Welcome to the Q&A Forum

HI Matt,

Yup I think you are right, nobody is really coming back with an option for this so I'm opting for Excel for now.

Thanks for coming back.

David

Thanks Ikkie,

Yeah I'm aware of these types of tools for generating nicer and seo friendly urls but in this case this is not the function that I'm looking for - thanks though for responding - appreciated

David

Hi

Is any one privy to an online tool that will let me create a dynamic URL parameter string but will allow me to generate multiples of the URL and add a distinct key for each one. E.g Campaign Source, Medium, Name, a Keywords etc. are all the same in the string but then I want to generate a unique id code at the end. Then export them as a csv and integrate into my database lists. Looking to run this into a few thousand as well.

I was going to just do this in Excel and combine two columns withe the string and the number count in the other column but if there is a tool that does it all that would be interesting to know.

Yeah I've done that too, I have left in authorship in some of my content since it does not hurt and if it ever comes back in some form well I guess its there.

Cheers

David

Thanks Linda,

Yup aware of the Google author drop, my gut feeling was just to remove it, which I'll do.

Cheers

David

I watched recently John Mueller's Google Webmaster Hangout [DEC 5th].

In hit he mentions to a member not to use Schema.org as it's not working quite yet but to use Google's own mark-up tool 'Structured Data Markup Helper'. Fine this I have done and one of the tags I've used is 'AUTHOR'. However if you use Google's Structured Data Testing Tool in GWMT you get an error saying the following Error: Page contains property "author" which is not part of the schema. Yet this is the tag generated by their own tool.

Has anyone experienced this before? and if so what action did you take to rectify it and make it work. As it stands I'm considering just removing this tag altogether.

Thanks

David

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Will do & thanks for the link.

David

Yup many thanks,

I guess I've been not been monitoring this one well. I was aware of these posts but not when the authorship was completely stopped.

David

Many thanks

Yip I'v read these articles (except John's posting). I think though as EGOL is mentioning that the actual removal must have been pretty recent. I for instance could still see authorship details a few days ago.

Maybe it was today, maybe not

David

Thanks for the info.

I checked GWMT tools for any related notifications to this but nothing that I can see.

I suppose there has been much talk of late about the actual effectiveness of authorship in SERPs influence and may be the decided to pull it.

Noticed today that when I search (non-personalised search, incognito etc.) some of my pages on Google ALL references to authorship have now been completely removed.

Does anyone know when this change occurred? I might be a bit slow this week (or last week) with concentrating on projects.

I know like others that photos went some time back but now there are no author details being displayed. Just the page title and description.

David

Thanks Candyman, yes this is not a question about to prevent Google for not indexing my content, I know this very well. It is more about how quick they have done this with the least amount of effort on our part to inform them.

Plus it is quite an interesting situation you found yourself in, never heard of this before.

Many thanks

David

Hi Samuel,

Thanks for replying but no I'm not asking that, this I know how to do. The question is about whether this could be seen as an example of page indexation where on my part there has been no explicit activity to inform Google of the content's existence and there are no links to it yet Google is still managing to index it. Why bother informing Google vIA some of the activities mentioned earlier when they will just index it anyway you know.

Thanks

David

Hi is it pretty standard for Google to index content that you have not specifically asked them to index i.e. provided them notification of a page's existence.

I have just been alerted by 'Mention' about some new content that they have discovered, the page is on our site yes and may be I should have set it to NO INDEX but the page only went up a couple of days ago and I was making it live so that someone could look at it and see how the page was going to look in its final iteration.  Normally we go through the usual process of notifying Google via GWMT, adding it to our site map.xml file, publishing it via our G+ stream and so on.

Reviewing our Analytics it looks like there has been no traffic to this page yet and I know for a fact there are no links to this page. I am surprised at the speed of the indexation, is it a example of brand mention? Where an actual link is now no longer required?

Cheers

David

Yup Sam got it many thanks for your assistance.

David

Hi there,

I have received email notification that my new inbound links CSV report is ready to export and download. I follow the OSE link but I am redirected straight back to the main page of OSE not the download.

