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Hi Judd

Do you happen to own also a Corporate site where you speak about the company that owns all 20 schools?

Let me know maybe there is a solution to your question with this site declaring the ownership of all 20 and the 20 declaring that that is the page where the original information comes from, though not duplicate content.

Hope to help you

Cheers

Claude

Hello,

We are currently researching the case of a client that suffered greatly after a campaign of reverse SEO. In a short spam of time (about 6 months) thousands of foul links were created pointing at this site, and as a consequence, it got an algorithmic penalization, and organic traffic dropped almost by half.

Does anyone has any experience with this kind of situations we could learn from? Obviously, we are already proceeding to disavow such bad links, but we'd also love to get to know who is behind this. Is there any way of finding out who or what company originated these links. Many bad sites were specifically created to harm this client's reputation, but the registrant is privacy protected. We could at best find out where these sites are hosted.

Is there any way we could progress further in finding out more about this? We are talking of a campaing carried out by someone who knows their way around SEO, and which took at least 6 months to a 1 years of constant spammy bombing.

Any leads will be greatly appreciated.

Regards

5yFVjCI

Hi Patrick thanks for your prompt reply, I consider that´s the best option.

Thanks for your advice!

Hi MOZ users and friends.

I have a website that have a php template developed by ourselves, and a wordpress blog in /blog/ subdirectory. Actually we have a sitemap.xml file in the root domain where are all the subsections and blog's posts. We upgrade manually the sitemap, once a month, adding the new posts created in the blog.

I want to automate this process , so i created a sitemap index with two sitemaps inside it. One is the old sitemap without the blog's posts and a new one created with "Google XML Sitemap" wordpress plugin, inside the /blog/ subdirectory.

That is, in the sitemap_index.xml file i have:

• Domain.com/sitemap.xml (old sitemap after remove blog posts urls)

• Domain.com/blog/sitemap.xml (auto-updatable sitemap create with Google XML plugin)

Now i have to submit this sitemap index to Google Search Console, but i want to be completely sure about how to do this.

I think that the only that i have to do is delete the old sitemap on Search Console and upload the new sitemap index, is it ok ?

Hi there Cocoheadfred!

I am happy to give you some advice, if you think that your question has been answered please mark my answer as good so your question will be displayed as "answered".

Hope to see something further on about you experience with this product.

Cheers from sunny southern Spain.

Claudio

Hi Chocoheadfred

I would say that results depend strongly on dozens of different circumstances. E.G. the industry you are working with and the particular product you are advertising. Also the commercial process and the delivery. I mean all the commercial cycle should be evaluated to judge if 10x View through conversions is reasonable or not.

10x shows you that they take their time to buy but if you are selling tourism industry I would say it's a bit overrated. If you are selling a new product which needs research, also. But if you are selling a commodity then probably you should check part of the e commerce process looks like people rejects to buy in a first process and needs more time or looks for a second option.

Could you give us an insight about the product and buying process and an idea of the companies profile, I mean if they are market leaders or small new competitors in a mature market for example.

I would guess that 10x View through conversion could reflect the need of the buyer for more info, maybe your product needs lots of research, maybe your brand is new and therefore the supplier needs research. Maybe your e-commerce could be a bit more intricate and buyers want to find a easier supplier. I sense you will not find the answer tweaking the adwords campaign maybe the answer is in another part of the process.

I hope it helps a bit, let me know!

Cheers

Claudio

Hi there Rand & Juan!

This is what I really love from Moz, Rand Fishkin in person answering and giving his sincere opinion about what was going wrong with Juan´s question.

Then, further on, when arguments were even more clear and consistent, he changes his opinion and therefore takes responsibility, giving his earnest point of view about possible Moz faults that are under study and certainly will be solved ASAP thus making moz a broader and more reliable tool.

Thanks for being sincere and credible, I understand that's the best way to construct a long term relationship, a widespread community and a profitable & sound company. Keep it up!!

Cheers from Southern (today not sunny) Spain.

