Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I thought I'd let everyone reading this thread that AJ Kohn just published a new post that directly addresses this very issue: http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/new-ways-to-track-keyword-rank

Dr. Pete, AJ's post echoes what you said in the comments here exactly. You said "1) Try to come up with a tangible metric, like average ranking across a set of keywords, or total organic search traffic, or total queries, etc. that you can show the boss is more connected to actual traffic and sales. If you can get him to accept a metric that's more on your terms, it'll be better for both of you."

AJ's suggestion "A rank index is also a great way to report to C Level executives. These folks understand index funds from an investment perspective. They get this approach and you can steer them away from peppering you with ‘I did this search today and we’re number 4 and I want to be number 1′ emails.

It becomes not about any one term but the aggregate rank of that index. That’s a better conversation to have in my opinion. A rank index keeps the conversation on how to move the business forward instead of moving a specific keyword up."

HIs post includes step-by-step instructions. Being the Excel moron that I am, I'm going to have to spend some time creating the suggested pivot tables, but hey, I have 6 months right?

The timing of this post was pretty spot on and I appreciate you all for giving me some direction on a situation that could have been not so productive.

You are very welcome JC. Don't give up on your rich snippets. I think it was Richard Baxter who recently said that the most common problem he's seeing with micro-data is people giving up too soon when they don't see Google picking it up and displaying it right away. It could take 6 months. Just hang in there, and by all means try the tool. I bet it works

I have heard that a good remedy is to invite @tomcritchlow to play a game of chess.

You are welcome. I hope all goes well.

I'm all in favor of the responsive design option. From an end-user standpoint this is much nicer because you know that no matter what device you are on you can visit the same destination but be served a version of the site that works best for your device--of-the-moment. I am interested to know what others, perhaps some folks with more technical backgrounds, think about it.

No, in my opinion, you don't need to start over. I've seen worse things happen and still have the site rank fairly quickly and well. Just adjust the settings so that google and other engines can now crawl the site and submit the sitemap via GWT. Other than a temporary bump in the road, I don't think it's going to have a long-term impact on your SEO.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Another thing to consider is what kind of businesses this "FollowMe" site sells their services to. It seems to me they are willing to sell to anyone. That means they might end up posting videos from one of your client's competitors along with their's. That's not a good scenario at all. They'd be much better off cultivating their own branded YouTube channel.

Hi Laurean,

Wow! Gross YouTube Spam, definitely.   As they say "If something seems too good to be true...." - A million views and no comments? It makes me wonder how much they are charging for their services and how much they are paying some poor schmuck to sit their and click "view video." My advice to your client would be "Run away!"

Dana

Hi Chris,

This is very unfortunate and I am sorry you are going through it. I would use Google's disavow tool and also forward them the correspondence that's taken place. Whether they do anything about it would be doubtful I think. But I do think they need to be made aware of what the ripple effect is from certain algorithm changes. Whatever you do, don't pay this guy to remove your links [IMHO] he is just trying to take you to the cleaners [literally] and I wouldn't trust him to get the job done. Google luck!

Dana

Hi Laurean,

OSE is short for Open Site Explorer.

David's answer is spot on. One thing he didn't mention is that it takes time for the goal javascripts to load. Many times, people who complete a transcation close the "Order Finished" page before the javascripts have a chance to load completely. Consequently, you are getting their conversion but it's not counting in the GA total.

Yes, I would say that is a very accurate assessment Gordon. For example,  "ready mix" and "ready mixed" are probably used interchangeably in the UK, however, in the USA the term "ready mixed" would be used much less often and instead we would maybe use "premix" or "premixed."

I do believe those kinds of differences would effect global search. Hope that helps!

Also, keep in mind that those Google numbers are estimates. They aren't hard and fast. They are based on data samplings and not complete data sets.

