I think that's just a business decision that the owner took that has nothing to do with SEO.  He wants to business under 2 different names and build two brands, which makes sense on the business side because he can have one brand  to target public A and another brand to target public B.

There are many cases where competitors company are own by the same group or person, for example, Walt-Mart and Sam's Club. There is nothing wrong on trying to dominate the whole market that's how capitalism works.

In my opinion, you were hired to build the second brand SEO and is not your job to judge his business decisions or complain because the other brand that he owns already have good links.

Did your site ever rank well on Google? If you don't see anything on GWT most like you don't have a penalty. Ranking on bing and Yahoo is usually much easier than ranking on Google.

You can use the "compare" button on opensiteexplorer to see how your link metrics are different from the websites ranking higher. Here is a step by step:

1. Go to opensiteexplorer.org
2. Put your site URL there and click on "Compare up to five sites".
3. Include in the list websites ranking in the top 10 for your keyword

ps: Make sure you compare not only the home page, but the pages targeting the keywords you are going after for example:

• mysite.com/targetkeyword
• competitor1/com/targetkeyword

You can also use the on page grander to compare  and fix your on page optimization.

I hope it helps.

No. Display url are just for "display".

Google adwords will calculate your quality score based on your destination URL.  Therefor if you destination URL is a 404 page you quality score will be affect.

Your quality score has a direct effect in how much you per click. (check this image http://www.wordstream.com/images/quality-score-cpc-savings.jpg)

You can check your current quality score by:

1. Click the Campaigns tab at the top.
2. Select the Keywords tab.
3. Look for the **Qual. score **column in the statistics table. If you don't see this column in your table, you can add this column by doing the following:

• Click the Columns drop-down menu in the toolbar above the statistics table.
• Select Customize columns.
• Select Attributes.
• Click Add next to Qual. score.
• Click Save.

I hope it helps.

I just did a similar migration Oscommerce to Magento, because the site was so big took a while for Google indexed all the new URLs even with the 301. We lost a little bit of traffic in the first 3 weeks but in the forth week we recovered the same traffic we had before the new site went up and in the following weeks we just kept growing.  Right now we have 20% more traffic.

The drop in ranking it's normal right after a big migration, when Seomoz became Moz they also saw a few weeks of drop in the organic traffic. I wouldn't worry too much about it yet. Just make sure your on page optimizations are well done in the new website and wait for big G complete your new website index.

Hey Mike

"Example Location" would be my choice.

You could still rank for "Example Location" with the title "Example is the best in location" but on my experience exact match is a best option...

Another thing to keep in mind is how competitive "Example Location" is,  maybe "Example location" is too competitive than you might want optimize for a long tail keyword and keep building links so eventually you might rank for the most competitive keyword too.

I want create a video gallery in my site. Does anyone know about any video CMS or wordpress video plugin optimized for SEO?

Yes I'm sure is organic... I did check GWT  together with GA, the traffic is really coming from organic and I'm ranking for the keywords. You can google for example: "hacker insidetshirts or "I know html tshirt"

A few tips:

1 - Use the Moz Tools + Google ad words to Make a Keyword research and Competition analyses to make sure you're not going after keywords that are impossible for you to rank or do not have impressions. (Try pick keywords with difficult below  45% and above 100 impressions)

2 - Use the On Page Grander on your Moz Dashboard to make sure all your pages are well optimized especially for the  keywords you can compete.

3 - Check your competitors back links using open site explorer and see if you can get a link in any of the sites where they already have links.

If you pick the right keywords and your niche is not very competitive, you should be able to start seeing results doing just those 3 things.

Did Google run any update Monday or recently?

My site www.shirts4geek.com, strangely had a 1000% organic traffic increase from day to night.  I didn't do anything in this site for long a time... but Monday I had a lot traffic coming from organic and every other day this week the site is doing extremely well on traffic and sales.

I'm ranking first page for many keywords relate to my products.

I wish I could figure out what happens so I can replicate it.  The site has very links and the On Page Optimization is kind of basic.

Does any have any idea how it could be possible? Have any one seen something similar lately?

Hi Tim,

I think you should do the migration all at once.

Make sure you 301 every page or at least the most important ones.

This video might help you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA

Magento is great platform, but if not well implement it became very slow. If you 301 your old pages for a much slower page or a page with very different content you might have problems. As long you make sure you content is aligned and your mageto site is fast you'll be fine.

Did you guys see Cutts Last tweet?

Today we took action on a large guest blog network. A reminder about the spam risks of guest blogging: goo.gl/cnkoFA  Matt Cutts (@mattcutts)

Which Large Guest Blog Network is he talking about?

