Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Biggest secret that I have is to make great connections to people in the business. I can't count the number of times I've run into a strange issue and it's great to be able to email someone you've meet with your question and get some expert feedback. Not to mention sometimes they share their super secret SEO tricks and tips.
Hi BreadMan!
If your goal is to rank #1 for this particular keyword, using the domain name with the exact match you've just bought is the best way to go. Search engines definitely reward this, though you'll also need to do all of the right things from a content, branding, marketing and linking perspective, too. Since they know that exact match domains can be easily exploited, they're sensitive to spam/manipulation, particularly so in new sites. I'd urge you to:
Consider the sites that are featured in places like these: http://www.google.com/search?q=css+galleryYou can redirect the site, but you'll get little to no benefit from the domain name exact match. If you already have a very strong site and you're just seeking to protect the name and maybe use it to redirect for offline branding, that's fine, but it won't be a positive SEO contribution unless there was good content/good links pointing to it previously. Best of luck!
There is no set amount of links that a site needs to be successful. I think you may have that 150 number confused with what we usually consider an acceptable amount of links ON a page. Not links pointing TO a page.
A good strategy might be to submit your site to a few directories a month, spend time working at creating partnerships (that might bring links), while also creating compelling content that people want to link to naturally.
If you're seeking link building ideas, I'd highly recommend reading through our linkbuilding category from the blog. Tons of great ideas there!
Hi Francesco,
The problem is that .uk.com is not a true TLD, like .uk.com, .com, or .org, it's actually a subdomain of the domain uk.com. So those 24 million links you are seeing are for the domain uk.com and not your site. The true TLD for the UK is .co.uk and not .uk.com. So your website is really just a subdomain of a very big domain. To get information for your site you will only be able to look at the subdomain information and not the root domain level.
Casey
Hi,
I definitely believe Google that these won't be treated as country-specific domains, and if I were offered a keyword.co versus a keyword.info domain, I'd most certainly go with the .co. I think that it will resonate with people due to being similar to what they're used to seeing. This, of course, has nothing to do with a technical advantage: we'd like to believe that a TLD doesn't mean much from the perspective of a search engine, although you do see .com keyword-rich domains ranking better than other TLDs with the same keyword, in a lot of cases. Again, you don't want to confuse cause and effect: does the .com really help, or are .com domains usually owned by people who put up better websites? Hard to say.
When big companies use a TLD, that certainly lends some credit to it, and I think the domains you've bought are good. I don't think you've wasted your money, especially if they were quite cheap!
I wouldn't spend too much time or money buying every .co. domain under the sun, but I do think they're a better investment than many other TLDs. I don't have any stories of big successes yet, and I'd go as far as to say that the TLD is a bit too new to know what its fate will be. I do, however, doubt it will become as highly spammed and disregarded as the much-maligned .info and .biz.
Hi Kicksetc - it's not quick and easy, but you can do some comparisons that will be helpful.
Basically, you'd want to build an Excel chart (or Google Spreadsheets / OpenOffice) that mimics the metrics that might go into local rankings. For example, see this post talking about all the potential ranking factors and how they correlate - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-places-seo-lessons-learned-from-rank-correlation-data
You could extract out those data points and compare them against each other for different queries to get a sense of how competitive/hard it might be to rank in the top results on a local/maps/places search.
Sorry there's nothing quick and simple. We're working in the long term to expand our KW Difficulty tool to perform analyses on local/places results, but it's going to be a while before we get there.
Best of luck!
Hi - I tested DCMI and hoped it would work many years ago, but it had no impact. I've talked to Googlers/Bing folks and heard them on stage say that they ignore all meta tags other than those specified - http://www.ninebyblue.com/blog/managing-robots-access-to-your-website-2/
In terms of microdata - there are rich snippets that Google now employs - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170 but you'll need to get accepted/reviewed by their editorial staff to be included (and then send it in via your XML Sitemap).
Sorry to say that the engines haven't agreed on any new meta data since rel=canonical (and possibly AJAX crawling protocols), but neither Dublin Core nor anything else like it is in practice to the best of our knowledge.
If you run some tests and find something, please do let us know!
