Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You've not done anything drastic to the site? It wasn't down when the crawl tried to run or anything like that?

Can you try doing a manual crawl: http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test

Might also be  worth contacting SEOmoz support.

Don't Panic!

Hi Marisa,

The first question that springs to mind is are all your pages being crawled? What does it say on the Crawl Diagnostics report?

I'm still seeing the Rel Canonical notices.

I agree with you, but you see it quite a lot - especially people trying to optimise for multiple location based variations.

I took it to be the kind of footers that are there to create spammy internal links for multiple permutations of particular keywords. The fact that they're not just low contract, but so unnoticeable that that the link really can't be there for any user benefit.

It seems that more than ever, it's a good idea to ask yourself what the reason is to add something to the web page...

Do you visitors actually use it? If they don't then I'd get rid of them without hesitation. IF they do, then I'd think about why, and what I could do to improve my navigation/architecture to help people find what they want... and then get rid of the tag cloud.

Instead of spraying the lawn, water the plants you really care about! Make sure you have links to your most important, most popular/useful content.

Are there any local publications (on-line/off-line/both) that would appreciate guest articles?  Remember direct traffic is also good!

Are their options for seasonal content? Frost, students going into their first rented accommodation at the start of the academic year...

Another way you can stand apart from the spun content is by carefully defining your target audience and then writing content that specifically addresses the needs of that audience.

Are there any trends/patterns in the types of customers/types of problems they have?

Where do each of these customer types congregate? Can you create awareness of your offering in this place?

As James mentions, capturing content (video/testimonies,pictures etc) as part of they day job makes it a lot less of a burden.

What are your competition doing? Remember you don't have to build the most awesome plumbing information portal - you just need to be better than the competition! What are they doing right? What could you do better.

Are there any news worthy stories? We regularly get stories about the left of copper pipes etc in the local press - are there any way you can help out local journalists?

Good luck!

It would also enable us to see how much better these additional factors make the search results with out own eyes and not have to rely on Google's promise that they do. Show us the evidence and let us come to our own conclusions!

At the moment it's a bit like a kid being told to eat their greens...

That's all well and good, but how do you get the average man on the street to switch?

For example, my dad has never "chosen" a search engine in his life. He just goes with whatever he browser defaults to / manufacturer set up as a default and failing that "google" because it's the only one he's heard of... He thinks any weakness in the results returned are because he "must have types the wrong thing."

It would be really nice to be freely toggle all the factors your mentioned on/off (and set defaults) so that you could have the search that you wanted.

I don't know if this google video might help: Video about pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

It talks specifically about this kind of article index pagination.

Just to keep it natural so if you were to read it out loud to others it wouldn't sound odd. Just make sure you avoid hundreds of links with the same keyword specific anchor text. When you come to linking to your static pages, try and think about more than just getting those keywords into the anchor text for the search engines - also think about the real people reading your blog articles - make sure your anchor text properly describes what they will find if they click on the links. If you/re trying to move your human visitors towards your offerings then think about making your anchor text compelling and trying to get the benefits of your offering in there somewhere. Good luck!

Are you sure there's not a link to your site on the referring site? How are you checking?

Google Analytics will be capturing the source location from the referer set in the http header when someone visits your site.

At least one other site has  google maps embedded, but that one is using an iframe. The site in question is using javascript and has a google maps API key in the header.

Both have claimed Google places listings with the location indicated.

Can you provide more details of the your site and the keyword your targeting?

If you're spending lots of money on blog posts and still lurking down on Page 3/4 then I'd be worried that you're not getting the return on investment. Are you getting ANY traffic to this keyword?

If you don't want to post the info here, then feel free to drop me a private message.

I wouldn't worry too much. You really want to look at the ongoing trends rather than just one weeks results. I've got certain keywords I'm tracking where I seem to swap position with my SERP neighbour every week!

If you see a trend where your slipping down the SERPS week after week then I'd start investigating why.

