A single week's change of less than 10, give or take, especially with new pages is not something to get upset about. Trends are what you want to get upset about. on a newer page, a downward trend of two weeks is cause for attention, of 3 weeks--cause for alarm. Even an older page can go through ranking upheavals of numerous ranking positions for multiple weeks and then pop back up.
Best posts made by Chris.Menke
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RE: When to note Keyword improvement/decline?
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RE: Will i able to rank in google of i rephrase amazon product description?
Hi there,
If you're marketing products already found on Amazon, rephrasing the descriptions may help a little. However, you would then be competing with all the other Amazon resellers who have rephrased their product descriptions. You would also have to take into account how well optimized your new descriptions actually are. You would also have to come to terms with the fact that product descriptions by themselves most likely won't give your pages enough strength to outrank the products on Amazon. Amazon's domain strength is enormous, making it difficult for a marketer to throw up a new product page and outrank Amazon for it.
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RE: High domain authority for shady link directories
In addition to what Matt said, some directories are very good resources for links and some niches have more than a few well curated directories that are worthwhile. Don't dispel all directories straight off.
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RE: Which pages should I index or have in my XML sitemap?
I think they should be indexed, but keyword research should shed light on this topic for you. It will let you know if your audience is searching for those things and in what numbers. Even as they are, though, they might make sufficient landing pages for google. You could de-noindex a group of those pages at a time, starting with the ones most likely to be popular and see how google treats them. I think I'd go that route rather than release them into the wild all at once.
To me, the pages with the most interesting potential are the /venues/ pages like /venues/md-concert-venues/a, for example. I think the potential lies in populating them with venue grouping, upcoming artists grouping, and state. How hard would it be to populate an area above the black line with all/some of the upcoming artists playing near the hotels that show on that page. That 3-way cross referencing would make those pages fairly unique on the web and unique on your site and would give google a number of good reasons to send traffic there. They'd probably be good pages to publish advertising on, too.
Also wondering if there is a thing such as "licensing" dedicated pages out to companies/hotels that are putting on non-musical events like conferences, etc, so they can link to a kind of pre-fab hotels-close-by page up for their attendees?
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RE: Indexed sites
Hi goodcat, you'll see from the FAQs on this page http://www.seomoz.org/help/crawl-diagnostics that the report data is from seomoz's crawl. Your question was asked and some answeres provided not too long ago over here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-it-possible-to-get-a-list-of-pages-indexed-in-google.
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RE: Why does Google dislike us so?
I can't see what's on the left side of that graph but if it's a steep incline, you may be seeing the results of a gradual devaluing of links that helped build your rankings and traffic to the point of early 2012. In any case, it does look link-related to me, in that the authority of your site may be declining relative to other sites that are relevant to your keywords.
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RE: High domain authority for shady link directories
That may be so. The way you say "content rich links" comes out sounding like "spammy back links" and Moz does try to keep its crawl focused on higher quality links. Again, as Matt said, Ahrefs and Majestic are good additional sources for back link research.
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RE: How ask Google to de index scrapper sites?
Doug,
Two things:
1. A site shouldn't "go by" two domain names. You should verify the means by which a visitor may be made aware of both domain names to be sure one of the domains is being 301 redirected to the other.
2. If you don't own the domains that contain the scraped content, you can contact the site owner to request that they take it down. Also, here is a link to Google's copyright help center on https://support.google.com/legal/topic/4558877 to deal with it that way.
You may want to step back and get a bigger picture understanding of the inner workings of your website, hosting and google. It will help you in the short term and long term.
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RE: Indexed sites
Use your OSE report to find pages that are being linked to from external sources and be sure to redirect all of those. Use your analytics report to find pages that are bring in search traffic and be sure to redirect those. The rest are neither being linked to nor bringing you any traffic so their priority is on the low end, anyway.
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RE: Traffic has dramatically fallen. Why?
