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Hi - Looking at acquiring a domain name that has a great product fit. The problem is it is currently getting a 10/17 Open Site Explorer SPAM score. The existing site for the domain is running Google sponsored link ads and is full of internal pages that link off to these ads. That explains the existing SPAM score. If I acquire the domain I'll throw out the Google ad pages and build instead a site with real valuable content that behaves like a normal site and look at building backlinks etc. My question is, following this approach, how long is it likely to take Google to not see the domain as some Spam factory so it starts getting well positioned SERPs?

How do you get your business name to appear on Google Maps? See attachment. What's the process to get this to happen? I have a Google Local listing, but that doesn't seem to be enough. ZzFnwBj

I notice that the MOZ Page Grader considers "/keyword1/keyword2-keyword3" in a URL string to be less effective than "/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3". Is this correct from Google's perspective? If I am trying to maximise my SEO for the page title "Business building tips", for example, does Google think my URL is more relevant if it's in the form: 1. www.website.com/business-building-tips
2. www.website.com/business/building-tips or
3. www.website.com/business/business-building-tips My instinct tells me 3 is more powerful, but logic tells me if I have a whole section devoted to "business" and one of those pages is "business building tips" then 2 should work just as well, possibly better?

I am trying to diagnose a massive drop in Google rankings for my website and noticed that the date of the ranking and traffic drop coincides with Google suddenly only indexing about 10% of my images, whereas previously it was indexing about 95% of them. Wondering if addition of lazy load script to images (so they don't load from the server until visible in the browser) could cause this index blocking?

My Moz Pro report from Sunday shows I have lost ranking on about half of the 1000+ keyword phrases I track. Most of these drops are of the order of 50 places or more. But 6 went up and the rest stayed the same. I see no corresponding drop in Google search traffic or Google search impressions. So how do I read this? About a week ago I switched my travel website to a premium theme and removed indexing on my Wordpress attachment pages. In the week since, There is no manual penalty visible. The new theme increased my page speed from C to A, so I thought it would help my rankings. Now I don't know what to think. My website is http://www.asiantraveltips.com

I'm getting good, solid growth in my Google SERPs and Google search traffic now, but I do notice that 70% of my high ranking search results are images and the CTR on those is only 3-4%. All my images are illustrative and highly relevant to my travel blog, but I guess that hardly matters unless they get CTR so people see them in context. Has anyone seen or done any good research on what makes people click through on Google Image Search results? What are the key factors? How do you optimize for click-through? Is it better to watermark your images or overlay label them to increase likelihood of click-through? Thanks, Tony FYI the travel blog in question is www.asiantraveltips.com and a relevant Google search where I rank highly is "songkran 2016 phuket".

This is not really an SEO related question but because we are all marketers here I'm hoping someone will have the answer I'm looking for. I want users to be able to defer answering an exit survey until they are finished their visit to our website. We will invite them on entry, but give them a check box that says "Ask me when I'm finished this visit" or similar. We currently launch using "exit intent" detection, but users keep complaining that we're asking them too early (before they've had a chance to do anything). And this with 30 second delay and minimum two page visit. The question I have is, how do we get a deferred survey back in their face at the end of the visit? Back in the days before tabbed browsers, we'd have pre-loaded the survey in a "pop under" window and it would have been there when ever they finally closed the browser window. With tabbed browsers, this doesn't really work any more. We can open the survey in a new tab but leave focus on the active tab, but will the user ever really go to the new tab? Is there a way to force focus to the new tab with the survey in it when the user leaves the website or closes the active tab? We don't want to change survey platforms (we've just done that), we need a solution that will allow us to deliver the survey within our own platform even if the browser handling happens somewhere else. Anyone been able to do something like this? Does your solution also work for mobile devices?

