Would like to offer an opinion but can't quite figure out what you're saying in paragraph 3.
Posts made by Chris.Menke
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RE: Need to move highest content pages into a sub-domain and want to minimize the loss of traffic - details inside!
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RE: Getting out of Google's Penguin
Hey Anders,
There's a lot that would go into answering that question and it would probably be best to do a little leg work on your own to get an understanding of what's happened and the major steps you'll be be taking here in the near future. Moz has a bunch of threads dealing with that topic and I'd browse through those to start with.
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RE: Domain Forwarding
Oh, so there's no content on those other domains? Then 301 them. Simple as that.
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RE: Domain Forwarding
It depends on numerous variables--the main one being are you continuously putting effort into all the domains or are they just stagnating with their existing content, links and social media activity?
If the sites are established and have links and search traffic going to them and are of decent quality, there may not be an immediate good reason to take them down, other than to consolidate limited resources to build authority for the main domain. In the future, those niche sites may provide less and less value to the main site if you're not maintaining on-page and off-page optimization, leaving you a year or two years behind the competition, who may have been continuing to build the authority of a primary domain.
There lots of questions and answers on that topic here in Moz and on the web. Here are a couple:
http://moz.com/community/q/multiple-domain-names-point-to-one-site
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RE: Moving to new domain - Social and Branding Questions?
Your branded traffic is typically the easiest and fastest to get restarted to your new domain. In addition to revising the domain name in all of your social profiles be sure to revise all of your local co-citations with your new website address.
It's worth going on more than just a "feeling" that your site was penalized when you're considering moving your entire domain because of it. You ought to be close to 100% sure.
Many people feel 301 redirecting will just forward the penalty to your new site.
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RE: Crawl errors which ones should i sort out
By fixing obvious errors, I mean fixing the ones that are showing up in the crawl report (and 404 errors caused by external links to missing pages) . It is possible that there are also other things that are contributing to your drop in traffic but take care of these first and if the problem persists, start digging into your analytics for other problems.
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RE: SEO Stratergy for new ecom site
Here's my feeling on that: When you say you are targeting "all major categories of product" I (rightly or wrongly) think of an Amazon affiliate-type site. When I think of someone launching an Amazon affiliate-type site and trying to market it, I think the many tens of thousands of other, similar site owners who have underestimated the budget and/or the time they need to do market it correctly. In those cases, 99% of their products remain forever invisible to searchers.
I have to tell you, the fact that your site is about finished and you're just now thinking about marketing isn't giving me the warm fuzzies. The marketing of each product-- individually chosen to be on your site because it fits a need of your target audience and within your marketing--would best have been dealt with prior to the development of your site. If the sell-everything amazon affiliate had thought that way, they may have gotten a handle on how much total time they would be investing in their marketing, as well as how and to whom they'd be marketing them to.
But since you're just getting around to it, for each product, I'd be asking myself, "why this product", "who needs" this product" "when do they need this product", "what is the buyer doing that requires this product" "how difficult will it be to get this product to show up in the search results?", "How long will it take to get this product to show up in the search results?" ,"How profitable is this product", "What's my marketing budget? "When do I need to see an ROI?" and then I'd start tossing products from my site for which I couldn't those questions right off the bat, so that I was at least starting with a core bunch of products I know something about.
If you're not that kind of site, please excuse my rant.
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RE: Moving to new domain - Social and Branding Questions?
BeytzNet
I'd say "Joe's Computers" all the way! I think way too many companies confuse their domain name with their brand name. Sure it's nice when they are the same, but if they can't be or if you've already built up equity in another name, it's usually far better to emphasize your brand.
I wouldn't just trash the old domain, though. Move your old site over to the new domain and put a new site on the old one and make it a project to work on trying to pull it out of the penalty. If down the road, you're successful, you could move back to it.
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RE: Google Places best practise
Jason,
Link back to the most appropriate page for the visitor. Typically, if a visitor clicks through from a local search result, they are interested in whatever local information you've created for them so sending them to an individual location page is typically the idea. Here's what the Director of Product Management for Google Local had to say about that.
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RE: Crawl errors which ones should i sort out
Tim,
Minimally, you want to redirect the pages that have external links and that get traffic from search. If you don't redirect pages that do have links to them from other pages on your website, each time the site is crawled, you will continue to get those errors--it seems you must have have carried over a bunch of old links from your old site if you still had 2000 not found errors.
It is possible that those not found errors impacted your search results but it could be other things, too. You should work your way through eliminating the obvious errors as quickly as you can so you can get to any other problems if that's what's causing your problem.
