Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Miriam. They do at least have the correct format on their G+ listings, but if it's a mismatch everywhere else, then they're a fish out of water.

It's great to read some solid resources advocating against it. I know this client is willing to do the right thing. I just needed the right pieces of information to make my recommendation stronger.

Thanks again!!!

Thanks Miriam. It definitely does output an invalid address because the city & zip don't match. Do you have any specific resources you'd recommend that I can use to back up my recommendation that this is not a good idea? Aside from the traditional you need a correct address and your NAP must be consistent? I have a feeling their argument might be "But if all my address citations match (even though it's incorrect) in the major local ecosystems, how will Google know? I'd love to be able to counter that with something more solid, or an example where someone else did something similar and their results went sour.

No. They're not an SAB. Brick and mortar.

I have never seen this before, but I recently took over a client that for all intents and purposes is considered to be in Metro A. They're just south of the border and everyone (customers, etc.) consider them in Metro A. The problem is their physical address puts them in Small Town B. For whatever reason, this client has decided that they are going to put their address as follows:

Street 
Metro A, Zip Code Small Town B

They've mismatched the city and zip code in attempts to have a stronger showing in Metro A organically. I've never seen this strategy before, my gut tells me bad, bad, bad. So I'm looking for a better strategy, advice, etc.

Thanks mucho!

This could be all inclusive of both Google and Bing (a la webmaster tools), or, add more specificity with two additional categories:
"Google Webmaster Tools"
"Bing Webmaster Tools"

(It was suggested I post this on the forum and see if anyone else would upvote this.)

Thanks!

D7s6zJm

Not back during the fall of 2013, but more recently there's been a change, and it's likely because of the website vendor switch.

Will the links eventually disappear from GWT? If so, do you know the timeframe?

Taking a long, Ace-Ventura-like breath here. This question is loaded.

Here we go:

• No manual actions reported against my client's site in GWT
• HOWEVER, a link: operator search for external links to my client's website shows NO links in results. That seems like a very bad omen to me. OSE shows 13 linking domains, but not the one that's listed in the next bullet point.
• Issue: In Google Webmaster Tools, I noticed 1,000+ external links to my client's website all coming from riddim-donmagazine.com (there are a small handful of other domains listed, but this one stuck out for the large quantity of links coming from this domain)
• Those external links all point to two URLs on my client's website. I have no knowledge of any campaigns run by client that would use this other domain (or any schemes for that matter)
• It appears that this website riddim-donmagazine.com has been suspended by hostgator
• All of the links were first discovered last year (dates vary but basically August through December 2013)
• There have not been any newly discovered links from this website reported by GWT since those 2013 dates
• All of the external links are /? based. Example: http://riddim-donmagazine.com/?author=1&paged=31
• If I run that link in preceding bullet point through http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php, or any others from riddim-donmagazine.com those external links return 302 status.

My best guess is at one time the client was running an advertising program and this website may have been on that network. One of the external links points to an ad page on the client's website.
(web.archive.org confirms this is a WordPress site and that it's coverage of Bronx news could trigger an ad for my client or make it related to my client's website when it comes to demographics.)

Believe me, this externally linked domain is only a small problem in comparison with the rest of my client's issues (mainly they've changed domains, then they changed website vendors, etc., etc.), but I did want to ask about that one externally linked domain.

Whew.Thanks in advance for insights/thoughts/advice!

Agree with all the ones above. Just adding Open Site Explorer to this list too

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

In Webmaster Tools, when you click on the 404 and the popup window appears, what is showing in the Linked from tab?

Thanks Andy! I'll add the second step of the URL removal tool.

Recently one of our clients switched web providers. We've been implementing 301 redirects to the new URL structure for the most important pages.

We noticed upon doing a site search, Google has indexed a .swf URL on page 3 of search results. Please see attached image.

1. Should I implement a redirect for this? There are no links to this filetype.
2. There are three others (.swf) that are indexed

I would think the best thing to do is to have the new website return a 404 for this page, as it's currently doing, and it will eventually drop out of the index.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks!

g2tur4r

Hi Kevin,

You should re-post this same question at the Google+ Analytics Community. I've received excellent help with Analytics questions there in no time at all.