Actually, your traffic started to change back around January and that could be attributed to panda but could be attributed to other things. Try this tool to see if that initial January decline matches up with an algorithm update here: http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/. Had you been doing any sort of content marketing campaigns or link building previous to that?
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RE: Hi! I first wrote an article on my medium blog but am now launching my site. a) how can I get a canonical tag on medium without importing and b) any issue with claiming blog is original when medium was posted first?
Here's Medium's info on adding a canonical tag to your content there: https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033930293-Set-a-canonical-link
There's no problem claiming it's original on your site if you wrote it, even if it was first posted elsewhere, so long as you wrote it and you use the canonical tag. Will you get dinged by Google for the move? Well, you are moving content from a very strong domain to a very new one so it's not likely to show up in the results as well as it did over on Medium.
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RE: Broad Website - What keyword to target
Targeting for a blog is a technical and labor intensive endeavor.
List and prioritize what the core values you want the blog to promote and the audience personas that would be most receptive to those values. (This is perhaps the most difficult task of all and not something that your typical SEO company will be helpful with.)
Determine whether you have the resources to enable the blog to promote all of those values to their fullest. (Can you create high quality content AND reach out to and engage the target social audience members and influencers on a continual/consistent basis). If not, begin eliminating values and their target personas by order of lowest priority until you are able to fulfill target audience needs AND achieve visibility in search.
In short, in your case, I'd look at my analytics, evaluate the words/themes/key terms/concepts that visitors are currently finding and coming to your site for and toss out all but the most successful 1/4 of them and then match that up with the list you came up with from paragraph one (above) to see how closely those lists match up.
If they're a close match, you're heading in the right direction--redouble your focus on those and in a few months re-evaluate. If they're way off, scrap your current content direction and completely revamp your editorial calender base on paragraph 2.
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RE: What determines the page order of site:domain?
Ruben,
In the past, it was generally accepted that the order was directly related to page strength and as far as I know, that's still the case. It may be a little fuzzier now though, as I guess that there is also a relevance quotient thrown into the mix--or something to that effect--which gives some priority to those pages that relate most directly to the overall theme Google has assigned the site/domain.
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RE: Hi! I first wrote an article on my medium blog but am now launching my site. a) how can I get a canonical tag on medium without importing and b) any issue with claiming blog is original when medium was posted first?
I haven't done this before but it seems instructions on the page I linked explains how to do it from the story page of an existing post. Did you check that out?
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RE: What is the best approach to handling 404 errors?
I haven't used that one but I just read up on it. It looks good.
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RE: Backlinks! Right or wrong way?
In addition to RN1978's comment, which I would agree with 100%, always have your mozbar ready to go and run an open site explorer report on every thematically relevant site you come across. Investigate the top links in each report to see it's also a link you can obtain.
Building authority is an endless process and you'll get better at it the longer you're at it. The more business-like your approach to it the better off you'll be. That means be knowledgeable, be persistent, and be creative.
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RE: Are on-site content carousel bad for SEO?
Alviau
I believe most of them are basically the same as tabbed content, just presented differently. I can't see the html in your example, but you should be able to--note Mueller's comment in this resource: "We do take into account anything that's in the html." https://www.searchenginejournal.com/googles-mueller-on-myth-of-hidden-tab-content/358724/#close
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RE: Occurrences of Keyword - Report card
I wonder if you might be thinking that placing keywords in the keyword meta tag is what you are supposed to be doing. Be sure that the keywords you are optimizing for are in the body of the page, not just in the meta description tag.
Also as a matter of semantics:
- Google indexes a page regardless of what the page was optimized for (provided, as you mention, it's not prevented from doing so). You can check if your page is indexed by typing this search: site:[your domain.com] or site:[your domain.com/specific_page]
- Google provides results for pages that are optimized for specific keywords and that it determines are the most appropriate for the search query.
If you haven't done so yet check out The SEO Guide From Moz for more helpful info
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RE: What if an employee leaves and removes Rel=Author verification from their Google Plus profile?