Remember the pages you're creating don't exist in a vacuum on the net and there are lots of factors affecting your ranking. What are the other sites in the SERPS for you keywork doing?

Blog posts may rank higher when they're new. Google has a freshness factor that it'll use when ranking so you can often see news worthy content slowly drifting down the SERPS over time.

As you build an authentic, diverse link profile I would expect to see more stability.

Hope this helps.

Hi Kevin, I think if you're tempted to start a directory I'd think very carefully about what you're trying to achieve. What are your goals for the site? What personally do you want to get out of it?

How can you stand out from the crowd? What is it about your directory that'll make it unique? What do you want YOUR directory to mean to people? What's the audience you're targeting?

You say it's a tourist town - why not build a virtual guide around the town? If you're visiting the town as a tourist - how can you help them get the most out of their stay? What are the "hidden gems" that people miss...

Google Webmaster tools will tell your the click through rate from the SERPS and Google Analytics can be used to measure the conversion rate. You'll need to define your site goal and think about how visitors move through your site from their landing page to your site goal pages.

No, there's no ideal ratio as such and it's always a good idea to look beyond the headline numbers, especially the relevance of the pages being returned in the SERPS.

You're looking for good volumes of search traffic with as little competition as possible. While those large traffic numbers for highly competitive keywords may look attractive, you may be better off targeting less competitive keywords with smaller amounts of traffic.

Think of it this way a large slice of a small pie is going to be better than just crumbs from a large pie.

However there are other factors to consider beside just traffic and difficulty. You also need to think about user intent, relevance to content / brand / offering and once you start getting some traffic the conversion rate.

A couple of questions first:

You mention "BRAND" in all the examples. What is this Brand, how does it relate to the topics covered and what's it meant to mean to people? Why should they care? What's going to tie it together across all these disparate topics? Is there a common theme/view across all of these subject.

While they may all be very different, if the blogs are about your insights, you experience then maybe they deserve to be under one banner.

Do any of the topics you want to cover share the same audience?

If you want to achieve good rankings, then the key really is to write good quality content that people are going to want to read/share/link to. Creating this content takes time. Seriously think about how much time you have available, not just for writing, but research and promotion (guest blogging etc.)

Can you afford to spend the time required across all of these topics? Would it be better to focus on one and build that first. It's easier to write about something you absolutely love. To which topics can you bring new insights, unique point of view etc?

Think also about your return on investment - what's likely to give you a better return? One totally kick-ass, blog or lots of weaker ones.

What do you want to mean to the world. Do you want to be known as the go-to guy for "cycle maintenance?"

My suggestion again is to think about how you want to be perceived and then do whatever you need to do to be that person - but clearly set out your goals first. (Don't stop at "write blogs, make money")

You don't say what your background is, or if you've been blogging before or how much success you've had in the past, so I hope this helps.

Obviously there's a lot to consider, by my guy feeling would be to go with separate blogs on separate domains and give them each an appropriate/unique personality/look. The more blogs you create - the more you're diluting your attention.

Good luck!

In a nutshell, it's the number of other sites that link to your page/site. You can find more info here:

https://moz.com/help/guides/moz-pro-overview/links/competitive-metrics

Number of linking root domains (# of linking root domains) includes only the number of unique root domains linking. Two links from the same website would only be counted as one linking root domain.

Engineers at SEOmoz have found that "# of linking root domains" is much more highly correlated to real rankings than "# of links".

Generally the more "connected" your page is to the the greater the authority the search engines will consider your site to have.  Not all links are equal though, and there are other factors involved...

Hope this helps.

I would - optimise your chosen page for the keyword you wish it to rank for. Check this page manually against you chosen keyword and fix any problems etc. Once you've done this your on-page grade isn't going to change.

Once you've got the page sorted think about your site architecture and internal site links.

Then you can start looking at the off-site stuff like link building etc.

