Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Angelos,

We use http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and yes we mention our sitemaps, among other things, in our robots.tct file:

http://www.ccisolutions.com/robots.txt

and

http://www.celebratecommunion.com/robots.txt

Thanks Ruth. I know they're busy rocking the new Moz, but I just wanted you guys to know we appreciate those little nuggets.

I loved this. The new robots.txt file is a big yawn. I miss the video. Can you guys add it back (or something equally delighting)? Pretty please?

I think the video Bereijk is helpful, but it also might be comforting to know that a lot of good sites, including Moz.com and Rand's blog often post links to their favorite content or make lists of recommended resources. Here are some examples:

From one of my favorite blogs, GetElastic,com: http://www.getelastic.com/choice-ecommerce-links-june-2013/

From Rand's blog: http://moz.com/rand/recommended-stuff/

I think if you curate content and put it all in one place in a unique and meaningful way it could actually be very helpful to visitors and end up helping you SEO. There's another site I saw recently that had snippets of SEO News at the bottom of the page with links for visitors to read the rest of the articles, but I can't find it at the moment. I thought it might have been Ahrefs.com or Majestic SEO, but it wasn't either of those. Does this sound familiar to anyone? If I find it I will come back and post it.

Yes, you can track/view this inside your campaigns. If you go to one of your campaigns and click on "Link Anaysis" - then click on "History" the first report at the top will show your Domain Authority trend versus your competitors over time. I've attached a screenshot in hopes that helps. You then have the option of exporting the historical trend data into Excel, where you can then get really fancy with it if you want to.

ng0lXvE.jpg

Hi Noah, First let me say, very cool. I'm a big fan of Zelda. What I am about to say has absolutely nothing to do with SEO and only has to do with my own perception of the game, my knowledge of the game, and how I would search for it.

Whatever search term I used, it would definitely have "Zelda" in it. Have you thought about optimizing it for a combination of the new game's title + Zelda? I certainly don't presume to know more about how people are searching than you do and I can't back up what I say with an ounce of keyword research. I'm just saying that if I were to search for this new game, or a preview of this new game, I'd type:  "Zelda link between worlds preview"....or something similar to that. Just my thoughts.

I too was confused by the question. Can you explain in more detail what your outsourced company is doing to "fix 20 on page links per month" ?  It sounds to me like maybe they are link-building for you, but I'm just not sure

Regarding the "more than one link per keyword" I am confused by this as well. When you are setting up campaigns, one keyword needs to go to one domain, but in the reports you may find that more than one of your URLs ranks for that term. But, this isn't something you configure in your campaign.

What more can you tell us? I'm sure Francisco and I would both be glad to help if we can.

Hi Brendan, You're on the right track with labels. I would definitely use those to flag your most important keywords. What you will have to do then is export your report into Excel, format it as a table with headers, and then sort by label. This will allow you to create a report on just those specific terms. However, I understand the desire to make it pretty for a C-suite executive. I highly recommend building a ranking index (people who read my posts are probably really tired of me recommending these two awesome people to help you do that).

Read a tutorial on how to build the ranking index written by AJ Kohn.

Make your ranking index beautiful by watching Annie Cushing's presentation from MozCon 2012.

I am an Excel moron and I rocked this out of the park thanks to them

Hope that helps a little -

Right on Everett. I agree 100%

Understood Alex. Yes, of course you would have to rebuild the pages first before you can 301, but it sounds like you are planning on rebuilding them (otherwise you wouldn't be able to use canonical tags either, because there wouldn't be a page to put them on).

I wouldn't just give up and ask Google to remove all of the old URLs. I agree with what Mike has to say about that below. A 302 is a good option if you are worried about the 404s sitting in the index while you are rebuilding your product pages. If you are still on the same platform (it sounds like that didn't change), I would suggest rebuilding as many of the old URLs as you can (if they were good SEO-friendly URLs). That way you could bypass the 301 redirect. If you want to create your pages so that product options are rolled in and separate colors of things no longer need separate pages, you can then choose whether to 301 redirect those old URLs or simply let them 404.

