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Hi Jennifer,

How can you still be in development and in the same time be "punished" for not having a mobile version?

To answer your question - Abercrombie is doing something similar as your client is doing. On the desktop version they have 5 languages - the mobile version is only English. If you search on Google.de (desktop) - you get the German version. If  you search Google.de on mobile - the titles in the search results are German - however the site which is displayed when you click on the links is the one that is optimised for mobile (= English version)

I guess this will be similar in your case - desktop searches will go to the translated version - the mobile searches will go to the mobile version (even if it's not in the language of the searcher).

Dirk

Nope - Moz is completely unaware of settings you define in Google Search Console.

Why don't you pick a preferred version & 301 redirect the other one to the preferred one?

Dirk

The trouble is not with your robot.txt - in the server config you block rogerbot completely and serve a 400 for each request it makes..

If you have a user agent switcher plugin in your browser & change the user agent to rogerbot (rogerbot/1.1 (http://moz.com/help/guides/search-overview/crawl-diagnostics#more-help, rogerbot-crawler+pr2-crawler-101@moz.com) - the server returns a 400 Bad Request.

Dirk

The moment they revoke your access it's exactly that - you won't be able to access the data from that specific account.

Dirk

Hi Dan

Sorry - my mistake - when I was replying I had the href lang tag in mind. Check the link in Lynn's answer.

Dirk

Hi Dan,

en-uk doesn't exist - it's en-gb. Check http://microformats.org/wiki/en-uk

Dirk

I noticed that you have a Vary: User-Agent in the header - so I tried visiting your site with js disabled & switched the user agent to Rogerbot. Result: the site did not load (turned endlessly) and checking the console showed quite a number of elements that generated 404's. In the end - there was a timeout.

Try screaming frog - set user agent to Custom and change the values to

Name:Rogerbot

Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; rogerBot/1.0; UrlCrawler; http://www.seomoz.org/dp/rogerbot)

It will be unable to crawl your site. Check your server configuration - there are issues in how you deal with the Mozbot useragent.

Check the attached images.

Dirk

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Not sure if it's a spammy tactic. If you look at the cached version of these pages you'll notice that it contains a section on the right hand site: Travel blogs we like (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:GS8irLH9VKkJ:www.travelsupermarket.com/blog/learn-to-make-a-monkey-out-of-a-towel/towel-origami-109/+&cd=2&hl=nl&ct=clnk&gl=be) - with a link to "what's Dave doing"

Date of Cache for this example is Sept. 15th. It's quite possible that in the mean time Travelsupermarket decided to drop that section on the page. Normally these links should disappear in the coming months as these pages get crawled again.

Dirk

Hi Ronell

Just to clarify - I don't argue that there is a the link between review time & quality of the post. I am quite happy with the quality of most of the  posts on Youmoz so you are certainly doing a good job.

I am not a native English speaker. If I get a message that it can take weeks before an article is reviewed for me this is equal to "it can take weeks before we read your post". Hence my remark - you can't judge the quality of a post before reading it and so your reply to Donna sounded a bit odd to me.

I understand from your answer that you do a quick review of the new posts every day. Probably it would be better to state this in the initial message (we did a quick review and it's a gem/interesting but will need some rework/needs to be completely rewritten/completely rubbish) rather than stating a generic message that it will take weeks to review.

Reading between the lines - by getting the generic message I understand that my post is simply not good enough at this point and is hidden somewhere at the bottom of the pile

Dirk

Completely agree with the answers above - just adding an additional resource. To quote Matt Cutts: "it doesn't hurt to put the nofollow link for a link pointing to a login page, or things like terms and conditions or other "useless" pages. However, it doesn't hurt at all for those pages to be crawled by Google." - source: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2298312/matt-cutts-you-dont-have-to-nofollow-internal-links

Dirk

Hi Ronell,

Nice ideas but when you do a post to promote Youmoz you might also consider speeding up the review process a bit. Not really motivating if you submit a post to get the message "We'll review your article as swiftly as we can, but because of the high volume of posts we receive, it could take several weeks for us to get to yours. ".  This is not really in line with your answer to the question of Donna ("Turnaround has more to do with the quality of the post than anything else") - you can't judge the quality of a post before reading it.