What the on-page report is great for, is finding pages that are ranking (but not as high as they might) for particular keywords. Some simple on-page optimisation and you can gain a ranking position or two. Can make quite a difference if you get a page up a couple of positions onto page 1 or into the top 3.

Are any of your other pages ranking in the top-50 for any of your chosen keywords?

From the help here:

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20878127-on-page-analysis-for-campaigns

"The On-page summary automatically generates reports for any of your campaign keywords that rank in the top 50 of your primary search engine. The URL that it grades is the same URL that appears in the search results.

For instance, if you have 75 keywords ranking in the Top 50, you should have 75 On-Page Reports. This generation happens automatically within 24 hours of when your rankings are updated."

If you select the Report Card link at the top of the on-page optimisation report you can run a report for any of your keywords. Just provide the URL you want to rate and off you go.

You can always run these manually on any URL/Keyword combination. Look for On-Page Optimization under Research Tools:

http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization

Hope this helps.

Write for people, not search engines and then keep it simple. Everyone understands simple - even rocket surgeons!

The only caveat here is when you're talking to a very specific audience. In which case you'll want to use language that they use/understand otherwise you can be perceived as an "outsider" or "amature".

So - think of your audience and then keep it simple as you can.

Who are the target audience of the translating services? I'd start by looking at blogs that spoke to this target market. For example are they students, small businesses, people in the legal profession?

Who needs the services your client offers, and where do they congregate. If you can get a blog post in front of these eye-balls then not only do you get a link... but you're also talking to potential customers. You might get some referrals traffic too.

It's not just about getting links to boost your rankings. Think about the potential referral traffic too. A great blog post on a site relevant to your niche can send you well qualified traffic that converts well. At the end of the day, it's not traffic the site needs - it's business. Also think about your positioning - If you visit a bunch of sites about fly fishing and see guest posts from the same person on just about every site you visit, you're going to think that they are more likely to be an authority on the subject. Just make sure the articles are good! Don't just cobble together a low value blog post just to get the link. Think about your positioning, think about the particular audience of the site and create something worth reading. If you've been offered a guest post then it's not unreasonable to ask a couple of questions about the site's visitors. What kind of thing are they looking for and how many readers of the blog are there? Even if you just get your name/brand in front of your customers, that can be a good thing. If you were given the opportunity to talk to a group of potential customers - how big would the group need to be to make it worth your while?

What are your competitors doing? A good first step is to take a look at what your competitors are doing, how they're building links, what content are they creating and who are they targeting (customers/market).

Using open site explorer you can reverse engineer their links. (If sites link to your competitors they may link to you - although I would suggest you dig deep and understand why they are linking to you competition. You may need to provide better content or a unique opinion. You can look at their top pages and see what other people are linking to.

Reciprocal links aren't the be all and end all. Ideally you want to get inbound links for reasons other than offering them a link back. Google are well aware of the practice and excessive reciprocal links are going to look a little unnatural. Can you think of ways you can earn links from authoritative sites in your niche?

What do your customers need?  How well do your understand the customers of the site? Can you provide some great content that satisfies their needs/problems?

What about guest blogging? Give-aways, reviews?

What's the niche the site is operating in? If you can provide more details then maybe you can get some more specific advice.

Hope this helps.

It's your blog directory widget that's adding buckets of links to each page and the more articles you add to your blog the worse it's going to become. I'd take a look and see how people are navigating from between articles.

I strongly that it won't do much hard to remove this directory. Maybe replace it with a list of just the top level categories instead of all the individual articles?

It's the collapsing categories plugin. If you look at the page source you'll also see that it's adding an awful lot of javascript to the top of the page.

I also note that the recent posts widget is showing white links on yellow backgrounds for me.

Hope this helps.

Do you have tags (or equivalent enabled?) This can generate an awful lots of links.

Can you give us a link to one of the offending pages? It's hard to provide more specific advice without more info.