404s aren't necessarily always a bad thing. Regarding the 2,000 of them you have now, if some of those pages just need to go away, you can let them 404 and they will eventually drop out of Google's index. You aren't required to manually submit them via GWT in order for them to be removed.

Hi Alex, I am sorry to hear about this. What a mess, no? If it were me, I wouldn't rely solely on the canonical tag. I would also create a spreadsheet and map all the old URLs to the new URLs and set up 301 redirects from the old to the new. 2,000 isn't too bad. You can probably knock them out in 2-3 days...but be sure to test all of the 301s and make sure they are performing the way you expect them to. Hope that helps a little!

Last year the videos from MozCon were given to all attendees as a "consolation" for the Wi-Fi being so bad. I don't anticipate Wi-fi will be an issue this year, so the videos are probably going to cost some pretty serious bucks...My advice?  Buy them. I have referred back to presentations multiple times over the year because they were so packed with information that it sometimes takes (me at least) a couple times through to fully absorb what's there. Buy the videos. They are worth every penny.

I've heard the Seattle Underground tour is awesome. I might have to do it this time around!

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

I highly recommend Lynda.com - http://www.lynda.com  Hope that helps!

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.

We recently had mod_deflate and mod_expire installed on our server in an attempt to improve pagespeed. They worked beautifully, at least we thought they did.

Google's pagespeed insights tools evaluated our homepage at 65 before the install and 90 after...major improvement.

However, we seem to be experiencing very slow load on our product pages.

There is a feeling (not based on any quantifiable data) that mod_expire is actually slowing down our page load, particularly for visitors who do not have the page cached (which would probably be most visitors).

Here are some pages to look at with their corresponding score from the Pagespeed Insights tool:

Live Sound - 91 http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/live-sound-live-audioWireless Microphones - 90 http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/microphones

Truss and Rigging - 79 http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/lighting-truss

light weight product detail page 83   http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/global-truss-sq-4109-12-truss-segment

heavy weight product detail page 77  http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/presonus-studiolive-16-4-2

Any thoughts from my fellow Mozzers would be greatly appreciated!

You could achieve this by building ranking indexes. Here's a great tutorial: http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/new-ways-to-track-keyword-rank

It takes a little bit of time to set them up, but after that it's a piece of cake. Every week I export my data from Moz and update my pivot tables. It literally takes less than a minute. Not only does this make it possible to visualize the data for custom date ranges, you can also track separate indexes based on your keyword labels if you so desire.

Hope that helps!

This is a great question and one I wish that Moz would give new users more guidance on in the beginning. You should set up your campaign based on whichever version of your site you set as the "preferred" in Google Webmaster Tools. I set up my campaigns without knowing this and once I figured it out and wanted to transition over, I had already gathered nearly 8 months of data. All of this would have been "lost" (I say that because of course I would have anything I had exported), if I had try to change my campaign from the "non WWW" to the "WWW" version mid stream.

Basically if you decide to change from one to the other,  you have to set up a completely new campaign, and there won't be any continuity (outside of anything you manually do using Excel, etc).

P.S. I would welcome feedback on my comments from the Moz community. I am hoping what I said was 100% accurate.

If I were you I would have waited a week before making any drastic changes. I have seen extreme, and sometimes major extreme volatility in rankings before. I've literally seen a site go from position one in Google, to not being in the top 50 to being #1 again the next week.

Don't panic.

Analyze.

Evaluate

Rinse & repeat.

When you feel like you've got a handle on what you need to change and why, make incremental changes.

Otherwise? You're pissing in the wind.

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?

In this instance I would create a Custom 404 page that says something like "We are sorry, this product is no longer available. Here are some helpful links to continue searching our site..."

You could also go the route that eBay uses, although it might prove to be a content management nightmare. eBay leaves up closed auctions for a really long time, but adds the message "This auction has ended."

For classified ads, I wouldn't 301 because, depending on what the item is, it could end up being misleading.

Just my thoughts! I'm interested to know what others think.