Here's the link to the Google+ Analytics community: https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/114481059214254340537

Also, are you using Google Tag Manager at all? Or are any other marketers using GTM on your website? That could possibly be why you're not seeing anything on your pages if an error exists in the GTM installation itself. If yes, there's also a Google Tag Manager community here:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/104865292981489764063

Vahe is correct. You don't need to have a PPC account to access the tool. Just a Google Account. You could also generate a gmail to be used by everyone for this purpose if people didn't want to create their own. Something like:

mycompanykwresearch@gmail.com

Count me in for this request also!

Do you have any secure pages on your website at all? Do you have any secure pages on a mobile site that uses the same domain name? Also, could you provide the domain name?

Hi TimDickey,

How about Google's Keyword Planner? https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner
Here are some additional resources with other tools too:

• http://moz.com/blog/keyword-volume-tools
• http://moz.com/blog/keyword-targeting-density-and-cannibalization-whiteboard-friday

I recommend setting up a process doc that can be easily followed by anyone across the publishing teams. It will take some time, and also some updating as algorithms change. Make it a shared doc that everyone can comment on or ask questions on, but all the protocol for keyword research always has one main source point.

That way everyone is researching the same way and keeping your entire organization on the right track. You can also make it required training that they view specific tutorials/webinars, etc., that will better educate them.

Hope that helps! I'm sure you'll get some additional great feedback in other responses too. Best of luck!

Thanks masdigitalmedia.

Hi All,

Recently we were given the option to choose from two custom urls for a car dealership's G+ page:
+brandname
+locationdealershipbrand

Made up example:
+scottford
+nyford

My gut tells me to choose the +brandname option, but curious to see if anyone had any other input about how the "location + dealership brand" custom url choice could impact local search results, if at all.

(I was surprised that it even came up as an option because to me it echoes EMDs...)

Thoughts?

Thanks!

I'm headed to the feature request also to add this request. This would be very helpful for the future. Thanks for providing the link Chiaryn!

I'm in the same boat as David Liu over here. I have submitted a few help tickets over time, and one of the responses I received back is that "The crawl report in PRO is on a slightly different schedule than Moz Analytics." I can understand that a different schedule could mean slightly different results, but in my case, I'm seeing huge differences between the crawlers (hence, I continue to submit tickets for my accounts).

When you are looking at Crawl Diagnostics, there is an option to export to CSV. When you do that you can see the referring URLs for this problem URL. That's a good place to start.

Thanks! I will definitely go check it out!

Federico,

I do the same thing! I have been wondering if one day that option to switch back will eventually go away...

Beta version has been out for awhile. Curious to know what people think of Moz Analytics.

Personally, I'm having a hard time making the switch from Pro to Moz Analytics because I'm so used to the navigation and layout of Pro.

What does everyone else think of the new Moz Analytics? Advantages? Disadvantages?

Areas Served vs. Magician + Location

I agree with the developer and definitely think you should move toward an areas served approach, either via the nav menu or working the areas into your home page content once (don't make it sitewide footer links that look spammy). With this approach, you're next task is to create custom local landing pages with content relative to those areas (photos, history, places you've performed, your favorite "magical" places within the towns, etc.)

I have seen some local landing pages with exact match in the Nav menu. Personally, as a web user, I'd much rather click on a town name than see a dropdown list filled with "Magician Surrey" "Magician Hampshire" that looks exactly the same, save for the location.

There are quite a few experts in this area:
Mike Ramsey: http://niftymarketing.com/optimal-local-landing-page-infographic/ Linda Buquet: http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/ and the forum here: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/ Mike Blumenthal: http://blumenthals.com/blog/

The important thing to remember is take the time and effort to make these custom local landing pages UNIQUE and something a web visitor would get value from.

Exact Anchor Text in Nav Menu

Don't overdo it. Make your navigation menu links be something that your web visitor will understand without question. There may be certain times when it's okay to use exact match anchor text but do so SPARINGLY and don't sacrifice your web visitors for the sake of exact match anchor text. Adding keywords in your anchor text should make sense to your visitors.