Dana

Hi JC, You're in luck. Google just rolled out a new tool, specifically for events, that helps you get them set up with Structured Data without having to go in and code your pages. It's called the Data Highlighter Tool. Here's a linke to the offical post announcing it: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/12/introducing-data-highlighter-for-event.html

Here is a quote: "Data Highlighter is a point-and-click tool that can be used by anyone authorized
for your site in Google Webmaster Tools. No changes to HTML code are required.
Instead, you just use your mouse to highlight and "tag" each key piece of data
on a typical event page of your website:"

Log in to your Google Webmaster Tools and click on "Structured Data" in the left Nav. - then click the subcategory "Data Highlighter" - Watch the brief video, then click "Start Highlighting."

I am hoping (for the love of God!) they add the same kind of simple tool to allow Webmasters to markup other types of data like product videos and reviews.

I hope this helps you out a little. Given that this tool is specifically designed for sites with events, it should be a perfect fit!

Dana

Hi Robert,

First let me say that I think this is the best keyword ever! I've never heard of a Quaich and considering half my heritage is Scottish I definitely learned something new today.

Okay, for the matter at hand. Just for grins, try changing your title to "Quaich Shop | Free Delivery | kiltmakers.co.uk" - Why? Your current title has "stop" words in it (i.e. "and" "the" "with" etc.) and  "Quaich Store" or "Quaich Shop" is a completely accurate description of what your page is about.

The only other suggestion I have for on-page optimization is that your article is pretty short, and basically repeats, in a substantially similar way, other information that is already on the Web about the Quaich. Write something longer, more interesting, maybe even funny (are there any Quaich jokes? lol). For such an unsually item (I'd never heard of it before and couldn't even begin to pronounce it) I'd think you could write an awesome article that doesn't just repeat other stuff that's out there.

Then see what happens.

Hope that helps!

Dana

I think that's a great suggestion Pete. Fortunately, diplomacy is one of my strengths, so if I approach it right I think it will work. I really like the idea of showing how many terms we are beating them at now and then working to improve that. That's realistic, measurable and best of all attainable. It also gives a nod to the vanity element that is in play here.

I think the hard part is the "moving competitor." One week the CEO will be complaining that we don't beat Competitor X, Y Z  so I start tracking them and then he comes in and says now he wants to beat competitors A, B, C and this group will have very little in common with X,Y, Z or even us in some cases. That's the case with Competitor X. They aren't even technically a competitor. The moving target thing drives me nuts. Define your business,define your real competitors (not who you'd like them to be) and then I can set solid SEM goals that will benefit the business goals.

I know, I know....I'm preaching to the choir!  Wish me luck guys. I'll let you know how it goes. If you see my resume show up in your mail, you'll know it may not have gone well

Matt, This was a great response. I especially like that you didn't stop at just offering links but you offered a complete answer in addition to those. That's something that makes this forum great.

True EGOL. I think the real irony in this particular instance is that "Competitor X" doesn't even consider us to be their competition. Sure we have some crossover in our product lines, but our core customers are completely different people, not even in the same industries. He just wants to "beat" them because he knows they are located close by (they are in Tacoma, we are in Olympia). I'm 100% certain that whatever link-building strategies they are or aren't using are not done out of a desire to compete with us. I don't think we're even on their radar.

Our toughest competitors are the big guys like Sweetwater, Musician's Friend and Guitar Center. They have budgets we can only dream of. Most of our "real" competitors (companies aboutthe same size, catering to a similar customer base) don't outrank us. We actually do quite well against them. Unless the goal is to move out of our niche (we target the church market) and go mainstream (with a similar online budget as a company like Sweetwater), I just don't think trying to "beat" this particular competitor is an effective apprach.

Thanks EGOL for your wonderful an insightful comments. Fortunately, I am very comfortable asking questions and I think he and I could have a good discussion. There is only one inhibitor and I do believe, as Dr. Pete mentions below, that vanity or ego definitely come into play.

I really like how you separate out items by things that effect the bottom line and things that reduce risk to our rankings. I like that angle and I think he can understand that.

