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?
Posts made by Chris.Menke
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RE: Traffic has dramatically fallen. Why?
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RE: Main keyword problem
Well, it is generally accepted today that a strategy of large numbers of back links using exact match anchor text is best avoided but I doubt that at this short interval, what they are doing is the cause of your continued downward slide--unless they are doing it on a very big scale. Diverse anchor text from quality sites should be the goal.
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RE: Impact of rogue keyword in content
Do you feel your rankings are being held down because of this?
Your title tag will go a long way in pointing google to your primary keyword, as will the remaining copy on your page. If title and the general vocabulary of your copy is primarily focused around your keywords you're probably in good shape. If those repeated terms you're talking about are so integral to the description of the product that you can't avoid using them, then it must also be true for your competitors--how do they handle it?
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RE: Similar URLs
This would be normal behavior for a brand new site--things will shuffle around for a good while and yes, even single-character difference in the URLs is enough differentiation.
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RE: Link Google Business page and Google Plus fanpage ?
At your Google+ Business Page, it's in the very bottom right corner. You're not seeing it there?
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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: How would I be able to move content from one domain to another?
If a page of content is being moved from a URL on domain A to a URL on domain B and will no longer exist on domain A, then the 301 redirect from the first URL to the second would be used to indicate that. A 301 redirect doesn't have to redirect the whole site, it can be used on a per URL basis. Here, read through this info on redirects:
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RE: Improving the keyword ranking of a subject that we deal with only one or two months of the year
Taimoor,
The place to start getting your feet wet with SEO is with the Beginner’s Guide To SEO From Moz. That will give you enough info to make you dangerous and then you can come back to Q&A and ask more questions based on that. My advise is to take it slow and don't make too many changes to your site until you've got at least a few weeks of reading and research in.
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RE: Similar URLs
Those URLs won't inhibit your indexation or your rankings.
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RE: Similar URLs
Graeme,
Things are just working themselves out as far as indexation. You'll notice that all your pages are showing in the index if you use google's search tools/date feature and search for results from the past month or year:
New sites can take a month or two before showing consistent site:domain searches. BTW, you can leave off the "http://" part of your site:domian search.
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RE: What else rather than posts for linkbuilding?
Hey Social,
The "technical SEO tricks" of the past aren't going to pay you big dividends these days. Today's link building is really about being excited about your product and being excited to produce content that others will find valuable. But there are still numerous, less exciting tactics that you can employ, as Jon Cooper points out in one of his posts on link building strategies. http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies . It turns out that link building is about being creative, knowing your product and your audience, and having a passion for spending hours on end discovering new places and ways your product or brand can fit into people's lives.
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RE: How to do ip canonicalization ?
Ramesh,
It's not a problem that you site opens when you type in the IP address--that's normal.
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RE: Have I been Hit by a Penguin? No Warning in Webmaster / Some Pages still Rank
It's not stale content. As the dates in the graph appear to correspond to Penguin 2.0, I'd be thinking along those lines.
Google algorithm change history: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
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RE: How would I be able to move content from one domain to another?
Emmanuel, it sounds like you're just talking about setting up 301 redirects from the URLs of the old locations to the URLs of the new location. . This can be done when changing content location within a domain or when changing it to another domain. The rel=canonical tag wouldn't be the right solution if you don't actually want the content to exist in both locations.
This Google webmaster tools info might be useful to you:
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RE: Any Effect From Little to no External Links?
If your niche is so small as to have little or no complimentary products or services, you may be bending the definition of a niche.
Links out help with networking and building your brand among influencers of complementary niches. It doesn't detract from or dilute your site's strength, so long as you keep them in the general vicinity of your site's theme. It will only help you if you create a few relationships with some other sites and share those relationships with your visitors via links.
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RE: Effect of changes on the Content page on search ranking
Aditya,
If the dynamic content is focused enough and your page title and back link anchor text correspond to the focused content you may be able to remain fairly steady in the rankings--depending on the term and the competition. If the dynamic content is all over the map and the rest of the on-page/off page SEO isn't well focused you'll likely have a tough time of it.
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RE: Need to know about content marketing strategy
Shailendra,
I think you'll find these interesting:
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RE: 2 URLS pointing to the same content
Use rel=canonical tag that shows A is the canonical version. Here's more on how to do that:
<cite>moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization</cite>
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RE: How to choose a Keyword
You can use Google's adwords tool or keyword planner but they don't get granular enough to include "Jiyugaoka train station" keywords. But what you do is organize several of your posts around the general "Jiyugaoka" topic and link to the general topic page from the train station, restaurants and maps pages (for example) with broad "Jiyugaoka"-type terms and from that category page, link out to the more specific pages with "Jiyugaoka train station" and "Jiyugaoka restaurants" anchor text.
It takes balancing to create your category pages at a high enough level that you don't end up with way too many categories that they become overwhelming to the user and not so many that they become too broad to rank for. That's the tough part about keyword research. Do broad research early on and map out your site's keyword direction to give yourself a strategic direction for your site.