Is there a problem? Are the access problems due to the Moz.com and Research Tools Outage. reported on Moz Health?

David

No worries Gary.

I have just one thought in mind, maybe have a read of this article by one of our content writers. See what you think, if the author's content is not quite what you are after no worries. - bit of a long shot but good writer (ex journalist).

http://instantatlas.wordpress.com/2013/11/22/calling-denise-from-derby/

Best

David

Ah! right no worries Gary, the people I'm thinking of focus on UK and US public health, write for Virgin etc.

Sorry I don't think I can get you a match on this one.

Good luck though, hope you find suitable people.

David

Is their a particular industry/topic/theme based copywriter you are after Gary?

UK based writer?

Not referring to myself, just aware of a couple of good ones I use and have done for a few years.

David

Hi Chenzo,

We noticed some real big increases across about 15 of our target keyword phrases a day or two after the recent algo updated (granted denied by Google). These updates for us we think are due to this update as we've been expecting the rank changes for a long time but much of our efforts could not budge our SERPs positions. Even though all our indicators were showing that we were not where we were supposed to be in relation to our competitors. I would add that these rank changes have affected our US positions, or UK positions (where we are located) have stayed relatively the same.

In reference to Oren's comments for we always expect to see a drop in traffic around the 16th of the December and that I can see is staying true to the nature of our business.

The positions I would add are centred around maybe a cluster of pages that have high PA, they are the ones where I've seen jumps in numbers of +9 as an average, with one in particular on a +20 (now first page) where previously it has stayed roughly on page 2 and 3 (Google SERPs) for most of this year. One has gone from 12 to 2 overnight and is still there today.

Best,

David

Listen to Peter he is spot on.

If you are going to try and go down this approach, you will get nowhere and you will also have unhappy clients. Your client needs to really understand the new online search landscape and get thinking of what content can we deliver that will be of real value to our visitors.

As well as GREAT content you should also be building in best SEO practice to your content.  Check out the Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet posted by Danny Dover - http://moz.com/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet-2013-edition.

David

Hi there,

I've been doing work in Japan for some time now and although I would probably have my URL's in Japanese I found that if I hagoo sound meter data, correct charset for that language and good links from Japanese domains when the content of my pages are served pretty well. See example here - http://www.instantatlas.com/whatisinstantAtlas_JP.html

I would say that most traffic from the above page actually comes from Yahoo Japan than say Google Japan (it does come but not in the same volume). I have a Chinese equivalent and traffic to this landing page comes from Baidu. I would like to point out that for both pages they will drive Japanese, Chinese and English queries from these countries.

We are about to embark on an overhaul of this page to include easier navigation, structured data etc.

Happy to share outcomes on these change over the coming weeks if it helps.

Best

David

Hi Craig,

To me it kinda looks like an 'Exact Match Domain' issue and that over this year's algorithm updates it may have now flagged your domain as of low quality. The fact that your site is very young as well and that this looks like an EMD for your target search query it's likely it is now going against you.  There is low historical data that the search engines can go on so it's likely to be devaluing your site to searchers.

Ref. "We have read keywords in the URL might be the issue, even though the page optimizer in MOZ says to do that. We are wondering if this is the issue or there is some other problem we are not aware of." A page's URL yes is used as an indicator of a page's relevancy but this is more about domain name address name rather than a page's URL.

This article is somewhat old but still helpful http://www.seroundtable.com/google-emd-update-15776.html

Best

David

Thanks Mike,

Yes I've set my preference in GWMT as I know that is the best thing to do, the question was more to do with whether it could be a potential issue but I'm gathering from your reply it is likely not to be.

Cheers

David

Hi I need to tidy up my home page a little, I have some links to our index.html page but I just want them to go to the root '/' so  I thought I could 301 redirect it. However is this safe to do? I'm getting duplicate page notifications in my analytic reportings tools about the home page and need a quick way to fix this issue.

Many thanks in advance

David

Hi there,

I would definitely be looking at the Moz Keyword Difficulty tool and other tools like SEMRush http://www.semrush.com/ both are great for gaining competitive insight.