My initial response to his request was this:

"Thanks [name removed]. Just for clarification, can you define what it will mean to beat [Competitor X]? Outrank them for every keyword?  I don’t think that’s realistic. Beat them in links? Adding 540,000 links in 6 months isn’t a realistic goal either. Are we wanting to beat them for selected keywords? If so, which ones? I have a list of about 754
keywords I’ve been tracking against competitors since last March, including
specifically [keyword A], [Competitor B], [keyword C] and a lot [250 or so] of media
terms [I’m sure we already beat Competitor X on those].  If I remove the media
terms from tracking I would have room for many more keywords that perhaps are
more relevant to competition between us and Competitor X. Would you like me to take
those media terms out and replace them with keywords common to both Competitor and Us? If there are specific keywords that you would like me to target that
aren’t already on the attached list, can you send me those so I can add them?
The spreadsheet also includes our current ranking for the terms [last updated 1/3,
next crawl is tomorrow 1/10.

I have been tracking these
competitors in SEOMoz Pro tools: [Competitor A],  [Competitor B] and
[Competitor C] because those were the top competitors you identified earlier this year  I only have room to track 3. Would you
like me to take out one and replace them with [Competitor X]? Let me know.

I love a challenge, but I need a clearer definition of the end goal and what would be considered a success.
Thanks!"

It was in response to this email that he stated that he wanted to "beat" competitor X on Page Authority (PageRank).

I think this fixation on specific keyword tracking is not productive. Randomly choosing a broad keyword like "shure microphones" and typing it into Google and being upset if we aren't on the first two pages is illogical to me. If that term brings in poorly qualified traffic and doesn't result in any revenue, then who cares if we don't rank for it. I'd rather rank for a really ugly misspelling that produces measurable results in line with our business goals. But, as I commented below, that's not quite as sexy as ranking for a big, shiny vanity keyword.

Thanks Dr. Pete. This is great advice. You hit the nail on the head with your phrase "vanity metric." That's really all it is.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, I succeed at raising the PR from 3 to 5, but sales tank, how does that get us closer ot our ultimate business goals? It doesn't. But hey, the boss will have his PR5.

I just think this fixation on vanity metrics and vanity keywords is not productive. I just created a conversion optimization strategy and proposal that could raise sales by $440,000 a year. I did solid research and rock solid numbers. The technical problems we've fixed so far have helped increase traffic. Organic traffic is up 50% year over year since they brought me on, but conversion rate is down 37%. This just seems like a no brainer to me....but it's not very sexy I guess, because it doesn't involve randonly punching in briad keywords into Google and seeing who we "beat" or who beats us.

I'm going to have to think on this and frame a very diplomatic approach to a path that I think will be productive and positively impact our real business goals.

Hi all. I am asking this question to purposefully provoke a discussion. The CEO of the company where I am the in-house SEO sent me a directive this morning. The directive is to take our Website from a PR3 site to a PR5....in 6 months.

Now, I know Page Rank is a bit of a deprecated concept, but I'm sure you would agree that "Authority" is still crucial to ranking well.

When he first sent me the directive it was worded like this "I want a plan in place with the goal being to "beat" a specific competitor in 6 months." When I prodded him to define "beat," i.e. did he mean "outrank" for every keyword, he answered that he wanted our site to have the same "Authority" that this particular competitor has.

So I am left pondering this question: Is it possible for SEO to increase the authority of a page? Or does "Authority" come from #RCS?

The second part of this question is what would you do if you were in my shoes? I have been devoting huge amounts of time on technical SEO because the Website is a mess. Because I've dedicated so much time to technical issues, link-earning has taken a back seat. In my mind, why would anyone want to link to a crappy site that has serious technical issues (slow load times, no persistent cart, lots of 404s, etc)? Shouldn't we make the site awesome before trying to get people to link to us?