Hi Thompson,

Thanks for your input, so I'm planning on eventually do the 301 for everyone. I'm re-designing  a big website and not everything is done, but I want users that are looking for the content that I already completed to land in the new site. (because the new site has a much higher conversion rate).

In other hand I have 30% of my traffic in my old site coming from direct visitors, I dont want those visitors to be send to other URL because it would be confusing. however I want people coming from google to go my new site...

Do you think I should sacrifice usability, so I don't risk Google to think I'm trying to do some kind of black hat, strategy.

Hi Guys,

I'm trying to build a 301 file with the file requirements:

1. It should be visible only for Google and other Search Engine Agents.
2. It will have a few direct redirects.
3. A few URL must be dynamic redirect. For example each page the starts with olddomain.com/category and is not in the list of of direct redirects should be redirect for newdomain.com/category

Here is my start point:

#301 Starts here

Set the agents

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Googlebot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} msnbot [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Slurp

Make the direct redirect.

Redirect 301 /category/sub1 http://www.newdomain.com/category/sub1
Redirect 301 /category/sub2 http://www.newdomain.com/category/sub2

Redirect everything else

Redirect 301 /category/* http://www.newdomain.com/category

#End of my 301

Will that work how I want? is there anything wrong?

Hey guys,

I'm trying to improve the quality score for a few of my PPC landing pages. Does any one know a Tool that can help me in the process. Something kind of like the "on page grader" but for quality score.

Thanks

http://www.dmoz.org/ -> It's Open Directory Project, maintained by a community of volunteer editors, basically is directory trusted by the Search engines and many times the description from dmoz is used as snippet in the search results. When you submit a site for dmoz a human will verify and will accept your site only if it follow the guide lines.

Google can still display their own snippet but I think is worthy a try....

If Google Understand that your meta description is not as relevant to your page content or search query, they will replace with the content from your page that they understand as more relevant, To solve the issue you can try get list Dmoz, often search engine pull their description from dmoz or rewrite your meta description.

I think what you need is very simple, why not hire a programmer to custom build in the exactly way you need? A good programmer can get it done in 10-15 hours.

Infographics have been used as a super effective online marketing tool for years and they're still working great, in fact, it's just a little harder (as it should be) to get them noticed… A few years ago, you could pop up any old ugly infographic on whatever old thing, and it would get hundreds of social shares. Nowadays, you have to ensure the data in your infographics is really good, and that the graphics themselves are aesthetically pleasing and relevant.

You can use a Forum Script to create your Q&A... a good forum system that I recommend us https://www.vbulletin.com/

HI James,

You can use Screaming Frog to generate your sitemap. If you have more than 500 pages you'll need to buy the license that cost  99 £.

-Felipe

Keep mind that the Search Volume displayed, is only for bing! You can use Google ad words tool to get an estimate from Google.

Yes your short robots.txt idea would create a huge problem.

In your Magento admin if you click in the menu Catalog > URL Rewrite Management

You will see the magento feature  that creates all the "pretty urls", in that page you will see a table. If get value from  Target path column and copy and paste after your site domain, for example domain.com/value_in_target_path...

You'll see that the page loads fine, you don't want Google to rank those pages with the "messy" URL so that's why you need all those stuff in your robots.txt

3.  Is there a reason Why can't it just look like this:

Yes, It would generate a lot of duplicates issues, for example your  robots.txt you have the follow line:

Disallow: /catalog/category/view/ -> That's the "real" category URL, you can access any category on magento by /catalog/category/view/id or by the "pretty" URL.
Because you disallow the "real: URL only the pretty URL will be viable for search engines. 

This same rule apply for many other parts of the robots.txt.

When I want a fast general overview of a website SEO Potential, I check using 2 Moz Tools, On-Page Grader and Open Site explorer... plus a get a traffic estimate from some spy tool like similarweb.com However a full audit is need to know deeper about a website.

Panda Target content, does your website has a lot of pages with very little content? Like less than 300 words?

If you were hit by Panda you have to improve your website content. I noticed that a lot of small eCommerce websites had problems with Panda not because the site had bad content but because in Google eyes the site didn't have enough unique content.

I didn't look at your site, but my intuition says that you don't have links issue.

1 - Do you have any notice on Google Webmaster?

2 - Do you see any huge traffic drop on GA? In the last year? If yes, you should check if there was any know Google update around that time. http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

ps: A big drop on traffic can be also cause by technical issues, so you should also check if  your site had any big update in the time the traffic drooped. (for example a cms change)

If you dont have any traffic drop or notice on GWT, I would recommend you not disavow any link.... If you see a traffic drop you have to do a link audit and conduct a link removal campaign..

