Yip SEMRUSH as being mentioned, however employ the Moz keyword difficulty tool as well and see if your competition are I ranking for the interesting terms. Good for supporting your keywords that you are aiming the site/pages in the right direction.

David

Hi Tony,

I see, sorry Tony I thought your concerns may have been around the use of the domain name you purchased and Google's interpretation of it as a legitimate brand site for users searching on that branded query.

I have seen sites where I've tested out generic queries to see if the domain has given them competitive advantage and well many are positioned in the top first page ranks but not all gain that coveted 1st place for that query. Which are taken by more established domains, with higher domain and page authority etc.

Sorry I can't be much more help to you than that Tony.

Best regards,

David

Hi Tony,

Looks like your putting some serious consideration into employing an EMD domain 'Exact Match Domain'. For me most of the last year looking at the MOZ postings and discussions around this practice they seem to want people to be wary of this. See this post for instance by Dr.Pete last September http://moz.com/blog/are-exact-match-domains-in-decline.

Personally, I would prefer the long haul road, build up my valued content on my sites and other properties and gradually through generic searches see people revisit but this time via branded searches. On if my competitors employed an EMD, this year he has done considerably down the ranks.

At the same time I gather you are wanting to rack up some quick wins and get people to your site ASAP. I tend to employ an initial 3-6 month PPC strategy on terms to see what works and then optimised content around successful terms with good conversion rates.

However granted if your legal business is going to be this name, then it might therefore be fine. These are just my thoughts but I hope that helps a little.

David

Hi David,

I think it is pretty important where you can employ the ccTLD of the target country.  I have Swedish clients and I do want to reach out and target our potential clients in this country. However I don't have a Swedish domain.

This page which is in Swedish does rank in Sweden http://www.instantatlas.com/Helse_Nord_Story-swe.xhtml

I have adopted schema for it and as well as obviously having the page in Swedish I did add the following:

So as much as possible if I don't have the ccTLD I at least try to cover all the other potential options such as title, description.
I suppose as well could change the URL to something more Swedish.

Hope that helps a little.

David

Like you Vince, I went through the process of disavowing a number of links with Google and Bing and yes a week or so later I started to see a big rank dips. The links had been sending traffic that skewed my bounce rate and visitor page time rate, quite literally adding 1000's of visitors a month. Now after a few months the site has returned to its normal monthly stats and rankings are back to normal. But it took about 2-3 months for this to all work through.

I know how you feel 'Why did I do that? darn it' but I think like Tom says it's better to stick out and not remove the disavow file and focus on building good content for people to link too.

David

I've noticed today that Google are not serving my author profile up in the SERPs, last night it was fine but today they've all gone. Could this be due to the release of in-depth articles? Has anyone else who is using rel author/publisher seen their profiles disappear. My pages are still in the same rank position but the information has been reverted to a previous state.

I'm in the UK and unsure what determines a Google roll-out in terms of time scale, so I wanted to see if in-depth articles are starting to make their mark in the SERPs in the USA or Canada.

Thanks for any input on this question.

UPDATE BELOW

** I've decided to update this question with my own possible answer just in case it is helpful to any one.

I see today that my Author/Publisher profile have now come back to my pages in SERPs, which I'm happy to see.  I am an avid user of creating annotations in GA for each activity/change I make on my sites. The other day I wanted to test the impact on changing my profile pic to my company's logo identity - so I recorded this in GA as a date point of reference. My pic was changed to the logo and voila it started to appear in search.

Why did I do this? Well our logo is a kind of high viz green box and pretty well stands out amongst the 10 blue lines and sponsored ads. I wanted to see if this would attract people's attention - should we not experiment??. For a time it worked but as you will see from my question my profile was essentially removed. Does Google watch out for this? It does not, for instance, serve our logo/profile for web pages where the author and the publisher are the same, meaning the company is the author and the publisher.

I can see that Google are requesting that for in-depth articles they would like you to use the schema mark-up for organizational logos for your articles - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/using-schemaorg-markup-for-organization.html. You will see in this posting quite a lot of discussion on logo size, code location, optimal settings etc. There seems to be a hint that the logo size should be around 50k and 230x230px.

So maybe this is the route we need to take in order for your brand's identity to be served with your content. I'll be trying this out on some of my content and wait and see. If anyone else is working on thism trying out new ways to serve their content using schema mark-up it would be great to hear from you.

Best

David

David

I have over 60 pages on my site identified by Google in GWT as having structured data with 4 types listed but overall since employing this to the site I've not seen anything that I can with confidence say that by employing schema it has benefited or hindered the site.

Hoping to reap what I've sown in due course.

Actually can I add though that on the pages where I've been adding adding schema I have noticed that in the SERPs these pages do not serve the information listed in the itemprop e.g. description but it is serving the information listed in the first H1 tag of each page. So at the moment I've been making sure the

text makes relative sense and is optimised for specific search terms. I was not expecting to see this but for others it might be worth looking at your pages in GWT where you have started to use schema, view what Google has on them and export them and review.

Would love to hear from others on this as well.

Recently I've employing rich snippets using the guides from schema.org

I find them a great way to let the search engines understand the content of my web pages, also author and publisher tags are all thrown into the migreat great love it.

My question however is what to do with the existing title and description tags? Should they be left in? Do they cause conflicts with the search engines?

Should I just ignore this gut feeling and leave them in.

Any insights into the use of schema and a standard tags appreciated.

Best

David

Hi Peter many thanks I will bear this in mind, sound advice.