Basically, you're SOL (siht out of luck), as we said in the Navy. There was a good discussion on this topic here some months ago here.
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RE: How does a keywords difficulty increases? what are main factors?
Hein,
More sites optimized for specific keywords = more competitive, even if the keyword is not very often searched. "purple and black widgets" for example my have 1000 sites "optimized" for the term but maybe only 2 people search for it per month. In the above case, a keyword difficulty of 30 and volume of 500 would be the better choice.
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RE: I need to find a writer that is SEO savvy yet great with hooks, editing, and.....
Besides well-crafted craigslist ads and elance (Hint: On elance, don't put your project out for bid, rather, research writers who fit your requirements and ask individuals to give you a quote. If they haven't provided enough info for you to determine that they are a professional writer and an industry expert, they're not the writer for you.), LinkedIn is also a good resource to find writers that fit the bill. But again, you need to be able to be explicit with your requirements.
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RE: PinPioneer & TumbleForce good or bad?
Hey Arnold,
A couple of things stand out regarding your question, specifically, "automated link building" and "surfing a black hat forum". A question pertaining to the validity of either is almost always answered in the negative--mainly because if you're not knowledgeable enough not to have to ask the question, you're best staying away. As far as those specific pieces of software--never heard of them and if there is any value in them, it's likely to be short term and likely to backfire on you in the future (if you have future plans for your site.
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RE: Is there an easy way to hide one of your URL's on google search?, rather than redirecting?
Depending on the strength of the page, Google's indexing of the noindex tag can take between weeks and months to recognized.
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RE: 301 Redirects - But still duplicate content?
Taulia, the duplicate content indications that your Moz campaign shows for pages that have been 301 redirected are there so you can make sure your redirects are targeting the right page. They're not actually errors and no, you don't also have to use conanical tags to those pages.
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RE: PinPioneer & TumbleForce good or bad?
I hear you. There are some decent tools out there but for the most part, spending your time on the tried and true ones tends to be the best use of your time and your client's money. Short cuts are paying off less and less.
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RE: Search visibility of website that only uses H2 tags - will not having H1 damage my visibility?
I agree with Martijn,
These days, heading tags don't do much. More important, I'd say, are the actual words you use in those lines that contain heading tags. The beginning of the first like (like where an h1 tag would be) should include your most important words. The beginning of the following paragraph (like where a page intro/summery following an h1 tag would be) should round out/expand on that vocabulary. The following headings and paragraphs should reinforce the vocabulary of the first paragraph.
Too often, the fluff that people produce for website copy gives them little to no relevance to their desired theme/topic.
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RE: Is it normal for Moz to report on nofollow pages in crawl diagnostics?
Houston,
As per Moz's help resources for crawl diagnostics, Moz doesn't actually index pages and your noindex tag will have no effect on their crawl. Rather, if your pages are blocked by your robots.txt, Moz will not crawl them.
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RE: Building Business Facebook PAges
Gosh, please don't take it badly--it was meant entirely in fun, I even put a happy face in my reply. I think you ask great questions and I enjoy your references to Weatherby, UK. I hope you can accept my apologies.
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RE: Any Good Study on the Effects of CTR on Keyword Capitalization in SERP Description
My Guess Is That For Every One Conversion You Get With That, You Loose One Plus Something. I Think That Capitals In The Title Is Something That We've All Learned To Live With But We Really Don't Need Any More. It's Like Are They Screaming At Me Or Are They Just Trying To Scream But Holding Their Tongue?
The Answer Is Easy Enough--Do An A/B Test On Some Of Your Pages And See What Result You Get. I'd Love To Know Your Results.
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RE: Links not appearing in Moz tool
Matrix, not all of the links to a site may show up in OSE. Moz crawls pages on the web down to a rough level that have an impact on search results and if you have links on pages other than those, they'll not be reported in OSE. Other link reporting platforms may crawl more pages and show more links, which can be useful info in a number of situations, but for many, just keeping track of those links that will help them in search engine results is sufficient.
