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When Moz stopped doing consulting, we put together a list of recommended companies in order to drive that traffic there and then to great consulting companies. This allowed for context for the visitor -- compared to direct redirection where a visitor might think they stumbled into some weird click scam -- and for us to give a link and specific information.

So I want to suggest checking out the webinar we had yesterday on speeding up your website.

I also wanted to address your comment about your crawlers and localized rankings possibly messing up your rankings. This is not the case. The crawler that looks at your site in Moz Analytics is different from our rankings crawlers. They do not connect. They do not influence rankings as the bots only record the information in the SERPs based on your keywords; they don't click into your site. Does that make sense?

They should be roughly equal, unless one has a drastically higher domain authority and amount of backlinks.

I'd go in and change the structure in WP and then 301 the old URLs with the redirect. Then your new posts going forward will only have the cleaned up URL structure and the old ones will be properly 301'd for all the SEO goodness.

Everyone's 301 redirect suggestions are correct. However, exact match domains may not be worth grabbing all of them for SEO. There's been lessening returns.

While I can't speak for HubSpot and their tools, you could use 301 redirects. Since behind a user login, you'll be an https site, you could 301 redirect the http URLs to the new Hubspot marketing site.

No, because search engines look for the last time that page file has been updated, not any recorded dates. I find it's pretty helpful, especially on blogs, to leave the date for users so they can evaluate if the information is relevant or the context of when you posted it.

I do think it's worth exploring other plug-ins and working in the nuts-and-bolts of site speed. Even though WP plug-ins are very helpful, it's always good to know the details of what's happening as much as possible. I'm not exactly sure how W3TC works -- I've never used it or any other site speed plug-ins personally for WP -- but it's possible it can't optimize everything or that it's working the best it or any plug-in can.

Looking at your site, I noticed a couple things:

Your site speed is pretty slow. You can use pingdom.com to check your site speed. This is a great study by Jon Colman about site speed and how much it actually affects your site. I noticed that you're running WordPress, and here's some tips on how to speed up your WP site. Google definitely factors in speed, and this could be affecting how the bots reach your site (or don't reach it) and account for the flux week-to-week. You are correct in that it shouldn't be that dramatic of a change week-to-week.

I also noticed that your homepage was a little overly optimized for keywords. As search engines start getting more semantic, you want to optimize more for the user. Definitely don't kill all the keywords, but balance is the key. Read through the copy as a visitor, not just the SEO and industry expert.

Will you not be using the site's homepage to direct people to all the different languages that the site will be or has been translated to?

It would be great if you could leave your site URL and some examples of what you're looking to rank for so we could dig in.

Did you do any recent changes to your site that may account for ranking changes?

While there's many reasons for a brand not to invest in Facebook, having issues tracking ROI directly back to sales is not one of them. There are many other reasons to invest in social media that support marketing efforts: branding, customer service, community building, etc.

I do think many brands overly invest in Facebook when they shouldn't because it's not right for their audience.

Glad to help! Hope you have a great New Year.

This shouldn't be a problem because Google says that they don't use social signals -- even their own G+ network -- to directly affect rankings. While we found there's a strong correlation in +1s and rankings, correlation doesn't equal causation.

I would consider only displaying that number in relevant places when considering what signal it sends your visitors.

Yes, search engines definitely know that subdomains are hooked to your domain, and there's evidence that search engines will count links toward a subdomain to your domain. However, there's speculation that those links are slightly discounted in the level of authority they pass -- they are a stronger signal to your subdomain -- and it's still best practice for your SEO to put your blog on a subfolder instead of a subdomain.

Yes, we do. Unless you click the checkbox that says not to crawl subdomains.

My very best educated guess (after talking with dev friends here at Moz) is that CloudFront is supposed to be used for long-term storage. This means the content isn't expected to change frequently. This is great for images and other static things. However, this is also a signal to Google not to crawl your site as often as it won't be changing that often.

