Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I'm not sure that they count because their really an airline, but they do a lot of online selling and that's Southwest Airlines. Their blog is one of the best http://www.blogsouthwest.com/  - I just think it's a great model for a business blog. I think they are getting upwards of 200K visitors a month too, pretty amazing.

Hi Sasank,

There are occasionally issues. If you notice problems, or if your historical reports aren't updating properly, I suggest you do a couple of things:

1. Wait a day or two before trying to export your historical rankings reports. For some reason, the historical reports don't always update when the rankings reports do.
2. If #1 doesn't work, email SEOMoz's helpdesk, Every time I've face a similar issue they've been able to re-queue my reports and get them to run properly.

Hope this helps a little,

Dana

I think reciprocal links to related industries can be perfectly natural. In some cases they can even be really helpful to your visitors. A perfect example is Pink Jeep Tours Sedona (I don't do SEO for them), they have a page for Local Area Info where they link to lots of different hotels, area attractions, etc. Almost ever one of those local attractions link right back to Pink Jeep Tours, and they are all followed links going both ways.

This all seems perfectly natural because they are helping their visitors find other fun things to do. In cases like these, I think the reciprocating links are very valuable because they are all closely related (by industry) and helping to increase each other's credibility.

Regarding your question about nofollow/no index. In my opinion, no that wouldn't be considered black hat at all. SEOMoz does it, for example, in Q & A profile pages for all the user's links, until they hit "Journeyman" level, when they remove one "no follow."

I think the no follow/no index is your own personal choice. Just keep in mind that Googlebot may decide to follow the links and/or index the page anyway. Search engines only view those as "suggestions."

Hope that's helpful and good luck.

Hi again,

Again I want to be sure I am understanding the question. Are you asking how to determine which citations are the most valuable and whether or not the value of those citations is determined by Google or by the SEO community? If so, I would answer that neither Google nor the SEO community determines which citations are the most valuable.I would say it's determined by the followers and subscribers of any particular source. For example, Yelp is extremely popular and many people go to Yelp to read restaurant reviews, find restaurants based on type of food, etc. Because so many people visit and use  Yelp, Google then looks upon a citation in Yelp as pretty necessary for certain types of businesses. If you are a restaurant and you have no presence in Yelp, it could cause Google to view your restaurant as less of an authoritative business.

That's a pretty long-winded answer on my part, lol. I hope it helps a little. Again, I might be misunderstanding your question so I apologize if my answer isn't helpful. Hopefully I am helping a little.

Dana

Great question Ricky. I deal with this all the time. It really depends on the publication. The first thing I would do is browse around a bunch of their other articles and see if you can find an example of where they linked to a source or a source's company website. Get in contact with the writer/editor and find out if they have a policy against linking or if perhaps it was just an oversight. The print world still doesn't necessarily think "on line," so sometimes they just need to be reminded that a link can be really helpful to their readers who want to find out more about the people, places and things mentioned in the article.

Almost every time I've ever gone back to a publication and asked for a link in context, they've been more than happy to comply. I did have one hold out, that flat out said "no." The person saying no was not a writer, or an editor, but the VP of sales. I chalked it up to her just not wanting to be bothered with it, so I got on LinkedIn, found out who the online editor was, sent them a connection request (they also turned out to be the SEO). I asked them to include a link in that very same article, and Voila! We got the link.

My advice is just to be very gracious and appreciative in your tone. The fact that you have a positive mention at all is awesome. I usually say something like " We have been big fans of your publication for years [only say that if it's true!] and it was so nice of you to mention us in this recent article. We thought it might be helpful to your readers if you included a hyperlink from our name to our site, Would you be kind enough to add that? We'd love to reference your write up in our blog."....or any variation. The more genuine you are, the better off you'll be. If you can, pick up the phone and call them. They have a way harder time saying no via phone.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Funny you should ask because I just found an awesome one today. I actually sent around to my team and recommended it to them earlier this morning: http://www.getelastic.com/

I think it would be great if there was a way to follow a particular Q & A thread without having to post a comment. There are so many great topics and discussions in here and sometimes I lose track of some that I'd like to continue following as people post, without having to post in the thread myself.

