Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Galen,

Thanks for your response. That worked perfectly!

Brendan.

I'm seeing something similar. I link my SEOmoz account but when I sign in with Twitter, my SEOmoz account becomes unlinked.

Hi Simon,

You're best bet would be to email the SEOmoz help team at help@seomoz.org. The usually reply pretty quickly and will you sorted much faster than posting here.

Cheers,

Happy Monday all!

Just a quick question about the Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics. I'm looking at the Assisted Conversions report over a set data range. I'm shown Assisted Conversion Value and Last Interaction Conversion Value for a PPC campaign. Would I be correct in thinking that the total value attributed to a campaign would the total of these values?

For example, let's say I spend £100 on a PPC campaign and the Assisted Conversion Value is £50 and the Last Interaction Conversion Value is £100. Is the total value of this campaign £150? I guess this would make the campaign a success as the ROI from the campaign would be positive.

Look forward to hearing all your thoughts!

Cheers,

Actually, it seems it is possible. There's a great thread on the topic on Webmaster World but essentially the code required is below. I added this to the .htaccess file of 123.com which did the trick! Now all traffic from abc.com redirects to 123.com except traffic from this one referring site which goes to the third party site.

RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^https?://([^.]+.)refering-site.comRewriteRule (.) http://www.third-party-site.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Hi, Thanks for your answer. Your example of the scenario is exactly correct. The issue is content based rather than speed. I'm trying to redirect the visitor to a third party site which gives them exactly what they're looking for. This article was the only one on the old site which had any value so it's not worth restoring. Do you know how I can redirect visitors from this link only to the third party site? Thanks again, Brendan.

Hi guys/gals,

I have a few domains and blogs which I use really for a bit of fun and experimenting. One of the domains (abc.com) wasn't doing much but has a few decent links built to it. I redirected this domain to an active blog (123.com).

Here's the problem: There's a particular external link to the homepage of abc.com which drives a lot of traffic but isn't relevant to the content of 123.com which it redirects to, causing a huge bounce rate from this link.

Is there a way (maybe using using htaccess) that I can redirect traffic from this one link to another domain completely?

I've contacted the owner of the external site but they are unable (or unwilling) to change the link.

I hope I haven't lost you all but shout if you need any clarification.

Thanks in advance!

In your SEOmoz report you are able to download all errors as a CSV file. The final column of this file will tell you the referring page of your 404. That should allow you to identify the culprit!

Me too. As with Jason, my site is brand new. I'd be interested in the answer.

Hi,

Try installing Yoast's SEO WordPress plugin. Read the documentation and set everything up and it'll sort these problems and more.

With regard to your 404 problem, download the csv file and look for the referrer column. This will show you where the link to the 404 page comes from.

Cheers,

Hi,

Take a look at your inbound links on OSE. Take a look with your Google hat on. Do they look natural? Are they links form websites relevant to nurses? I would say no to both of these questions so I'm guessing that's why you've taken a whack.

Because our site gets a pretty high level of visits, GA samples our data which can throw things out quite a bit.

http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=66084

Thanks,

Hi from sunny Manchester!

I'm looking for recommendations for alternatives to GA. I'm specifically looking for something which won't sample data and will give us accurate numbers. Our site is pretty big, it receives 6 million+ visits and 50 million+ pageviews/year.

Any recommendations would be greatly received together with any good/bad experiences you've had with them.

Thanks in advance,

Brendan.

Thanks for the replies guys. Unless I'm going crazy here, the H1 tag is for wedding favours and not wedding flowers.

I take your point about the canonical link. Unfortunately this is an issue with our CMS which I'm looking to resolve shortly. Do you think that could be one reason for the ranking?

I also completely agree with you on the sub domain issue. It's something I want to resolve in the long term but in the short term, it's not really an option I'm afraid.

Thanks again guys.

Morning all, I'd really appreciate it if you could take a quick look at this page and see if I'm missing something here.

The targeted keyword (wedding favours) is pretty competitive and the rank had been slowly improving until recently and we've now slipped to 25th on Google UK. I've added a "Pay with a tweet" button for our eBook which has been pretty well received (around 100 downloads) so far so the social side is better than our competition.

I've also written a few guest blogs with links back to the page from a variety of sources.

Here is the page analysis on OSE.

If you could take a quick look and let me know if I'm missing anything here, it would be most appreciated!

Thanks in advance.

Thanks for your reply. Removing products from the feed isn't really an option for us as it is for you but we can definitely look at improving our calls to action for related products.

Hi chaps,

Quick question for you. I'm drilling down in GA to one of our eCommerce pages which has a pretty high bounce rate. I'm looking at referring keywords and they don't seem to make much sense. The page I'm looking at is a pretty deep page but the top referring keywords are all branded terms. The page isn't included in our site links.

To explain a little further, this is the scenario I think is happening:

• User searches using "Brand term".
• They then click through to our homepage and eventually land on the deep shopping page (on a different subdomain)
• In GA Content > Site Content > Pages > Primary dimension set to keyword - "Brand term" shows as the referring keyword.

Does this sound right? We have a custom GA script set up to track multiple subdomains.

