Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

You are so welcome, and as I said, technical SEO is something I've been thrust into learning because of my current situation as an in-house SEO.

I think you may be on the right track, but there are other, very talented technical SEOs here who I would ask for a second on your decision. Perhaps Dr. Pete, Ian Lurie, or Everett Sizemore could chime in with a much more accurate response on the robots.txt

Good luck!

First off, welcome!

Second, I would say don't worry at all about your call to action button. Every eCommerce site has call to action buttons on every page (i.e. "Add to Cart"). The pages that happen after that don't matter to search engines with one caveat...just make sure you have a properly configured Robots.txt file.

Third. If all of your product pages are indeed trying to capitalize on the same key terms....yes, you have a duplicate content problem. Don't wait for a tool to tell you what you already know in your heart!

Take some time, and prioritize and start to re-write you product pages to use a wider variety of keywords (particularly long-tail) that better describe the products you offer.

I hope this helps!

I thought this was an interesting question. I have a lot of admiration for one particular guy who knows a lot about launching a Website before it's perfect. His company's motto is "Doing is better than perfect."

He's Mark Zuckerberg.

Yeah. I'd launch it and then make gosh darn sure you follow up and clean up after the explosion.

Howdie,

While I've gotten much better at technical SEO due to necessity over the last 4 years, I still don't consider it my "forte." That being said...Are you maintaining ownership of the old domain or have you sold it? If you still own the old domain, I dont see any reason why you can't 301-redirect individual pages from the old domain to the new domain. Moz.com just went through this scenario...quite successfully it seems. If you aren't maintaining ownership of the old domain, I think that was a mistake and agree with Lesley. Hold on for the ride because it's about to get ugly.

Sorry, I don't mean to be negative, but domain migrations are scary even for the best in the business. If there's any way in hell to do it, 301 your old pages to new "equivalent" pages on the new domain. Even if you do that, hold on for the ride. It will still most probably be ugly for a few months.

Good wishes and I hope all goes well!

Dana

I agree with Sheldon, and, just for perspective....try running http://www.google.com through the same w3c HTML validator. That should be an excellent illustration. A page with almost nothing on it, coded by the brilliant folks at Google still shows 23 errors and 4 warnings. I'd say not to obsess over this too much unless something is interfering with the rendering of the page or your page load speed.

Hope that helps!

Dana

I have several colleagues in the industry (and some fellow marketers) who have asked me where the best places are to look for and post SEO job opportunities. I personally like InBound.org and LinkedIn. Where do you recommend marketeers look for job opportunities?

D

Thanks Phil. Excellent suggestion. I hadn't thought of using the reference URL in OSE. That should work great.

Thanks Vadim. Yes, this Cloudflare post is exactly the one I was referencing in my question. As I mentioned, Ilya Gregorik posted a rebuttal to their experiment here: post in Google+

It seems to me that if a Google developer says TTFB absolutely does matter that this would take precedence over anything Cloudflare might say.

What do you think?

Thanks Vadim. This is helpful. In the first article the author writes:

"The only thing that is controllable is the server you are on." He suggests optimizing the database. What specific & measurable directive might I give to our IT manager that would accomplish this goal?

The second post looks very helpful indeed. I am downloading Microsoft's VRTA right now. It's a bit technically over my head, but I get the concepts. This should be something I can pass on to IT...however, it seems the info could be a bit dated (it repeatedly references IE 7)...Is there anything additional that might be more current?

Thanks again!

Please forgive my ignorance on this subject. I have little to no experience with the technical aspects of setting up and running a server.

Here is the scenario:

We are self-hosted on an Apache server. I have been on the warpath to improve page load speed since the beginning of the year. I have been on this warpath not so much for SEO, but for conversion rate optimization. I recently read the Moz Post "How Website Speed Actually Impacts Search Rankings" and was fascinated by the research regarding TTFB. I forwarded the post to my CEO, who promptly sent me back a contradictory post from Cloudflare on the same topic. Ily Grigorik published a post in Google+ that called Cloudflare's experiment "silly" and said that "TTFB absolutely does matter."