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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: Dropped domains are really helpful for backlinks?
If you're saying that you've bought these dropped domains and you're hoping that you're going to get link juice from them, you're going down the wrong path. Once upon a time, it was that easy but today, not so much. On a very small scale, the links in those blog posts are not going to do anything to help your client. On a large scale, it's possible that they could be detrimental some time in the future. There's really no short cuts to doing real link building these days--that means good content and strategic networking to build your links.
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RE: What is the best approach to handling 404 errors?
Dave, you can use a tool like ScreamingFrog or Xenu's Lunk Sleuth to find links pointing to the 404 pages. You can leave the pages to 404 unless you can see in your stats that search was sending you traffic to those pages or you have external links going to them--in that case you'll want to 301 them.
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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
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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: What can i do to get google to visit my site more often
Tim,
Did this drop happen after your website update or was the update in response to a drop in your rankings?
From your other comments, I think it's only been a month so since you transitioned to your new site so you can still chalk this all up to that transition.
Due to the redesign, those previously ranking pages may now be buried deeper within your architecture, you may link to them differently, or your redesign may have overlapped with an algorithm update reduced your visibility. Have you verified that you were not penalized?
If things don't change, you could take a look back at which pages were ranking for the keywords you specified and 2. verify that either you're using the same URL or that the old URL is 301'd to the new one (you should have done that already); 3. look at your old site (maybe using the waybackmachine) to review your internal linking to those previously-ranking pages (how many internal links, the anchor text and from what pages) and verify that the new site does the same.
edit: not being crawled often is a symptom of not having enough authority as meets your needs or architecture that leads to sporadic crawling intervals. If those money pages are linked to from the home page, you might rule out the latter.
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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: Footer Link in International Parent Company Websites Causing Penalty?
So it seems the link network became a weight around your neck, so to speak. If you didn't receive an unnatural links warning in GWT then it was an algorithmic smack and if those links were, in fact, the issue, then you may just draw a new baseline at you current levels and start working your way up again from there.
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RE: Footer Link in International Parent Company Websites Causing Penalty?
Well, if they were all nofollowed, it would be hard to suspect that they were the problem. Still, thatsalotta back links! I think it's interesting that the other US sites didn't take that same hit and that some of their traffic increased--almost as though the links to the main site disappeared and the link juice consolidated on the remaining links to the other US sites.
I've made a couple of mental guesses but there's just too much going on there without enough detail to put an educated guess down in writing. I'd like to know if the links between the sister sites were spread evenly among all the sites, if the sites are all in the same market, and the outcome of the hunt to discover whether all the links were all nofollowed or not before taking a stab at it.
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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: Google is Really Slow to Index my New Website
At a month old, that's not unusual.
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RE: On-Page Grader Levels
Larry, don't crank that number up too high--it's not a grade, it's the number of times you used the keyword in each of the elements shown above the total. You really should be looking at a few times in the body and not more than once everywhere else.
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RE: Google is Really Slow to Index my New Website
Live or not, I don't think there's a difference in the impact thewebhostinghero.com has on webhostinghero.com at this point. So long as they're not linked, whatever is done is done.
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RE: Google is Really Slow to Index my New Website
It's just that the very first search I did with a piece of your content showed results for duplicate content. I'd did a few other checks after that did, in fact, come up clean. By the way, something seems a little off regarding your pagerank--it's kind of strange to have that kind of PR with the back links I see in OSE.
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RE: Building Business Facebook PAges
I'm not able to point you to a superlative guide on that subject.
However, I would like to introduce the idea of "geocommentspam" : -) as I'm beginning to wonder if your questions aren't actually cloaks for unsolicited bits of "information" pertaining to a targeted geographic location.
Now, some people may see your comments as a good way of raising awareness and brand building for a community, while others may see them as superfluous, off topic rhetoric that detracts from the conversation at hand-- and may not actually even be coming from a resident of such location, rather, from someone from outside who was paid to make it appear more popular, inviting, and worthwhile than it may actually be.
Depending on which way the wind blows, I have to say that a manual penalty from the powers that be may possibly be in store for you.
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RE: Should i put a full article on my home page to get google to visit more
Content provides relevance; links and offsite references provide ranking ability and support relevance. It's those offsite factors to do the most influencing of your crawl rate. My suggestion is to focus less on the actual crawl rate and instead focus on learning who your audience members are, what their needs are and on using your writing skills to create content that they'll want to share. When you're doing that, your crawl rate will go up. Oh yeah, links will help with that too.
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RE: Should i put a full article on my home page to get google to visit more
You hadn't mentioned the "upgrade" and if the site was recently re-designed, that could be a contributor to your issue and It may not be a penalty at all. On the penalty issue however, Google may tell you that no manual penalty has been assessed but that doesn't rule out an algorithmic penalty to your site--algorithmic penalties are not something that will verify.