Hi Charlotte,

There's a lot to consider, but I'd say that colours/font aren't where you'd start. I'd also say that getting some CRO awareness can really benefit your SEO - after all, our customers want sales/leads not rankings!

It can be really hard, especially when you've worked closely with a website/business for some time, but the key is to try and take an external perspective and see the site through the eyes of your customers/visitors. Can you identify the kind of person who would be interested in the site's offerings? What are their needs/problems and how does the site address these.

What you want to establish:

Are you targeting the right keywords? What is the user intent behind the keyword - are people searching for that term really looking for the products/services you are offering. Are they really likely to be your customers?

If the offering being clearly explained - are you clearly expressing the benefits (to them). Do your pages answer the "What's in it for me?" question.

Is the purpose of each page (and it's position in the conversion funnel) understood?

Do you have clear, appealing calls to action. Is it obvious to visitors what to do next? Don't leave people hanging.

What are the objections that people may have before taking action. How can you address these objections (social proof/testimonials etc, guarantees, try before you buy etc)

Hope this helps!

What page are you checking? As well as picking "only external" have you tried selecting "pages on this sub-domain" or "pages on this root domain" to check for any links to any page on your site?

I agree with Yannick. Once you've created pages following best-practice then it's time to leave them alone and build some links. As Yannick says, this is a lot easier to do if you've got something worth linking to.

Take a look around your niche, how strong is the competition and what are they doing to get their rankings. What content are they offering, are their any gaps you can exploit, if there something you can do that's unique or just better?

You can use Open Site Explorer to look at the backlinks of your competitors. See if you can figure out why they are getting links.

I don't think you'll see much, if any, difference putting keywords in bold. I also wouldn't recommend using bold tags (and un-styling them in CSS) just to boost your rankings.

While putting keywords in bold may help search engines understand what your page is about it's such a minor signal that just building one good link may be a better use of your time.

Think about the real people visiting your pages, as well as having good headings to break up content, sensible use of emphasis/bold can help with the "scanability" of the page.

I just assumed that the my twitter profile page hasn't been crawled (yet). I know OSE is showing twitter links to other sites. (I notice that SEOmoz.org has a bunch of links from twitter.)

Do you link to your twitter profile page from anywhere? Are those pages linking pages in the linkscape index?

Not overly worried about this as links from twitter are "no-follow".

Carl, it's now displaying the following error message: "Keyword Difficulty Tool is having issues displaying AdWords API data. We are working with AdWords API folks for a fix soon!"

In the meantime you'll have to pop back to the adwords keyword tool to get the traffic numbers.

Hi Barry.

In the Duplicate Page Content report you can click on the number in the "Other URLs" column. This then lists the pages that have been identified as duplicates. If you've got loads, you might want to think about exporting your Crawl Diagnostics as a CSV file.

Hope this helps.

Hi Justin, I take it that you've not had any other signs that you've been penalised. You've not received any warnings in your Google Webmaster Tools or had the clients pages vanish from the search results completely? They still have pages in the index?

You mention that you're trying to recover from a previous companies link-building activity. How much information do you have to work with?

Do you have any historic ranking reports? Do you know how the rankings have changed and when? Can you find out what the position was before they started their link building and how it's changed over time?

Can you establish how badly your client has been affected? Do you have access to the site's analytics? Can you see/quantify any sudden loss of search traffic etc?

Personally I'd start by taking a good look at the SERPS for the chosen keywords and seeing how strongly your clients pages are likely going to compete.

In your view, with a cynical SEO eye, do the pages deserve to rank higher than the competition?

How would your client react if you put their page and a competitors ranking page side by site and asked them to say honestly which one was best? (I don't recommend that you do this unless you know how they'll respond!!)

Hi Caroline. My guess would be that they're not being directly penalised, but are suffering because their inbound links are coming from what Google sees as low ranking, low-quality, low value-add sites such as, but not always, content farms etc.