Okay, that's what I thought you were trying to do. Are you doing this for reporting? For better, realistic goal making?

Unfortunately, we currently do not have a batch tool for OSE. We do offer an API for Mozscape data, which you can then important all the data at once into a spreadsheet or another tool you've built.

Are you talking about your domain? And how hard it would actually be for you to rank? It definitely factors in the DA from the ranking domains.

"Your Keyword Difficulty Score is based on the Domain Authority and Page authority for the top 20 search results that keyword is pulling on Google. These sites are analyzed using our Mozscape index to pull Page Authority and Domain Authority. These two metrics (along with a host of others from the Mozscape index) help create the Keyword Difficulty score." from the FAQ about KWD.

Hrm... I'll do some digging to see if I can find anything odd/off. And ask some of our other frequent users to see if they're having the same issues.

Hi Max,

Sorry to hear about frustrating timeouts. Definitely the worst! Forum usability is definitely something we keep an eye on. Right now, there aren't any known bugs surrounding timeouts.

I do suggest deleting your cookies and cache as this could be a cookie fail.

Please do let us know if the problem persists.

Thanks!

I agree that the easiest way is to build in SEO features to your submissions. Making sure that the title translates into an H1 tag, etc. One of the reasons why YouTube became such a success, pre-Google purchase, was because every time you upload a video to YouTube, you do some SEO work: tagging the video, upload a transcript (if prompted), adding a description, etc. If you make the user interface easy to do this, you'll be ahead.

When it comes to complex schema data, I wouldn't worry as much. Most forum/article submissions rely on long tail traffic. Spend time optimizing the best traffic drives or the pieces that get the highest social shares, which might also work great on searches. It's okay to cherry pick the work when you don't have time to do it all.

EGOL is definitely correct that those pages can hold a ton of value if a brand/company has the time/resources/bandwidth to optimize them. Most don't, so it's better to noindex than have duplicate and/or thin content category pages. But if you can and will optimize, do it!

You can either choose to deindex pages one by one or deindex the whole subfolder.

Since usually category pages have the same content as or a preview of the content on your other pages, this doesn't affect your long tail traffic as that traffic will go to the other pages. Usually the problem with category pages is that the content's thin or duplicate. Now, you can make content just for category pages and keep them to drive traffic to. I worked in e-commerce pre-Moz and we wanted to rank/land people on category pages, such as women's shirts, and made unique, solid content for those page.

Doorway pages are pages set up with redirection, spoofing, or cloaking to get some SEO benefit that's usually short-term gains and typically not so kosher. Basically, the visitor thinks they're getting one thing and ends up with another.

Landing pages are any webpages on your site which you're driving traffic to.

Hope this helps!

Your dev is correct. You do need to set up redirect. We have a great guide about how to set up redirects. Redirects that are set up properly will help your SEO, not hurt it.

There's some impression, when it comes to customers/visitors, that .coms and other TLDs that we're "used" to are still more trustworthy. If you're second guessing it, you should probably go with your gut. You can always buy the .BID TLD and use it later.

So yes, Google is starting to factor in mobile user experience as one of it's many ranking factors. It is still a bit unknown how this works -- machine learning or human review? -- and exactly how much you're going to get dinged.

But if you can't get the budget, then that's a different issue. You need to be making a solid business case for spending the budget to get a mobile site. You need to dive into your analytics and figure out the user experience for someone coming in on mobile. Figure out how much money you're losing because of this experience. Figure out how much potential traffic you'll get. Figure out how best to tackle the project. (Depending on your site, you might not be able to make everything mobile right away. Example, Moz's site is terrible for mobile, which we're planning on fixing. However, the blog and Moz.com marketing/resource pages are the priority. Putting our software into a mobile experience is a different project.) Best of luck!