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RE: Text analysis Tool: WDF*IDF - Within Document Freqeuncy x Inverse Document Frequency / tools?
My personal feeling about term frequencies on pages is that it's like chasing your tail. Whatever way Google uses term frequency measurements is so wrapped up with a bunch of other machine learning algorithms that you couldn't possibly come to any real conclusions about its employment as a stand alone factor.
It's time to jump off the frequency bandwagon. As Matt Cutts says, Google is moving from "strings to things"--meaning a more holistic understanding of the page is where things are going.
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RE: 301 with nofollow ?
Nick
Your 301 redirect will take place on the server level and your nofollow will take place on the page level. The server is going to redirect the bot to the new resource before it gets to the nofollow. As far as whether you can use a 301 to escape a penguin penalty is the subject of substantial debate but it's generally not thought so. Here's one of the most authoritative and interesting threads on that subject: Google 2.0 - How To Recover.
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RE: Find Historical SERP Ranking for a Term?
As far as I know, there is no tool like that and it seems that it would be very well known and used if such a tool existed but you may be able to get some of what you need from semrush.com.
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RE: Need advice badly domain rank loss
It looks like you may need some hands on help. Moz has a list of list of recommended SEO consultants you could contact for additional assistance--you could go that route.
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RE: Need advice badly domain rank loss
Francisco,
The info you provide isn't really enough to help you with any insight other than something sounds strange when you say that your rankings are the same but your traffic is going down and based on that, you are ready to start combining domains based on this information.
It would be important to have a clearer understanding of what is happening with your traffic. If your rankings are the same. why is your traffic falling? Use your analytics to isolate which keywords may be bringing in less traffic now than a month or two ago and which landing pages are receiving less traffic. Based on this information there may be a different set of options to investigate other than consolidating domains.
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RE: External Followed Links Over Time Nasty Drop HELP!
Francisco,
OSE won't always show all of your lowest quality links and what it does show may fluxuate. In addition to OSE, take a look at links showing at majesticseo and ahrefs.com, and even your google webmaster tools to get a fuller picture of your back links and which you may want to disavow.
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RE: Results for wrong keyword
Sure it's organic?
Maybe deindex the page for a short while and then put it back and see what happens--maybe it's just a google glitch.
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RE: Is Wordpress good for SEO
Studio, here's a great post on wordpress SEO. Yoast makes a very useful plugin too.
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RE: Results for wrong keyword
No, I guess that couldn't be the case if they're landing pages on your domain.
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RE: Results for wrong keyword
Maybe your analytics code is mistakenly being used on some other site?
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RE: Setting up addon domains properly (bonus duplicate content issue inside)
Mathew,
It sounds like you're on the right path. In cases where dupe sites have existed for a long time, there may be external links pointing to both sites, so you want to survey back links. If google analytics is installed on the domain(s) to be redirected, be sure to note which pages are bringing traffic from search. Redirect pages with back links and those getting search traffic to the appropriate domain.
Depending on the circumstances, after the settling-in period, you could see an increase in rankings for the main domain. If she's a local business and has all of her local citations set up, it would be good to make sure all of them reflect the proper domain name. Also, attempt to contact sites with links pointing to her old domain to see if they'll update the links.
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RE: Guest Posting
Studio,
There's noise that the low quality guest posting tactic is next to be targeted by Google so consider the quality of your posts and the quality of the sites you get your posts published. That said I'm familiar with two services--Bloggerlinkup.com and myguestblog.com but I'm sure there are many more.
edit: myblogguest.com not myguestblog.com. Sorry.
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RE: 301 Redirects
Hey Robert, give these answers pertaining your question a read and see if they help:
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RE: Website is not stable on maps.google.com
Movement in the search results is normal--even large fluxuations. Remember, you're not the only one who would like to get their site to the top of the search results and Google is constantly evaluating and adjusting the results. Working to solidify your local results means working on getting more co-citations and reviews on the sites that google uses to help determine local results.
Go over these resources for a good overview of local search essentials:
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RE: Advice on Content Publishing
Phillip,
Nice slippers. You might start by eliminating those who may not want to give such a gift to their dads--and that would be most everyone who's not taking their first crack at an arts and craft project. But since that leaves only a very young audience who's not likely to be reading your article, you'd probably want to target those who would be assisting them in their project--Mom. So maybe go after the mommy bloggers and sites focused on craft projects for kids--that kind of thing.
FYI, in the future, try conceptualizing the content you'd like to make, then research the potential publishing outlets to get a good idea of what those blogs and websites are likely to publish or link to before you launch into actually crafting your content. That way, you can tailor your content to your target audience and you already know who your going to reach out to once it's done.
