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Wondering if I could pick the brains of fellow mozer's. Been working with a client for about 3 months now to get their site up in the engine. In the three months the DA has gone from about 11 to 34 and PA is 40 (up from about 15) so that's all good. However, we seem not to be moving up the ranking much. The average DA of competitors in the niche in the top ten is 25. We have 9.2 times the average no of backlinks too. During a call to the client today they told me that they noticed a major drop in their rankings a few months back. Didn't say this when we started the project. I just searched for the first paragraph on their homepage and it returns 16,000 hits in google, The second returns 9600 and the third 1,400. Searching for the first paragraph of their 'about us' page gives me 13,000 results!! Clearly something is not right here. Looking into this, I seems that someone has use their content, word for word, as the descriptions on thousands of blogs, social sites. I am thinking that this, tied in with the slow movement in the listings, has caused a duplicate content penalty in the search engines.  The client haven't copied anyone's content as it is very specific for their site but it seems all over the web. I have advised them to change their site content asap and hope we get a Panda refresh in to view the new unique content. Once the penalty is off i expect the site to shoot up the rankings. From an seo company point of view, should I have seen this before? Maybe. If they had said they suffered a major drop in rankings a few months back - when they dropped their seo agency, I would have looked into it, but one doesn't naturally assume that a client's copy will be posted all over the web, it is not something I would have searched for without reason to search Any thoughts on this, either saying yes or no to my theory would be most welcome please. Thanks Carl

Hi, all. Anyone else seen a massive increase in the Not Provided keywords in their analytics in the past couple of weeks. Probably related to this (source:http://searchengineland.com/post-prism-google-secure-searches-172487) _In the past month, Google quietly made a change aimed at encrypting all search activity — except for clicks on ads. Google says this has been done to provide “extra protection” for searchers, and the company may be aiming to block NSA spying activity. _ Other than the unreliable stats from WMT, there doesn't seem too many ways which we can now find out what is sending traffic to our sites!

I am developing an ecommerce site, just ran it through the Moz crawl to see what's what and it has come back with a lot of issues. Most of these issues are around duplicate page titles (it is not happy with paginated titles, ie Shoes, Shoes Page 2, Shoes Page 3 etc) and it has also found a lot of Overly-Dynamic URL's. Again, these seem to be from  some of the search functions and filters used Accessories&pto_sort=priceAsc&pto_page=6 other than spending a lot of time and effort trying to rewrite these urls there is little I can do about them. Should I just ignore this? I wouldn't imagine it having a massive impact on the rankings of the pages. Thanks, Carl

Hi all Got an email from a client asking about this, Ive not come across this one before.  The client has a Google + account with about 2500 reviews on their website on. They have linked this into their adwords so these show on their ppc. However, on the ppc ad it says only 650 reviews. Quite a difference!! Anyone know why this would be the case? Thanks

Hi all Just wondering what other Mozewrs' would do about this..... I want to add a revenue stream to a blog of mine and I have decided that an affiliate store is the way to go. I can create a store with merchant datafeeds and pull in products related to my site, and all being well make some pennies from it. Obviously all the datafeeds are published on many other sites and so it will be very duplicate content. Would blocking Googlebot from the store be enough to ensure that the site doesn't receive a penalty for duplicate content? I would be keen on getting the product category pages indexed but not too worried about the actual products themselves. I would like to make some revenue from the site but not at the risk of killing the blog. Thanks

Anyone else having trouble with the compare your keyword positions with competitors section of the analytics?  The rankings for my site(s) are fine but whichever competitor I click on to compare rankings to just returns 'Not in Top 50' the competitor is ranking. I have just manually checked and they are very much listed in the engine. Is this tool broken?