Here's Matt Cutts answer about exact anchor text and not overdoing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybpXU0ckKQ

I also use the technique of doing site:rogerlapin.co.uk magician hampshire and then seeing the top 10 pages google has for me and placing a text link from each of these pages in the body text.

A better technique would be paying attention to your content on your website and linking internally where it makes sense. Be careful with overloading your pages with links as well. The way I like to think of internal linking is much like you would see a newspaper or informational site providing links to give you more context about what you are reading.

Does Google only take into account the first link to a page i****t discovers? AND When doing link analysis I now see I have two links to each page but understand that google will only account for the first one (from the menu)

No. Google will crawl all internal links on a page up to a certain extent. If you have hundreds of links on a page, the crawler may abandon ship eventually and not crawl all of those links, which is why Moz and others have recommendations about the number of links on a page. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en (Keep the number of links on your page to a reasonable number.)

Link Priority:
There's a 2010 article from Rand saying that links higher up on the page are given more weight, however, it's three years old and one of the comments on that article says Matt Cutts debunked that idea, though I can't find the video. It seems like there hasn't been much conversation on first link priority since 2012. Here's another article from 2012 about internal link placement on the page: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2185977/Anatomy-of-an-Internal-Link

There's also a video from Matt Cutt's about the history of page rank and multiple instances of the same link on the same page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYWlEItizjI

I don't have a definitive answer here as far as link priority and order on the page. Maybe you can find more resources in the Q&A on that topic, such as this one: http://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-internal-links-on-page-any-benefit-to-nofollow

Hope all of this gives you some guidance and a lot of resources

It's definitely not a good idea. People don't like being deceived, and I imagine all of these pages have miserable bounce rates. As a user, imagine clicking on a search result thinking you're getting one company and you end up on the landing page of another. Definitely a poor user experience.

In Google's Quality Guidelines, one of the things they specifically mention is:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en

• "Don't deceive your users."

As for this site using the competitors names in their meta keywords (outdated) and their descriptions, I don't know if Google has a specific penalty to address that specific issue (maybe others will comment on that), but I do know that Google is looking for accurate information in page titles and other areas of the page to return relative results to searchers.

Overall, it's a bad practice unless done so for legitimate reasons (you are The NY Times writing about new owners of The Washington Post).

Additionally, there's an exception here for AdWords where you can buy a competitor's name and show up for searches in the paid search results. But I'm assuming you're referencing organic search results.

Hope that helps. I know it can be frustrating to see.

Hi Jesse,

I use Chrome Incognito for checking search results, and I find that I often have to go into the gear settings and click Disable customizations based on search history.

Do you also take that step as well?

Tom,

Would there be any benefit to use GWT's url removal tool for the old mobile website? m.domain.com?

Thanks,

Ellen

Thanks Tom!

Hi Mozzers,

My company recently took over a website for a client and moved them onto our CMS. We are having some issues right now with sitelinks.

A few things have happened to cause this:

1. Our IT department didn't put in the proper 301 redirects from their old subdirectory pages to the new corresponding subdirectory pages. (Insert head smack here.)

2. In addition to taking over the client's desktop domain, we've also taken over the client's mobile site. The mobile site has changed from m.domain.com to www.domain.mobi. Again, there was a missing 301 between the two (head smacking ensues).

As a result, Google has selected the following pesky sitelink for one of the sitelinks returned during a brand search for the client. The brand search is returning a sitelink under www.domain.com as:
IIS7 IIS7

When you click on the sitelink for IIS7, it's a link to m.domain.com which NOW redirects to www.domain.mobi.

My question is how long until the IIS7 sitelink goes away and is there anything we can do to speed it up?