Given this directive to improve our site's "Authority" - would you scrap the technical SEO and go whole hog into a link-earning binge, or would you hunker down and pound away at the technical issues? Which one would you do first if you couldn't do both at the same time?

Comments, thoughts and insights would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Mike,

Sorry to hear about your troubles. I can relate. Not the company where I'm at, but the company before that chose to go black hat and continues to do so. Just glad I'm not there for the inevitable fall.

Question, have you monitored the source code of all of your pages? I encourage you to audit the source code of every page on your site, just to make sure you haven't been hacked. Look for long lists of links that have been commented out.

One of the sites I did SEO for many years ago was hacked and then the hackers (most likely black hat SEOs) then built link campaigns into our site. It took years to get rid of those irrelevant links. It's a really old tactic but I'm sure there could still be people engaging in this kind of thing. This might not be it at all, just thought I'd suggest you check out your pages.

Good luck!

Dana

Well, I may have answered my own question

I found an SEOMoz forum post by Ruchard Baxter (of course!) - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/schemaorg-a-new-approach-to-structured-data-for-seo

It appears Schema.org is the way to go....I wish Schema.org hadn't referenced GoodRelations because I feel they sent me hopping down a bunny trail of the "old ways,"

Still, any insights, ideas or experiences any of you have had with structured data markup on large e-commerce sites would be very helpful and interesting to me.

I am trying to implement Structured Data markup on a large e-commerce site that has ancient code and is not on any standard e-commerce platform. It is a Webstore we self-host that was developed for us and heavily customized.

What's worse is that I don't have access to the source code. I have to somehow instruct our IT Director how and where to place everything. So I'm going to need to be meticulously specific.

As I began wading through our code and determining where to insert code as instructed by Schema.org I ran across this on one of their pages:

"This class contains derivatives of properties from the GoodRelations Vocabulary for E-Commerce, created by Martin Hepp. GoodRelations is a data model for sharing e-commerce data on the Web that can be expressed in a variety of syntaxes, including RDFa and HTML5 Microdata. More information about GoodRelations can be found at http://purl.org/goodrelations/."

I went to check it out and it appears that this could be a great resource as it has a snippet generator and several "cookbooks" for adding micro data to our site. Here's a link to their snippet generator:

http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/grsnippetgen/

However, with a catalog of 5,000 SKUs, needless to say we aren't going to plug in our products into this generator one-by one.

Has anyone here successfully used GoodRelations to help them implement micro data into a large E-commerce site that isn't a standard platform (not Magento, WP, Joomla or Volusion) ??

I would be very greatful to anyone who can share their experiences and or make suggestions on how we might best proceed. Thanks!

Dana

There's no bullet proof hard and fast way to do this, but this is how I approach this problem. I use Google's Keyword tool to give me a base "ballpark" CPC. Then, I calculate what my average profit will be from an average conversion. For example, say my profit from a $100 sale is $50. Say, for example I'm going to count on a 2% conversion rate for my ad, and Google says the average CPC for my term is $2.00. This means that for every $200 in my ad spend (100 clicks) I should get 2 conversions. That would mean I am only breaking even, not really making any profit on the sale at all. That being the case, the only way to be profitable in this case would be to improve my conversion rate significantly and also work to lower my cost per click, perhaps by improving my ad's quality score. You need to determine what your profit goals are from the campaign because this is going to greatly influence your target CPC. If you are using the ad as a customer acquisition tool, it might not be so bad to take a loss on the transaction if you gain a customer for life.

One other place to compare CPC costs is in SEMRush. This can give you a ballpark idea of what competitors are paying per click, but as with Google, these are averages based across broad data sets that you can't see, so you really need to take them with a grain of salt.

Start with your ballpark figure and your sales goals in hand and tweak the ad and bids until you hit your target. In my experience, this can take as little as a week and as much as 3 months, so you need to have patience. All new campaigns, by sheer virtue that they have no history are going to cost you more money at first. Once your quality score improves and stabilizes, your costs should come down.

I hope this helps!