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RE: 301-Redirects, PageRank, Matt Cutts, Eric Enge & Barry Schwartz - Fact or Myth?
Dana,
When you say "inherits about 72% of Page A's pagerank if no other links are on the page", I think that's where your understanding goes off track....either that, or it's where mine goes off track, because my understanding is that the percentage of PR that is passed from one page to another page is based on an unknown "X amount", not on the linking page's toolbar pagerank. I think is better to say ...inherits about 72% of the pagerank that page A is able to pass...---not 72% of Page A's pagrerank. Does that make sense?
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RE: What is the best way to grow local seo outreach?
Yes, that's what you should do for organic traffic but since it sounds like you don't have a physical presence there, I wouldn't expect to show up in the local results. Before going after NJ traffic though, I would say to first be sure that you are already ranking well for your NY related searches--and converting that traffic efficiently. For local businesses, it typically makes sense to maximize the potential of your closest, most likely customers before reaching out a broader audience.
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RE: 301 Redirect from Old Domain to New Domain
A page to page redirect from the old site to the new site is the ideal but you might cut corners by just redirecting those pages that are bringing you in search traffic and those that have external links to them. You don't need to put any redirects on the new site's .htaccess file, though. The traffic from the old site will already knows which page to request based on your changes to the old site's .htaccess file.
Best practice is to leave your 301 redirect in place is 180 days.
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RE: How to 301 redirect old wordpress category?
Beytznet,
You may want to try this wordpress plugin to do you redirects. If you haven't already read it, here's Moz's best practices for redirection. And on this page is a link to a tool that can generate redirects for you.
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RE: Ranking drops POST Penguin?!
Mathew,
Even if all of your links were "built naturally" you can still be impacted by Google penalties assessed to sites that are linking to you. If, for example, a site that is linking to you and providing your site with some amount of link juice gets penalized, it my no longer be sending you that juice. The impact may be huge if it was a powerful link or if many of your links were coming from sites that were penalized, or the impact may be relatively minor if the penalized site was helping with your rankings in a small way.
Those kinds of changes happen with or without penalties being assessed, as back links from other sites may fall away or lose value over time (link rot). It looks like you may just need to keep up the hard work of marketing you site on line to rebuild your rankings.
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RE: How much is my competition spending on adwrods?
You can use spyfu.com or you can use semrush.com, competer.com, or keywordspy.com to get a good idea of the PPC keywords they are using. As I understand it they get their data from a variety of Google sources.
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RE: SEO from INDIA Smarter then Google?
Go for it! All you've got to lose is a little bit of money. Maybe it will work out for you.
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RE: If I put some keywords in my pages might it optimize my homepage?
Here's a good place to start working on that topic. The Content Marketing Manifesto.
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RE: If I put some keywords in my pages might it optimize my homepage?
Rephael,
That's not going to do much for your homepage search results. It may help a bit more, however, if you link to your homepage from those other pages with those keywords--but only a bit, if at all.
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RE: Can Forum Signature Links be a positive thing?
That's perfectly legit Zachary.
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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: Broad Website - What keyword to target
I think that equally important as what Adam says is to have a clear understanding of what you want your blog to accomplish. If its successful adsense monetization , you first have to define what "successful" is and then you have to go about making and measuring the value of the choices you make pertaining to your content.
All too often, I come in contact with potential clients with ecommerce sites, for example, who have errantly believed that if they weren't making enough money with the 3,000 products they had on their site, that they had best increase the number of products they were selling. The problem with that strategy is that it gave them even less time to concentrate on who the customer was for any one particular product or how to effectively position the product in front of that customer.
A narrower scope is better if your resources are stretched and you are not currently efficient at reaching the audience your products/content targets. At the same time you are filtering the list of potential keywords your blog could/should target, you have to balance the objectives of your blog, the resources you have at your disposal that you can use towards achieving those goals (content writers/producers), as well as what audience has been defined as being most most likely to help you achieve "success". The narrower the scope, the easier it is to be authoritative, the easier it is to create consistently authoritative content, the easier it is to find and reach out to your audience socially, and the more likely your ads are going to target your specific audience, and the more likely your blog will be successful.
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RE: Are Moz Ratings that reliable/correlated against SERPS?
Hey Magic,
Domain Authority is a measure of off-page factors such as linking root domains, number of total links, MozRank, MozTrust, etc. It demonstrates the _potential _a site has to rank well in Google without taking into account most keyword and on-page factors. A site that ranks best for "arctic circle", for example, may be very authoritative and have great domain authority because of the strength of its back links but it may not rank above other, less authoritative domains for "snow", for example, unless it has well-optimized concepts on the site pertaining to the term.