What we've been doing to fix this:

1. Demoting sitelinks in GWT for www.domain.com that have the old subdirectory structure while the 301 redirects are being implemented. I can't demote this m.domain.com as a sitelink for www.domain.com because it's a different subdomain, and GWT will only allow me to demote subfolder pages or the www.domain.com itself

2. We've verified m.domain.com and demoted its homepage as a sitelink. Still not sure how this could stop it from showing up for a brand search that returns www.domain.com

Thanks in advance!

Thanks Keri!

I know we can subscribe to Q&A's for updates, but is there any bookmarking type option within the Moz Community Q&A so I can star or favorite my questions in one area?

Often I come across really great ideas/solutions in the Q&A, and it would be wonderful to quickly access all of my favorite q's/discussions in one area for later.

Thanks mucho.

Thanks Moosa. I'll check out the link. To add, we already do use categorized sitemaps in the sitemap_index.xml structure. We have it split into several different sitemaps. No links are duplicated across those sitemaps, and we have noticed a boost in more pages being indexed since we implemented that.

My question still remains though.

If this sitemap (www.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml) has the following structure:

<sitemapindex<span class="webkit-html-attribute"> xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"</sitemapindex<span>><sitemap></sitemap>http://www.fancydomain.com/Pages_Sitemap.xml<sitemap></sitemap>http://www.fancydomain.com/Carnivorous_Kittens_Sitemap.xml<sitemap></sitemap>http://www.fancydomain.com/Baby_Dragons_Sitemap.xml<sitemap></sitemap>http://www.fancydomain.com/Jimmy_Hoffa_Sitemap.xml Can we also add:

<loc>http://blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml</loc>

into that same location? And if we can, is there any benefit?

Thanks!

Example of setup:
www.fancydomain.com
blog.fancydomain.com

Because of certain limitations, I'm told we can't put our blogs at the subdirectory level, so we are hosting our blogs at the subdomain level (blog.fancydomain.com).

I've been asked to incorporate the blog's sitemap link on the regular domain, or even in the regular domain's sitemap.

1. Putting the a link to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.xml in the www.fancydomain.com/sitemap.xml -- isn't this against sitemap.org protocol?

2. Is there even a reason to do this? We do have a link to the blog's home page from the www.fancydomain.com navigation, and the blog is set up with its sitemap and link to the sitemap in the footer.

3. What about just including a text link "Blog Sitemap" (linking to blog.fancydomain.com/sitemap_index.html) in the footer of the www.fancydomain.com (adjacent to the text link "Sitemap" which already exists for the www.fancydomain.com's sitemap.

Just trying to make sense of this, and figure out why or if it should be done.

Thanks!

Hi Melissa,

If I read your question correctly, you've run into a situation where your mobile URLs for your mobile website are appearing in desktop searches? Do you have a sitemap on your mobile website that is properly formatted for mobile websites? That's a strong indication that your website is in fact a mobile website and should not appear in desktop search results, only mobile search results.

Here's a great resource on mobile sitemaps: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34648

Hope that helps.

LOL. I scanned so quickly in my reading of this thread that I did think you were an SEOMoz employee.

Hi Adam,

I had to dig through the forum to find this answer. May I suggest a future feature that would change the icon from an envelope to something that would actually say "Follow this Question"?

Don't know if that's already in the works or if it's been suggested before, but I'd like to add my vote for it.

I am really hoping I'm wrong. It stinks that we get to do all of this cross-domain tracking, different configurations and such so we can set up different profiles, but then we can't actually set the profile to the right domain.

Anyone know if this could be a Universal Analytics bonus feature?

Hi Dan,

From my experiences also, you can't set the association at the profile level. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1120006

It would be a great feature to add, and if it does exist, I'm all in.

It's likely your client will still maintain his rankings for "city + service" searches since the city is not changing, but, remember, your client does have competitors out there working on local search too. Regardless of your street address change, rankings may fluctuate based on how hard they're working. A drop in rankings would occur if you sit back on your laurels and all of your competitors are working tenfold (naturally, organically) on local search, but I don't think changing a street address would have a major effect.

I hope someone on this thread will comment about their tested results with having to do the same thing, since I don't have direct experience here.

To add, you absolutely have a big task at hand to make sure all of the downstream listings that feed into the local search algorithm (and Local+) are all corrected to reflect the new street address.