Hi Eyepaq,
SEOmoz using a CDN to host all of our images, though we set up a DNS change so they can be hosting on a third party server but listed at cdn.seomoz.org. Doing what you are talking about shouldn't effect any of your "juice" if you are just using it to display your images using the img tag or via css. You pdfs might be affected since you are using a <a href="">tag which tells Google you are linking to that file. In the long run you will be much better off than anything you might lose by doing something like this.</a>
<a href="">Casey</a>
First, no, SEOmoz does not offer any automatic directory submission tools. We do offer this page as a service to our customers, and you may find it useful: http://www.seomoz.org/directories
Yooda does seem like a nice piece of software, though I can't say that I've used it.
I've also heard decent things about this one:
http://www.fastdirectorysubmitter.com/tutorials/73-fast-directory-submitter-video.html
For the most part I've found automatic submission tools to be pretty frustrating, and almost certainly never worth the money. I'd also be careful not to run wild with directory submissions, as Google could pretty easily detect spikes in backlinks from directories.
I hope that helps!
Hey Donnie,
I've used both CakePHP and WordPress to some degree, in fact SEOmoz's main site is built on CakePHP. I'd say that for someone with limited coding knowledge, I'd send them to WordPress because of all the plugins. If you have a good handle on PHP and like creating your own plugins then first up CakePHP.
Hi - in general, yes, it's best to use something like the rel=canonical tag (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps) or to specifically tag mobile content as such - http://searchengineland.com/dont-penalize-yourself-mobile-sites-are-not-duplicate-content-40380
If it's translated to different languages, you're in the clear - that's considered substantively unique content and not subject to duplicate filtering (at least, 99% of the time).
Happy to help - great to have you in PRO!
Hi Farhad,
Feel free to email me casey[at]seomoz.org and I will look into your problem. Also include the details of your problem and I will find the correct person to address your issues.
Thanks,
Casey Henry
Marketing Ninja
SEOmoz
Personally if I had a choice I would use WordPress every time, since it provides my clients with access to a "backend" where they can edit pages and such if needed. CakePHP is for hard core people who love to write code and such.
I don't think we have plans to switch to that, though I'm not always in the loop on things like that.
Hi Danny,
The Moz.com website/blog are running on PHP/Nginx. As Matthew said, Nginx is much faster and less intensive on the servers for both CPU and memory. Nginx has some great documentation and is really easy to get things to redirect. It's as easy as adding lines like the following to your configuration and your good to go:
rewrite ^/q$ /community/q permanent;
rewrite ^/q/(.*)$ /community/q/$1 permanent;
Making the switch from Apache to Nginx was one of the best things we ever did and I would highly suggest you do the same thing for both static and any dynamic sites you may have. I'll most likely never use Apache again.
Casey
Users who have a certain number of MozPoints don't receive that message since they are most likely trusted to not SPAM their fellow community members. So as EGOL said it's a SPAM protection since most users never send more than a few message a day. If you need to send a large number of PM please contact me and I'd be glad to review you message for you.
Casey
Hi Highland,
I would defiantly work on making sure that your product only lives in one category. The canonical tag is a nice little band-aid but it still fix the root of the problem. I would suggest you can have it listed in many different categories but it only lives in one category at the product level. So for instance:
It's displayed here
site/cat1
site/cat2
site/cat3
But it only displays product details at a url like this
site/category/product
I'm not a huge fan of having Google crawl 4 or 5 extra pages per product just to find a canonical tag when you could just spend the extra programming time to make it work correctly.
Casey
There is no benefit to having it on every page. In talking with our Google rep they stated they just needed on our site/homepage but since sometimes they don't know what they need, it was placed on every page via our CMS. At this point we haven't seen any negative effects from it but we might try placing it only on the homepage to see if that does anything.
Casey
First off, I'd just say that internal navigation controls tend to have only a small impact. That's not to say it's not worth doing, just that you shouldn't expect a massive ROI unless your nav structure is truly horrible
That said, nofollow might not be the best choice - here's why: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow. You might also want to read - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-illustrated-guide-to-matt-cutts-comments-on-crawling-indexation
There are some potential other ways to do this, though:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-consolidation-the-new-pagerank-sculpting
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-faceted-navigation
Basically, my suggestion would be to think about how you could implement some form of consolidation or possibly use less navigation by default (maybe only enable the long drop downs if a user is logged in, or only show them on the specific category pages).