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RE: Should i put a full article on my home page to get google to visit more
Making that change isn't going to get the page indexed more often and crawl frequency probably isn't your primary problem. If you've been penalized, you're really going to need to sort out what the cause of penalty was if you're to recover from it effectively. You might try reading through this post for a starting place on penalty ID:
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RE: Google is Really Slow to Index my New Website
One month old is very young to be expecting search traffic. On the other hand, being so closely connected to a triple-penalized site, being a month old, and having questionably original content, isn't going to give google the warm fuzzies about the quality of your site. I'd be making sure my content was spotlessly authentic and more than that, I'd be figuring out how to create some engagement with it--that's what would really speed things up for you. Your content may be providing relevance but authority is going to come from engagement.
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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: Does every keyword need its own landing page?
To start out with, I'd think more along the lines of unique content for each product vs. for each keyword, but yes you want unique content for each of those pages and each page should be focused on one keyword.
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RE: Recovering from a site migration
I wouldn't think that's your problem or your answer. If you've been working on it for months and recently did the migration, it can take some time for the redirects to take effect. Are you verifying that new URLs are being indexed? If they are, are they receiving the same traffic as the old ones? If not, what's different about the content on those pages? Did you drastically change your navigation or your content? If you made sure that, at least, you redirected old pages that were getting search traffic and had exterior links to them, things should pick up again.
If you made the redesign as an organic SEO effort for a site that didn't already have enough authority to bring in the search traffic that you want, the redesign probably isn't going to help. If you redesigned a site or URLs that didn't get crawled often, the redesign isn't likely to help them get crawled more often. You have to make sure that your new URLs are indexed and then compare their search traffic to the old URLs in order to determine if there is a problem.
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RE: Canonical tag for Home page: with or without / at the end???
Gregory,
Matt Cutts has said that it doesn't matter algorithmically--essentially, Google deals with both as though they are one. I'd go with whatever your web server defaults to serving. If visitors normally get a trailing slash, canonicalize that, if they don't canonicalize on the URL without the slash.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
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RE: Linking my pages
Well, while your current setup may be helping you in the rankings, by it's nature, it puts you at risk for a penalty. You may go on for years and not be penalized or you could get whacked at the next update. If I was going to make a guess as to the likelihood of such a penalty, I'd put it at 40-60% within the next couple of years--other SEO would likely give different numbers. I think all would agree,however, that you could keep your existing links and mitigate your risk of penalty by consistently working to build good, strong links from other resources to offset the footprint of your little network. Will you have enough good links by the time your site was evaluated by a potentially penalizing algorithm update is the question you have to be comfortable with not knowing the answer on a daily basis.
If those 10 sites are are a side job for you and you can easily assume the risk, then you might wait it out and see if you can get away with the setup you've got. If you plan on depending on those sites for your livelihood in the future then conforming more to Google's best practices is more in order.
There's probably no reason why you couldn't keep a link or two with some combination of brand and keywords in their anchor text on each site to each of the others but I don't think I'd go beyond that (others may differ). If the links are currently helping you, then you are going to take a rankings hit when they're removed but that hit would be to preserve the long-term health of the site. From here out, it's about working on building better links to your sites.
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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: Linking my pages
Marko,
I'd propose that you remove all of those links before the end of this week. No if's, and's, or but's.
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RE: Content too buried in source code?
Hey seosarah,
Here's a fun thread with 3 of Moz's heaviest hitters each weighing in on your topic--each with a bit of a different take on it...
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RE: Does every keyword need its own landing page?
Eric, give this a try:
Take one of your long tail keywords, plug it into google search and review each web page that shows up in the first page of results. Note how focused is each one is on that keyword--at the exclusion of any other keywords. Do other searches on similar long tail keywords on your list and see if the same pages show up in the results or if a different set of pages show up in the results.
If you compare all of your keywords to what shows up in the search results, you're likely going to find a couple of things. 1) You're going to get a tiny taste for how much time and effort it's going to take you to create content for each of those keywords; 2) You're probably going to find that for a majority of your search terms, different sites show up for each search; 3) You're a bit overwhelmed at the realization of how much content you're going to have to create.
If that's the case, do yourself a favor and pare down your list of keywords to a small fraction of the total and work with those as a starting point. Create your content for what will be your most profitable terms, keeping in mind that the whole purpose of its creation is to get your target audience members to engage with it in some fashion. Work in your content for your longer-tail keywords to help bring in traffic for those terms as well as to provide ranking strength for your money terms. When you've got a good grip on that, start branching out into you next tier of keywords.
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RE: How to do a site migration followed by a domain migration and avoid 301 redirect chains?
Brad,
Not reading any time frames into the scenarios, option 2 is your quickest, easiest, and most direct route from where you are now to where you want to be after the domain migration. As far as Google or SEO is concerned, there's no need for the intermediate step of redirecting the directory and then redirecting it again.
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RE: Using a subdomain to improve rankings
If you're starting out from scratch, put your blog on your main domain. Build brand-type links to your home page and make sure your blog posts are of high enough quality to warrant inbound links from relevant sources. Don't put too much emphasis on keywords.