I proceeded to begin gathering information on our site's TTFB using data provided by http://webpagetest.org.  I documented TTFB for every location and browser in an effort to show that we needed to improve. When I presented this info to my CEO (I am in-house) and IT Director, that both shook their heads and completely dismissed the data and said it was irrelevant because it was measuring something we couldn't control.

Ignorant as I am, it seems that Ilya Grigorik, Google's own Web Dev Advocate says it absolutely is something that can be controlled, or at least optimized if you know what you are doing.

Can any of you super smart Mozzers help me put the words together to express that TTFB from different locations and for different browsers is something worth paying attention to? Or, perhaps they are right, and it's information I should ignore?

Thanks in advance for any and all suggestions!

Dana

You're welcome Dan! I just noticed there is also a post in YouMoz on the subject:

http://moz.com/ugc/the-new-adwords-keyword-planner-your-keyword-research-process

Hi all,

Because I needed to educate myself on how to get the most out of the new Keyword Planner versus the old Keyword Tool, I wrote a blog post last week on the subject located here:

http://www.danatanseo.com/2013/07/google-keyword-planner-vs-keyword-tool.html

Dan, you are correct the new default is exact match, while the old was broad, and yes, now you can toggle between "exact" "phrase" and "broad" with one major caveat, these are based on your specific Adwords account targeting settings. So for example, in my case, we target only the USA, so now my results when researching are only the USA....which may not be appropriate at all if I am doing research for a client that targets more that just the US. I'm sure you can see how that could pose some significant problems for accurately targeting high-opportunity keywords for other countries.

As Jeff says below, yes, you can still get global monthly search volume by targeting all locations. For me, the only way to reasonably do this without fear of totally screwing up the settings on my existing Adwords campaigns is to open a completely separate Adwords account just so I can do research. Yuck!

Fortunately, there are some alternatives to the old Google Keywords Tool:  Wordstream's Keyword Tool, UberSuggest, SEMRush, SEOBook's Keyword Tool

Larry Kim has also written a good post on the differences between the old and new Keywords Tool/Planner....but it's a little daunting (IMHO), so read it first thing in the morning when you are wide awake with a fresh coffee at your side.

Hope this helps guys!

P.S. The other thing that really sucks is you can no longer check a box next to specific keywords and export just those. You now have to export the entire list and filter through them in Excel. This drives me nuts!

Hi Christy,

I think the jury's still out. The original intention was to syndicate our videos across as many channels as possible. Given that we aren't going to hire an agency to do it, the submission process comes down to me, and honestly, I still haven't finished submitting all 140+ of our videos just to DotSub.com alone, let alone the other possibilities on this list.

I am thinking maybe I didn't ask the question the right way around and perhaps I should start a new question like "What are the benefits, if any, of syndicating your video content across as many free video channels as possible if your goal in creating videos is solely brand awareness?"

In other words, our videos weren't created to gain links. They were created to gain eyeballs and awareness. That being the case, wouldn't it be better to upload as many as possible to as many placed as possible, especially if it doesn't cost us anything more than the time it takes me to do the submissions?

Thoughts?

Hi Keri,

I did actually end up using Followerwonk to sort through my followers and decide on some that weren't quite relevant to my (or my other Followers') interests. Some of them ended up being people who had obviously only followed me in order to get me to follow them back...and then once I did they dumped following me like a hot potato, lol! I ended up maxing out the number of people I could "unfollow" in one day on Twitter...I seem to be hitting barricades no matter what I do, lol. Anyway, I was able to make plenty of room now so I can now follow people I really AM interested in without fear of hitting the 2,000 limit any time soon. Thanks Followerwonk!

Hi everyone!

I searched existing Q & A and couldn't find an answer to this question. Here is the scenario:

The site is: http://www.ccisolutions.com

I am seeing instances of category pages being identified as 8 levels deep. For example, this one:

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/B8I

This URL redirects to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/headphones - which Xenu identifies as being only 1 level deep.

Xenu does not seem to be recognizing that the first URL 301-redirects to the second. Is this normal for the way Xenu typically reports? If so, why is the first URL indicated to be so much further down in the structure? Is this an indication of site architecture problems? Or is it an indication of problems with how our 301-redirects are being handled? Both?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

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.