Hey Mozers,

One of my 2014 resolutions is to start doing A/B Testing, so far I have been following "best practices" and "common sense" when comes to website design, but I would like to go above and beyond.

I was hoping a could get a few tips some of you that are already doing A/B testing.

How is it been? Do you see a great ROI? What do you think would be best path for who is starting now? Any book or links you would recommend?

Thanks

How many links are you talking about? I think that if you naturally link your sister companies sites in your company sites... you don't have to worry about having a separate hosting.  Google wont go after you if have a few links from the same ip.

Now if you have 40 sites all linking for your main site.  Google might see that as manipulation so you can try to hide that you own all the sites. however the host is only thing, they can also check for who owns the domain etc...

To make it look good they hired a good designer and spend time and money doing CRO.  You can see in the links below the technologies behind the scenes. However produce a great website is not about the technology it's about knowing the theories about designing a website.  A professional using only Microsoft Pain as tool will do far better than some one with all the tools in the world  that only knows how to use the tool, one can master every single feature of Photoshop for example and still  make poor designs is not about knowing the tools is about knowing design.

http://builtwith.com/?http%3A%2F%2Fwww.quicksprout.com%2Fthe-advanced-guide-to-seo%2F

http://builtwith.com/?http%3A%2F%2Fbacklinko.com%2Flink-building

Did you see any lost in traffic in your site lately? You should be very careful removing link many of those links might be actually helping your ranks. If you don't have any penalty or traffic decrease I think is better use of your time to keep building good links.

Right in the paid version wont stop! You can see in their website that the limit of urls will be remove once you buy the license.  http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/licence/

It should catch everything, maybe you can contact their support just to make sure, they are very good on support over twitter.

Yes I just run a craw for 500 000 urls

You can try crawl the site using screamingfrog, make sure you  check the box “Check Links Outside Folder” in the spider menu.

How often do you guys use the search operator "link:"?  How accurate is the data? Why the numbers of links when we use the parameter is way lower than the number on Google webmaster Tool or open site explorer? It only show the most powerful links?

Thanks, I'll try do that the messy is worse than I thought...

Here is a example:

This URL:

http://www.toolsandmachinery.com/jet-parts-5883/jet-dust-collection-8097/jet-jc-3-parts-8110/jet-foot-jc3-141-289123.html?buy=now

302 for: http://www.toolsandmachinery.com/jet-parts-5883/jet-dust-collection-8097/jet-jc-3-parts-8110/

Looks like their shopping cart (OS commerce) is doing all the 302. ..

I'm doing an audit for a new client and their website has tons of 302... (more than 1000)... What is the best/fast way to change all the 302 for 301...?

You can just add a canonical url tag.

http://moz.com/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

this article will open your mind about keywords: http://moz.com/blog/keywords-to-concepts

I would say that they have 80% of their keywords using long tail strategy in a site with new 1000 pages that makes sense... also the 20/80 rule apply also apply for SEO. (20% of your landing pages bring 80% of your traffic). You can see that they rank for very competitive keyword like: "Most Expensive Shoes"... You can see other keywords they rank well here: http://www.similarweb.com/website/listdose.com

Hi Rachel.

Before you spend money hiring a Magento Expert (the good ones aren't cheap) you can try do the follow:

1. Move your site for a Magento optimize server. I use and recommend Simple Helix.  (they will even move your site for free).
2. Use cloud flare pro as your CDN, they have very nice options that will optimize your website code in the fly. https://www.cloudflare.com/features-optimizer
3. Install the GT Metrix Magento Extension. (they have a very nice feature to optimize all the images in your site).

Those steps should be enough to bring your load time to 2-3 seconds, I did myself in many magento sites with speed issues however if after that you still having problem you might need hire a magento expert.

• Felipe

HI Bob,

• I wouldn't replace the H1 and H2 for  strong.
• I think is good idea to use exactly matching in the Title.
• You can check the "perfectly Opimized page" in this image by Rand: http://dc8hdnsmzapvm.cloudfront.net/rand/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/perfectly-optimized-page3.gif

Hi,

Does any one know if using the moz APIs, I can created a "SEO" dashboard inside my backend?

Thanks

Strange, I tested on my site and the load time is 2.69 without the plugin and 2.75 with the plugin.

In 2008 our "friend" Matt Cutts wrote a post where he suggested 5 plugins, I am not sure how relevant those plugins are after so many is years, but is worth a try.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/wordpress-plugin-related-posts/

Maybe, Links play a big whole on your ranking, and without this 301 you loss big part of your link profile.

You can use Excel formulas to generate a list with all your URLs with .php....

Here are the links for  the ones I use:

http://wordpress.org/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin/

http://www.hupso.com/share/

Can you place the 301 again?