Let me know if you've got follow-ups after checking these out. I'm happy to help further.
We pull the numbers via javascript. If you check out posts.js when you are on the blog you can see where we make a call to Facebook and to Twitter to get those numbers. We also have hard coded the numbers at specific dates just in case it fails so there is a number present.
For the feedburner numbers we do those server side and ping the feedburner api and cache it. So there is one unlucky sole every hour that has to ping feedburner to recache the number.
We will be going back to the direct download option by the end of the week. If you need a report before then and didn't get your email, try submitting it again.
Hi.
I think there are a few things you can look at that should help with this specific keyword. Please note that anytime you focus on one specific keyword you could be jeopardising traffic from other keywords. Having said that there are a few things I would look at if my focus was only on that keyword.
Firstly, I would look at updating the title tag slightly. You currently have Language Translation Services | Translation Company, UK. It tends to help having your main keyword as the first thing in a title tag. It would be relatively easy and still very natural to re-write the title tag to remove language as the first phrase and start with translation services.
Secondly, and in my opinion more importantly I would look at adding some textual content to the homepage. It is the homepage that is ranking on the 2nd page for the keyword, yet there is very little content mentioning the phrase. It is only mentioned in anchor text or in very sort snippets of text. I would look at writing some content explaining what your translation services offer and what your unique selling point is. You should avoid write the content with your users in mind and not worry at all about the search engines. Doing this you will naturally make use of the keywords required.
With those changes in place I believe you will be in a better position to rank for the keyword however I think you will need to continue building good quality links. If you compare your site with language connect (who I see in 9th) you'll see there is still a way to go based on these metrics.
(I've ignored babelfish in 10th, because they aren't a good comparison, in that they aren't a direct competitor except for in the SERPS).
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.pstranslation.co.uk%252F/www.languageconnect.net/a!comparison
The interesting metric in my eyes is the difference in linking root domains, which is thought of as a strong indicator for rankings. One word of warning, from what I see almost all your links are going to your homepage. Its natural for a large percentage of links to point to the homepage however to hardly have any external links to your internal pages could look suspicious.
Good Luck
Hi Michael,
Now a days Google is really Google at figuring out what version of the website you want to go with but with that said, isn't really that hard of a thing to fix. I'd say that as long as all your internal links are consistent in pointing to the same version, then you shouldn't have anything to worry about. In the long run of things, by making the redirect you won't see this huge bump in rankings but it is a standard practice that is done.
Casey
After talking with our rep we found that it wasn't needed on all pages so we now only have it on our homepage.
Hey Henry,
I'd make sure that the landing page has a rel canonical tag on it and you should be good to go. My guess is that Google either gives full value for the link or a very high amount of the value. Google has gotten a lot better at identifying what page deserves value when it have variables attached to it.
Casey
Hi Yudhis,
With every update of our metrics, which is almost monthly, we adjust them to try and match what we are seeing in the SERPs. As always there are other factors that we might not be aware of that could effect things in the SERP you are looking at but we do readjust things with every update.
Casey
Hi Dstrunin,
I would still use the rel canonical tag even with or without the filter in place. So if you have a list of products displayed unfilter at companyname.com/productcategory/page1.htm, I would add a rel canonical with it pointing at companyname.com/productcategory/page1.htm. For the filtered results,companyname.com/productcategory/filters/page1.htm , the canoncial tag would still point to companyname.com/productcategory/page1.htm.
It doesn't hurt to have a canonical tag point to the same page it's on.
If you can't do that I would meta noindex those filtered pages and remove the robots.txt stuff. Robots.txt doesn't tell Google they can't index it it only says they can't crawl it. So they could still index old stuff they crawled before you did the robots.txt stuff or index the title tags.
Casey
Hi Michelleh,
We've been testing things to see what it takes to get the authorship image to show up. It really came down a two things, one was making sure that your Google+ profile was included in lots of other's circles and second, that you complained a lot that your picture wasn't showing up. I've had success with both. There are also a few good blog posts out there that suggest Google is really picky with the setup and if there is even a minor problem you picture won't show up.
How does everyone use the mozMetrics (mozRank, mozTrust, Domain Authority, Page Authority) with their clients? Do they ask you what these metrics mean and if so how do you explain it to them?