I have recently switched all my travel affiliate links to TripAdvisor using their javascript code that converts the natural links (direct links to TA URLs) to affiliate links. I have set up goal tracking in GA to try to put a monetary value on clicks through to these links (based on the known conversion rate to commissionable bookings) but GA is over-reporting the goals by a very large margin. I'm wondering what I've done wrong. The first screen shot below is of the goal settings I used in GA. The second screenshot shows that GA is reporting 7125 goal completions since I set up the goal on 7 August. The third screenshot shows the actual number of GA events recorded on outbound clicks to TA URLs in the same period, which is just 97. So the goal completions being recorded far exceed the actual goal completions, but I'm not sure why. I know I've done something wrong but as this is the first time I've used goals, I'd appreciate some help to see what I've done wrong. Thank you. 3f7dc3de6f9f1373d47994144a5cb016 56aa39130a7d54b07d8f2ce9cf1d7fb0 35ee827275928ca8c4d4c941f0672ef8

I am trying to make some sense of the data in the "Landing Pages" report under "Search Engine Optimization" in GA versus the data under the "Landing Pages" report in "Behavior | Site Content". For example, the SEO report says my page http://www.asiantraveltips.com/blog/bangkok-skytrain-bts-mrt-lines/ received 22,000 search impressions in the past 30 days and 900 "clicks" (12.42%). What are these "clicks" when the Content "Landing Pages" report says the same page only got 382 "sessions" in the same period??? What are these "clicks" if not clicks on the search results link that should be reflected in landing page sessions on the corresponding page?

What's the current thinking on the best structure of information on a website for SEO? Structure for visitors can be best achieved through navigation menus, but I am more interested in how I should organise my URL structure so Google can make sense of the depth of my site topics. The website is an Asian travel blog so there are essentially two specific types of post on the site. One type is location specific (may be about an attraction, a city, a region or a country). The other type is general (usually about an aspect of travel like travel cash, visas, scams, etc). At the moment, all my general posts are organised like www.asiantraveltips.com/blog/[post-name]. My location-specific posts are organised like www.asiantraveltips.com/[country]/[region-or-city]/[place-name]/ so that Google can see I have depth of topics about each country and region. But I find it hard to keep consistency in this arrangement of URLs and I don't know if I might be better off to just have everything flat and tagged as a blog post like www.asiantraveltips.com/blog/[country]-[region-city]-[post-name]/? What's best practice these days? How are others organising travel blog websites?

On 6 June, Google search traffic to my Wordpress travel blog http://www.travelnasia.com tanked completely. There are no warnings or indicators in Webmaster Tools that suggest why this happened. Traffic from search has remained at zero since 6 June and shows no sign of recovering. Two things happened on or around 6 June. (1) I dropped my premium theme which was proving to be not mobile friendly and replaced it with the ColorMag theme which is responsive. (2) I relocated off my previous hosting service which was showing long server lag times to a faster host. Both of these should have improved my search performance, not tanked it. There were some problems with the relocation to the new web host which resulted in a lot of "out of memory" errors on the website for 3-4 days. The allowed memory was simply not enough for the complexity of the site and the volume of traffic. After a few days of trying to resolve these problems, I moved the site to another web host which allows more PHP memory and the site now appears reliably accessible for both desktop and mobile. But my search traffic has not recovered. I am wondering if in all of this I've done something that Google considers to be a cardinal sin and I can't see it. The clues I'm seeing include: Moz Pro was unable to crawl my site last Friday. It seems like every URL it tried to crawl was of the form http://www.travelnasia.com/wp-login.php?action=jetpack-sso&redirect_to=http://www.travelnasia.com/blog/bangkok-skytrain-bts-mrt-lines which resulted in a 500 status error. I don't know why this happened but I have disabled the Jetpack login function completely, just in case it's the problem. GWT tells me that some of my resource files are not accessible by GoogleBot due to my robots.txt file denying access to /wp-content/plugins/. I have removed this restriction after reading the latest advice from Yoast but I still can't get GWT to fetch and render my posts without some resource errors. On 6 June I see in Structured Data of GWT that "items" went from 319 to 1478 and "items with errors" went from 5 to 214. There seems to be a problem with both hatom and hcard microformats but when I look at the source code they seem to be OK. What I can see in GWT is that each hcard has a node called "n [n]" which is empty and Google is generating a warning about this. I see that this is because the author vcard URL class now says "url fn n" but I don't see why it says this or how to fix it. I also don't see that this would cause my search traffic to tank completely. I wonder if anyone can see something I'm missing on the site. Why would Google completely deny search traffic to my site all of a sudden without notifying any kind of penalty? Note that I have NOT changed the content of the site in any significant way. And even if I did, it's unlikely to result in a complete denial of traffic without some kind of warning.