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RE: Link Google Business page and Google Plus fanpage ?
Flo,
Since your + and places pages didn't merge when you verified the Google+ Page contact Places support so they can do the merger manually for you. Go to the Local listing created through PlacesPress the Report a problem link and report it as a duplicate of your Local listing created through Google+.
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RE: When Googling site:mydomain.com what does listing order tell us?
Gregory,
Generally they are vaguely in order of strongest to weakest--according to google. The site:domain is a good way to get a sense of which pages on a domain are the strongest but don't rely heavily on those results.
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RE: Should I use location in keywords in a campaign?
You're going to end up with different organic and local search results for a "pool builder" search done by someone within the SF area than you will for a "pool builder san francisco" search done by someone in SF and/or outside it. How you show those results to the client will be up to you.
The client will almost always be happier to see higher results. You could start out tracking more and then trimming that list down as the project moves forward. Of course, if the client doesn't actually have a physical presence in a location, that will be more difficult to show the higher results. You are talking about organic, yes?
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RE: 301 Redirects (non-www)
Yeah, that's not good. You have your redirect set up improperly in your .htaccess file? Take a look at this info to figure out what you may need to adjust.
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RE: Finding authoritative sources on Google+ - is there a tool?
Steve, here are a few to check out:
- CircleCount www.circlecount.com/ track your followers and analyze your shares. See how many followers you've gained over time.
- FindPeopleonPlus www.findpeopleonplus.com/ research, outreach, and link building. Sort by keywords, profession, country, and more.
- ** SharedCount** API www.sharedcount.com/documentation.php combined statistics of Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and more, the SharedCount API puts a ton of social data at your fingertips.
- Google+ Ripples To view Ripples for a public post in your stream, just click the dropdown arrow at the top of the post you’re curious about and click View Ripples. Google+ Ripples creates an interactive graphic of the public shares of any public post or URL on Google+ to show you how it has rippled through the network and help you discover new and interesting people to follow.
- All my + http://www.allmyplus.com/ is a useful tool for evaluating the activity and engagement of specific profiles
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RE: Is Galaxy.com blackhat?
You know what I do when I want to get sense of whether or not a directory page might be worth it? I go to the directory page that I would expect to get a link from, click on a link, then run a OSE report on the page I land on to see how it shows in the report. Do that for a few more links on that and other pages and you'll get an idea of it's value. Keep in mind that directories are often not a good choice when it comes to long-term link value.
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RE: On Page Optimisation - Do I stick or twist?
Hey Ash,
The thing about longer page lengths is not so much that they have more words per se, as much as it is that a 1000 word page may contain a _broader vocabulary _as compared to a shorter page. However, I can give you countless examples where a 300 word page outranks a 2000 word page simply by virtue of the quality of the writing. So, even though everyone seems to be all hung up on "more words are better" you're better off thinking about how well do you understand your audience's questions and how thoroughly have you answered them.
Ultimately, however, ranking is not just about the words on the page, but about your audience's experience with your content--are they clicking through, are they spending time, are they sharing. In order to push you up in the rankings, Google wants to see that your content is important to your audience and its vocabulary is only part of that equation. I might recommend Rand's content manifesto for some inspiration on how to move forward with your site's content. I think what you've described so far is a good start but there is an entire universe of directions you can take it and now may be a good time to start looking at the bigger picture.
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RE: Social signals: are they weighted differently?
Nick, I did a lot of searching on this for you and my conclusion is that at this time, we're not able to distinguish a difference in ranking value between the two.
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RE: Backlink of competitor inner page
sorry, it ahrefs.com
Are you sure that that particular page has back links? If you are, what is the quality of the pages those links are on?
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RE: Why isn't my Facebook page showing up in search results?
Jess,
As Takeshi said, Google may still be digesting your URL change. Also, your /imageworkscreative URL shows quite a bit more engagement than your new one yet does--with 1992 likes vs. 119. So, in the mean time, be sure to work on building up those engagement signals around your new url, it's likely to help.