Trying to clear up a manual link penalty a client has received and I have found the client's site has been blog commenting 14,000 times on just one domain!! I need to do a reconsideration request and show Google that I have cleaned up the mess (the client has 50k backlinks, of which I am not happy with about 75% so far!!) but I cannot expect the website in question to go through 14k pages. What would people advise here. Would you state the sheer number of links on this site in the reconsideration request and use the disavow tool? Doesn't this suggest that I have been lazy and not put the effort into to clearing things up up

Looking for some opinions here please.  Been involved in seo for a couple of years mainly working on my websites and picking up the odd client here and there through word of mouth.  I must admit that up until a few months back I was guilty of using some grey methods of link building - linkvana, unique article wizard and the such. While no penalties were handed out to my domains and some decent rankings gained, I got tired of always being on the lookout for what the next Google update will do to my results and which networks were being hit, and so I moved a lot more into the 'proper' way of seoing. These days my primary sources for backlinks are much more respectable... myblogguest bloggerlinkup postjoint Guest Blog Finder http://ultramarketer.com/guest-blogger-finder/ - not sure where i came across this resource but it's very handy I use these sources alongside industry only directories and general word of mouth. Ironically I have found that doing the word by hand not only leads to results I can happyily show people (content wise) but also it's much quicker and cheaper. The increased authority of the sites means far fewer links are needed. The one area I still am having a little issue with is that of building keyword based backlinks. I now find it fairly easy to get my content on a reasonable quality site - DA to 40 and above, however the vast majority of these sites will allow the backlink only as the company name or as a generic read more type thing. This is fine and it is improving my website performance and authority. The trouble I am finding is that while i am ranking for the title tag and some keywords in the page, I am struggling to get backlinks for other keywords. In an ideal world every page on the site would be optimised for a different keyword and you could then just the site name as anchor text to build the authority of that page and make it rank for it's content, but what about when you (or the client) wants to rank the home for a number of different keywords, some not featured on the page. The keywords are too similar to go to the trouble of making unique pages for, and that would also add no value to the site. My question really then, after a very long winded way of getting there, is are others finding it much more difficult to gain keyword based backlinks these days?  The great thing about the grey seo tools, as mentioned above, is that it was super easy to get the backlinks with whatever anchor text you wanted - even if you needed hundreds of the thing to compensate for the low value of each!! Thanks Carl

Hi I created a couple of new campaigns a few days back and waited for the initial crawl to be completed. I have just checked and both are reporting 5XX (Server Error) on all the pages it tried to look at (one site I have 110 of these and the other it only crawled the homepage). This is very odd, I have checked both sites on my local pc, alternative pc and via my windows vps browser which is located in the US (I am in UK) and it all works fine. Any idea what could be the cause of this failure to crawl? I have pasted a few examples from the report | 500 : TimeoutError http://everythingforthegirl.co.uk/index.php/accessories.html 500 1 0 500 : Error http://everythingforthegirl.co.uk/index.php/accessories/bags.html 500 1 0 500 : Error http://everythingforthegirl.co.uk/index.php/accessories/gloves.html 500 1 0 500 : Error http://everythingforthegirl.co.uk/index.php/accessories/purses.html 500 1 0 500 : TimeoutError http://everythingforthegirl.co.uk/index.php/accessories/sunglasses.html | 500 | 1 | 0 | Am extra puzzled why the messages say time out. The server dedicated is 8 core with 32 gb of ram, the pages ping for me in about 1.2 seconds. What is the rogerbot crawler timeout? Many thanks Carl

Wondering if I could pick the brains of those with more wisdom than me... Firstly, sorry but unable to give the client's url on this topic. I know that will not help with people giving answers but the client would prefer it if this thread etc didn't appear when people type their name in google. Right, to cut a long story short..gained a new client a few months back, did the usual things when starting the project of reviewing the backlinks using OSE and Majestic. There were a few iffy links but got most of those removed. In the last couple of months have been building backlinks via guest blogging and using bloggerlinkup and myblogguest (and some industry specific directories found using linkprospector tool). All way going well, the client were getting about 2.5k hits a day, on about 13k impressions. Then came the last Google update. The client were hit, but not massively. Seemed to drop from top 3 for a lot of keywords to average position of 5-8, so still first page. The traffic went down after this. All the sites which replaced the client were the big name brands in the niche (home improvement, sites such as BandQ, Homebase, for the fellow UK'ers). This was annoying but understandable. However, on 27th June. We got the following message in WMT - Google has detected a pattern of artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site. Buying links or participating in link schemes in order to manipulate PageRank are violations of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. 
As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to xxxx.co.uk/. There may be other actions on your site or parts of your site. This was a shock to say the least. A few days later the traffic on the site went down more and the impressions dropped to about 10k a day (oddly the rankings seem to be where they were after the Google update so perhaps a delayed message). To get back up to date....after digging around more it appears there are a lot of SENUKE type links to the site - links on poor wiki sites,a lot of blog commenting links, mostly from irrelevant sites, i enclose a couple of examples below. I have broken the links so they don't get any link benefit from this site. They are all safe for work http:// jonnyhetherington. com/2012/02/i-need-a-new-bbq/?replytocom=984 http:// www.acgworld. cn/archives/529/comment-page-3 In addition to this there is a lot of forum spam, links from porn sites and links from sites with Malware warnings. To be honest, it is almost perfect negative seo!! I contacted several of the sites in question (about 450) and requested they remove the links, the vast majority of the sites have no contact on them so I cannot get the links removed. I did a disavow on these links and then a reconsideration request but was told that this is unsuccessful as the site still was being naughty. Given that I can neither remove the links myself or get Google to ignore them, my options for lifting this penalty are limited. What would be the course of action others would take, please. Thanks and sorry for overally long post