MozTrust is the “distance” between a given page and a seeded trust source on the Internet. Think of this like six degrees of separation: The closer you are linked to a trusted website, the more trust you have, yourself. Again, this has to do with your ranking _potential,_not how well optimized a page is around a key concept. If you take a page on a domain that has a link to it from the above mentioned arctic circle site and you delete all the content on it, but leave the URL, it will still maintain its trust score but it wouldn't rank for anything.
Also, sometimes google penalties will leave your site with high pagerank an other ranking factors, such as those measure on OSE, yet the site is stripped of its ability to show up in the results.
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RE: Is it worth getting links from .blogspot.com and .wordpress.com?
The thing is Wilkerson, if the only thing the site has going for it is that it can get a mommy blogger network to link to it, then you're also saying that there's nothing worthwhile about the site, its products, or its content. Let me tell you, as soon as a whole bunch of links to your site from a bunch of profiles that are also creating links to a bunch of other sites who's only links are coming from the same mommy blogger network, you're going to be staring penguin square in the eyes. If you're thinking about jumping into a link wheel or link network, think long and hard. Ever wonder why all those "mommy bloggers" work off of free, expendable websites?
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RE: Is that Penguin 2.0 or just temporary situation?
If your back link profile is good it's just coincidental that your traffic drop, your IP address change, and Penguin2 all happened on the same day, then wait it out--obviously you're doing something well to have all those back links. If your link profile is on the low quality side, it's probably time to start cleaning house and doing the things penguin victims have to do. Here's a little more info on the May 22nd penguin update.
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RE: Link Relevance vs Link Authority ?
When you're talking about a link of such low quality, relevance is going to be a moot point--there's just little to no value to be gained from the link. Sometimes, low quality pages/sites grow into higher quality site/pages and such links build value. Before deciding to disavow them look over the site and get a feel for what it's potential may be--if they're linking out indiscriminately and their back link profile is a mess a link from the site is likely to never be of value.
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RE: Is that Penguin 2.0 or just temporary situation?
Almost 5K back links in 5 month is not bad as long as they're coming from legitimate sources and the growth is consistent. If I were going to make a guess as to whether it was the IP address change or the back links that were the root of the problem, I'd guess the back links.
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RE: Wrong Descriptions for Title's on Google SERP?
I second that. Google is creating it's own snippets for the search results rather than using your description because your category descriptions are all the same. Easy fix.
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RE: Page rank check
In that case, it certainly can change over night but usually, with a new page or a page with that doesn't get much traffic it can take a month or more. It is often the case that the home page will be re-indexed more often than other, less trafficked pages on your site, so don't expect that when you see one page updated in the results that the other ones are right behind it.
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RE: Lawyers or Solicitors when Key word research feels like splitting hairs
If the client is so hard headed that even after you've explained to them how hard headed they are--and that they may not get the ROI they're hoping for out of this tactic, they still insist, then I'd focus you efforts on a single page. I'm guessing there is a geo term associated with your search and I'd pull out the stops as far as creativity of the content on the page, getting local citations, as well as getting internal and external links to the page with anchor text that includes both terms.
I'd say it might be a toss up as to whether or not to use both term in the title but if you used one, then I'd go heavier on the link anchor text for the other. Examine the real differences in the words--are they exactly synonymous or are their some slight differences in their meanings? If there are differences use each of the words in the first couple of sentences that distinguish their differences--in fact, I might just make the whole page about what is the history of the two words, how are they different, when should you correctly use one vs. the other, who might be using them correctly or incorrectly, which one might apply best to your hard headed client... that kind of thing.
I'm sure it can be done but it is going to boil down to creatively building authority and relevance for the page. Good luck. I love lawyers.
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RE: Page rank check
Hi Premio,
Typically, your pagerank won't change as a result of on-page SEO. Increases in pagerank are typically due to back links and other offsite factors and changes in PR due to those factors may take many months to impact your tool bar pagerank. But don't focus or Pagerank--focus on creating content and on reaching out to your audience with content that is shareable and helps them make their buying decisions.
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RE: Duplicate title tag
John,
It is certainly there. The first thing I'd look at are the social chicklets (facebook, twitter, g+, linkedin) at the bottom of the page. Those links look like they're code strangely. Then 301 one of those pages to the other. Look in your file manager on the server for the page you think is not supposed to be there--it may be an old page that was supposed to be deleted but wasn't--just a guess.