I agree wholeheartedly with Lesley and EGOL. It sounds to me like you either need to find incremental ways to improve on what your client is already doing, or completely revamp the business model.

What is the purpose behind the goals that have been set for the Web sales? Is it a long-term strategy of wanting to eventually move all sales there? i.e. becoming a direct to consumer business? Is there the belief that the Web site gives customers a better experience than when they purchase the same product in a store?

Since you mentioned that the product is in the health and beauty sector, has your client done any market research to determine how many customers would even consider buying it online? Depending on the product, it may be something that people may just not want to buy without trying in person. I'm a big fan of Paul Mitchell and Lancome products. The only time I've ever purchased those products online instead of in a store was when I lived so far away from the nearest store that purchasing online was way more convenient...however, I only purchased products I had already bought in a brick and mortar store at least once. I would have never made my first purchase of those products online.

Granted, I may be a different persona and the products might be entirely different but the motivation could be identical in your client's case. When Lesley said "The people that are the furthest away from the store will be the low hanging fruit, I would push more marketing effort in to them..." I think that's a brilliant tactic and one that could accomplish your goals without cannibalizing the excellent work that your resellers are already doing for you.

Good luck!

Thank you so much Thomas. You always amaze me with your thorough and excellent answers here in the Q & A. I appreciate it very very much.

I forwarded your info to our IT Director and he and I had a discussion about CDNs. He seems to think that, while a good solution, they are also extremely costly. I wonder about this because I believe Volusion is using CDNs on all of their sites now. We are self-hosted (and wanting to get out of the self-hosting business) so your comments on choosing nginx over Apache will come in very handy as we move towards a new platform and a 3rd party host.

Are you aware of any affordable CDN options?

Thanks Lynn. Yes, this is exactly what we do. It does appear that page load speeds have progressively gotten slower and slower since the beginning of this year, which it when we started our initiative to improve speed. Google Webmaster Tools is also reporting that our average page load time for the past 90 days is 1108 milliseconds, which is significantly worse than the 745 millisecond "time spend downloading a page" we had at the beginning of this year.

Thanks to Thomas's suggestions, our IT director spent some time evaluating some of our pages (and site as a whole) to find out what the major culprits are. It appears that our images are over 50% of the contribution to the time it's taking for a page to load. We are now thinking that perhaps spending some time and effort optimizing images might help a great deal.

FYI - Our Avg. Page Load Time has increased about 8.5% for USA Traffic since we installed mod_expire and mod_deflate on our server in May/June - It has gone from 4.17 seconds up to 4.29 seconds.  As an ecommerce site we have seen the data that shows the impact on conversion rates when a site/page takes more than two second to load, so it's definitely something we are working hard to address.

Thanks so much for jumping in on this one!

I wish our CMS would make siren sounds, flash the lights and throw a pie in the face of every person (or thing) who initiates anything that will cause us duplicate content issues. Maybe then they would stop!

I agree with Jesse on the duplicate content issue. However, and maybe as a secondary question (that I would love to hear feedback on), does resolving the duplicate content issue from redirecting one version of a domain to another have any real measurable impact on a site's performance?

In my own experience, it doesn't.

Here's why I say this. Of course, I'm long-winded, so it involves a story... I came onboard at my current company in September 2011 as an in-house SEO. There was and still are a lot of technical SEO issues that haven't been resolved. However, some things we have successfully conquered. This "www" versus "non-www" was one of them. We hadn't redirected one to the other.  It's always exciting to find something you know is wrong and be able to fix it fairly easily and inexpensively. We fixed it...and? Absolutely nothing changed...Well, that's probably not accurate. After this change and several other technicals SEO fixes (i.e. making our canonical tags absolute instead of relative) our PageRank went from 3 to 4. That's it. Rankings didn't improve. Market share didn't improve. Traffic didn't improve. Conversions didn't improve. In fact, they all went the other way.

The only reason I bring this up is because I think there's this overwhelming desire that all we have to do is find that "one thing" that's dragging our site down, fix it, and boom, everything will be rainbows and unicorns. Should these things be fixed? Absolutely. Just don't expect that any one of them is going to show any kind of significant impact. Make a strategy, come up with tactics to support it, and pursue them with dogged determination. Chances are, your problem is never just one thing, but a whole lotta things that are all working together to drag your site down.

