Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Alt tags are intended for the purpose of describing the image, while you can include keywords in them, if you use all the same keywords, while not actually describing the images, it will be seen as stuffing, I strongly suggest not to do that. Instead focus on writing a real image description and try to put the keyword in them, not forcing the keywords neither. If the picture can include a keyword in the alt tag great, but if not, just don't.
Hope that helps!
The most complete source of those kinds of updates is SERoundtable... Barry, the writer, scrapes everything going on with updates/chatter of suspected updates/seo, etc.
Yeah, you can work for countless hours in link removal, then a week after Google removes your penalty BAM, another batch of 100,000 links and they probably spent $5 (?) in fiverr for those links and you are f***, again. Rinse and repeat. And instead of focusing on what matters, your business, you need to focus on keeping your Website clean from what others can do.
Google seriously needs to figure this out by themselves, instead of using us to police the Internet, while they $$$$$$.
Anyway, you shouldn't trust in those numbers in terms of correlation with rankings. Those are kind of "old" metrics that Google does uses, but given the other "hundreds" of signals they use you will be able to see sites without any trust, popularity or whatever metric Moz shows ranking above sites with lots of power... Even more now, when many of those "power" sites may have site-wide, or partial penalties of any kind...
Many do. Pinterest, Twitter, etc. They fetch those <a>'s and then rewrite the code via js. Googebot sees both, the one with the rel=nofollow and the one without as they are capable of executing javascript.</a>
<a>There's no impact on your end, if that's what you are wondering, however, given the latest statements by Matt Cutts, widget links should be nofollowed and Pinterest isn't following Google's guidelines, but I guess those kind of penalties (penguin) do not apply to that kind of sites... although I think they should.</a>
You can return a header last-modified, LastMod in your sitemap, or use the Fetch As Googlebot in WMT and then submit the page to the index.
Even with any of these in place, Google automatically re-crawls your site every few days/weeks or even hours...
When you go to your G+ page, does the verified icon appear on the right of the URL?
G+ pages rank within SERPs just like any page, if your G+ page has no authority, backlinks or whatever Google uses to rank, then it won't show up. Have you tried searching "brand name google plus"?
Mind sharing the reason of the suspensions? What was the violation? Perhaps that has something to do with the site...
Wow, that's a new one. Never heard of a suspended G+ page, and even less about a site penalized because their G+ page was suspended.
Can you give us more background? Why was the page suspended? Have the Webmaster received a manual action noticeable in their WMT?
What I would do, and did for my site, is to noindex (via meta tag) all those search results pages, they actually don't provide any value, you don't want them indexed, those are pages for users searching your site. If a user searches for a term that you have an article/product or whatever, they will find the article/product page more interesting than a search result page, google probably won't even show that in the SERPs...
I see this all the time within my niche and almost every niche. Google has become a useless engine, unless you are looking for news or information, but in that moment you decide to buy something, BAM, pure crap.... maybe because those sites are the ones that buy google ads?
How about myblogguest? You decide where to publish your article from the offers you receive from blog owners... You only need to pay for a membership, or as a blogger, you can publish others' articles without any paid membership.
Before accepting an offer, check they blog offering, their reputation, their previous posts, etc. Just don't take ANY offer, look for the good ones.
You can also do some outreach for yourself. If you are writing the content, simply contacting the blog owners asking to post your article (include the article, as many receive hundreds of "shallow" requests) should work. At least I am writing for high quality blogs, such as SEJ, SearchEnginePeople, etc, just by contacting them with my articles ready to publish. You can later establish a relationship that could led to faster publishing, or even skipping the review process.
Hope that helps!
Ohhh the 1 million question... Why Google show different results depending on the browser, computer, connections, etc...?