Have you guys  (Mozzers) ever considered adding a "Follow this thread on Twitter" or "Follow this thread by email" function?

Or is there already a way to do this (without posting), that I just haven't found?

Hi tagbiomed,

I want to help, but I first want to clarify something. In your post, you said  "it dropped from the page 1 top ranking it had for years on that primary keyword to page 13."

Did you mean that your page dropped from #1 to #13 spots in the SERPS, or from page 1 to page 13 in the SERPs? There's a big difference between those two things and I just wanted to clarify.

Thanks!

Dana

You are very welcome.

I've seen this problem rear its ugly head in a number of instances that cause various, interesting problems. For example, there are two major Audio Video brands: Allen & Heath and K & M Stands that both feature ampersands in their branding. The problem we've had with it is from a database perspective. Ampersands just cause all kinds of problems. Still, these brands have been around a long time.

Think "M&Ms" - no one really searches "M and M" [unless it's "Eminem" ]  - So, I think it's a matter of choosing one for branding purposes and sticking to it. In your case, with a law firm, searchers are really searching proper names (I'm thinking). So if I were to search for a string of last names, I might be more likely to use "and" instead of "&" - Until the "&" becomes part of the branding, I think Google is probably going to defer to the "and" version. Even if the law firm was huge, I'm not sure it would ever reach that level of brand recognition. Some successful brands with ampersands [Just for fun!]:

H&M, A&W Rootbeer, A&P Grocers, Proctor & Gamble, B&H Photo, Bang & Olufson, AT&T, Ben&Jerry's, Arm&Hammer, Boys&Girls Clubs of America, A&M Records, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Johnson & Johnson, H&R Block, Ernst&Young, Fod&Wine, Black&Decker

(Thanks to Sporcle, but they left M&Ms off their list! How can that be?) Thanks for the fun question

Hi! I thought I recognized this thread Yes, I am the culprit of the "hub page" suggestion.

I call a page a "hub page" if it functions like the center of a wheel with a bunch of spokes attached to it. Okay, so for example, you have a store selling sweaters. All of your seaters have a specific part number based on size, color and style. You have some choices. You could create a separate page for every part number. However, this quickly becomes a daunting task for you, and an impossible site to navigate for your customers because you could have 200 separate product pages all for the same sweater, with the only difference being size and color.

Instead, you could create a "parent" page that is just for this one particular style of sweater. You create "children" pages for all the possible sizes and colors. You then allow your customer to select size and color either via dropdown menus, charts or whatever seems best for a particular product. You set all these product pages as either "children" of the parent product or attach their part number to specific options, so that when that option is chosen that part number goes in the cart. The customer never actually sees an individual product page for that color and size of sweater, it simply exists in the back end as a means of allowing your customer to pick specific items from your inventory.

So, you see, because you created (technically) separate product pages, you technically have a whole bunch of URLs but all circling around or connected to the parent page. The individual part number "pages" are like spokes on a wheel connected to a parent "hub" page.

Now, all that being said...a hub page on a content site can follow the same principle, however for completely different reasons. This even happens in e-commerce. For example, say you sell clothing. On your site, you also have size charts. From every clothing page you link to your size chart page. In that case your size chart page becomes a "hub." Hub pages tend to outrank other pages because you are pointing to them with lots of your pages, indicating to both visitors and search engines that they are somehow especially significant.

So, on the one hand a hub page can be used for online merchandising, on the other it can be used as an important reference point for visitors. The simplest version of a hub page would probably be a main category page on a Website.

This is really my own viewpoint. I have had extremely good results ranking well for hub pages. I am interested to know what others think and how they explain the concept.

Hah! I knew there was one. Just couldn't find it. Thanks Adam (as my father would say "It's a good thing it wasn't a snake!....)

There are times when rel=publisher is more approrpiate than rel=author, a product page on an e-commerce site for example. Will a site be penalized for establishing authorship on every page? Absolutely not. In fact, I think that is what Google is intending for people to do.