Hi Mozzers, I'm carrying out some analysis on our eCommerce site and the bounce rate from Google Shopping is well above the site average at 60%. Our shopping feed is submitted to Google every morning so we know that images and prices are up-to-date which would obviously cause a high bounce rate. Any ideas on what might cause this? Is it normal for Google Shopping to produce a high bounce rate? Cheers guys!

Hi Shajan,

I've only taken a quick look at your homepage but it looks as though you might well be over optimising. The phrase "virtual assistant appears" 38 times on the page which is too much considering the amount of text on the page. It doesn't read very naturally. There was a great post on SEOmoz a couple of weeks back which you might want to take a look at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lessons-learned-by-an-over-optimizer-14730

Hope that helps,

Brendan.

Hi Muhammad,

This is in response to your second question. I would start by using a tool such as Xenu's Link Sleuth and run a report on your site. This will give you a report of how 'deep' pages are within your site ie. how far they are from your homepage.

As you might know, the general rule for most sites is to have all pages within 3 clicks of the homepage so this is a good way to judge the effectiveness of the site architecture.

Hope that helps,

Brendan.

Thanks Naghirniac,

Since I posted this I've looked further in to the CMS update and found that each and every page on our site (around 8,000) has a relative canonical link on it which points to itself. They also cannot be edited thus making them completely useless! Gotta love these CMS developers! URRRGGGGHHHHH!!!

Thanks anyway,

Brendan.

Hi guys and gals,

Our CMS has just been updated to its latest version which finally adds support for rel=canonical. HUZZAH!!! However, it doesn't add the absolute URL of the page. There is a base ref tag which looks like <base <="" span="">href="http://shop.confetti.co.uk/" />

On a page such as http://shop.confetti.co.uk/branch/wedding-favours the canonical tag looks like rel="canonical" href="/branch/wedding-favours" />

Does Google recognise this as a legitimate canonical tag? The SEOmoz On-Page Report Card doesn't recognise it as such.

Any help would be great,

Thanks in advance,

Brendan.

Hi Omri,

Probably not the answer you're looking for but drop the SEOmoz help team an email at help@seomoz.org and I'm sure they'll help you out. They usually respond pretty quickly.

Hope that helps,

Brendan.

Hi Robert,

Unfortunately I'm not part of the SEOmoz team but there's an update due tomorrow. You can check the Linkscape Schedule here.

Hope that helps,

Brendan.

Hi,

I had a similar problem where our homepage was out ranking the target page. It was down to a number of things but mainly the fact that a lot of links using the keyword anchor text were pointed at the homepage. I would be surprised if your new page replaces the homepage in the SERPs soon after launching it. You'll need to do a few things first.

• Either build new links or get the existing links repointed to your new landing page
• Make sure your on-page SEO is spot on
• Use your internal links effectively to point to your new page using the targeted keyword

Hope that helps,

Brendan.

Hi Gerard,

In my experience the SEOmoz ranking report is fairly accurate. It's sometimes a few places off but it's good enough. I suspect that you're seeing personalised results which would account for the difference in rankings. To make sure that you're not seeing personalised result, add pws=0 into the URL. For example, if I search for widgets, I should see the URL as http://www.google.co.uk/search?pws=0&q=widgets

If you're using Chrome, I wrote a blog post about how to easily get non-personalised results.

Hope that helps,

Brendan.

You're right that it does mean Friday. If it hasn't shown up yet, I'd fire an email to help@seomoz.org who'll be able to help you out. They're usually super speedy at replying.

Thanks,

Brendan.

Hi,

I think the best one around is Excellent Analytics. It's a free plugin for Excel, has decent(ish) 'how to' guides on their site and is recommended by Google so should do everything you're looking for.

Hope that helps.

Hi Rob,

I wouldn't waste your time trying to clean up your backlink profile. It's more than likely that Google will simply ignore these links anyway. You're much better spending time creating some great content that will help to make the web a better place and attract good, natural links which Google will count.

Hope that helps,

Brendan.

Hi,

You've got some good answers there with regard to the Facebook links. If you're looking to post images, I'd use pinterest.com. Use the Google Chrome plugin to pin the images directly from your site and you get a do-follow link back. The value of the link is up for debate due the sheer size of the site but I've seen decent traffic levels coming from Pinterest recently.

Make sure you write a decent description for each image you pin, engage with other users and I'm sure you'll see results.

Hi Keri,

We took all of the above on board and decided to redesign the page completely adding more content to the page and decreasing the number of links. Our rank improved almost immediately so a great result!

Thanks to all who helped out.

hi Philipp,

We did something very similar recently. Our rankings had dropped significantly for a particular keyword. We added 2-3 paragraphs of well optimised text to the page (amongst other changes) and our ranking recovered within a couple of days and is now back on page 1.

I'd absolutely add some text to the page you shared but it seems to have other problems too - 298 links on the page for example. I'd look to cut those down too.

Hi,

Make sure you've got the SEOmoz toolbar installed in your browser. This will give you a decent idea of page and domain authority and trust.