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RE: Oh my gosh a gender change
It should be "Journeyperson" if we're going down that road. Otherwise, SEOmoz would be in the position of having to assign a gender bias based on only an name and a picture. I don't think that's enough these days.
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RE: Contest Outreach Strategy
Ivan,
I'd say that one audience that is likely to respond favorably to your contest would be small companies with new websites. Such an audience is most concentrated around lower-end and new web designers who are willing to make relatively inexpensive websites for clients in order to establish a client base.
Those types web designers are rarely at the top of the search results for "web designer [your city]"-type searches because their domains aren't established enough to rank highly. That means that if you do a search like that, you're like to find those rising-star web designers down past page two or three (along with the falling-stars who have had their time in the sun and have dropped out of page-one due to unsustainable SEO tactics--there are a lot more of those than there used to be). If you contact those low-ranking web designers with your contest, they may be happy to to ask their clients to tweet something to you in order for a chance to win.
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RE: Domain Authority
Neville,
I'd recommend you start with this Whiteboard Friday video on domain authority.
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RE: Duplicate Titles Shown in Moz Analytics
Social,
I think of title tags as sort of like a magnifying glass that Google looks through to see the rest of the words on your page. When the words in the title tag correspond closely with the rest of the words on the page, it may create just enough focus (relevance) to permit the page rank well for a keyword used in the title.
However, if a second or third or fourth page on the site has the same title tag, then those pages would have to have the same page copy as the first if they were to rank as well as the first. Since that would be duplicate content, however, they could never actually make it to the top of the search results.
Two things: 1.) Unique page titles help a page to rank for the unique keyword focus it was optimized for. 2.) Many identical page titles on a site may lower the overall quality and ranking ability on the site in general.
That's all to say you're better off with unique page titles for each page.
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RE: Problem to log into moz
Been having the same problem. Twice, I logged out, cleared my cookies and logged back in successfully--but I'm not sure that was actually the solution.
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RE: Does Keyword Tracker rank eBay links as weaker competition than they actually are?
Conner,
From Moz's documentation on the Keyword analysis tool, it analyzes the distribution of page authority and domain authority of the top 20 results in Google for your query so it's not just looking at the first page results but basing it's score on the results on the first two pages. The keyword difficulty score is by no means perfect and int this particular search it may be starkly obvious which factors are more dominant in composing it. I would see that as an opportunity to better understand what is required by your site to rank more highly for your query.
What scores are possible?
We break up keyword difficulty levels into a number of ranges:- 76%-100% - Extremely Competitive: These are among the most challenging keywords to rank for. On-page optimization, massive link strength, and high domain authority are necessary to achieve top ranking positions.
- 51%-75% - Highly Competitive: Powerful sites with strong pages tend to dominate these results. Links in quantity and quality (at both the domain and page level) are required to earn top rankings.
- 26-50% - Moderately Competitive: Search results in this category require high authority domains with well-targeted pages OR lower authority sites with powerful individual pages to achieve top results.
- 0-25% - Non-Competitive: Keywords in this range tend to have less powerful sites/pages in the top results. Rankings are achievable by pages on low authority domains with good on-page optimization and light link metrics
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RE: On Page Reports for Long-Tail Keywords?
I think that with the understanding you have, you're already beyond the report's capabilities to instruct you--fundamentally, it's a fairly simple tool. At this point, you don't need a report to help you further, you need to interpret your real-world results to make decisions that will let you tweak your pages in the right direction.
Ultimately, SEO is not about following a strict set of guidelines--it's about having a well-founded knowledge level and then leveraging that knowledge in unique ways in order to gain an advantage over your competitors.
In other words, it may be time to use the force, Luke. That's what we all used to do before such reports were available.
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RE: Domain Authority
From that video, you want to go to this one: A Manifesto of Content Marketing and then to this: Moz Chap. 7 Growing Popularity & Links