Your second question is well if they are competitors then surely you would be wanting to at the very least have a competitive positioning of your online content with them. I have different competitors for instance for different keywords, I have common grouped competitors and niche competitors, they may be domestic, foreign, a specific vertical and so on.

If you were starting out on employing an SEO strategy then your question actually might be construed as a little back to front, as I would be wanting to analyse my own site's keyword phrase conversions to determine which are the most effective, have the highest CTR etc. and then utilising tools such as the ones mentioned to see who am I competing against with my best converting KWs. Plus you would be able to identify any mismatches of who you deem as your natural competitors against ones that you are not aware of from the analysis you carry out on your own site traffic data.

Hope that helps a little.

David

Thanks Gary for coming back on this one. - nice suggestion.

We ended up buying the domain in France.

Many thanks,

David

Your welcome Niamh.

David

DA fluctuates Jonathan, OSE might not have registered all your links and I would not get too hung up about it. For one of my websites I have had for instance in the last months 68, 65, 64, 62, 64, 66, 64. My sites are pretty strong and about 10% make up .gov and .edu root domain links but are pretty well fixed this year.

Ultimately I don't get hung up on DA much. Also I would use Freshweb explorer and reach out to sites that are mentioning you to develop better links with them.

Best

David

Simply put imagine your site is a book, a user comes along and finds the book has two chapter ones with the same title and the same page content - what value is that to the reader? None

Search engines are all about search quality and content, if they are seeing duplicate titles, descriptions and content how are they going to know what content on your pages is relevant to the user and delivers value to the users need.

I would make it a best practice for your business to ensure site content is rich, valuable and not duplicated across your sites domain. Also make sure descriptions and titles are short but descriptive. Maybe you can get your site's content manager to use great little tools like SEOMofo for this - http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html

Also get them looking at using schema.org and develop rich snippets for your page metadata.

Others can maybe come back with a better answer on that one - (read Robert's comments below regarding link quantities).

David

I have ran a lot of AdWord campaigns and I've never seen any impact on my organic placements. I've heard people talk about this before but I've never seen a negative cause and effect between the two search models.

David

I don't think we are seeing a drop in traffic in September, more likely the opposite.

In late September we had an alert in GWMT by Google of a spike in soft 404's maybe others have experienced this. We had never seen it before, it was always a stable factor in our reports and only started around the beginning of September. We have rectified this by explicitly telling Google what pages are 404 which after after doing made even more positive changes to our SERPs. As I understand it Google does not like soft 404's and deems them detrimental to search quality. We feel that Hummingbird may have had a hand in is since it occurred around the same time that Hummingbird was rolled out.

Might be worth looking at this in GWMT for similar reports for your client.

David

Thanks Chris,

I think it was around January this year that we moved away from 'data presentation software' when that was action'd the move was pretty quick and our site moved to 5th position in the US for the new term. It stayed there for a couple of weeks. As the year went on we noticed that the ranking in the US was moving away (downwards) and there seemed to be more of a determination occurring in the SERPs positions for this term when we saw algorithm changes in Mozcast and Algoroo (please note I don't get too hung up on Algo changes, it is used as a general indicator). However we did not see the same impact in the UK and other countries. In fact overall our ranks in September are much better with many more US No.1-3 ranks and 4-10 ones as well but this homepage one is our troubled rank. Reading about Google 'Hummingbird' I'm thinking has this benefited our site overall in September, well like others it has not been detrimental but why the issues in US for our home page?

However, if it can be hard to move away from and established keyword phrase then why the discrepancy between the UK and the US, what factors or algorithm indicators are causing such rank differences? Surely what is applicable in the UK also holds in the US and vice-versa. Unless that is not the case and this is where my concerns about geographic relevancy of the domain comes into play.

I like your thinking about new links that aid our re-positioning, we do this with our customer implementations on specific landing pages, especially in the local government field and yes it does work and I feel supports our SERPs in Google.

In terms of links in the US well we have many from say for example the CDC and the World Health Organization (e.g. pulled from OSE http://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/atlas/countydata/atlas.html) and over 25 US State Departments of Health, how many sites even in the US can claim to have such powerful trusted domain links?