If you are posting, verbatim, your content might very well be attributed to Facebook instead of your site because Facebook has so much more authority than your site. If your ultimate goal is to rank for your content, then posting your content on your site and linking to it from Facebook is the way to go. If your goal is attention to your content, then perhaps posting it on your Facebook page and linking to your site is the way to go.

Is it duplicate content if posted in both places? Yes. You could put a canonical tag on your site, but if the content gets posted on a site of higher authority, chances are that site will get credit for the content, canonical tag or no canonical tag.

I thought I remembered a very similar question to this one that was posted recently so I did a little digging and found it.

See if this helps: https://moz.com/community/q/converting-to-wp-should-i-add-html-or-301

If it's at all possible to redirect to a relevant page, I would do that. If the 404s are for pages that are no longer relevant, or old content you really don't want people to be able to find any more, then a 404 is just fine.

Personally, I view appending the name at the end of the title to be more for branding than for SEO. If you are trying to build a brand, it can be very useful to reinforce it by placing it at the end of all of your title tags. This works great if you have a unique brand and your brand name is short enough to actually fit within the character limitation of the title tag while still giving you room to describe what's on the page.

Regarding whether or not to use ".com" - I think it depends on your business and your intent with the site. If the majority of your business is taking place online, then the .com might be very appropriate. Or, if whatever action you are hoping the visitor takes is an online action, then again, the .com would be very appropriate. If, on the other hand, you are a plumber and what you really want is for them to call you, then maybe leave the ".com" off...for example "Roto-Rooter"....if you search "roto-rooter Seattle" you'll see they append "Roto-Rooter Plumbing" at the end of their title tag, not "Roto-Rooter.com"

Hope that helps!

Thanks Saijo,

I am on Blogspot and the referral spam is not coming in the comments. I am being referral bombed by this Web site because they are trying to sell me on their services. All I can say is, Yuck!

I can't "nofollow" anything because they technically haven't placed a link on my site anywhere. They are, however, grossly distorting my pageview count because they are artificially sending "visits" via this URL (please don't visit it - there could be malware, etc):  http://r-e-f-e-r-e-r-.com/

The only reason I posted my question here was to find out from the Moz community whether they think this is something worth worrying about or not.

It amazes me that every day in search marketing is filled with something new that I don't know or never heard of.

Most of you are probably familiar with referrer spam, but I hadn't ever heard of it before. I am currently experiencing referral spam on my personal blog. What's the best way to get rid of this pest? Shall I ignore them? Block them in my robots.txt file? Use Google's Disavow? or should I just plain holler "Curse you referral spam people!!!"  ?

Thanks all!

If you are starting every page title with "Photographers Miami" then I think that's probably not the best because you'll be trying to target the same keywords with every page. If, on the other hand your page titles look more like this:

Photopgrahers Miami | Cameras & Accessories

Photopgrahers Orlando | Cameras & Accessories

I think these are perfectly fine. You might notice that exchanged the word "equipment" with "cameras.: Equipment could mean anything. I assume you are selling cameras, so why not say so? Also I removed the word "Find." Save your call to action for your Meta description. That word "Find" is not helping your title at all. However, it's perfect for a meta description.

Those are my thoughts. I hope they help!

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.

Depends on your content, but we use Christian Newswire http://christiannewswire.com/  We've been extremely happy with them. They are responsive, have wide distribution and are more reasonably priced than PRWeb.

Hi Andrea, I don't think this solution is going to achieve the SEO benefits you seek. If I were you I would actually include the transcript in text on the page if you can, much like what is done with Whiteboard Fridays in the Moz Blog. Here's an example:  http://moz.com/blog/processing-fluency-impacts-web-marketing-whiteboard-friday

Hi! Are your ads for affiliate links? Or are you advertising as an authorized reseller of the trademarked product? There are many rules revolving around affiliate links that may or may not apply to an official retailer carrying the product. Some good examples of products/brands that are very specific in terms of how and what can be advertised where and by who are Sony and Apple.

I started out in the world of affiliate marketing so I understand the numerous limitations there, particularly on bidding on branded search terms. There is a very good reason for it and this may or may not be the case here so I just thought I'd ask.