Claudio

Thanks for dropping by Linda,

You are right, my moz profile page has came back to some sort of normality, not the same PA but similar, I believe this "relatively small change in PA" is due to what Rand, Patrick and Matt have explained referring to "mozscape update issue".  Actually I placed a form in the moz help desk and Sean´s answer was the following: "Thanks for writing us and it does appear to be quite a mystery. While we do not seem to be able to determine the reason for this particular disappearance..." and they didn´t see any links at all in my profile which refering to links, it appeared as empty!. As a matter of fact I couldn´t fill them "again" as for me, they where perfectly correct and seen in my own profile.

Anyway, things are more or less back to where they had been before.

Thanks for all your replies, I believe it was some sort of a mistery, and will remain as a mistery...

Regards from sunny southern Spain.

Hi Patrick

Thanks for dropping by!

I do not see any relation between the mozscape issue and the real page authority (real strenght) of a link. I reviewed this link through different tools eg majestic and it vanished...

Anyway, I maybe misunderstand your answer.

Any further thoughts?

Hi there

Anybody has seen his page authority regarding his own profile page from moz.com vanishing?

Mine was aproximately 46, now PA=1

I´ve checked it and nobody is making any comments about this so maybe.... it´s just me :S? Any clues?

I loved my link from moz.com!!!

Cheers

Claudio Heilborn

Hi Michael / Chris

In this case, unfortunately I have a harsh experience which makes me differ with Chris´s experience; I would definitely go forward with disavowing if you are really interested on making clear for Google that you do not value those links, even if they point to non-existing urls

A couple of years back we had a client (and still have it) with a huge hack that produced thousands of links pointing to pages of our client´s hacked domain. We even suspected of a “black hat” maneuver to make damage to our client´s SEO through this procedure.

We had a hell of a problem letting Google understand that those links where empty and pointed to a 404, even after we deleted all the content and the urls didn´t exist anymore... strange behavior still happened from time to time and until the appearance of disavow tool….unexpectedly Google re indexed those links, even that they pointed already for YEARS to nonexistent 404 urls

I would take the time and disavow if you are really interested on Google not indexing those links.

I hope you can profit from this experience.

Cheers to you both, form sunny southern Spain!

Hi Chocoheadfred

I would say that results depend strongly on dozens of different circumstances. E.G. the industry you are working with and the particular product you are advertising. Also the commercial process and the delivery. I mean all the commercial cycle should be evaluated to judge if 10x View through conversions is reasonable or not.

10x shows you that they take their time to buy but if you are selling tourism industry I would say it's a bit overrated. If you are selling a new product which needs research, also. But if you are selling a commodity then probably you should check part of the e commerce process looks like people rejects to buy in a first process and needs more time or looks for a second option.

Could you give us an insight about the product and buying process and an idea of the companies profile, I mean if they are market leaders or small new competitors in a mature market for example.

I would guess that 10x View through conversion could reflect the need of the buyer for more info, maybe your product needs lots of research, maybe your brand is new and therefore the supplier needs research. Maybe your e-commerce could be a bit more intricate and buyers want to find a easier supplier. I sense you will not find the answer tweaking the adwords campaign maybe the answer is in another part of the process.

I hope it helps a bit, let me know!

Cheers

Claudio

Hi Ryan

The tool is great and has been updated!

But, you must be logged to adwords, you don´t need to have an active account spending money, nor you will be charged for using this tool. You just open an account and use the tool.

http://adwords.google.com/keywordplanner

Edit: I have re read your question, probably the problem is that you are not using the second option of the keyword planner, in which you are searching for keyword volume. The actual layout is different, but the tool is even better than the previous. Here a link to understand the use of the tool.

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2999770?hl=en

Good luck, cheers from sunny southern spain!

Hola Jonathan!

If all those visits are real (and you are not being hacked) I would be definitely happy, (as a matter of fact much more than happy) and prepared to jump from this hosting to a much more powerful one, even if you have to invest on doing so. That sort of viral effect is something we marketers are searching as the holy grail in the crusades… you shouldn’t reject it, on the contrary you should make good use of it.