Thanks for your input Chris much appreciated.

Hello Robert,

Thanks for coming back to me. Yes it is a .com and I actually have not selected any country in GWMT. About 4 years ago I asked Rand about this feature, he told me that they do not set this for their own site since they have a global customer base. As we have a global customer base as well I have left this option with no country target.

The ranking issue seems to have really occurred this year, pre-2013 my ranks in the US would generally be in the first page. In 2012 the primary keyword phrase of the home page was 'data presentation software' which was No1 in the US. It was felt that this was too broad in nature and hence changed. With all home page references to this phrase removed I thought that would then tell Google that this site is not geared towards that phrase. However it has now put us back to being No.1 for that phrase and the one we are aligning to at currently No.19 and stagnates around 19-21.

The only thing in the last couple of days though is I got a message from Google in GWMT that there has been a noticeable spike in soft 404s, so I'm investigating this.

Thanks though Robert for suggesting this option.

Best

David

Hi,

I'm endeavouring to see what the Moz community thinks of the current situation I'm finding one of my domains in. This issue for me tends to span most of this year so it is not impulsive in nature and I'm hoping community member(s) may good solid insights into the issue that I may have not considered.

My issue relates to the geo-location of a domain and the what the current level of priority this may be this year due to all the algorithm updates from Google.

I have a domain located in the UK with pretty much a consistently high DA, PA and root level domain links profile higher than our competitors for our target keyword phrases. Our domain is also made up of more .edu and .gov links than the others and its Moz Trust is higher. This being the case we are ranked No.1 in the UK for that phrase - great!

The problem:

• many of the competitors can be seen in Google.com and they outrank us. We outrank the same competitors with the No.1 UK slot in Google.co.uk but no where near in the US.
• none of the competitors in the Google.com have a higher DA/PA etc. many are not US companies
• Moz give's us an 'A' grade for the keyword phrase and there are no internal 'nofollows' only 'nofollows' to our social media sites on the home page. There is one H1 on the page that includes the phrase.
• We have many No1 US slots for our landing pages e.g. 'election mapping software', 'data presentation software','cancer mapping software'. Ironically the 2nd one we moved the site away from last year and now the home page makes no on page references to 'data presentation software'.
• Our rank for our target KW phrase fluctuates between 19-21 in Google.com. It moves up every so often, then along comes an algo change flagged in mozcast/algoroo and it gets knocked back down again!
• The issue seems to be around the home page of the site no other pages have this type of issue. Our page indexation with Google is at a healthy 87%.

So is this a domain geo-location problem? If our domain was hosted in the US would that change things? How can these same competitors who we out rank in the UK outrank us in the US if domain location is not a major algorithm factor? If it is a factor then it screams online digital protectionism to me - I don't think that's right but it's an frustrated emotional response (for now).

Please note, I am well aware of discussions in the past about the benefits of having your domain located in your target country. However I came to understand that these days that is less of an issue and that valued content, site authority, social signals etc. play a far more significant role in determining a site's SERPs. Just to add I do monitor the social signals of competitors and there is nothing that I would say is of a major difference to our own efforts.

Any thoughts that I should consider or ideas are welcome.

Many thanks in advance.

David

Hi,

I was wondering if any one knows if the French government has changed it's stance in recent years to the ownership of domains in their country. My understanding is that it can be pretty difficult to own a domain there if you do not reside there. In the past I have had people register domains using their passport as identification to prove their domicile in that country.

We like many others have sites with .com/fr etc. and we do have one domain that is a .fr and seriously out performs the .com version.

Many thanks for any input on this question.

David

*** UPDATE - Sorry no need for a response, I've just been informed that businesses who are located in a Member State of the European Union (EU) are allowed to own .fr domains which the French government needs to comply with.

Best,

David

Hi there,

I generally submit one or two new pages a day via this tool on GWT + Bing and have never really seen the crawl rate change 'which by the way I leave Google to determine'.  I tend to only see changes in the frequency rates on GWT when I deploy mid to major changes on my sites, there is a constant flurry of activity over a few days then it more or less reverts to site average.