The problem right now is there is such mass confusion over rel=author and rel=publisher andhow to use them properly, that right now, you see lots of sites that should be using rel=publisher using rel=author instead. Because Google has done such a poor job of articulating how and where to implement these things, I can't imagine them penalizing sites for using one when they should be using the other. Although, I suppose strange things have happened.

I do think that the intention with authorship and also structured data markup is that Webmaster implement all the appropriate tags and markup on every page of their site.

Hope that's helpful!

Dana

Hi Christopher,

Yes, this is a perfect example of what I was talking about. Matt Cutts at no point in this video says that PR has no value. In fact, he says exactly the opposite. He says:

"There are a lot of SEOs and people in search who look at the PageRank toolbar, but there are a ton of regular users as well. You would be really surprised at how many just regular people have the Google toolbar and use PageRank as a way to figure out ihow reputable something is....We get into our tunnel vision and think no one else uses the PageRank toolbar, but the fact is a lot of people do."

He goes on to say that Chrome doesn't have a PageRank toolbar and IE10 won't allow toolbars or add-ins of any kind. He talks about how, if IE10 catches on, the PageRank toolbar might not be used by as many people.

He then reiterates: "A lot of people do use it. I believe we will continue to support those people while they use the Google toolbar...but it looks like the writing's on the wall that with IE 10 the Google Toolbar won't be allowed any more on IE 10 in Windows, so we'll see how things develop in the future."

So you see, his video is about the Google Toolbar. He never even addresses PageRank, aside from the fact that it is something in the Google Toolbar. He certainly acknowledges that people use it and that Google continues to support it.  In no way did he ever say or even imply that PageRank wasn't a valid way to determine the trustworthiness of a site. In fact, he said just the opposite.

What are your thoughts?

Dana

I agree completely with Simon. We too have attempted to syndicate content and had the sites we submitted to then outrank us with our own content. The fact is, if you submit your content to a site that has higher authority than you, chances are they will rank for the content, not you, even if you have canonical tags and authorship in place and even if you publish the content on your site first. We've seen this happen not just with content like articles, we've seen it happen with products (i.e. if we have the same products for sale on our site, Amazon and eBay, Amazon and eBay will outrank us for those same products), and we've certainly seen it with videos. Post the same video on your site and YouTube and YouTube will rank for the video, not your site.

This isn't to say nothing should ever leave your site or get posted externally. If your business or someone at your business wins an award or does something positively newsworthy, reaching out to a reporter or blog editor with a story is a great way to raise the brand awareness you seek and obtain valuable referral traffic from the exposure.

The scenario at my company is almost identical to yours. The other difficulty I face (and I'm sure you and Simon have seen this too as in-house SEOs) is one of vanity. Stakeholders can get very caught up in the number of views their videos are getting on YouTube, or the number of eyeballs an article will get if it's syndicated versus just placed on their own site. Convincing them that being the sole location of that original content is sometimes a hard sell. I think the best way to do that is to produce a couple of pieces of great content and convince them not to distribute those around, then track how well that content gets positioned in the SERPs. If you can show them some real examples of the strategy being successful on a small scale, they'll be more apt to allow you to continue down that path. Hope that's helpful!

Hi Kenji, First and foremost, congrats on getting the interview!

As far as link building for a larger company, the first thing I would tell them is that you want to do a complete audit of existing inbound links, you versus competitors. From this, you will be able to identify some missed opportunities (i.e. low-hanging fruit that you could immediately harvest). You'll also be able to identify opportunities based on who's linking to competitors. For example, we had a competitor who had an inbound link from Columbia University. When I researched the link I found out it was from a professor who linked to our competitor (and several others) as a resource for his students. My company really belonged on that list. I wrote to the professor and told him that I thought we would make a good addition to his resource list and, simple as that, he added us and we got and inbound link from Columbia University.

In your interview, I would say that you will make an organized effort to be connected to the activities being performed by other departments that might result in linking opportunities. An example might be, if a department is reaching out into the community and mentoring a group of students, reaching out to them and asking when and where their work might be published online and just politely request an link back as a courtesy...They will say yes.  The same goes for charity involvement. A company of 5,000 employees without question probably does a whole lot of #RCS. Find out where they are involved in the community and look for possible linking opportunities (i.e. donor pages on charity websites).