It's highly recommend that you noindex category, tag, archives, and author pages in WordPress. (I assume you're using WP; though there are many similar blogging platforms out there.) The reason is because these pages come across as thin and/or duplicate content, and you are risking getting hit by Panda. Now that doesn't always happen. My own personal blog had these pages indexed for a very long time, and I didn't have any problems. But I also didn't seen any problems when I did deindex them. But I don't get a ton of traffic, and I'm sure traffic to, popularity of site, and competitive nature all factor into Google's radar.

I'd worry mostly about it becoming a duplicate content nightmare. It would be better to have a choice to buy the brand new item or a refurbished one on a single product page. Think of how Amazon lets you select different versions of a books, movie, etc., different sellers, new/used, etc., all on one page.

Some great suggestions already! But I'd add that sometimes it just takes time for Google to catch spammy practices.

I think it's very much worth figuring out and questioning why you use Facebook as a medium for your marketing. What you get out of it and what people get from your brand. For Moz, we know people contact us there for customer support, and even if our posts get shown to 0 people (at which point, we'd stop posting there), we'll need to maintain a presence because people reach out to us at a higher volume there. This is not true for everyone.

Buffer recently did some testing on their Facebook account with various techniques, and here's what they found.

In my opinion, it's very okay for a social media manager to say "Facebook isn't working for us anymore, this is not where we'll be putting our time anymore." And telling customers that on the page. Since Facebook is a free network and you don't own it, unfortunately, this means that they can change the functionality at anytime and there's nothing we can do about it.

Google is super fast when it comes to the main, most important stuff on your domain. It's still indexing stuff from the old SEOmoz.org domain because we have a ton of pages! and frankly, some of them aren't very popular. We also made the decision not to redirect every single page and killed a ton of them. The less popular pages are lingering (though with the right 301 redirects, we're still getting that traffic to the still important to us pages) with SEOmoz.org, either waiting to be indexed at Moz.com or tossed out as they no longer exist.

For dealing with people who are scraping your site, make sure you have canonical tags implemented on your pages for your shiny new https site. Most scrapers steal the code, so they grab those too.

Hi Noah,

Yes, unfortunately, over the past year and a half or so, Facebook has drastically changed its algorithm in what it will show users in their News Feed. Unfortunately, brand pages have suffered the brunt of this. At Moz, we've seen something very similar. We have over 170,000 "likes" to our page, but our posts rarely see more than 3,000 views and some are as low as 400. We also play by the book and try to engage our audience in relevant manners, which Facebook has claimed is how to get more engagement.

In February of this year, the Federalist tried to "crack the Facebook algo." They found several strong factors and came up with the following equation about Daily Organic Reach of your page:

Daily Organic Reach = -22 + (Total Likes x 5.399%) + (Daily Paid Reach x 0.327%) + (Page Views x 0.416%) + (Weekend [1 if yes, 0 if no] x -194.4) + (Posts Per Day x 81.08)

I'd love to see more brands messing around with the elements in this algo -- which include paid ads, which Facebook swears don't count for or against your organic reach -- to see how much is true.

Yep, Facebook has massively changed how it shows content to followers of your page, which has killed most organic showings in the newsfeed or severely limited it. This started about a year and a half ago and has just gotten worse over time.

Hi,

I took a look at your site, and I ran a report in OpenSiteExplorer on your backlinks. It doesn't look at all like Penguin, like others suggested below.

My suggestions:

1. Take a look and see what your competitors are doing. If this is recent, we've definitely see fresh/newly updated content be pushed to the front of SERPs temporarily and then die back down to lower numbers.

2. Make sure your content is getting updated.

3. Your content looked pretty thin. While in the past ranking competitively for this term was pretty easy, when I did a search (granted even incognito, I'm in the US), I got many results from UK government sites and wikipedia ranked pretty highly. Without solid, uniquely interesting content and strong, relevant links, it'll be very hard to beat these sites.