Hi Tim,

I understand you frustration and it really could be so many things causing this that it's impossible to say for sure without digging in deeper. Here are some initial things I would say could be factors:

1. The very first thing I noticed is that every single one of the competing sites you mentioned has the word "lifestyle" in their URL." Two of them have "lifestyle" AND "magazine" somewhere in their URL. I find that interesting.
2. When you redesigned, did you change any or all of your URLs? If so, then it might be worth meticulously working your way through your 301 redirects and make sure they are all functioning properly.
3. Even if your 301s are fine (if your URLs changed), or even if you simply re-platformed, but kept your URLs the same, a drop in rankings and traffic after a big change like that is completely normal. I've seen drops of anywhere from 25-75% that lasted for anywhere from a few weeks to 6 months or more before beginning to recover.
4. While "fresh content" is most likely an element in Google's algorithm, it is only one of over 200 other elements and none of us know to what extent one element has more weight in effecting rankings than another. If you are competing against established sites, with a lot of social signals (i.e. customer reviews), inbound links, etc. it may not matter that they don't update their content very often. A great piece of content that isn't time-sensitive really doesn't need to (and probably shouldn't) be constantly updated.
5. It doesn't sound like you changed your domain when you redesigned the site, but if you did, this could firther complicate matters.

It might be worth an experiment to build a micro site on a domain that contains one or both of your keywords. Maybe target a specific niche or location and see how well it does. If it does great, link it back to your original site, if it bombs, you won't have harmed your existing asset. These are just thoughts.

You might also want to consider revisiting your keyword research and seeing if there are any opportunities that your competitors aren't leveraging. I bet there are some nuggets you'd get out of that exercise. Sorry, no definitive answers here, but hopefully some things to think about to help you strategize a solution. Cheers!

Dana

There's no guarantee that the turnaround time will be as fast as you would like, but have you tried submitting your updated page via "Fetch as Googlebot" in Google Webmaster Tools. Most likely, you've already tried this, but if not, I'd start there. Just make sure after you've done the "Fetch" that you click "Submit."

Other than that, we are all really at the mercy of Google's crawl bandwidth allowance so it could just be that it will take a bit more time. What is the cache date on the current Google listing?

Hi Christopher,

I hope you are well! Have you considered using IFTTT? (http://www.ifttt.com) I am thinking there may be a way to create a "recipe" that goes something like this: "If" someone mentions my company/product/brand on Twitter "Then" send me a text message. That might be a scrappy way of accomplishing it, but it might take a little maneuvering because I don't think you can use Twitter directly. If I had zero budget, but some time on my hands, I might try playing around with that. There may even be someone here in the Q & A who's already figured out how to do it.

If I had a little budget, I'd consider Email2DB. They have a 30-day free trial so it might be worth exploring:

http://www.email2db.com/

Hope that helps a little!

Dana

Hi Bruce,

We are transitioning to Wistia and have about 20 Wistia videos up on our site already. To my knowledge, it is not necessary to do anything special in order to assure that the embed code any users might copy and paste into their own sites will link directly back to your site. This is one of the biggest advantages to switching to Wistia in the first place. Here's an example URL where we have a Wistia video embedded:

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/allen-heath-me-1-personal-monitor-mixer

If you click the "Embed" icon just below the video you will see an iFrame code appear for people to copy and paste if they want to share the content on their own sites. This works just like a YouTube iFrame, in that it directs the visitor directly back to the site where the video originated...in this case it would divert people directly back to your site giving you full credit for the content.

I hope that's helpful. Did I understand you question correctly? Or are you seeking to do something different with anyone who wants to embed your content? Let me know, cheers!