You will profit on SEO, look it this way, you would have to invest a huge amount of money to get this relevant traffic.

Build a strong SEO on your basic set of keywords around this post, and profit on this, it will have a huge impact and payback on SEO positioning. Even though your business is local you will profit on relevant, real and viral traffic into your site, wherever this traffic comes and specially if you could transform your blog in magnet for relevant keywords.

Relevant traffic (wherever they come from) will bring you positioning, and positioning (also in Ecuador) will bring you visits (from Ecuador) & that you can transform into more clients to your local store.

If you do not know how to do this, here in Moz you will find lots of friends that will try to help you doing so…

Hasta la vista!

Cheers from an incredibly nice Saturday winter morning in southern sunny, always sunny, Spain.

To see incoming links,

1. Google Webmaster Tools?

2. Also if 1) you can use www.majesticseo.com (you need to approve via GWMT so that it shows all the necessary data

3. and of course you can use opensiteexplorer.org

But, and this is a great but, Facebook, linkedin and twitter will not show you lower level links, just a general link facebook.com/ or linkedin.com/ this will only help you identify the media not the post...

You will just see in your analytics as Alex said in  "social referrals" so then to know exactly which facebook post was THE ONE which brought you traffic you should have previously, now late for past traffic but still possible for the actual one, introduced tags in your posts so as to know it came from this specific one. There is a nice post about this in Ana´s Kravitz,(like lenny but not her sister... she did an amazing work on this and is very easy to DIY.

Unfortunately if you do not suspect from which post this specific and unusual traffic could have come... then, there is very little to do about the past IMHO, maybe sombody else could give you another hint... but I doubt it. Only to be tidy enough to tag every single new post that you make and track it on analytics as Alex said.

Here the link from Ana´s blog, good luck and if you need any further help do not hesitate to ring my bell.

http://www.akravitz.com/tag-track-social-media-traffic-for-google-analytics/

Cheers from a cloudy (once in a very long while) day in usually sunny Southern Spain.

Definitely agree with Robert, I find no concern on a do follow link and I also would go for a long tail alt text, telling what the tool is useful for.

Good luck and anyway you can make a try and look for your own experience which by the way we would love to hear about when you achieve some conclusions.

Cheers, today no sunny day even in southern spain... :(!

Hi Iris, as Martijn Scheybeler says, moz could be reporting  a NOTICE finding those canonicals.

You should see something as: "Here are some other things we found in our last crawl about this page. These notices might not be affecting your site negatively, but might be interesting for you to know."

It´s a notice not an issue to be solved.

Hope it´s useful and you can continue scaling about using moz which is a terrific tool to optimize, just need to get used to it!

Cheers

Hi Byron

At a first glance at least, I would not agree with your new SEO. I definitely prefer your actual flat pyramid url scheme than this new high piramid url proposed.

Google will never read those deep new urls!

Maybe I would try to change your actual ones, but never hiding them three leves deep beneath earth...After undergoing such penalties I personally would not be so much afraid on making huge changes, and I would take the "risk" of changing them but do not hiding them!

Hope it helps to build a panorama.

Good luck

Cheers from a sunny winter in Spain

Claudio

Hi Marcus,

Have a look to 1778 backlinks coming from asooy.com they look definitely spammy... probably others, also would advise you to move cautiously with new links 100´s links per day could show spammy also with a site that previously had no backlinks except those spammy ones and also about 3000 from bradford-webdesign.co.uk which don´t either look to much of "natural" sort of links...

Maybe disavow those ones and start slowly and naturally with new links, change your anchor, and work them from different domains.

Hope you good luck from southern sunny Spain!

Hi again Wardy,

In my opinion your url and anchor (url BroadbandSpeedTest.co.uk and "speed test tool" as an anchor text) are natural enough not to bring any problems. Do not forget to tell us how it worked!

Cheers