David

Hi Peter,

Thanks for replying.

My company had built another site and Google tied this domain as a site when. We had to change the domain entirely and therefore I needed this site link to be removed.

Only 2 activities at this were carried out on the site

1. The request to remove the site link In GWT

2. The introduction of a Canonical tag in the head tags of our home page. I did this to attain a  'A' rating in the SEOMOZ On page Optimization tool.

As mentioned the other day I commented this out the other day. As an update to this question, I have now seen a very bid drop in page crawl within GWT. At the same time ranking for this term jumped 15 places to 20th in the US.

I find this bizarre as no other countries experienced the same ranking fluctuations in such a dramatic manner.

If as you say you feel it is coincidence could I have employed the canonical tag incorrectly?I don't think I did but never employed this tag on our home page before, only on specific pages.

So overall still a little confused as to what caused it, glad that the ranks have returned but did my actions actually make this happen.

Best,

David

Hi there,

Has anyone seen a page crawling increase in Google Web Master Tools when they have requested a site link demotion?

I did this around the 23rd of March, the next day I started to see page crawling rise and rise and report a very visible spike in activity and to this day is still relatively high.

From memory I have asked about this in SEOMOZ Q&A a couple of years ago in and was told that page crawl activity is a good thing - ok fine, no argument.

However at the nearly in the same period I have noticed that my primary keyword rank for my home page has dropped away to something in the region of 4th page on Google US and since March has stayed there.  However the exact same query in Google UK (Using SEOMOZ Rank Checker for this) has remained the same position (around 11th) - it has barely moved.

I decided to request an undemote on GWT for this page link and the page crawl started to drop but not to the level before March 23rd.  However the rank situation for this keyword term has not changed, the content on our website has not changed but something has come adrift with our US ranks.

Using Open Site Explorer not one competitor listed has a higher domain authority than our site, page authority, domain links you name it but they sit there in first page.

Sorry the above is a little bit of frustration, this question is not impulsive I have sat for weeks analyzing causes and effects but cannot see why this disparity is happening between the 2 country ranks when it has never happened for this length of time before.

Ironically we are still number one in the United States for a keyword phrase which I moved away from over a month ago and do not refer to this phrase at all on our index page!! Bizarre.

Granted, site link demotion may have no correlation to the KW ranking impact but looking at activities carried out on the site and timing of the page crawling. This is the only sizable factor I can identify that could be the cause.

Oh! and the SEOMOZ 'On-Page Optimization Tool' reports that the home page gets an 'A' for this KW term. I have however this week commented out the canonical tag for the moment in the index page header to see if this has any effect.

Why? Because as this was another (if not minor) change I employed to get the site to an 'A' credit with the tool.

Any ideas, help appreciated as to what could be causing the rank differences.

One final note the North American ranks initially were high, circa 11-12th but then consequently dropped away to 4th page but not the UK rankings, they witnessed no impact.

Sorry one final thing, the rank in the US is my statistical outlier, using Google Analytics I have an average rank position of about 3 across all countries where our company appears for this term. Include the US and it pushes the average to 8/9th.

Thanks

David

No problem Joel

I'll do this as I asked my Houston office to check the ranking (I'm in the UK) and they have it as 25 which is fine as its a recent change for us but the Rank tool is the only system showing a rank of 50 and Google.com are showing 20

I'll send over the details.

Thanks again Joel.

David

Hi

I take it the Rank Checker tool is not working right yet as I'm getting bizarre ranks for some of my keywords. Some stating 50th when I know we're on the first page for instance, even using GA > search engine optimisation the averages for this term for instance is 11th across all countries.

If this is the case and its still being redeveloped I'll just skip the tool for now

Cheers

David

Many thanks Chanan much appreciated. I've had a look myself to see how my boards are ranking for keywords and phrases and currently they are not ranking in Google images. However I am ranking 10th for a specifc phrase and the phrase needs to reflect the name of the board.  Which is fine and I am now changing the board name to reflect a better keyword phrase and see how this develops over the coming weeks.

So in summary Pinterest is showing promise I think as a tool to employ in your SEO arsenal.

David

Oh right

Many thanks for that, I'll go and have a look now

David

Hey!

What's happened to White Board Friday - I have been away but I'm sure I've not seen any for a couple of weeks - or am I wrong?

Friday morning - Coffee, doughnut in hand and no little people on my screen to watch and listen too!

Best

David

Many thanks for your input Waqid and much appreciated.  Yes by all means any analysis from your project where Pinterest is involved is helpful

Best regards

David

Hi I wanted to see if the SEO team have had any feedback from members who have started to use Pinterest.  I've had it for a month or so now and I've been adding pins every day since - (quite addictive actually).

What is interesting is the gender element to the people who are following and repinning my pins and boards i.e. female.  It would be interesting to understand why this the case, why is it so popular with female users.

Ultimately I'm tyring to guage the benefits of employing Pinterest for SEO purposes and whether its worth keeping it in my arsenal of social tools.

Any insights welcome.

http://pinterest.com/visualizations

Best

David

Hi there,

I was wondering if anyone knew of a good B2B Affiliate marketing service for advertisers. I have a new software tool coming out shortly which I want to sell online and part of my requirements to do this is to set up an affiliate program for it.

It has been 5 years for me since I last looked or used any affiliate tools so kind of feel I'm having to start all over again.

As to reach of the affiliate solution it really needs to be on a global scale, failing that US and UK networks

Thanks for any assistance

Re

David