Dana

P.S. Here's the embed code for the above video if you want to try it out:

<iframe class="wistia_embed" name="wistia_embed" src="http://fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/fdnz3j82q4?version=v1&videoWidth=560&videoHeight=315&volumeControl=true&controlsVisibleOnLoad=true&plugin[socialbar-v1][buttons]=embed-twitter-linkedIn-googlePlus-facebook&plugin[socialbar-v1][logo]=true&plugin[socialbar-v1][badgeUrl]=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ccisolutions.com&plugin[socialbar-v1][badgeImage]=https%3A%2F%2Fwistia.sslcs.cdngc.net%2Fdeliveries%2F39051b62d0e4f252affe3b7fe5b95279dc143941.jpg%3Fimage_crop_resized%3D100x20&plugin[captions-v1][onByDefault]=false&canonicalUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ccisolutions.com%2FStoreFront%2Fproduct%2Fallen-heath-me-1-personal-monitor-mixer&canonicalTitle=Allen %26 Heath ME-1 | Personal Monitor Mixer" allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" width="480" height="298"></iframe>

Hi Jesse,

I just recommended this book to one of my colleagues here are work. It's Ginny Redish's book Letting Go of the Words

Happy Reading

Dana

P.S. Thanks for tuning me in to Daniel Pink.

Jesse's answer is spot on!

Hi again Fabrizio,

Have you thought about experimenting with a couple? Perhaps choose two categories that may have slipped from page 1 to page 2, or even the top of page one to the bottom of page 1. re-write the URLs and then track the results. If you get the desired result, then move on gradually to update the others. This way you mitigate risk, but still find out whether or not it's something you might benefit from.

Just a thought.

Dana

Hi Fabrizio,

Mike's answer is a good one and I would also definitely recommend Dr. Pete's post.

What I would like you to be aware of is the risk in what you are wanting to do. If you are already ranking well, for the love of all that is holy in this world, leave your URLs alone. Here is what Dr. Pete had to say about the "risk factor:"

"All Change Is Risky

I know it’s not what the motivational speakers want you to hear, but in the real world, change carries risk. Even a perfectly executed site-wide URL change – with pristine 301-redirects – is going to take time for Google to process. During that time, your rankings may bounce. You may get some errors. If your new URL scheme isn’t universally better than the old one, some pages may permanently lose ranking. There’s no good way to A/B test a site-wide SEO change.

More often, it’s just a case of diminishing returns. Going from pretty good to pretty gooder probably isn’t worth the time and effort, let alone the risk." - Dr. Pete Meyers

You need to manage expectations on this one if you decide to go forward and make stakeholders aware that they could be looking at a significant downside (decrease in traffic and links) immediately after implementation. That doesn't mean that there couldn't be a significant upside eventually, but there are no guarantees.

I love your site by the way. My daughter and I have been subscribers on and off for years. Cheers!

Dana

Yes, Nikita, I think you've got the gist of it and you are on the right track. Good luck!

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

Yes, I understand this issue very well and have seen it many times. Most often, it is happening because another of your pages that is being indexed is still referencing those pages. Please forgive Google, it is but a humble, not-so-intelligent bot (despite what the world would have you think). If you keep referencing a page that doesn't exist, Googlebot will say to itself "but it does exist! it does!" and keep indexing it, despite the 404 error. I mean, for all Google knows, it is your intention to bring that page back and maybe you just screwed up and it is 404-ing, you know?

Here's the remedy:

Do a content audit. Here's a great post on how to do that: http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/how-to-perform-a-content-audit/ 

You will discover many things, without a doubt, including pages that are linking to these 404 pages. Decide what to do with those pages, i.e. nix them, re-build them, whatever. If you have pages in Google that you really do want out of the index and those same pages are 404-ing....simply go to your Google Webmaster Tools Account and in the left nav select  "Google Index" and then "Remove URLs." Then simply click the box that says "create a new removal request" and enter the desired URL into that Box. Provided your page meets the requirements (and if  it's producing a 404 error it does) Google will prioritize its removal. Under no circumstances should this be confused with the disavow tool. Just to make that clear.

I hope this helps. Any questions and I'm happy to help further if I can.

Hi dealblogger,

In the situation that you describe, what I would do then is separate out these items and make them two categories, one for maternity deals and one for pregnancy deals. Put all the maternity clothes and gifts under the first category and all the pregnancy pillows and prenatal items under the second category. This will enable you to land people searching for the right items under the right category. It will also enable you to focus traffic to the right part of your site based upon intent.