Hi Daniel,
When I was working on my own I spent just about zero time on the phone building links. Like they said below, I did most of my link building via emails since it was much less time consuming. I've also talked with some of the other people in the office and over at Distilled and they agree that they spend almost no time on the phone building links.
I'd say it's your responsibility to build the links but I would pick a easier solution than the phone.
Casey
Sure looks like either a penalty or a massive discounting of links to me. You're not banned, but you're way back in the results given your link profile. I took a quick look at your robots.txt and it looks fine.
If Google is still seeing 13,000 pages as duplicate content, this could be the issue as well, as Google's internal "quality score" on your site is not going to be pretty. But giving the number of inbound links you have, I'm much more inclined to think that Google has identified your link exchange script and discounted all links related to that.
There's some discussion out there also on whether you can get dinged for over-optimizing your anchor text. See this article. While that case study is a pretty small number of sites, if Tim's findings are accurate, you're definitely at risk. Both your internal and external links to your home page are virtually 99% "watch movies online" and "watch free movies online".
So here's what I would do:
#1 solve the duplicate content issue
#2 see what you can do to change the link exchange process to make it less recognizable to Google
#3 go vary your anchor text, adding new links and changing a few old ones like this profile link to use www.freemoviedb.com as the anchor text.
Hi Steven,
After looking at your account, it looks like the problem might be that you setup your campaigns to crawl domain.com and really your domain is www.domain.com which are two different domains in the eyes of our software and Google. I suggest you setup new campaigns to crawl the www version and that should solve your problem.
Casey
A thing to remember is that OSE doesn't discount any links or websites that may be spammy. My guess is that Google is discounting those links and pages since Squidoo is known to be very spammy and most likely was effected in the last updated by Google. My suggestion would be not to follow in the same suite as them and avoid falling into getting links from these type of spammy places.
Casey
Hi NicB1,
We use Amazon CloudFront here at SEOmoz and it allows us to setup a CNAME for our CDN. So if you look at our images you will see we use a few different ones, such as cdn.seomoz.org, profile1.seomoz.org and profile2.seomoz.org. While I haven't done any studies on this, I can tell you that we have not seen a major change in image traffic in making the CDN switch a few months ago.
I'd check with your CDN people and see if you can setup a CNAME and place it on a subdomain.
Casey
Hi Randy,
The Web App will try to find pages that rank well and score well in the On Page Report. Just because you have added 48 keywords doesn't mean that you will get 48 on page reports. Usually when I find a situation like this I find that my site isn't well optimized for the keywords that I entered. If you want to view the on page report for a specific keyword and page you can run it manually also.
Casey
Hey Danny,
I've always done 301 redirects from the server and avoided any other method. This was more for my sanity to make sure that I was getting all the equity I could if there was a difference, not saying there is a difference but if there way, I wanted to be safe. Since it sounds like you may be constrained by your technology, the solution you are going with is fine but if you had both options available, I'd go with the server side redirect always.
As Erica has stated, on our Pro Plus and Pro Elite accounts you can add your logos to the reports but you can not replace the SEOmoz logo. The report will have both your logo at the top and ours at the bottom. Hope this helps.
Hi, currently OSE does not handle HTTPS request but it's on the road map to be complete in the future. When our crawler for OSE crawls the web it currently does not crawl HTTPS pages, hence they are not included as an option to pull from. This hopefully will be coming in the next few months as we just added it to our web app.
The Cols parameter works just like it does in the Links API. For example:
http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/13991127/Anchor Text API
If you want to display term or phrase, which has a bit flag of 2 and internal pages linking which has a bit flag of 8, your Cols Parameter would be 10. That would return both the term or phrase and internal pages linking. You simpily add the bit flags and use that as your Cols Parameter.
This makes it so you don't have to loop through and make a bunch of call to get multiple columns.
Hi MrPaulB,
GWT take average position for a few different things. For example if you have a few different pages that rank for a keyword it calculates the average rank based on that. For example, if you have a page that ranks number 1 for the keyword "Blue Widgets" and another page that ranks 20th for "Blue Widgets" the average rank would be 10. It's a bad metric to use and often confuses people.
Hi Lara,
You can still find your old questions at http://www.seomoz.org/qa/my. Watch the blog tomorrow for some important info about the old QA section. Let me know if you have any further questions.
Casey