I bet you will cover so many existing "missed" opportunities that you'll be busy for a long time chasing them all down.

I hope this helps and GOOD LUCK!

Dana

If you haven't seen it already, watch his full MozCon 2012 video here for free: http://moz.com/blog/2012-mozcon-videos-are-here  It's the second big image link on the page. It's priceless.

Hi Pedram,

Has it dropped out of it's position recently? I have seen occasional volatility like this. If you know your page is solid and your content is solid, the best thing you can do is be patient and wait. Many times I have seen a well ranked term plummet down and disappear for a few days or weeks and then pop right back up to where it was before. The other thing to evaluate is how many conversions and how much revenue was being generated by that keyword. The only reason I suggest this is because I am constantly getting emails from one stakeholder asking "why aren't we ranking for keyword x?" When, in fact, "keyword x" is not really a valuable term for us, but is more of a vanity term. If that's the case, you'll need solid data and your "educational hat" to go to your stakeholders and explain to them why they shouldn't get fixated on certain terms.

How are your rankings doing when viewed as a whole, across the board? If you haven't already, I would highly recommend building a ranking index. AJ Kohn wrote a great blog post that will walk you through how to do it. Since I built these about 6 months ago, I haven't had to respond to very many "Why aren't we ranking for Keyword X" emails. Hope this helps!

Dana

I am curious to know what tools you are using to check your PageRank. Google very rarely updates PageRank. I think at most it's maybe 3 times a year. In my own experience it's been less often than that. So, the reason I ask is that PageRank is not usually changing as much as in the example you provided because Google simply doesn't update it that often.

There may be people here who know better than me how often this is done and how often it's been updated in the last year, like Dr. Pete Meyers.

I would check these things out before jumping to any conclusions about your new site's PageRank.

Cheers,

Dana

Yes, I noticed this too. The workaround doesn't seem to help in my case as I already had images turned off. Not sure what to make of that?

Fun idea Jesse...although to be perfectly modern SEOs shouldn't we call it #possem ?

I understand why blog comments might be "nofollow" - because it preserves the page authority of the post. However, I don't understand why one would want to "noindex" blog comments. It seems to me that all that UGC, if indexed, would just make the page it resides on far more valuable.

Is my view of that skewed? Am I missing something? Thanks! (and sorry to answer your question with a question)

If it were me I would nofollow the comments but index the content of the comments.

Hi Bob,

I use Screaming Frog for this. If you don't already have it, it's $99 very well spent. Once your site is crawled it's very easy to pull the 404s into an Excel spreadsheet and deal with them from there.

Hope that helps!

Dana

I think the best source I've come across about truly 'demystifying" structured data is Richard Baxter. He did a really great Mozinar a few months ago that had some great information and "how-to's" with real-life examples: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/microformats-real-life-use-cases

He also wrote a great blog post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/schemaorg-a-new-approach-to-structured-data-for-seo

and I think there's an even more recent blog post from Richard on the subject that I can't seem to find at the moment. Perhaps someone here can point us in the right direction?

I would paraphrase some of what Richard has to say, but I'm still mystified and struggling with how to markup my site content properly, so I'd better let Richard do the talking

Dana

You are welcome. Yes, you know the same is true when evaluating site performance in Google Analytics. We were recently researching what day of the week and time of day would be best for email sends. If we'd just chosen the day and time with the most revenue, it would have been totally skewed by one $5,000 sale that came in on an normally slow day at an even slower time. You have to mix your analysis with common sense. An algorithmic "Conversion Optimizer" isn't capable of inserting the "common sense" part of the equation...at least not yet!

I know that the number of 301-redirects can sometimes raise concerns about site speed. However, 1,000 is really not that many. Large e-commerce sites can have 10,000 301s, or even more. Depending on how the 301 files is handled even this large number can be handled in ways that have very little impact on site speed or page load times.

I think the number in your vase is nothing to worry about.

I do think that deleting and 301 redirects is the best way to go for anything that's remotely relevant. For those that aren't, create a custom 404 page and let them 404. Eventually they will drop out of the index. If they don't, you could still file a remove URL request in Google Webmaster Tools.