Does that help answer your question? If not, let me know and I can try to rally some additional help. Cheers!

Dana

Hi Bryan,

I can totally relate with riding the high after MozCon. Now is the perfect time to do something about it, while the fire is still hot, yes?

My background is in eCommerce, primarily, but my very beginnings on the net were in email marketing. While my current job title is "SEO Strategist," I have never considered myself just an SEO, but more an Internet or digital marketer. To answer your questions, I would answer these first:

1. Have you written a complete business plan for this new product and new Website? If so, I assume you've identified potential competitors, done your SWOT analysis, defined customer personas, have a budget, financial projections, et al. If you have, you should also know already how you are planning on promoting your site. Is it some paid search, Facebook ads, retargeting, blogging, print, organic, email, other? What mix of those?

2. Have you defined the new brand? Have you decided who this brand is going to be, what it looks like and what it's supposed to (hopefully) mean to your customers?

2. Are you going to be using an existing list of customers to spearhead your efforts, or are you going to begin a new list?

When I think about the answers to these questions, in my own experience, my list of 3 new hires would probably be the same regardless of the answers:

1. Brand Strategist / Search Engine Marketer (preferably someone with a strong background in eCommerce sales)
2. Email Marketing Manager (eCommerce background) - For Retargeting Emails, Content Emails, and Promotional Emails.
3. Community Manager  (again, eCommerce background) - for Social Media, Blogging and Blogger Outreach

I would outsource the UI and graphic design as Francisco suggests. The three positions I mentioned are three you'd most likely never want to outsource and they should bring a mix of other skills that should make for a strong team. For example, if you haven't yet written your business plan, a good brand strategist most likely has written or helped to write a business plan at some point prior to coming on board with you. They should be able to help with that.

I'm excited for you and keep us posted about the launch of the new product!

Dana

I don't usually respond to requests for specific referrals like this, but I can say that both Francisco and Moosa are gracious, ethical and upstanding members of this community. I would encourage you to talk to both of them and then decide which might be the best fit.

Yep! What Alan said!

Without going into the "why" of the multiple stores, I would say, yes rel=canonical to one version of the page and not on the other pages. However, this can take Google quite a while to recognize all of the rel=canonicals across a large site.

I can't see how 301-redirects would be helpful unless you are talking about removing the multiple stores and using 301s to redirect the removed URLs to relevant existing URLs on the remaining store. (Personally, again, without getting into the "why" of multiple stores...I would get rid of the multiple stores if they don't offer anything unique and 301 everything to one store).

I wouldn't use "nofollow" for any of the pages in this situation. I'm interested to know what others think on this.

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.

Hi Angelos,

Yes, if I select individual videos I can see the site it is embedded on, but not the specific URL. I am attaching a screenshot as an example for this particular video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adxvLifTuuQ  I have circled two instances that show the playback location is on a competitor's Website. However, the only location given is the competitor's domain, not the actual URL where the video may be embedded.

I thought maybe if I exported the report that the URLs might show up there, but no luck.

Anyone else have any ideas about how to get this information? Thanks Angelos!

XtBvaU1

We have several hundred YouTube videos. In the Playback Report section in YouTube analytics, I can see a list of sites where people have viewed our videos. Some of the sites listed are competitors. The report does not show the URL of the page where the video is embedded.

Is there a way to find this information?

I have already tried using Google to search for the URL, but I'm thinking this isn't going to search the source code and the video URL isn't going to appear on the page anywhere.

Any ideas? Thanks!

Thanks Shah. Dario, listen to Shah. She knows way more about this topic than I do. Her comments will be helpful I am sure.

This is one of those situations where it seems like you've done everything right, but you still lose. It's something every SEO can Identify with I am sure.