David

Hi Maureen relating to what Keri was referring to on DA doing down. I see on my main site that for August in OSE my DA has dropped a couple of points but so have all the competitors I measure against.  My KPIs such as lead generation, inbound inquiries etc. have not dipped as a consequence.

Like Thomas comments I tend to see subtle impacts on my site's SERPs when comparing tools such as MOZCAST but that is more a short term issue and generally they resolve upwards over the longer term - which is a better metric.

David

Thanks Mark I'll have a look at the article.

Best regards

David

Hi Rui,

I see what you mean, we just redirect our .co.uk domain with the ISP to the .com one as it was being treated as a low quality domain. It was something like a .com DA of 68 as opposed to a co.uk DA of 16 (bizarre why that was happening). After that our content in SERPs was/is balanced across all the countries in question.

Personally I like to partner with people in these countries, help them write content with our PR people and optimize the content for their countries. I know not everyone has the facility to do this but I find it drives traffic well from these countries on content that was originally written in the UK but tailored for say an Australian audience i.e. 'If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it probably is a duck!' in other words the more localised the content can be the better when trying to work in other countries.

Cheers

David

I would be more inclined to say that other factors are at play to how my ranks appeared in other countries other than the one I reside and work in. My site does not really have a country level target so geo-targeting would not be a strategic/necessary tool for me. My approach here would be to leave it to the search engines to determine if the value/quality of your content to searchers in other countries and not feel that just by using geo-targeting in GWT that it is actually going to improve your presence in a specific target country.

Here I have 2 stories that are optimised for specific keyword phrases. One story is from Ontario, Canada and the other Atlanta, US. I don't think about them in the sense that the first should be geared towards Canadians and the other Americans, more important are the thematics of the stories that should be deemed more importantly than a searchers geographic location.

http://www.instantatlas.com/public-health-ontario.xhtml
http://www.instantatlas.com/CDC_Story.xhtml

I asked Rand a similar question years ago about geo-targeting and from memory I think he said this feature is not active on the Moz site (at the time) as they want the site to be available to all, irrespective of what country the reside in.

David

Agreed it will be flagged as duplicate content and personally speaking I would not set geo-targeting to Canada I'd just leave it off targeting completely. Done it like this for years and my ranks for my target keyword phrases are near the same irrespective of Canada or the US and my site is actually a UK domain.

I always find this tricky about the type of domain as well so as Irving is saying a .com would be helpful, with unique content and I guess 'maybe' the domain should be understood by Google to actually reside within the US i.e. hosted there. You might want to look into the importance of a domains registered geo-location these days - but that might just be old paranoia on my part.

However, ultimately content should be king with a good link quality strategy, can the owner of the domain for instance attain & build good US based root domain links?

David

Depending on the thematics and neutrality of your content that you want to create, I would suggest adding an additional category of .edu and .gov.uk for the UK market. I actively look for and write in .gov.uk sites and this makes up about 5% of my Root Domain link profile. Not sure these days how Google determines the domain link quality of an academic and government sites but pretty sure they are still deemed as being of high quality and trusted.

Granted these types of domains are tricky to get content on but worth trying out.

David

Not quite Hacking but despicable all the same.

See this video clip from the UK investigation programme 'Dispatches' - 'Click farms': how some businesses manipulate social media - Channel 4 Dispatches video trailer. I'm not sure if you can see the programme outside the UK but you should get the general idea from this 'Guardian' posting.

People bent on fraud and shortest route to quick gains will try anything Christopher

http://www.theguardian.com/media/video/2013/aug/02/click-farms-social-media-video

David

Thanks Keri

Thanks Ron

Thanks and Ditto another bunch in there

Anyone else receiving several duplicate Moz Weekly Rankings Report today?

I think I have received about 15-20 email duplicate reports on my weekly rankings.

David

Hi Maria,

Do you have a link to a sample page using Schema, your grab shows 2 pages listed with Structured data - maybe one of them?

Kind Regards

David