Dirk

Thanks everybody for your help.

We are still figuring out why the click rate in WMT has dropped but we discovered the main reason of our traffic drop. Our external advertising company had added a Analytics tracker in an external script which was interfering with the normal measurements.

When I checked the codes last week with the Chrome plugin everything was fine but I was visiting the site with my Ad blocker activated (so the external script wasn't called). When I visited the site today with Ad block de-activated it indicated that our tag wasn't measuring. The external tracking code was removed & traffic went back to previous levels (it's a bit scary to realise that about 50% of our visits have the ad blocker activated)

Dirk

There is a similar question here - https://moz.com/community/q/why-rogerbot-can-t-crawl-site-https-unplag-com. The advice is similar - check your logfiles for Rogerbot / Moz and see what the response is.

When I checked the other question I noticed that there was an issue with the configuration of the name servers - it is possible that it's a coincidence but you seem to have issues with your name servers as well: http://dnscheck.pingdom.com/?domain=www.practo.com×tamp=1445520589&view=1
You might want to correct that.

Dirk

Not sure why you would want to do that. If you want to know if it works - give it a try & check with the Google Analytics plugin for Chrome if the correct data is measured

Dirk

Follow the advice from Jordan below and try to check your log files to see what the server response is when Rogerbot is trying to visit the site.

I noticed some DNS issues with your site - check http://dnscheck.pingdom.com/?domain=unplag.com - Nameservers don't seem to be ok. Also noticed that you have a 302 redirect from http -> https - while this should be 301. Probably not related to your main issue but worth checking.

Hi,

There was a similar question a few days ago: https://moz.com/community/q/is-there-a-limit-to-how-many-urls-you-can-put-in-a-robots-txt-file

Quote: Google Webmaster Tools has a great tool for this. If you go into WMT and select "Google index", then "remove URLs". You can use regex to remove a large batch of URLs then block them in robots.txt to make sure they stay out of the index.

Dirk

Comparing YoY & drilling down to browser version doesn't really make much sense - example IE 8 had a marketshare of 4.96% in Sept. 2014 - and had a share of 2.19% in Sept. 2015. Same for Safari - current version is 9.0 - and updates are semi-automatic so 7 & 8 became almost extinct.

Use Screaming Frog to check if the tracking code is still present on all pages - and use the Chrome Analytics plugin to check if the tag is sending data.

The fact that your ranking is equal doesn't say much - it could be that for your main keyword Google is showing a special format (check the possibilities in this post from dr. Pete). If this is the case - even when keeping your position, your click rate and traffic will drop dramatically.

If you take a shorter time frame - did you saw a specific drop in the past weeks? Or is the drop only when comparing YoY?

Dirk

Strictly speaking - you are not using the correct url in the link.

Your code:  => however this url doesn't exist but is 301 redirected to https://de.yourdomain.com/about-us

Could you try changing the url to small caps & test again with the hreflang tester flang.dejanseo.com.au  (which is also indicating the same error as WMT)

Dirk

If you put noindex/follow the pages /2, /3 etc will not be indexed - however the blogposts they are linking to will be indexed (as Google will follow the links).

Most cases pages just containing links to blog articles have little value as landing pages - that's why I think that the noindex/ follow is more appropriate. Next/Previous is normally meant for articles cut in several pieces (publishers do this a lot to increase pageviews = bigger inventory)

Without knowing your site it's difficult to judge which is the best solution.

Dirk

Same here - score on Page Speed insights is pretty low as well - and also a timeout on webpagestest.org

Dirk

Have to agree with Kyle. Your home takes 28sec to load (http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151020_BG_PFQ/1/details/). Other pages take up to 48 seconds (http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151020_01_PHY/). You also have very low scores on Page Speed Insights.