This could possibly have something to do with the way your CMS handles the "-" punctuation elements between your two phrases. If you aren't using actual HTML markup for it, try changing to the HTML version, which would be:  -

Conversely, if you are using the HTML markup, try taking it out and just using the  -

Let me know if that helps at all....of course you will have to wait until Google recrawls the page to find out if it worked. If this is the issue, you will want to check your other pages to make sure it's not happening on them too.

SEMRush.com can do this for you, but you need to upgrade to the Guru level to get access to historical data. It will give you the info for you and any competitor you want. The Guru level is about $149 a month. It doesn't require an annual or minimum commitment so you could join at that level for a month and drop back to free once you felt like you'd gotten the data you needed.

Does that help?

Thanks Thomas!

Okay, so I have one vote to take them down.  

Interested to hear from others who have an opinion on whether they should stay or should they go?

I agree with everything Nakul has said. Just to piggyback on that with additional information, try to think about it this way. Remember when someone gave you $1.00 when you were little and said "Don't spend it all in one place?" Well, someone at Google must have grown up with the same grandparents I did.

Okay, now, the analogy-free explanation

Google has a "crawl budget" every day. Every day that budget is allocated to millions of different sites. Now, by "sites" I mean "pages." Some pages change really frequently (i.e. the Yahoo New homepage). Some pages change hardly ever (i.e. an archived blog post). Also, some pages have very high PR and others, not so much. Also, some pages load extremely fast (consuming less of Google's bandwidth when the page is crawled) which leaves more Google resources available to Google to crawl more pages. Google likes it, and so should we all because people with fast sites are making it possible for everyone to get crawled more often (in essence, making them very considerate, well-behaved members of the Internet community).

So, based on all these, Google is going to apportion a part of its crawl budget to your site on any given day. Some days, it may have more room in its budget for you than others. Part of this might be effected by how fast pages, on any given day, load from your site. A ton of parameters can come into play here, including whether or not the pages on that day are heavier, or whether or not your servers are performing really fast on one day versus another.

I'd say the two things to be really concerned with after considering all of these things are:

1. Is Google indexing all of the pages you want indexed?
2. Is Google's cache date of your important pages recent enough? (i.e. 3 weeks or less)

If the answer is "no" to either one of those, then it's time to do some investigation to find out if there are technical issues or penalties that have been put in place that are hurting Google's ability or desire (not the right word to use about a bot, but I'm using it anyway) to crawl your pages.

Does that help?

Okay all you video SEO lovers, I had a thought today that I thought would make an interesting question.

I have been using the tools at DotSub.com to transcribe our videos. The tools are great, and even better, free. We have about 80 videos on DotSub and all of these videos are also on our YouTube channel. Once I've completed the transcription, I've been exporting the .srt file and uploading them to YouTube to replace the God-awful machine transcriptions (sorry Google, but they are baaaadddd).

Anyway, sometimes our DotSub video will outrank the same YouTube video, sometimes not. The 80 videos on DotSub have amassed about 10,000 views and a couple of translations...which is nice, I guess?

Recently, we've begun experimenting with Wistia. Here is a search term for which our YouTube and DotSub video results pretty much flood page 1:  "studiolive webinar"

All of the DotSub videos also exist as Wistia videos on our Website and blog. For obvious reasons, we would rather have our Wistia videos rank in those three positions which right now are dominated by the DotSub versions.

Should I remove the content from DotSub in order to try to get the Wistia videos to rank instead? Or should I leave them all there? I should probably add that we do have Wistia videos that are outranking both Dotsub and Youtube versions of the exact same videos...so I know that's possible. I'm just wondering if by leaving all of these videos up at DotSub if we are cannibalizing our potential at ranking for videos that link back to our site?

What do you think?