Hope this helps and good luck!

There isn't a way to do this in Moz Pro Tools, but I believe there is a way to do this in some of the upgraded (paid) subscriptions for SEMRush. I think even there, there is a limit to how far you can go back.

If you changed any of your URLs when you went through your site redesign, you may just need to audit old links, new links and your 301 redirects to make sure all of them are functioning as expected.

Ultimately, the rankings that you had are really less important than what your traffic is telling you. It could be that you inadvertently took down some highly linked and highly visited pages, and, regardless of rankings, that's hurting you now. One thing you can do is backtrack in Google Analytics and look to see if you had specific pages that were producing a lot of traffic before that aren't now. That will help you zone in on the problem and fix it.

I think perhaps the intention was that they didn't want these pages to be indexed. This makes sense for certain things/links from a homepage, like "My Shopping Cart." But honestly it looks like a lame attempt at Pagerank sculpting, which Google has been wise to for many years. The two "nofollow" links that concern me the most are the "Site Map" link and the link to their blog. Why in God's good name wouldn't you want a bot to follow links leading to your sitemap and blog. That's nonsensical.

Regarding the other "nofollow" attributes, those aren't necessary either. Get rid of them all. Matt Cutts has said on several occasions that he sees no practical reason why any Web site would want to "nofollow" any internal page. Here's a video where he says that:   http://youtu.be/86GHCVRReJs

So, bottom line, "If it's a link within your site to another page within your site, I would leave the 'nofollow' off."

There you have it. I hope that helps!

Dana

You asked: "Would the users come to my site just looking for information or would they actually think of me for the service?"

The answer is (hopefully) yes and yes. You see, as a business you need to attract people who are at different stages of the buying cycle. I prefer the AIDAS model that qualifies visitors this way:

Attention

Inverstigation

Decision

Action

Satisfaction

As an e-Commerce business you absolutely have to have messaging that addresses every stage in that process.

To address your other question about content: Great content is valuable as long as the right people are able to find it.

What does that mean?

Great, specific information about individual products is going to be very valuable on the product pages. Content that compares one model or one brand to another could be very useful  on a blog, to address visitors who are in the Investigation stage of buying.

Blogging content is going to be a great way to establish yourselves as anauthority.

Writing aritcles could mean press releases, new product reviews etc. Again these address people at Attention or Inverstigation stages of the buying process. In business, that's called the top of the funnel. It is every bit as important as the middle (decision) or bottom (Action and Satisfaction) part of the funnel.

Does this help a little? I hope so.

Dana

Hi Tim,CRO is high on the "to do" list for us in 2013 and I recently had to put together a proposal for a budget. Here are some of the sources I used to help put my proposal together:http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/excellent-analytics-tip-7-the-adorable-site-abandonment-rate-metric/http://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate http://www.houseofkaizen.com/resources/calculators/bounce-rate-impacthttp://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/10/17/the-back-story-for-the-300-million-button/http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1691779/benchmarking-average-conversion-ratehttp://index.fireclick.com/fireindex.php?segment=6http://www.internetretailer.com/2011/09/13/conversion-boost-online-retailershttp://www.davechaffey.com/Internet-Marketing/C7-Service-Quality/Conversion-rates-E-commerce/http://www.thinkmetrics.com/benchmarks-for-websites.phphttp://www.marketingexperiments.com/blog/research-topics/ecommerce/e-commerce-landing-page-mistakes.html

http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2011/04/06/fundamental-guidelines-of-e-commerce-checkout-design/http://www.marketingexperiments.com/blog/marketing-insights/average-conversion-rates.htmlhttp://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1695493/declining-conversion-rateshttp://www.baynote.com/2011/07/forrester%E2%80%99s-top-five-e-commerce-trends-still-hold-true/Some of these might be more helfpul than others. It's a long list. If you've never read "The $300 million button" I'd recommend starting there just because it's very inspiring.Cheers,Dana

Take a look at the auto-suggest for simply "the best way to" -   "weed" is still in the picture. I was curious if I put in "related searches" what I would get...Apparently there are a lot of fat people with fleas who want to get high, predict the future and ask a girl to homecoming.