If you check the results above - they contain a lot of useful information on where to start to improve the load times.

Dirk

Hi Becky,

You are correct - normally if a tag is fired it won't be counted as bounce (unless you set "noninteraction=true" - check https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033068#NonInteractionEvents)

Dirk

If you check your page with external tools you'll see that the general status of the page is 200- however there are different elements which generate a 4xx error (your logo generates a 408 error - same for the shopping cart) - for more details you could check this http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151019_29_14E6/1/details/.

Remember that Moz bot is quite sensitive for errors -while browsers, Googlebot & Screaming Frog will accept errors on page, Moz bot stops in case of doubt.

You might want to check the 4xx errors & correct them - normally Moz bot should be able to crawl your site once these errors are corrected. More info on 406 errors can be found here. If you have access to your log files you could check in detail which elements are causing the problems when Mozbot is visiting your site.

Dirk

I would leave it like this especially if these pages generate long tail search traffic. Having semi-duplicate pages isn't necessarily going to hurt you (check also: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/myths-about-duplicate-content/). Check also this article https://moz.com/blog/have-we-been-wrong-about-panda-all-along) and finally Google (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en) :

"Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results."

If your site has enough pages with rich content & these "thin" pages have value as landing pages for your visitors don't start messing with it.

Dirk

It can be useful - it depends on what you want to know. If you do not implement either of them - the time on site will not be correct as there will be no time on site calculated for bounced visits.

Personally - I prefer to know if people scroll to the end of the page (so I assume they have read the article) rather than just put an arbitrary time to fire an event. It will in both cases make the time measurement on your site more accurate. Both ways of measurement will reduce the bounce rate.

I think it's certainly useful for e-commerce - but then I would rather use enhanced e-commerce tracking.

I don't really understand what you mean with "I thought that if you took into account the time spent on page, and set these parameters in analytics, that it wouldn't in fact be counted as a bounce?" - could you explain?

Dirk

To quote Google: "Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results."

Having a backlink from the copied page to your site can help Google to determine that your page is the original source - however it's no guarantee (if his site has a better link profile it could well be that Google prefers the copied site). It would be better if the copy site would put a canonical url pointing to your page.

Dirk

Time on page has the same issue - suppose somebody visits your site - spends 10 minutes reading an article & then goes to another site. It will be counted as a bounced visit - but even worse - the 10 minutes spend on your site will not be measured in Analytics (check http://cutroni.com/blog/2012/02/29/understanding-google-analytics-time-calculations/)

This is one of the advantages of the Advanced Content tracking - it measures better what people are doing on your site. The fact that the bounce rate decreases for me isn't the big win - the fact that you get better time measurement on site & that you can check the interaction (do they scroll to the end) are the things that bring benefit.

If you don't want to use the tag manager - you can also do this with the normal tracking code: http://cutroni.com/blog/2014/02/12/advanced-content-tracking-with-universal-analytics/ (Cutroni is the Analytics Advocate @Google)

Dirk

Href lang tags should be reciprocal: If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A, otherwise the annotations may not be interpreted correctly (source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/troubleshooting-hreflang-annotations-in.html)

Example: suppose http://www.example.com/es/myspanishpage.htm contains the spanish content & http://www.example.com/en/myenglishpage.htm the english version both url's should have the hreflang tags:

The error you get indicates that you tagged only one version & forgot to tag the other one.

You can check here if implementation is correct: http://flang.dejanseo.com.au/

Hope this helps.

Dirk

It's possible that your site hasn't been crawled yet (since you changed the robots.txt). You can see in your campaign dashboard (upper right corner) when the next crawl is scheduled.

Do you see any specific error codes on your dashboard?