As with most things "SEO" I'd say it depends. In your specific example, the word "maternity" has completely different search intent (in my opinion) than the word "pregnancy." What kind of deals are they? If the deals are for clothing, then "Maternity Clothing Deals" might be a good title. At least here in the states, people say "maternity clothing" but probably wouldn't say "pregnancy clothing." If the deals were vitamins and supplements,  then the term would probably be "pregnancy vitamins" or "pregnancy vitamins & supplements" not "maternity vitamins."  In other countries, it might be different. On the other hand, in the case of champagne glasses, I could definitely see a title like "Champagne Glasses | Champagne Flutes"...because a fair number of people might use either term, when they are looking for the same things.

I would recommend doing some keyword research based on specifically what kinds of deals the page is about. Are the deals for clothing? Then maybe "Maternity Clothing Deals" would most likely be the best title. Your keyword research will most likely help you match the right words with the intent of your potential visitors.

Hope that helps!

Personally, I am a fan of your #1 option. The second option, to me, seems like it could send very mixed messages about what is most important on a page. The third option, in my opinion, is too  limiting and could be very prone to coming off as spammy. I'm a big fan of synonyms and weaving keywords together in natural ways that support the context and content of a page. If you throw all your efforts behind a single keywords, all I can imagine is a very boring page. However, this really all depends on the keyword itself and the content that might be right for it.

For example, for a very specific medical condition, let's use "Meniere's Disease" as an example, this might be a time when you optimize a page for that keyword and nothing else because it something extremely specific, with a very specific name given to it by the medical community. However, if your term was "gas mileage," I would expect to see content that didn't just use "gas mileage" but also used terms like "fuel economy" "fuel efficiency" - Some keywords are just naturally more prone to having synonyms, and some aren't, so I wouldn't even set a hard and fast rule about it.

Given your space limitations in addition to everything else, I would go with option 1. Hope that helps!

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

Yes Doug, you totally get my confusion. Your scenarios describe more clearly exactly what I am wondering. In the case of your third example, Matt even stated pretty clearly in the video (perhaps even both videos) that chains of redirects can be a problem.

I totally agree with you that avoiding redirects altogether and updating the links is the way to go. Even Google's own Pagespeed Insight's tool often makes this recommendation when evaluating pagespeed of a site. If 301's are exactly the same as links, why would the tool recommend avoiding them?

Yes, I think perhaps Matt said what he did because he was looking at 301s and links in complete isolation. If so, then what he says is believable in theory, but I can't think of how it would actually happen in practice.

I've been trying to wrap my head around this for the last hour or so and thought it might make a good discussion. There's been a ton about this in the Q & A here, Eric Enge's interview with Matt Cutts from 2010 (http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml) said one thing and Barry Schwartz seemed to say another: http://searchengineland.com/google-pagerank-dilution-through-a-301-redirect-is-a-myth-149656

Is this all just semantics? Are all of these people really saying the same thing and have they been saying the same thing ever since 2010? Cyrus Shepherd shed a little light on things in this post when he said that it seemed people were confusing links and 301-redirects and viewing them as being the same things, when they really aren't. He wrote "here's a huge difference between redirecting a page and linking to a page." I think he is the only writer who is getting down to the heart of the matter. But I'm still in a fog.

In this video from April, 2011, Matt Cutts states very clearly that "There is a little bit of pagerank that doesn't pass through a 301-redirect." continuing on to say that if this wasn't the case, then there would be a temptation to 301-redirect from one page to another instead of just linking.

VIDEO - http://youtu.be/zW5UL3lzBOA

So it seems to me, it is not a myth that 301-redirects result in loss of pagerank.

In this video from February 2013, Matt Cutts states that "The amount of pagerank that dissipates through a 301 is currently identical to the amount of pagerank that dissipates through a link."

VIDEO - http://youtu.be/Filv4pP-1nw

Again, Matt Cutts is clearly stating that yes, a 301-redirect dissipates pagerank.

Now for the "myth" part. Apparently the "myth" was about how much pagerank dissipates via a 301-redirect versus a link.