It is certainly known that Google WILL show what "he" thinks might be more useful to the user searching. They DO track what you searched, visited, etc, even if you are not logged in, they WILL deliver personalized results based on several (yet unknown) variables, some are location, device, browser, etc. You can even search with the same account, computer and different browsers and get different results, for some reason they think a search within the same device, and account, but with a different browser should deliver different results (this isn't always the case, but in my experience I found this kind of results regularly). The device is "understandable", pages may look different in different devices, so perhaps a page that is ranking well on a desktop, doesn't rank too well on a mobile device as it may be "unreadable" while on an iphone (for example). So is the location, they want to deliver more local results, and that is also understandable.
What I would suggest is this cases, is that you take ONE of the ways you track and then stick to it to run your reports, Moz uses (I think) this type of query: https://www.google.com/search?q=auto body calgary&gl=us&pws=0 (I almost find the same results as they report using that).
To answer your second question, it is also kind of a mystery, we cannot control what Google shows, and they will show what they think is for the best interest of the user. So even if you create a landing page for a specific word, that word SERP may show your homepage instead of the page you created or the other way around... Who knows...
Do you mind posting your URL so we can have a loot at it?
No, the location of the server has nothing to do with the rankings as long as your Website is served fast for your users. Load speed is an impacting factor, but not the server location.
With today's cloud servers, CDNs, etc, Websites are being served depending on the user location. Suppose you used Cloudflare, then your Website would be served to Google from LA (most likely) while a user in the U.K. will probably get your Website served from the U.K., making it actually (almost) impossible to know where it is hosted and therefore not a useful ranking factor.
Hope that helps!
Exactly, although it was "invented" to prevent duplicate content issues and therefore used on those pages that are duplicates, it doesn't make any harm (and possibly bring benefits for future issues that may arise), you should still use it.
As it says, it is a recommendation, not a must :).
Exactly. If they are redirects because you need to login then a 302 is the way to go. If you use a 301 for those redirects, some browsers may cache that redirect and then when the user is actually logged in, he will still be redirected to the login page as the browser "thought" that page was no longer available (and that can potentially create an infinite loop)...
Over the years, I found 2 options to go about that:
Hope that helped 
Well, then you could even get a decrease in rankings, or no change at all. If, for some reason those links were not passing juice (as Google could consider the source a spammed site) then you will keep the same rankings. If those sites were actually passing juice, it will depend on how much (the more they passed the more you'll lose)... (lets hope for the first option!).
Although canonical tags are not intended to point to themselves, I mean the page http://www.domain.com/page shouldn't have a canonical tag pointing to itself: "http://www.domain.com/page" I found it very useful. Specially now that sources add their own query string (ie http://www.domain.com/page?utm_source=twitter), to minimize the chances of having a duplicate content issue.
Hmm... are those 302 because you need to login to view that content? or you just removed the page?
If you completely removed the page, then a 301 would be the best option, even if you don't want the final destination to rank, as Simon said, they still accumulate pagerank and pass it to the other linked pages (which some could be of the ones to WANT to rank).
302 are temporary redirects, meaning that it's temporal, at that specific moment the page isn't available (because you need to login to view it, it is being updates, or whatever is the reason), but with a 302 you are basically telling search engines to index that page, but just come back later as specifically now it isn't available.
Were those links removed as a consequence of a penalty? Or just to maintain a clean profile?
Most likely a penalty. Manual or algorithmic, did you check your WMT? They are now showing all manual actions (and some algorithmic too, such as a link devaluation).
This reminds me so much to "The Matrix"...
Following Today's post on Moz Blog: Amazing Correlation Between Google +1s and Higher Search Rankings, Search Engine Land released a Matt Cutts statement that clearly says that Google +1s does not affect rankings at all: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-once-again-1s-have-no-direct-impact-on-rankings-170200
Now, who should we believe? Do we need to focus on G+ or it would be better to spent our time using other link building/earning techniques?
It wouldn't be an easy task for sure, but if done carefully and following all others previous experiences (like the transition of SEOMoz to Moz), you should be in pretty good shape.
You will however, see a decrease in organic traffic for a few days, but that should return to normal after a few days. Both Google and Bing have an option that allows you to inform them about an URL change.
Just make sure everything is well redirected/canonicalized.