My Google search rankings are improving rapidly at the moment, but a lot of my rankings are for images (presume that means the images are appearing near the top in Google Images). How do I capitalise on that? It's not really much help to me that my images are popular unless it results in traffic to the pages where those images are used. I am running Wordpress so I have the option to have images embed as "no link", "link to attachment page", "link to original image", etc. Is there any advantage of using one of these over the other? I'd really like to set it up so that when a Google Images user clicks "View Image" it loads the attachment page or the host content page rather than the image. Bad SEO? I'm not sure if the fact that I'm using Jetpack Photon CDN image hosting will make this more complicated or not. Tony

I'm wondering why my website www.travelnasia.com home page URL does not rank in the top 50 for the brand keyword "travelnasia". Does this indicate a problem? A page linking to my site ranks at No 1. A domain listing for my site ranks No 2. A SiteJabber review of my site ranks No 3. My own privacy page ranks #4 and my Contact Us page ranks No 5. My home page is nowhere to be seen in the top 50. It does rank #1 for the qualified domain "travelnasia.com", just not for the unqualified domain. I just don't know what to make of that. My competitors all seem to rank #1 for their brands, so I'm not sure why I don't at least rank in the top 50 for mine.

Is there a technique to optimising for multiple key phrases? In the "old days", we'd have written doorway pages targeted at different key phrases, or just written a landing page for each key phrase. Now we're told that more is better and having all the info about a topic in one place will get you better SEO outcomes. But that means pages must be optimised for multiple key phrases. For example, I currently have three pages that are related topically: Bangkok Skytrain (Guide to BTS and MRT Lines) - this page is a description of the metro train system in Bangkok and how to use it. Gets traffic from key phrases like "bangkok BTS line", "bangkok commuter trains", "BTS and MRT lines". Attractions near the Bangkok Skytrain - this page has a map for each major skytrain station and details of nearby attractions including hotels and restaurants. Gets traffic from phrases like "bangkok mrt and bts map", "bangkok rail link map", "how to get to siam on MRT" and "bangkok airport rail link map" (so mostly gets key phrases with "map" in them). Best shopping from the Bangkok Skytrain - this page talks about the shopping centres in easy walking distance of each skytrain station. Doesn't really get a lot of traffic and probably pulls that from the other two. Ideally, I probably should combine all of these into one page now. But how to optimise for all those key phrases? Should I just optimise within each Heading 2 as I would within a page? Does that risk confusing the overall page SEO?

How on earth does "southeastasiatravelblog.com" rank No 3 on Google for "Asian travel blog"? It's just a collection of basically PR type travel articles. I have profiled its backlinks using Open Site Explorer and 71% of them are dead. The rest seem to be mostly "run of site" links from his other websites, which aren't particularly travel or Asia related. The highest PA for a live backlink to this site is a link from within his own website (PA 27, DA 15). Most of his backlink anchors are URLs and look fairly EMD to me. The site has few shares (6 FB shares, 7 FB likes, 1 Twitter share). So what makes it rank so highly for this phrase? My site I'm comparing against is "travelnasia.com" which is a fairly new domain with a DA 23, PA 31 and about the same amount of shares but far fewer backlinks at this stage because I recently changed URLs to shake off what might have been an algorithm penalty from Google. I am now receiving a growing level of Google search traffic again, but it's a long climb back. I'm looking at strategies, which is why I was checking out the site above.