Dirk

Difficult to tell how long it will take before it's completely removed (Google is never very clear on how long it takes). If it's urgent you could use the url removal tool :https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en

Dirk

Don't forget that for Universal Analytics the code needs to be in the head section - not in the footer (this wouldn't explain the drop in traffic however)

Did you check the pages with the Analytics plugin - to see if the tag is always fired?

There is  a similar thread on Google Productforums - but the answer isn't very clear either: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/mrD1aOjHLC8

Without the actual url it's (and access to the stats) it's difficult to guess what could be happening.

Dirk

Hi

Well - given the troubles Moz has to build the regular index in the past months I doubt they will add this feature anywhere soon.

Don't forget that DA & Trust is an internal metric of Moz - which tries to predict how well your site will rank in the SERP's. As all tools, it is just an estimate of the real thing.

Dirk

The links to the images do not seem to work.

If you modified the Analytics code - my first idea would be to check if the tags are present on all the pages - you can do this quite easily using a customer filter in Screaming Frog.  Set the Analytics on "hour" view - during the period of transition - and see if there is a sudden drop of traffic at a specific point in time - if this is the case - it's almost certain that the drop is related to a problem with the Analytics tag.

Check Analytics reports- check if the drop is equal in all sections or if the drop is significant in some sections - which could give you an indication of where to look. If you're site has a structured url - the easiest way to check this would be in the Audience report > Site Content > Content Drilldown.

Check the pages with issues with the Chrome Plugin for Analytics - check if Analytics is collecting data on these pages - you could also consider using the Analytics Debugger plugin

Dirk

You can't force Moz to crawl all backlinks or submit backlinks. While the Moz bot is crawling a huge number of sites/pages (check this page for the stats). Even when these figures are impressive - it's still only a fraction of the total web and what Googlebot is crawling/indexing. So it's quite possible that some backlinks were not (yet) discovered by Moz. Check also the FAQ on how the backlinks are discovered.There just was an update - so you'll have to check again after Nov. 15th.

As each supplier is using a different method to crawl the web - it's a good idea to check multiple resources to get your backlink profile (raven tools, afhref,...)

Dirk

In addition to Ria's answer - make them noindex/follow.

If these pages (2/3...etc) would have any value to be included in the SERP's you could consider using rel next/previous - indicating that these pages belong together and should be considered as one page. The way I understand your question - the noindex/follow is probably a better solution.

Dirk

No they will not be indexed. Check: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2007/03/using-robots-meta-tag.html:

If content values conflict, we will use the most restrictive. So, if the page has these meta tags:

We will obey the NOINDEX value.

Dirk

Hi

I guess you have already checked that the page is accessible for crawlers and has sufficient internal links to be discovered by the bots (if not - try crawling the site with Screaming Frog)

If it's only one page that isn't picked up you could try a fetch like google & submit to index to force the page being indexed.

It could be that Google considers this page as less important and crawls with lower frequency compared to the other pages (to deep in the site, to few links, not enough content,...)

Dirk

Hi John,

URL: goo.gl/gPC9FY  - we rank high for all keywords containing the words "malvorlage" or "ausmalbild" + keyword - like "malvorlage stern"

Titles  - no changes on titles recently - as most images were labeled with Malvorlage & we noticed that Ausmalbild became more popular - the new images we added were using "Ausmalbild" as title rather than "malvorlage"

Layout - that was one of the first things I considered - given the fact that the image search in Germany is still on the old presentation (preview of site rather than slider). We checked this and it seems that it's still the old version which is used.

Dirk

Hi Egol,

Know exactly what you mean - we had this on our Spanish site after a less successful (to put it mildly) site migration - our images remained in the search results however the site was no longer ours but from someone else (that was also the moment we discovered all our images were spread all over the web...). Multiple complaints (and months) later the site started gaining traffic again.

It doesn't seem the case here - I did manually check key images - and the site behind is always ours. I also used the "search by image" to see how many times it was copied - and although copies existed - it were mainly smaller sizes on non concurrential sites (like schools).

