Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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.

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 cqbsdbunpicv8s76dlddd1e8u4g

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

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

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

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, 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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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