Hope that helps!
Because people is liking, sharing and commenting on company's A post, regardless if it was a re-share. Company B will only benefit of that as a "share" and if the users who see company A's post goes to company b's post and like/share/comment there.
Hey Ron,
You can't. There's no way to request an "on-demand" crawl. You will need to wait to the next crawl date (which is shown in your crawl page).
Cheers!
Hey Stephane,
The reason: Google thinks your H1 content is more likely to interest the user than your title.
Control: None. However, you should do some tests analyzing why Google thinks your H1 is more attractive than your title and change it to better target your audience.
Hope that helps.
Yeah, I was testing exactly the same when you posted the response. I even tried crawling a googlebot-mobile and still I get the 301 redirect. Which, for everything that I am seeing it is correct, as no matter what browser I use (desktop, mobile, spider) I always get a 301 to the www. version.
@michelleh, are you sure there's a mobile version not being redirected to the www. one?
Probably because of the personalization? I guess Google saves some navigation data in your browser, therefore when performing the search you may be sending some usage details and therefore google is serving you more personalized results.
There are so many variables google uses that results aren't consistent at all within browsers, accounts, computers, locations, etc. That shows you how invaded is our privacy when using google (at least I see much more consistent results over bing and yahoo).
Lisa, use the plugin @Saijo George recommended: http://wordpress.org/plugins/limit-a-post-title-to-x-characters/
It will do the trick automatically for all pages and it doesn't require any programming (PHP or MySQL) skills.
This is what I would do:
.htaccess
Options +FollowSymLinks -Multiviews -Indexes
RewriteEngine On#This line is for the categories
RewriteRule ^category/(.*)$ index.php?l=product_list&category_name=$1 [L]
Note: you will need a new rule for each "type" of page. That was an example for the categories only.
Then you will need to add some PHP code to read the $_GET["category_name"] variable, which should be text (like banner-stands) and get the category id from your database to later load the products. You have several ways to do that, for example: insert an extra column in the DB with the category name "dashed" and search the category id using that new field.
You should then change your internal linking to use those new URLs instead and add a rel=canonical pointing to the new versions of the URLs.
Don't 301 all others until you have the above solved and working. Make sure you make everything safe, as with that structure something like index.php?l=product_list&c=1&sort=asc won't work anymore unless you create extra rules for that, same as with pagination, if you have any.
Hopes this gives you an idea on where to start.
***You are not redirecting dynamic to static urls, you are just making them friendlier
We also noticed some weird crawls last year using random numbers at the end of the URL, checking in google webmaster tools we saw that most of those urls were reported as not found, checking from where the link came from google listed some of our URLs, but didn't had any link to those URLs google was trying to fetch. After 2 or 3 months those crawls stopped. We never knew from where Google got those URLs...
I think you are right. Google is fishing for content. I would find a solution to make those URL friendly by removing the hash and using some URL rewrite and pushState to paginate that content instead.
Here's a previous question that may help: http://moz.com/community/q/best-way-to-break-down-paginated-content
You can either create a script to go over the posts, recognize some pattern on the links and add the nofollow attribute, or edit post by post adding the nofollow.
As you mentioned Wordpress, a PHP script should do the work very fast and easily using an html DOM parser.
Here's an example: http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/
and run something like:
foreach ($html->find('a') as $a) {
if(!checkUrl($a->href)) {
$a->rel = 'nofollow';
}
}
checkUrl is a function you should write to recognize those affiliates links...
Hope that helps!
Philip,
There's been a question similar to yours a few weeks ago, I suggest you check it out, it might respond your question as well:
http://moz.com/community/q/best-way-to-break-down-paginated-content
Eugenio,
I don't think there's a way to tell Google what to show. However, if you are building your site in such a way that it has content markup (such as schema, microformats or using the highligh tool in WMT), you are basically telling Google that that is the best way to display the search results.
If you actually prefer to show the meta description (although it is impossible to force Google to do it), you should remove whatever markup you have in your site, then let Google just display what it wants (hopefully your meta description).
