.org' -based URLs in structured data markup will remain widely understood for the forseeable future and there should be no urgency about migrating existing data. This is a lengthy way of saying that both 'https://schema.org' and 'http://schema.org' are fine."

That being said...I think I'll go switch Moz.com to https now. Think they will keep http:// around for a while, though. Especially considering SEOs who implemented Schema before https and G doesn't want to penalize site owners for not knowing any better? <- My personal thoughts on this.

Thanks again!

Thank you SO much for raising this question!

The Beginner's Guide To SEO is currently being updated and will address exactly this.

Google's John Mueller has stated in the past that it's ok to put a link on a client's site back to yours as long as it's rel="nofollow". When I was previously self-employed at Pryde Marketing, and heard Google state this, we instantly changed our client footer "Made by Pryde Marketing" links to rel="nofollow" and almost immediately saw organic improvements. I can't say for certain that changing our client > Pryde links to "nofollow" 100% caused this, but it didn't hurt.

My personal opinion is that you can benefit from clients linking back to your site in a credible way (ex. If you built their website) and have a rel="nofollow", you will be fine. If you reverse engineer any of the top web developer's sites, you'll likely see quite a few "built by xyz" linking back to their domains.

Hey lcourse,

Definitely don't send users through an intermediate URL, that will get you penalized.

How many affiliate links are you looking to add? If it's just a few you should be fine.

Don't try to hide anything from G or go overboard on affiliate links. Here's a great affiliate link penalty case study to better understand the limitations of affiliate marketing.

Hope that helps,

B

Definitely, agree with Robert. You do not need rel=canonical tags on filtered / search views of your content.

After you remove these rel=canonical's, I'd suggest running your site through Screaming Frog's rel=canonical error report to confirm that the rel=canonical issues are fixed.

Hope that helps,

B

Hi Jessica!

You're absolutely correct, use of a canonical on paginated pages should point to a "view all" page as opposed to page 1 of the paginated content. I've heard of the Yoast plugin causing some problems with rel=canonical markup in WP and would suggest getting rid of that canonical (especially if you have rel=prev/next markup).

Hope this helps.

B

Hello,

Are you seeing an internal site link as the first result for your brand search? I'm a little confused, would you mind attaching an image of what you're seeing?

Thanks!

Yes, but you currently have an error in your markup, so Google is not rendering it properly. Please see link above. On-site review markup does not necessarily boost rankings, but can help with CTRs, etc.

But yes, even with the right markup for aggregate, Google could choose to ignore it.

The best way to influence rankings (specifically for local) is to have customers review your business on local review sites(Google +, Yelp, etc.) these do help to naturally increase your local search rankings over time.

Hope this helps,

B

So the consensus is that there's no right or wrong answer here, but in general, you should be looking to be higher than your competitors (especially on non-branded KWs).

You should also aim for higher visibility over time. The higher your visibility, the more traffic you will drive to your website. However, if you don't see organic traffic increase (with increased search visibility), you might be missing some primary keywords.

Hope this helps,

B

This is such a great question Meagan! I imagine it'll be quite different for individual industries?

Let me check with my team to see if we know the ballpark average search visibility and what you should shoot for. Thank you for asking this

-Will get back to you soon.

Thanks EGOL

Apologies, it was late and I've heard that term used in a few different ways. Should have figured that was the case though. -Thank you!

This is another great resource on how Search Visibility is calculated: https://moz.com/help/guides/moz-pro-overview/rankings/search-visibility

Google's structured testing tool is showing an error in your markup: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/#url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.uncommongoods.com%2Fproduct%2Fintersection-of-love-photo-print

I've also seen plenty of pages properly marked up with Review Markup and G chooses not to use the review snippet.

In your case, because you're using an aggregate review, I would suggest looking here for more info as well: https://schema.org/AggregateRating.

Hope this helps,

B

This is a great robots.txt cheat sheet to help figure out what robot exclusions might be right for your pages.

Hi Phil,

It would 100% be worth it to rewrite some of your content and add unique value adds (graphics, video, audio, etc.) to help round out the page, better fulfill your user intents and provide multiple consumption options for your visitors. Google also loves to see old pages updated and improved. It would also be interesting to test this out on one of your payday loan pages to see what kind of organic traffic you can gain back through some on-site content improvements.

It would be interesting to test this out on one of your payday loan pages to see what kind of organic traffic you can gain back through some on-site content improvements. Bonus points for tapping into key influencers in the loan space to try to get some natural link love that could go a long way in re-indexing your content.

Sidenote: I just did a ton of keyword research for an upcoming blog post on keyword research. Looked into "loans", there is huge opportunity for "loan calculator" content. --Lots of volume, low competition.

Hope this helps,

B

Hi Zach,

Your review markup is showing up in Google but not your actual web page? Could you please link to an example?

Is the issue that you like the review snippet to also show up within your site?

Thanks,

B

Just to clarify, what do you mean exactly by search visibility percentage? Percentage of visits to your website via organic search?