If you suspect this to be the case it's really important to look beyond the headline "linking root domains" number and look at the domain/page authority of those linking domains.

If you were trying to differentiate good content from bad - would you look at the number of votes, or the number of votes from respected sources? (Espectially when you know that people are trying to game the system by building lots of "easy" low quality links.)

This is of course just my opinion. I'd love to know if there any evidence for actually "link penalties".

You won't get Google to do anything about them, but Google have said that "crappy backlinks" won't hurt you, they just won't be worth much anything.

(Backlinks obtained in an underhand unethical manner might though...)

If you really want to get the links removed you'd need to contact the individual webmasters. This is likely to take lots of time/effort that you're almost certainly better off spending doing some high-quality link building or content creation.

Definitely worth setting up RSS news feeds from both Google Alerts and Google Blog Search for your keywords to keep an eye on what's happening in your niche. As well as lots of ideas for new content/articles you'll also see what's happening in your niche and what your competitors are up to.

You can also set up a twitter search for your main keywords too. I'm sure there must be opportunity there - lots of students tweeting about getting their assignments proof read etc.

The Title Element Too Long is just a warning that your title is likely to be cut-off when displayed in the SERPS.

If you've got your website (or company name) at the front of the title then you're going to be pushing your more valuable unique page keywords further to the right. If your title is cut off then you could lose some important words from your title when it is displayed. There's a view that keywords nearer the start of your title are likely to carry more SEO value.

Do you need to have your website name in the title? Are people searching for your website + your keywords? Why is it there? What are you selling? Are you selling your website or is the website selling your goods/services? What's more important - promoting the website name or getting visitors to the site?

Remember that your page title and meta-description is likely to be the first part of your website that someone is going to see. As well as trying to get your pages to rank as highly as you can in the search results you also need to think about click through. There's no point being #1 if nobody clicks on your SERPS.

You need to think about making your Title and Description as relevant, appealing and compelling as possible to the searcher. Think about the search terms and try to match the searchers intent. You want them to feel that they're going to find what they are looking for in you click on your SERP entry.

There's some studies that suggest a shorter title tends to be more appealing.

Google will highlight the searchers keywords in bold - this helps people gauge how relevant your page is likely to be to their search query. If your valuable keywords are being cut-off they won't get these signals.

IF you have a big, reputable brand, then adding this name to your titles is probably a good idea as you'll benefit from the trust in the brand. If you're not a well known brand then I'd put the brand name at the end of the title if anywhere.

Hope this helps.

If those pages you write attract their own inbound links then the link-juice that flows into your site, into those pages, will also flow to the other pages on your site giving other pages on your site a boost too.

Don't just think of link juice as something that flows down from your home page.

Adding more (quality) content will also help your website rank for all those lovely long-tail keywords.

Just remember that it's not JUST about links/link-juice. The pages should have a purpose and be written for the audience you're targeting. Make sure you're thinking about answering their questions rather than your own, and provide them with the information they need.

All those deep pages that have lots of back links also pass on page rank via their links too and I bet that in most cases pages on a website have one or more links back to the homepage...

I've got the same thoughts as Aran.

What are these 182 sites for? Why do they exist? What are they meant to achieve?

If these sites are deindexed, do they have any value? Do these sites get any traffic? Does the mainsite get any traffic via these sites (and is this traffic worth anything - does any of this traffic convert?

Do these sites have any inbound links?

If these sites provide no value, no links, no business etc then I would seriously question why you need them.

The effort required to get these sites up and running and delivering some value is almost certainly going to be better spent on your main site.

Thanks for the weather report! Are these new or returning visitors? (Does that reveal anything interesting?)

Is this a constant bounce rate or a recent change? What's the trend? What's the period covered?

As well as emails... any printed material (or other) with QR codes?

How much difference has all these blog comments made? What other link-buidling activity are you involved in? Blog / Forum comments are pretty low-value.