Dana

My advice would be to only change the title tags in this particular instance if the content of the page was also changing to reflect that the season is over and playoffs have started. Otherwise, if the content of the page hasn't changed at all and you are happy with your rankings, leave them alone. I'd throw in the caveat that if any of them just need basic improvement (i.e. they are too long and being truncated or they aren't well-written), then of course improving those is always a good idea.

Hope that's helpful.

Dana

Hi Santiago,

The best way to resolve this problem is to use a rel="canonical" tag in your source code section. It would look something like this:

It will take some time for Google to recognize that the tag is in place. So you will have to be a little patient for GWT to pick up on the fact that the tag is there. Additionally, you could submit the default URL in GWT to have that URL removed from Google's index, but I would run it through OSE first to see if it has any significant inbound links and if it does it may be best to leave that alone. Also, you should know that even if Google doesn't index the page it could still identify it as having a duplicate content issue.

I hope that's a little helpful!

Dana

You are very welcome.

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

Hi Vladokan,

I hope I am understanding your question correctly. It sounds like you are wanting something that will show you what citations you already have, which ones you are missing and perhaps even which ones are there but not quite complete. As it turns out, SEOMoz just acquired a company that can help you do just that. If you go to http://www.getlisted.org and put in your information you can find out what citations you already have, which ones you should have (but don't) and which ones you might have partially complete that should have more information.

I am not sure how well this works (if at all) for international sites, so am interested to know what you discover for your own site and what suggestions some other members here might have.

Dana

You are welcome Andrew. Yes, Mozcast is pretty nifty!

Mozcast indicates some fairly "hot" activity (or buzz about activity) in Google's algorithm on December 10th. That doesn't mean there was an update and it doesn't mean there wasn't. Most of Google's updates aren't ever announced (They do hundreds every year). It could be that you suffered from one or the other or both, but the short of it is, you are on the right track to simply making a better site, period.

IMHO, it doesn't matter which one it was. What matters is that you are doing all the right things to making your site better. I think that's the true essence of SEO. Knowing what the algo updates are and what they address is interesting, but if you are taking care of some real SEO issues, like structured data, removing duplicate content, writing better content and earning great links and yes, important house-keeping issues like addressing your 404 errors properly, algorithms can come and go and unless you try again to take a backroad and easier path to success, you should come out just fine. #RCS will help make your site algo-proof Glad to hear you are back!

Dana

Yes. I totally agree with Darin. There isn't a duplicate content penalty, per se, and the tools he listed are quite good suggestions as well.

IMHO, even if the HTML is different you could have duplicate content if the H1 or paragraph text is substantially similar. However, is this automatically penalized? No. Syndication of content can be quite prevalent on the Web. For example the AP breaks a news story and posts it online and it is subsequently picked up by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Wherever the content appeared first, particularly if it has a canonical tag in place, that source will be credited with having the original content. The other sites aren't going to be penalized, but they aren't going to benefit from it either.

Similar things happen on large e-commerce sites all the time. For example, 100's of e-commerce stores sell lightbulbs. Those descriptions are most certainly "substantially similar." It'd be kind of strange if they weren't. They aren't penalized for that.

I hope this is helpful! It is always good to set up a Google Alert for any great pieces of content you do write, just so you can be aware of who might be copying your stuff! (Tynt.com can also be very useful for this).

Good luck!

Dana

Hi Zora,

This best way to do this is to grab a random section of text from the page and go to Google, then paste that section of text in the search bar inside "quotes."  For example, from your question above, I could search:

"SEOMoz's crawler identifies duplicate content within your own site, which is great. How can I compare my site"

you will see that the result in Google is a result to this page (once it's been indexed, which hasn't happened quite yet) - Just be sure to put quotes around your snippet.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Hi Jarno,

Thanks so very much! I have to say I am really liking the A1 generator. How awesome of you to follow up. I really appreciate that. Yes, if you want to send me the complete sitemap via PM that would be awesome. I certainly hope I can return the favor Happy Holidays!