Here's where my head starts to hurt:

Does this mean that when Page A links to Page B it looks like this:

A -----> ( reduces pagerank by about 15%)-------> B (inherits about 85% of Page A's pagerank if no other links are on the page

But say the "link" that exists on Page A is no longer good, but it's still the original URL, which, when clicked,  now redirects to Page B via a URL rewrite (301 redirect)....based on what Matt Cutts said, does the pagerank scenario now look like this:

A (with an old URL to Page B)  ----- ( reduces pagerank by about 15%) -------> URL rewrite (301 redirect) - Reduces pagerank by another 15% --------> B (inherits about 72% of Page A's pagerank if no other links are on the page)

Forgive me, I'm not a mathematician, so not sure if that 72% is right?

It seems to me, from what Matt is saying, the only way to avoid this scenario would be to make sure that Page A was updated with the new URL, thereby avoiding the 301 rewrite?

I recently had to re-write 18 product page URLs on a site and do 301 redirects. This was brought about by our hosting company initiating rules in the back end that broke all of our custom URLs. The redirects were to exactly the same product pages (so, highly relevant). PageRank tanked on all 18 of them, hard. Perhaps this is why I am diving into this question more deeply.

I am really interested to hear your point of view

I read that post at SEO Roundtable and I agree with Eric Enge's interpretation of what Matt was saying in the video. Here's Eric's comment in full:

"It's funny because I find this news for a completely different reason.  We have long known that links from a page can't pass all that page's PageRank.  No one knows how much PC is not passable, but I have always assumed that it was something like 15%.

In the interview with Matt, my working assumption was the 301 redirect passed nearly all the PR, maybe all but 1% or 2%.  I never thought the 301 eroded PR at a greater rate than that.

This comment makes this sound like the 301 redirect consumes the same amount of PR as a normal link.  So, my understanding of the dilution through a 301 just jumped from 1 to 2% to something more like 15%.

So now, when you move a site from one domain to another, the degradation in PageRank is quite significant!"

I would love to hear others' take on this one.

I think this totally depends on how much authority your original pages have accumulated. If it's a really old site and you've got beaucoup links, I'd leave the .html on there. The other thing I would take into consideration is the time involved, and potential for error, when having to submit 301 redirect requests via a ticket system. That just sounds like trouble waiting to happen. I'd keep the .html if it were me. Just my 2 cents !

Agreed on all counts with Mark. In addition, if you haven't done this already, make sure you have canonical tags in place on your pages. Good luck!

Hi Shanaki,

I think most people here can really identify with your frustration. I don't know if I'm the only one, but I completely ignore the page grader in Moz's Pro tools. I have many pages that have F grades that are ranking really well. When I first started using Pro Tools I paid a little attention to the grades, but once I realized some of my top keywords were doing really well with the page grades of "D" or "F" I decided to just ignore the grades. What good is an "A" if you aren't ranking, and worse, aren't getting any traffic?

My suggestion would be to completely forget about the grade and take a fresh look at the page. Would you write any of it differently if you aren't thinking about Moz's grade?

You also might want to do a technical SEO audit of your site. Maybe there's some technical problem affecting you. Maybe check your pagespeed as part of that.

Last but not least, perhaps try some user testing. You can get three user tests done within hours of requesting them at UserTesting.com for under $100 total. I'm not sure how well they work for non-English sites, but if you can do a few user tests you might gain some insight into what's going on (i.e. if there are usability problems, etc).

Good luck!

Thumbs up and thanks to all three of you for the tips. I am going to use Followerwonk to evaluate who I should keep following and who I can stop following.

Bas made a good point about the DM. I used to write a personal thank you to everyone who followed me, until that became too overwhelming. Then I tried setting up an automated response in IFTT...which I think I disconnected a while ago, but I am going to check to see if maybe it's still active. Perhaps it is and that could maybe be hurting the "happiness level" of new followers.

Thanks guys!

Thanks so much Bas and Mathew for your responses. Yes, these are all things that I have tried so far, but as of yet, it doesn't seem to matter how many people I "infollow" I still cannot follow more.

Could it be that I need to separate "danatanseo" from "danatan-the-plain-old-human-being-that-talks-about-her-kids" into two separate Tiotter account?