How about picking a handful of the more authoritative blogs, with the higher numbers of subscribers and seeing if you can get some guest posting opportunities.

Blog comments are a great first step when building a relationship with blog/blog author, but you need to get involved in the discussion and not push your own site.

Once you've got some engagement going then you can approach the blog for guest post opportunities...

I think if you've commented on 1500 blogs then it's probably time to move on to some higher value tactics!

Good stuff! Before you leap into generating lots of great content - have you considered...

1. What are you business goals. (It's not getting hits to a website!) How is your website going to support these goals. Try and think a little longer term than just "selling our service." How are you going to build a relationship with your customers and retain them...

2. What are you customers needs/goals. What motivates them. Do you have a clear understanding of your customers. (Beyond the broad categories like "students" or "home based businesses". Can you break this down further to build personas?

3. What is a customer worth? How much is a customer likely to be worth? Not only in their first purchase, but during their whole life as a customer. How much is the business prepared to invest to get a customer? How many customers does the website need to deliver in order to make it a success.

Once you understand these, you can start to think about the content you need to do some research. You need to to work out how you can connect your services with your target market by developing suitable/compelling offerings. (How do you know there is a market out there?)

This is where keyword research comes in. But don't limit it to just using the google keywords tool. If you can, talk to your target audience then do! I know you've already done some keyword research, but I've often been surprised at how differently prospects search for solutions about their problems! It amazing what people will tell you if you're prepared to listen!

Look at Google Insights for some of your keywords to look for seasonality. Understand why this happens and how you might run different campaigns/need different content at different times of the year. Look at the geography can you identify specific target markets there? It'll also show you some top searches and rising searches.

Can you talk to your potential customers? If your can, don't talk about your service, but listen to what their problems are, what pain can your relieve? What are their concerns. Why wouldn't they use your service (what do you need to do to reassure them?) What are your competitors doing?

Undertake competitive research to fully understand your competitors. Take a look at their websites. What markets are they focusing on. How are they appealing to their customers.

Using Open Site Explorer, take a look at their Top Pages and the Anchor Text of inbound links to see if you can identify the search terms that they are optimising for. (You can tell how much SEO activity they are engaged in too!)

Once you've got all this info, think about: What makes you unique/remarkable. Why should people come to you rather than your competitors. What's the promise your going to make to the world. What are you going to stand for? How are you going to stand apart from the herd.

How do your services solve the problems your potential audience has? What are the benefits of your service (flip "features" into benefits by asking why is this important to your customers) What content do you need to target a specific market niche.

Once you know this, you can start to build your initial content. Instead of building a page hierarchy. Think about building your sales funnel. Think about your landing pages (your offers), The supporting content to address concerns/build credibility (Testimonials, guarantees, samples etc), And the Goal pages (sign-ups, contact pages and purchase pages)

Be wary of "Services" pages. Nobody sits down with the intent to find/browse some services. Always think about the "What's in it for me" angle from their perspective. Why should they be interested in your services. Instead of a Services section for instance, you might want to have different sections for your main market niches: "Small Businesses", "Students", "Legal" etc.. Try to keep an external perspective. This isn't about you. It's about THEM!

Think about the purpose/goal of each and every page, it's position in your sales funnel and how it's going to move people on to the next step. Why does the page exist. What does it have to do? If you know how your sales funnel is meant to work, you can measure the flow of customers through your funnel and identify content/pages that aren't working and fix the leaks. If you don't know how people are going to move through your site it makes it much harder to do this.

Once you've got your core up and running, then you can continue to add further offers (specific to different market niches). This widens your funnel, but you need to watch how these new leads convert and identify any content you need to support this process that's missing.

Clearly identifying your target audience and their needs will also help you write/target your blog content . You want to be investing in content that's relevant to your audience.

Hope this helps, and hope that it's not just telling you stuff that you're already aware of!

I really wouldn't worry about meta-keywords. Much better to spend the time on the content!