Dana

Yes, we definitely use XENU, but I think I like Screaming Frog a bit better (although our IT Director swears it's broken).

Hi Christopher,

Thanks for the update. Yes, I looked at it too and other than it not being "pretty" XML, the data seemed to be okay. The one thing the A! generator did that we couldn't do was assign the values for importance and frequency specific pages are modified. If that data is accurate, that's pretty cool. I'm just not sure, although it seems it did identify pages that are modified more frequently correctly. I have 30 days to play with the free trial, but so far I think I like it a lot.

Dana

While I don't think anyone can say for sure if one specific thing like this could result in lower ranking, IMHO a truncated title is not generally going to be the culprit of rankings drop. However, I do think a truncated title can significantly lower click-thru rate on your organic listings, which could be a factor in rankings (i.e. higher click-thru rate could equal higher rankings).

I always encourage the sites that I SEO to adhere to Google's character limitations and make the most out of the organic real estate Google gives you. It's your chance to get someone to come to your site. If the title/and or description is truncated, it has less chance of being compelling, or containing the information that makes someone want to click through and visit your pages.

Hope that's helpful!

Dana

Hi Irving,

Doesn't this seem like an instance where Googlbot is not adhering to the "no index, no follow" suggestion? What do you think of my comment below? Is that scenario a possibility in this case?

I ddisagree that this page is spammy. I don't think that the content is an issue. It is, after all, a wedding cake topper. Just my two cents

Thanks,
Dana

I believe this is happening because Google bot is interpreting these as two separate pages. Sure there's a canonical on one, so Googlebot might consider that one the source of the original content, however it's still seeing two pages and those pages do have identical Title and Meta Descriptions. In other words, just because there's a canonical tag doesn't pre-empt Google from identifying the duplicate content as a duplicate.

I know it seems counter-intuitive, but I am fairly certain this is the case. Interested to know what others have to say.

Dana

Hi Webious,

Please forgive me if this question is basic, but I have to ask before answering in more detail. Did you put either 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new ones or canonical tags on the new URLs (and remove them on the old - if they were there) in place?

Dana

Thanks Jenn!

I like your suggestion of having a status box with a link Paul.

Hi Jamo, I think there is a minor issue with Moz Q&A right now. My points in one place or the other have been quite off for the last 5-6 days. No Worries, they are tracking everything. I believe it is just a glitch and that once they get it fixed all will be well with the world

Hopefully someone from SEOMoz will also chime in on this question

Ciao,

Dana

Hi Scott,

The "Mon" icon means that a crawl is still in progress (by Roger Mozbot) and hasn't completed yet. Once in a while there can be glitches and the crawl will get stuck, but usually it resolves just fine. Regarding your second question, what did you use to track your rankings prior to SEOMoz or have you been tracking theme here all along? Just curious to know if you are seeing rankings drop here or if you are comparing the rankings you see here to another tool you've used somewhere else. Cheers!

Dana

The best stuff on structured data markup that I've watched/read recently is posts by Richard Baxter. Here are some links. The last link is a Mozinar in here that I attended too:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-lowdown-on-structured-data-and-schemaorg-your-questions-answered

http://seogadget.com/the-future-of-seo-structured-markup/

http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/microformats-real-life-use-cases

Richard Baxter is a genius...just sayin'!

Dana

Hi Bob,

Having worked with both very large and very small e-commerce sites, I'd recommend in this particular case (especially if these 300 products are going to be broken into 20 categories), that it would be best to just keep the Nav as flat as possible and yes, avoid pagination and put all the products onto one page. Scrolling is faster then the latency of moving from one page of category results to another. It simplifies everything for users (and search engines too!).

Good luck!

Dana

P.S. When I say "put all the products onto one page," lol I did not mean that literally. I meant once the products are in their respective categories, leave the category pages so that all the products in that particular category are available on that one page.