I am about to move my Thailand-focused travel website into a new, broader Asia-focused travel website. The Thailand site has had a sad history with Google (algorithmic, not penalties) so I don't want that history to carry over into the new site. At the same time though, I want to capture the traffic that Google is sending me right now and I would like my search positions on Bing and Yahoo to carry through if possible. Is there a way to make all that happen? At the moment I have migrated all the posts over to the new domain but I have it blocked to search engines. I am about to start redirecting post for post using meta-refresh redirects with a no-follow for safety. But at the point where I open the new site up to indexing, should I at the same time block the old site from being indexed to prevent duplicate content penalties? Also, is there a method I can use to selectively 301 redirect posts only if the referrer is Bing or Yahoo, but not Google, before the meta-refresh fires? Or alternatively, a way to meta-refresh redirect if the referrer is Google but 301 redirect otherwise? Or is there a way to "noindex, nofollow" the redirect only if the referrer is Google? Is there a danger of being penalised for doing any of these things? Late Edit: It occurs to me that if my penalties are algorithmic (e.g. due to bad backlinks), does 301 redirection even carry that issue through to the new website? Or is it left behind on the old site?

I have noticed just this week a lot of new backlinks from a site called handmadearea.com - for example http://handmadearea.com/url/hp-printer-software-zpe-center/. It looks like the site is somehow stripping my content structure and inserting spam where my content goes. Has anyone seen anything like this before? Should I be worried about it? The backlinks are not showing in Google Webmaster Tools so I can't easily disavow them at this point. Are they likely to be doing me harm? What can I do about them?

At PubCon 2013 I notice Matt Cutts mentioned Panda softening and I wonder if anyone who was there has any greater insight into what they are thinking? Is Google finally responding to the overwhelming number of webmaster complaints about Panda? What sort of issues might they be responding to? "We are looking at Panda and seeing if we can find some additional signals, and we think we've got some to help refine things for sites that are kind of in the border zone, the gray area a little bit, And so if we can soften the affect a little bit, for those sites, that we believe have got some additional signals of quality, that will help sites that were previously affected - to some degree." All I am seeing on the discussion forums so far is more blah blah blah...

I've just been comparing search appearances in Google Webmaster Tools with organic search traffic from Google and found that the two do not correspond at all. Why would this be? GWT says my appearances in search crash-dived around the second week of September (does this correspond with a Google algorithm update?), but my organic search data in Google Analytics for the same time period shows that search visits actually increased. Anyone else seeing anomalies like this? 525f2de7c58cc2-09483641 525f2e345acdf1-83344837

Although Moz does a great job of tracking keyword rankings within the "top 50", a lot of the time with new sites and new content we are trying to track improvement in performance way out beyond that (just trying to get into the top 50). Although Moz tells me that a keyword has moved up or down outside the top 50, without knowing the actual position it's hard to reconcile that in terms of improvement. Is there a tool out there that will do what Moz does for the top 200?

I'd like to get some input from the Moz community about the domain name I use on a travel website I run as a hobby. I got heavily whacked by an update in September 2012 which some have said was because my site is an EMD. Others said it was because I had poor quality backlinks (but in fact I hardly had any). With the benefit of hindsight, I'd love to know what really happened. The website is www.traveltipsthailand.com (now www.asiantraveltips.com) and the "brand" I use is "Travel Tips Thailand.The traffic penalty I incurred was around 80% and despite a LOT of work overhauling the site and trying to build some better quality links, I don't believe it has really recovered much. It ranks for non-competitive, low-traffic key phrases (which means it's not penalised as such), but struggles to rank anywhere meaningful on any phrase likely to drive traffic to the site. At this stage I really just want to know whether to persist with the site (it's heartbreaking, to be honest) or drop it an build something new from scratch. I monitor the site's progress using Moz Pro, so I can see all the search ranking, authority and backlink data. 5254ab15dcaa91-52423790