PS: the keywords tag isn't used by Google anymore, that's a useless tag you can safely removed. However, Bing said that they still use the keywords meta but it is just one of over 2000 ranking signals they use. So it's basically up to you use it /don't use it (you won't find a big site making use of the keywords meta anymore).
Hope that helped!
yeah, the thing is DA is a metric that WAS able to predict rankings, but not anymore since the introductions of penguin and panda.
You can research endless niches and you'll find that high DA or PR show up lower than sites with no PR or DA due to an algorithmic/manual penalty.
There's been a lot of chatter about changing domains when there's no manual penalty and some claim it worked pretty well.
All tag pages are set to noindex, so if some are still showing that's because Google hasn't removed them yet or even still indexing them. It isn't a wordpress theme either, it is an in-house designed and programmed website, including the blog.
It would be a good experiment, but are you willing to lose Fan page likes (regular readers) against URL likes (one timers).
I just made a search to see if there was any info on a test but couldn't find anything (no one tested that yet, apparently) but practically the same answer to your question: http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/16810/best-practices-for-facebook-website-like-vs-page-like
Exactly, those 73k likes are liking your facebook page, not your site (URL). Test using your facebook page in OSE, how many facebook likes does it show? I am guessing about 73k
It has nothing to do with "where" the like took place, visiting your site, the user can click the LIKE button within your facebook page plugin and they are liking your facebook page, not your Website.
No one knows how or even IF social interactions help rankings, we are all guessing they do, but no one is certainly sure or knows how much they help. That said, a like to your URL is more valuable SEOwise, however, people liking your URL just liked your URL, while if they like your facebook page, you can have constant contact to those users.
You decide whether to have the like button or the like box, both, or a like button with your facebook page as the href. I would actually go with the like box or the like button using my facebook page, that way I can earn users that I can actually reach later.
We are in business since 2005 and we always used the .net version as it was the only one available when we started. In about 2007 we bought the .com version to the person who owned it but we kept using the .net as customers were already used to that version.
In January we started to see a SE traffic loss, not to mention being outranked by several sites (95% of those site spammers). We had no manual penalty but it could be an algorithmic, we are not sure if we even have some sort of penalty or is just that our niche is too spammed.
We are now considering moving the site to the .com version as all our tries of increasing and regaining our ranks were useless (backlink cleanup, disavow tool usage, excellent link building, excellent content creation and social interactions). Our DA and PA are both higher that any of the other ages ranking on top. We have about 3k pages indexed.
What do you guys think? Should we move the site to the .com? (note that the change is ranking-wise, not in terms of branding).
And if we do, should we 301 all pages? or rel=canonical to avoid a possible "penalty flow" to the other domain?
Note: for years, the .com version was/is 301 to the .net one.
Thank you all!
Why don't you try deleting the reports and creating them again so they run once more to see if the report issues are now fixed?
When you set the "goal" to track conversions you are allowed to set the value of the average conversion. There's a way to use variable values if you want to actually track the specific value of your goals.
You can read more here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2907896?hl=en
OSE doesn't report the "likes", "tweets" or "+1s" that you may get on your pages or accounts. If you make a post on Facebook or have a page with millions of likes, it doesn't matter at all for the OSE report.
What matters is actually the amount of likes your URL received, the same applies for g+ and twitter. To increase that, you should place the Like, Tweet and G+ button on your homepage, or change the "href" of whatever buttons your have in your site.
This like button:
will return 19 likes (which are the likes that URL received). Almost the same amount OSE reports
This one:
will return 73 (same happens here: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.discountqueens.com%2Famazon-ultimate-shrinky-dinks-jewelry-designer-1495%2F).
Hope that helps!
Affiliate links are a kind of "paid links" as the affiliate gets a remuneration for placing the link there (indirect, but still).
They should be nofollow'ed, it could be a little late now as you can't force affiliates to change the links, but if you are placing them using javascript, it should be pretty easy (even injecting them with a js file should use the rel=nofollow attribute.