Here are some things I would think about before deciding what to do next:

• Google Webmaster Tools "Links to Your Site" is notoriously slow, and has, even in recent months, been completely wrong for more than a month at a time. There was a period of about 6 weeks in the past year alone where it was reporting "0" links to many peoples' sites. Remember, it's a free tool, not without its own problems.
• Google let you know there's been no manual penalty....regardless, that doesn't mean of course that an algorithm change or Penguin refresh didn't chew up your site and spit it out. I'm sure you've already considered this.
• Do you know the approximate date that these 60,000 links showed up? I am thinking you can narrow it down pretty accurately. Try uploading that date into Chartelligence (it's a Chrome app) and then overlay that on your Google Analytics data. Does that date correspond with any significant changes in site metrics? Can you reasonably show causation?

My point on the last thought is: you want to be absolutely certain that it's those links that caused your rankings drop. You also want to know if that rankings drop significantly affected your site performance.  It's very possible that it could have been something else, or a combination of several things that caused it, not just those links alone. If you can say, after considering all of the above, that you are 95% certain those links were the sole cause of the rankings problem, and the rankings drop is significantly impacting your site performance...then you will know more clearly how to proceed. I'm sorry it's not a better answer in terms of "do x" and you will "achieve y." But this is one of those situations when diagnosis can be difficult.

(Total side note: It's funny, you know, people go to doctors all of the time who have difficulty accurately diagnosing ailments, and they are pretty tolerant of that. They'll even take prescription medication from a doctor who might even say outright they don't know what the problem is, so they are going to try treating the symptoms. Even so, medicine is a highly-respected profession. Conversely, SEOs attempting to make accurate diagnosis and treat the symptoms of a problem are often maligned as being nothing more than "crafty guessers" because no one really knows the Google algorithm. I've had stakeholders refuse to follow my suggestions because I couldn't say with 100% certainty that my diagnosis was correct because, as one continually says: "You don't know Google's algorithm, do you?" He's gone so far as to completely throw out anything an SEO, SEO company or anyone associated with an SEO site like Moz has to say. If it doesn't come from Google directly, he views it all as bunk. This was a bit of a sidebar, but I just wanted to express that it can be very difficult to get a client to accept a diagnosis that's an "educated guess." We have a long way to go in building up our profession to the point where stakeholders value and trust our expertise.)

Excellent answer Tom. I tuned in because I didn't know the answer to this one and yours was superb.

Actually, with 50,000 OSE might not be the best choice. I would keep an eye on your Google Webmaster Tools # of inbound links and perhaps monitor via http://ahrefs.com.  There may be some other suggestions from the good folks here that I haven't thought of. Good luck!

I wouldn't panic about this. Getting a sudden spike from a post that gets carried on a news site isn't really that unusual. Did you pay for the backlink? If not, I wouldn't worry about it. If you did pay for it, and now you're feeling a little queezy, then yes, have them take it down if it makes you feel better.   I would NOT use the disavow tool. The site is a PR4, you could do a lot worse than to get 50,000 links from a PR 4 site. I'd also take this in context with your overall link profile. If you only had 10 links and now you have 50,010...yes, this might be a problem, and I stress "might."  If you have 100,000 and now have 150,000 it could still be a problem, but far less of one. Also, if you've had spikes in inbound links before, then no worries.

This can happen for a number of natural reasons. For example, we have an industry publication that occasionally posts a ton of info about our products. It can add 20-30K links in one month, and they might all be gone the next month.

Honestly, I'd sit tight for a couple of days and watch OSE and Fresh Web explorer to see if they are dropping off over time. My guess is they will and anything that you may have done while in "panic" mode may end up hurting rather than helping.

Search volume can be incredibly volatile from one region to another. I would imagine that "outage notification" as a term could be incredibly volatile, because it's really pretty vague. If there was a major earthquake, I would think that colume for that term would soar...or any natural disaster really. On the  other hand, if things had been relatively quiet and  there hand't been any major seismic or weather events, then that might mean something else.  but that all depends on where you are, and where you are trying to sell.

If search volume in a remote area of Pakistan increases by 5,000 percent, and it's only temporary because of a weird event.....is that something you can build a business on here in the States? Of course not

There are many factors to consider. Search volume is one tiny piece of the puzzle.

Could be because the canonical is to the "https://" version of the page instead of the "http://" version. Was this done intentionally to avoid duplicate content issues between the two? Could be the page grader is having trouble distinguishing one from the other. Just a thought.

Woohoo! Awesome