Maybe check out this link from Blumenthal's about moving a business to a new location: http://blumenthals.com/blog/?s=changing+address

Also, the readers at Blumenthal's are also very committed to giving advice and answering q's. Might be another resource for you on this question.

You can also implement cross-domain tracking in Google Analytics so it won't be considered a bounce as your web visitors go from one site to the other.

See these guides https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/gaTrackingSite

http://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034342?hl=en

Your other option could also be to make one domain a blog of the other domain. For example, something like:

www.sparrowmakeup.com.au/portfolio

You'll have to forgive me if that structure is incorrect. International SEO is not my forte yet.

Are referring to cross-domain tracking in Google Analytics?

If yes, in the most basic sense, it's a way for you to share the same Analytics tracking code with multiple domains, subdomains, etc.

I'm a visitor on your website www.ilovepeanuts.com. Your website sells peanut brittle. It just so happens I love peanut brittle, so I decide to buy some from your website.

The only problem is, when I get to your shopping cart, it resides on store.ilovepeanuts.com. If you don't enable cross domain tracking and use the same tracking code on both www.ilovepeanuts.com AND store.ilovepeanuts.com, you lose valuable data about my user experience on store.ilovepeanuts.com

Cross domain tracking allows you to preserve the same visitor data between your website and your store website.

Hope that's a simple enough explanation.

Thanks. I thought that might be it. Definitely was considering that one. Great to know it's worthwhile.

Francisco,

What is Avinash's program? Is it still offered?

Thanks!

90 days of data is available, as everyone's already pointed out.

Furthermore, you won't be able to see the previous 48 hours of GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) data from today's date as it's still being compiled.

Google Analytics will not store the "Queries" but will record any clicks on organic keywords in your Organic Search sources section.

It takes at least a month in my experience to see changes showing in search results. I also see a lot of fluctuation in client accounts, so definitely look at average ranking trends over a longer period of time.

Also, there are few external links to your website for the term "kayak fishing" http://awesomescreenshot.com/03112whz3f

It's true the other domains all have kayak fishing in their urls, but you also have links with that term in your URLs too site:yakangler.com/kayak-fishing

I would recommend trying to get links from quality domains using anchor text Kayak fishing and other phrases incorporating Kayak Fishing ("submit kayak fishing stories" for example), and linking back to the relevant pages on your website plus a few links to the home page.

Just don't overdo it and keep it natural. You may even want to check in with a few Chamber of Commerce websites or local city/town websites, as they may be looking for content or resources for people who want to kayak in their area.

Best of luck to you!

There was some activity reported in http://mozcast.com/events for January 2013. Also, have you checked to see if anything was done by webmasters of your website around that time?

Hi Mark,

What are you doing to get external links to your website? Check out some of the page 1 competitor listings for your targeted keyword using Open Site Explorer. The people ahead of you may have a longer list of quality links, older domain age, more social shares, etc.

Check out what your competitors are doing, and if it's white hat and great for users on your website, try to replicated it on your own.

Also, you have a lot of great content and sections on your website. I really enjoyed finding the kayak fishing reports--though at first I was confused because I was expecting to see regional weather reports for kayakers in those designated areas (probably because I'm not a kayak fisher).

Regardless, these reports are really fun to read and I think you should leverage them more in your SEO. We all know that thoughtfully created user content is beneficial, and you seem to have a lot of that. I would optimize this page http://www.yakangler.com/submit-content with more content about "Submit your kayak fishing stories" and text about how to do so on your site, examples of what you're looking for, etc. Currently the page says it will auto-close in 5 seconds but doesn't.

Also consider changing the anchor text in your footer link for "Links"
Though you link that anchor text to legitimate links, Google bots may not be able to understand that, and may think you are in fact trying out some blackhat when you're not, as you said. Try changing it to "helpful resources" or something similar.

Hope some of these suggestions help.

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the reply. The developers will take care of that part. Have you ever heard of anyone using 400 instead of 404 when it's more of a user-generated error?

-EEE3