Is the topic of the page and other links on the page relevant to your site? Are there links for all sorts of sites and industries on there with no clear focus? That's a sign of site which is selling links.

Put the URL of the page in to Google and make sure it ranks first. If not, steer well clear. Also take a few title tags from random pages on the site and google those too to make sure they're ranking and haven't received a penalty.

There are many more factors but I hope those will get you started.

Hi,

I've always just just used the Akismet plugin for WordPress which comes with the WordPress installation. You just need to sign up for an API key. It's not perfect but does a pretty good job and is more elegant than using captcha.

Hope that helps.

Hi,

I'm looking at adding my site to a directory. It's highly relevant to my industry and has relatively good PA/DA.

The external links on the directory uses some PHP code like the following:

http://www.ThisDirectory.com/visit.php?i=3141635&url=http://www.ExternalDomain.com

Obviously the links works as a redirect but they do not show up in OSE. Would Google count this link as an inbound link?

Thanks,

I'm 100% confident that nothing breaks Google's guidelines. The only thing I can think of is that our anchor text is overly optimised. That's my worry.

Thanks again,

Brendan.

Thanks Robert,

You've managed to calm my nerves somewhat!

Now I'm off to take a look for those Chinese Gambling Sex Enhancer sites you speak of!

Thanks again,

Brendan.

Hi Robert,

Thanks for your reply. The reason I asked about the penalty is because the new links used keyword rich anchor text. Couldn't this be the proverbial straw that triggered the Google penalty? Obviously I take this in to consideration when link building and mix it up as much as possible but the vast majority of links to this page are internal and as such use 100% keyword matching anchor text.

For your info, the site is very well established in the market however we have made a lot of changes to the target page recently (URL, page title, alt text etc). I know there can be no categoric answer to this but you seem confident that I shouldn't panic and just sit tight. Could you tell me why you think I haven't been penalised? Are there any methods of testing for keyword specific penalisation?

Thanks again,

Hi all,

We've been working on improving our ranking for a specific keyword for the past couple of months. Progress has been steady if not spectacular (it's a very competitive keyword). Last week we obtained (not bought!) a site wide link from a partner (nothing fishy, they are business partners in the same industry) as well as a link each from a relevant resource site and a directory with good PA/DA. The anchor text used on the new links is keyword rich.

This week our rankings have fallen dramatically from page 2 to page 39 for our targeted page although other pages on our site still rank well for this keyword. The targeted page is still indexed by Google.

Could Google just be reassessing our ranking for this page and it will return to its previous rank or is it likely it has received a keyword specific penalty?

Thanks in advance.

You should include the rel canonical on both pages. Eg:

Page One
<title>Page one</title>

Page Two
<title>Page one</title>

Hope that helps,

No worries,

Sorry - my mistake - I didn't mean Open Site Explorer. You can find the 404 report in your campaign settings in your SEOMoz dashboard. Click Errors and Download as CSV top right. You can sort the CSV in Excel to group all of your 404's and easily find the referral page.

If for some reason you can't access the Errors page in your dashboard (still waiting for your report to finish etc), you can do pretty mush the same with software called Xenu Link Sleuth.

Cheers,

Hi there,

Yes - you should definitely worry about them. Get them fixed or add a 301 redirect to a relevant page.

In my experience, lots of 404's often stem from a small number of places such so it shouldn't be a case of having to manually fix every single link. If you fix the link in one place, you'll probably fix it in hundreds of others. Download a CSV of your broken links from Open Site Explorer. You'll easily be able to see the referring page and fix the links.

Hope that helps.

Hi EGOL,

Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, redirecting the subdomain to the root isn't an option due CMS limitations. We're looking at this long term.

For now I've added a link to the wedding stationery page using keyword anchor text from every page of the subdomain including the high PA pages.

Any more ideas? It seems crazy that the homepage ranks for this term given there are no optimised links to it and the keyword appears only as links to the pages we want to rank.

Thanks in advance.

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your response. The link to the "Create your own stationery" is correct as this is another of our targeted keywords.

We renamed the target page and gave it a new URL (with 301 redirects) which is why is has a PR of 0. It's actual PR will be around 3.

Your point about the subdomain is a good one so thanks for that.

Are there any more suggestions out there?

Thanks again,

Brendan.

Howdy,

I've read a number of posts on this issue and followed all the advice I could find. My issue is this: several of our targeted keywords have the wrong page ranking which results in a loss of conversion and high bounce rate.

I use the site:mydomain.com operator to see how the pages are ranking which I find really useful. One of our targeted keywords is 'wedding stationery' and the page which should rank is shop.confetti.co.uk/branch/wedding-stationery however this page ranks 3rd on our domain.

I've done the following:

• Optimised the correct page
• De-optimised the ranking pages
• Added links from the incorrectly ranking page to the page I want to rank using keyword anchor text
• Added internal links to the page I want to rank from high Page Authority pages using keyword anchor text

Here is a link to the SERP which shows the ranking for our domain for the 'wedding stationery' search term.

I made the changes a couple of weeks ago.

Any advice or explanations as to what is causing this would be greatly received.

Thanks in advance,

Brendan.