Hi Scott. I have never used Raven Tools and am just at the end of their 30 day free trial. I have always used SEOMoz rankings reports and SEO reports to give to my CEO (I am in-house). Honestly, he rarely looks at the rankings and is far more interested in the trend and sources of organic traffic and revenue. I appreciate where he's coming from because if the rankings look great but revenue stinks, then the rankings aren't really worth a hill of beans. I think it's much more valuable for me to identify opportunities and threats more than anything else.

Now that Raven Tools isn't going to have the Rank Tracker or SEMRush info (I was more disappointed about that part actually), are you reconsidering your Raven Tools subscription? Do you think it's still worth the money? The reason I ask is that my free trial ends on December 9th and I've already got approval to upgrade, but am not sure if I want to now. Thoughts?

I agree with Matt. 2013 is going to be all about 4 things (IMHO):

• Google+ and authorship
• Optimizing for the Knowledge Graph
• Structured data
• Mobile

And we'll all be peddling as fast as we can to get on top of these when, without a doubt, something completely new will come along that we haven't imagined yet ....That's what makes SEO endlessly fascinating!

Yes, well there are a couple of things to consider and test.

First and foremost, check your GWT code and make sure that nothing's change. Same with Google Analytics.

Have you changed platforms?

If not, I would say it's "Hoy Crap Batman" time and you need to start analyzing everything. What's your Pagespeed? Is your site online? If so, was it offline earlier in the week? (Maybe you weren't checking every minute) If your site is hosted by someone else, get on the phone and demand some answers.

I don't think you need to worry about losing your seller ratings. I believe those should be fine. Your campaigns may take a ding on their Quality Scores though, since the account you are moving them to will not have any history for those particular campaigns. I would recommend contacting someone from Google directly and ask them. Usually there is a real human being attached to your Adwords account to whom you can reach out and ask. Is the agency a Google Adwords Certified Partner? If so, I would think the changeover shouldn't be a problem, but I would ask before making the jump just to be sure.

Hope that helps a little!

Dana

Testing, testing, testing...just keep those SERP pages testing....RAWHIDE

Oh, here's the tune that goes with my lyrics:

Be patient it's the Blues Brothers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdR6MN2jKYs  Just subsitute the words "rolin' rollin' rollin'" with "testin'' testin' testin' "

Seriously, Google's testing all the time. I am sure the same thing is happening with Knowledge Graph and Structured Data as we all eagerly participate as guinea pigs in Google's tests.

One  thing's for sure...Google's SERPs are going to change a t light speed over the net 5 years.

Dana

It looks like a potential competitor already owns: miamiwaterfront.com

However: waterfrontmiami.com is available. 6,600 local monthly searches, but only medium competition. I would buy it.

I recommend Matt, Oleg and the guys/gals at http://melen.net/  Matt and Oleg are pro members here as well. (http://www.seomoz.org/users/profile/357534)  Hope that helps!

This is a great question and great example. The first thing I want to know is, what is your brand name? Do you have a brand name? I understand that "legal migration service in Cape Town" is what your business does, but is that the brand name as well? If not, and you do have a brand name, I'd go for the brand name, personally.

If you don't have a brand name yet, I would consider making "LMSCT" the brand name, and brand the hell out of it. Yes, and make it the URL too.

I wouldn't go for the EMD. That brings with it too much potential risk (IMHO) in terms of potential algortihm updates that are hurting EMDs and rewarding brands. Besides, the EMD is extremely long and hard to remember. Another thing to keep in mind is when and if you do paid advertising, that EMD is so long that it's most likely going to tap out the character limitations of a lot of ads, and take away room that you could have used for your marketing purposes.

That's my two cents. Interested to know what other people think!

Dana

Hi Angelita,

This just means that the Web page in question in the report is missing a Meta description tag. Here's a link to an article in Google Webmaster Tools that explains all about these tags: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Go to Page 6 in the guide for a good explanation of how to best use and implement Meta description tags.

I hope this helps!

Rui has given two good answers below. Cheers!