It's being pulled from their Wikipedia page. Google will generally attribute things like this to larger brands with significant search volume. You could try to fill out a comprehensive Wikipedia page for your business to see if you can get a similar card, but you'd have to generate a certain amount of search volume for G to add something like that.

Surprisingly, I couldn't find any schema markup on Walgreens website.

In a nutshell; you have to be a big enough powerhouse to get meta cards like this, or drive significant traffic.

Always fascinated by these ranking riddles!!

...Sooo it appears to be a bit of a linking network that is working in this particular case. This is my theory:

1. http://siliconprairienews.com/2016/06/leveragerx-helps-doctors-connect-with-financial-experts/ (DA 56 & PA 43) is linking to www.leveragerx.com (nothing spammy or strange going on).

2. siliconprairienews.com however, has a huge linking network with over 10,000 backlinks...

The simple point to leveragerx back in June seems to be all it took for them to jump up the page.

Agree with Andy, here's another great resource on how Google considers Sitelinks.

Hope this helps,

B

Hi Sanjay,

Appreciate you searching the community for similar questions. Do you have comments allowed on that page? Curious if it could have picked up any link spam from that. Agree with Brian to scan your website and reach out to your server provider to see if they have any more details on a potential hack.

Do you happen to also have Bing Webmaster Tools? It would be interesting to confirm if they also picked up any sort of hack.

Hope this helps!

Yes, that sounds great! Please let me know how it all goes and if you run into any other hiccups.

Cheers,

B

Did some digging and found a few resources stating:

Googlehadan official statement about this in its webmaster guidelines:
"If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a ? character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few. Don't use &id= as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index."

That was many years ago but more recently Google changed its position on that subject. The entry has been removed from Google's guidelines but here's the official statement from Google's blog:
"Google now indexes URLs that contain the &id= parameter. So if your site uses a dynamic structure that generates it, don't worry about rewriting it -- we'll accept it just fine as is.

Keep in mind, however, that dynamic URLs with a large number of parameters may still be problematic for search engine crawlers in general, so rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions is always a good practice when that option is available to you. If you can, keeping the number of URL parameters to one or two may make it more likely that search engines will crawl your dynamic urls."

Click here read the full article

Penalization for personalisation

Let me know if this helps

Fascinating question Gyorgy!

I've always been a big fan of dynamic targeting.

It would be a great idea to have different URL parameters for each unique set of content. You might also want to push these pages to fetch & index within Google Search Console (and your sitemap.xml to showcase you're not attempting to cloak, etc.)

This would be a fantastic question for Google reps...I can try to reach out to someone today and let you know what they say.

Cheers,

B

PS. Just curious, how are you pulling in persona data?

Hi David,

Curious why you're not interested in doing rel=canonicals? I think I understand your overall goal and would suggest simply hiring a content marketer or writer to differentiate the content from product A page to product B page.

Hiring a content marketer or writer to differentiate the content from one to the other would be well worth it in this situation. Have the writer re-organize and re-write the content (while maintaining the same message) so that crawlers will view each page as unique.

Cheers,

B

It's also worth mentioning that Google gets SO MANY of these before and after requests they have created a segmented carousel (Dr. Pete would prob punch me for using that name haha!) -Nudity is not an issue for these indexed / segmented photos and greatly improves UX.

THANKS PEOPLE!!

Peace, Love & Grandma Hugs

oL5a1hM.png

Great example! We haven't been flagged for any nudity but it's great to be aware of situations like that. Thanks so much

Image names have been optimized, are you referring to the "?attachment_id=117" that WP auto assigns uploads?

Are you familiar with a custom code we could use to alter that auto attachment name?

Thanks so much

Hi MoosaHemani,

Thanks so much for your response! -Only a small % of the images (ones that have been embedded on pages are indexed), while we are trying to make sure the before and after photos are being properly indexed. -All names of photos have been optimized aside from WP's auto ?=attachment_blahblah thing.

Also, how would we "use natural anchor text instead of targeting keywords all the time" for photos...the primary website is naturally linked to things however not sure what you mean for the photos?

Thanks,

B

customerparadignm.com makes a good point, however I've seen consistency & having a set office location work better.

https://moz.com/local/ does a great job of cleaning up consistency errors and is less expensive than Yext Business Listings.

Tips:

1. Submit a Change Of Address to G

2. Consistency, consistency, consistency.

3. Verify all major business listings for your new location.

4. Make sure your new location is on your website.

5. Schema markup never hurt.

Good Luck Fiona!

One of our clients is in the Cosmetic Surgery business (bodevolve.com) and individuals most likely to purchase a cosmetic procedure only search for 2 things....'**before & after photos' and 'cost'. **

That being said we've worked extremely hard to optimize all 500+ before and after photos. And to our great disappointment, they still aren't being indexed...we are testing a few things but any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

All photos are in the 'attachment' sitemap: http://bodevolve.com/sitemap_index.xml

I'm also testing a few squeeze pages like this one: http://bodevolve.com/tummy-tuck-before-and-after-photos/

Thanks so much,

Brit

The account settings state that there are 300 keywords PER campaign but I've found that I've met my max without getting up to 300word/campaign...

Any feedback would be much appreciated.