How do non-business websites think about exact match domain names and branding after EMD and Panda? What is an EMD and what is a "brand" when there's no business or commercial brand involved? And does it impact your SEO outcomes? I have a Thailand travel blog which is a personal crusade of mine. I like Thailand, I love travelling there and I like sharing my experiences and knowledge. I don't have a business name, so when I started the blog I just used the best phrase I could find that was available as a domain name - at the time it was "bangkoktravelthailand.com". Late in 2011 I thought this sounded a bit spammy, so I found a new domain name "traveltipsthailand.com" and 301'd across to that. All went well and traffic grew consistently thanks to good writing and some basic SEO, until in late September 2012 the site got 'whacked' by Google - possibly due to EMD, but I think more likely due to Panda and some accidental poor quality backlinks (I posted a reply on another travel site, pointing back to my site, but it ended up becoming 100s of low value backlinks because of the way that site managed it's "latest comments" widget). Since then I've been trying very hard to rebuild my traffic, but it's a tough gig. I am now averaging better than I was in Sept 2012, but nowhere near where I was on trend to be by now. I have a small social media profile (800 Twitter followers plus Google+, Facebook and Pinterest) and I am slowly building some supporting pages on prominent Web 2.0 sites and seeking out quality guest post opportunities. But I still worry about the domain name. Does Google see it as an EMD? I don't use the domain name words at all in my page titles (I use xxx | Thailand travel blog) and I try not to use it in anchors either (I tend to use "Thailand travel blog" or my own name. But I still have a few old backlinks that say "Travel Tips Thailand" and I use that phrase as my brand when talking about the website. So how should sites like mine think about "brand" and "EMD"? Is it an issue or not? Is my domain name holding my site back? I have others I can use like "1travelthailand.com" and "thailand-travel-blog.com" but I'm just sitting on them, not sure where to go. I also have "asiantraveltips.com" and a long term view of rolling this site up with other blogs I'm slowly developing about China, Cambodia and Vietnam. But again, not sure where to go any more. Anyone care to share their thoughts?

I did a lot of work to one of my sites last week and eagerly awaited this week's MOZ report to confirm that I had achieved what I was trying to do, but alas I still see the same errors and warnings in the latest report. This was supposedly generated five days AFTER I made the changes, so why are they not apparent in the new report? I am mainly referring to missing metadata, long page titles, duplicate content and duplicate title errors (due to crawl and URL issues). Why would the new crawl not have picked up that these have been corrected? Does it rely on some other crawl having updated (e.g. Google or Bing)?

I am trying to better understand why some of my pages rank well and some don't rank at all. I've discovered that slight changes to how the key phrase is typed into Google can have dramatic effects on the results. Why is this? And how should I interpret it or use it? I understand that some phrases will be more competitive than others, but that doesn't seem to explain the variances entirely. For example, http://traveltipsthailand.com/phuket/best-bachelor-hotels-in-phuket/ (which is SEO optimised for the long-tail phrase "bachelor hotels in Phuket" and "girl-friendly bachelor hotels in Phuket") ranks #1 or #2 for the key phrase "bachelor hotels phuket", but if I modify the phrase slightly to "bachelor hotels IN phuket" it drops to #12 (page 2) with less relevant competitors (like "Bachelor hotels in Chiang Mai") getting in ahead of it. Likewise, if I search on "best bachelor hotels phuket" (the URL phrase of the page) it is #1 or #2 again, but if I modify the search phrase to "best bachelor hotels IN phuket", my SERP drops to #13. If I use the longer-tail key phrase "girl-friendly bachelor hotels in phuket" the results are even more dramatic. I rank #5 for that phrase in the SERPs with or without "IN" in the search phrase. But if I remove "bachelor" from the key phrase and just search on "girl-friendly hotels in phuket" my page drops right off the SERP radar. Somewhere above #200 I think. Would love to get a better understanding of what influences these changes if anyone really knows. Is it just Goovoodoogle or is there a logical explanation? 51c0d097f1c8d9-81984651 51c0d11688af68-43859477