Positions remain good to excellent. Even more amazing is that for some keywords the position improved more or less at the same time as the drop in CTR

Can't understand why the click rate decreased that dramatically.

Dirk

Hi Rob

forgot to mention that - analytics was the first thing I checked and is working fine. That's why I checked search console.

Dirk

Hi Antonio,

Not sure which language you prefer - but you can find some sample codes here: https://developers.google.com/webmaster-tools/v3/samples - I tried the python example which was quite well documented inside the code, I guess it's the same for the other languages. If I have some time I could give it a try - but it won't be before the end of next week (and based on python)

Dirk

One of our sites in Germany had a very sudden drop in traffic (starting Oct. 7th). The site gets most of it's organic traffic from Image Search. Checking in Search Console revealed that

• search volume for keywords increased in that period
• our average position is stable
• our click rate dropped dramatically

(we double checked - searching the keyword in "anonymous mode" still showed our results for main keywords in top image positions (first 2 rows)).

As an example (see attached screencopy) - keyword had clickrate of 1% (average) - dan dropped to 0.06% while the position remained stable.

Germany is still using the "old" version of image search (unlike the rest of the world) - which gives the site preview rather than just the image slider when you click on a result in image search. Our first thought that this was changed - but it seems that it didn't change.

Ideas what might cause this dramatic drop in click%?

There have been no major technical modifications on the site for the last 2 months.

thanks,

Dirk

GjlV8CW.jpg

Hi,

If the campaign is archived it doesn't count as active campaign. Suppose you have a campaign limit of 5 in your subscription - with 5 active campaigns, archiving one of them liberates one "slot" that you can use for a new campaign.

You're not really charged on campaign basis but are charged a fixed fee (with 5/10/25/100 allowed campaigns depending on your subscription)- so archiving one campaign wouldn't really change the monthly charge.

Dirk

To update - even worse: on the blog itself you are linking to the canonical version - not to the /blog/ version. So it would be impossible for Google to index /blog/ type of content.

If you do woontrends 2016 site:www.keukensduitsland.nl you will notice that the canonical version is properly indexed (even with the strange js redirect.

Dirk

It's not related to the robots.txt - you can easily check that in Webmastertools (Crawl > Robots.txt tester)

First issue is the location of the link - if you put a small link to the blog hidden in the left corner at the bottom of the page Google is not going to attribute a lot of importance to this link.

Most important issue on your blog articles is the canonical - example:

http://www.keukensduitsland.nl/blog/woontrends-2016/ has as canonical url: http://www.keukensduitsland.nl/woontrends-2016/ - however this page will redirect you with javascript to the blog article.

Make the canonical self referencing and do a proper redirect on the other pages (301 rather than js redirect)

Dirk

Hi Rob

Wanted to reply you on your previous question but than I noticed the new one. I have the impressions that your new site has compatibility issues with the different plugins you use.

I tried to check your site with different external tools (web-sniffer.net - first time 302 status but no details / webpagetest.org - check: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151013_3E_13EQ/ - failed & http://www.webpagetest.org/result/151013_1P_14V3/1/details/ - check the 302 in the first line ) - and results are not consistent. Apart from that - as mentioned previously - when checking your site in Firefox I can see the Analytics snippet in the source - when I try the same thing in Chrome the snippet is not present.

The cached version of your site (homepage) isn't complete - check http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_cThj8msp3EJ:www.advanced-driving.co.uk/+&cd=1&hl=nl&ct=clnk&gl=be#da-page_in_widget-4 - are you blocking some js/css files in your robots.txt

Try fetching pages like Google in WMT (and with the other tools) and check the results - you could try to enable/disable each module to see if results change.

Dirk

Gianluca - I guess this time it's my turn:  As far as I know they only have one official language in the Netherlands (Dutch) - I guess you refer to Belgium (3 official languages Dutch/French/German).

It's a common error to make this mistake - but the difference is easy to spot: Belgium is qualified for Euro '16 - unlike the Netherlands