Given the way Alex describes the separate magazines, I am thinking they wouldn't like having the 301-redirects from a branding perspective. I like the idea of adding an attribution link to the original article. I have doubts about the "noindex" because I think that in many cases Google completely ignores this attribute. I'm not sure that's worth going through all the trouble of doing.

Have you tried putting the "duplicates" back to back in Open Site Explorer? I am really curious to know what that looks like.

I have experience with applying for the google Trusted Stores classification. You are not going to be able to achieve through eBay transactions. You are only going to be able to achieve it through your own storefront with your own brand.

That being said, would you do better in the SERPS with a Godle Trusted Stored icon? Yes as long as you are only looking at Paid Search Results. If You aren't bidding in Goole Adwords, then  no, absolutely not, no boost.

The other thing to consider about Google Trusted Stores is their minimum transaction levels. If you don't have at least 200 transactions in a month, you won't qualify for the program.

Depending on your sales volume, I'd recommend looking elsewhere to get a "boost" in the SERPs.

I agree with Jesse for the most part. I think the key is: what kind of content we are talking about? Adding tons of low-value, thin content pages to a site all at once (or even gradually) is probably going to diminish the authority of existing content. I do think that adding thousands of pages that have no page authority to a site that contains pages with a decent amount of authority could, theoretically, dilute the authority of the existing pages depending on site architecture, internal linking and the ratio of existing pages versus new pages. However, I would expect this to be only temporary, and if the new content is great quality, should be nothing to worry about long term.

Hi Chris,

Hah! What a coincidence. Okay, so I do have a specific siggestion pertaining to Volusion. Yes, you are correct in that when you are first setting up your store, if you write SEO friendly URLs (I believe they pull it from the "Product Name Short" field), Volusion automatically takes care of the redirect in that situation. However, if you then decide to change one of those, I believe you need to manually set up a redirect in the 301 redirects database section of the back end. This may even be true if you had default URLs, launched your store, got crawled and indexed and then updated to a SEO-friendly URL. (You may want to check with Volusion on that - but sometimes their tech support is hit or miss).

You may have already done this too, so again, if so, I apologize

Also, have you checked to see if Google might still be indexing the old URLs in addition to the new ones? If so, when you click on the old one, are you getting a 404, does it stay the same, or does it redirect? If it redirects, what is the canonical tag? When I was last on Volusion they hadn't implemented a good way to manage canonical tags either. Because of their template, the canonicals were all http://www.MY-STORE.com , which wasn't good. They may have improved that since I managed one of their stores, not sure.

Also, are the stats in your original question purely out of SEOMoz, or are they from Google Analytics? I find SEOMoz can occasionally fluctuate wildly if I change targeted keywords in a campaign.

Just some thoughts to hopefully help!

Dana

Hi Steve,

I believe this discrepancy could be happening because in order for a "goal" to be completed, the analytics script must complete load on the "Thank You" page. Sometimes a user will "x" out of a page before the script can completly loading, so that lead doesn't get counted as a completed goal. Similar discrepancies happen when viewing conversion stats in Adwords versus Google Analytics.

If the previous scenario is not the cause, it could be something in the setup of the goal that isn't attributing a goal properly. Is there anything "in common" about the visitors' paths for the ones that weren't counted? Perhaps investigate that to see if perhaps you've included some steps that maybe don't need to be there...or if your "required" step can somehow be bypassed but still lead to a conversion.

Hope that helps a little!

Dana

Yes. If you compare both URLs in open site explorer, it's pretty clear why the one outranks the other. You have many more inbound links to http://www.vipgoldrj.com/paginas/ensaios.html  I am attaching a screen shot to show you. Hope this helps!

Dana

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I totally agree with Moosa....I am guessing you also have limited resources. Maintaining two separate sites, one desktop and one mobile requires a lot of major time that most small businesses and small website owners just don't have. One version of your site that's managed via one CMS that is a responsive design is the way to go if you are short on time and resources...and let's face it...even if you are an enterprise corporation, you are still short on  on resources.

Hi Clinton,

I'm not a super-technical SEO, but it looks like maybe you have something going on in your htaccess file or robots.tct file that is telling google not to include any pages from  your site.

Have you changed anything in the backend settings recently?