Hi,

No, we do not have a place for you to upload a list of your disavowed links. The main reason is that we actively avoid crawling very spammy sites, where most of the links you're disavowing probably live. We try to identify quality links that you'd want to report on.

We definitely have more reporting and other helpful SEO tools besides just looking at your backlinks. If you haven't, I suggest signing up for our welcome webinar (or watching a past recording) where we walk you through all our tools.

If they were recently randomly generated by some errand code, you can let them die and 404. The only time you want to redirect a page to another is if that page 1) is getting traffic or 2) has backlinks. Since you're dealing with a code error, those two are very unlikely and you can be confident in just killing the pages.

We've definitely seen a lot of evidence that EMDs do not work the way they once did, and they could very well be hurting your rankings for your main domain. Dr. Pete wrote a great post about this a while ago that's still very applicable. Seems like since your products are related, it would be much better to integrate the sites together and put them in a subfolder of your main domain instead of separate sites. You'd, of course, want to 301 redirect and all that jazz to maintain most of your link equity and ranking signals.

Hi Clifford and Linda,

Unfortunately, this Q&A conversation has taken a turn for the worse. Both of you are clearly working hard for your businesses and for your families, and we all can empathize when frustrations with our work is escalated and our livelihood is at stake to make it work.

However, personal attacks and personal grudges are unacceptable here as it goes directly against our TAGFEE code and our community guidelines. This isn't to say we can't have disagreements, lively debates, or hard conversations. But we always need to remember the human we're dealing with on the other end of the conversation.

Right now, a couple things will happen:

1. I will shutting down this post so it cannot get anymore comments.

2. I will be editing some of the comments to remove personal attack language.

3. Both of you will be getting emails so we can clear up anything there.

Thank you.

Hi!

I recommend starting with the Learn section on our site. We have a great amount of resources to help with a lot of this stuff including a beginner's guide to social media, guide to link building, and lot of other goodies. We also put on biweekly webinars that cover a range of topics, and you sign up for future ones, our mailing list for alerts about upcoming ones, and view past ones of interest.

You are correct that our tools will report the link and the link equity from it. We don't discard or discount paid links. Google has taken major effort to do this -- much of it very manual, human reviewed -- and we don't have that kind of bandwidth.

That said, we do have something exciting in the works, hopefully, releasing no later than early Q1 to more comprehensively look at the quality of that link. Stay tuned.

The information changes to a completely 2015 page are set to go live this week. But, I do happen to have the hotel link: book your 2015 hotel room.

FWIW, Wired recently did a study that showed if you're coming from the UK, it's best to buy your flight 53 days out.

If Google isn't picking the "right page," then either 1) your pages aren't optimized well enough or 2) it's too niche and Google doesn't know what it's looking at. For the latter, you could combine higher categories and then have customer specify what they want when they buy. Example: If you were selling shirts, you wouldn't have separate pages for every size variation in every color, you'd just have one page about that shirt and then let the customer select color and size.

If you've removed all the spammy links and got back into Google's good graces, you should be fine.

The order of those items in the doesn't matter for rankings. Additionally, meta keywords are no longer used as a factor in Google's rankings, and they haven't been for many years. (Sometimes companies use that field for other things.) I suggest checking out this post from Rand about how to create the perfectly optimized page for a keyword.

Since you're so niche, volume of traffic probably is less concerning as not that many people are looking for it. I'd look more into the conversion rates on those pages. Are those customers finding what they need and buying off the page? Why or why not? For example, if you're only getting 80 visits per month, but 70% of that traffic is converting and they're buying thousands of dollars worth of product, you're doing something right.

It definitely sounds like something on your site. Can you share the URL or an example of a page where you're seeing this in the SERP in order to better help you? Thanks!

Definitely check out our Keyword Difficulty tool. It uses Bing's API to track keyword volume.

When I've done this type of research, I've used a mix of metrics: keyword difficulty, Google trends, Adwords, etc., to figure out estimated volume.