Wondering if I could get a second opinion on this, please.  I have just taken on a new client, they own about 6 different niched car experience websites (hire an Aston Martin for the day, type thing). All the six sites they have seem to perform reasonably well for the brand of car they deal with, the average DA of the sites is about 24. The client wishes to move all of these different manufacturers into one site and have sections of the site, they can then also target more generic experience day type keywords. The obvious way of dealing with this move would be to 301 the old sites to the relevant places on the new site and wait for that to rank. However, looking at the backlinks profile of the niched sites, they seem to have very few backlinks and i feel the reason they are ranking so well for all the individual manufacturers is because they all feature the name in the domain. Not exact match, but the name is there. If I am thinking right, with the 301 we want to tell Google page x is now page y, index this one instead. Because the new site has a more generic name I don't think it will enjoy any of the domain keyword benefits which are helping the sub sites, and as a result I expect the rankings and traffic to drop (at least in the short term). Am I reading this correct. Would people use a 301 in this case? The easiest thing to do would be to leave the 6 sub sites up and running on their own domain and launch the new site to run alongside them, however the client doesn't want this. Thanks, Carl

Hi all I added a new domain to my campaigns yesterday and got the usual message saying we will have a small set of results ready in a couple of hours, and the rest will be done in a week or so. 24 hours later, this same message is still showing. Anyone else experiencing this or is it just related to my domain? Many thanks. Carl

Hi all, Wondering if anyone could help out here, good a very strange issue.... Went into Google Webmaster Tools and looked at the incoming links to a client's site (new client, only just gained access to WMT) and noticed 2563 links coming from a domain. Upon viewing said domain it is a 100% copy of the clients site, I mean 100%; the phone numbers, email address etc are still pointing to the client's site. Everything is the same, the pages, the navigation etc. When I click on a link on the copy site it loads the same pages but at their site, the internal linking points to the version of the pages on their site.  It seems to be an ongoing thing because the last time the client updated their blog was last week and this is on the copy site. Obviously this cannot be helping with regard to seo. The client knows nothing about it so not come from them. The copy site is indexed in Google!!. The first thing to do is to contact these people and ask what they are doing. This is proving to be easier said than done, the contact details (as mentioned above) on the pages still point back to the client and the whois gives no details. What would be the first step to take here? Obviously there is the whole legal area about stolen content but that can wait until we have the site down and out of Google. Is there somewhere in Google to report things such as this? I will speak to client and if they are happy I will share both the domains in question, they know I am seeking alternative opinions Many thanks Carl

Wondering if anyone could help out. A while back I made an affiliate store using wordpress and merchants products feeds. I didn't get found to adding any unique content to the site and, as was to be expected, I gained a penalty and my search traffic died. A few months back I redesigned the store, still using merchant csv but now with 98%  unique content on each page. However, try as I may I still cannot get anywhere in the engines. The domain doesn't even rank for it's own name!! I have submitted reconsideration request but they have replied saying no penalty on the site. The domain is www.digitalcatwalk.co.uk. While the domain isn't massively strong I would prefer not to have to start again as I feel it is a very good domain name. Any advise would be most gratefully received. Thanks Carl

Hi all Wondering if anyone could help out with this one please. My client is a government backed free internet safety website and in the next few days they will be launching an update on all of their pages which will let people know if their browser is out of date. For example, when you go to their site you will get a message advising you to upgrade your browser for security reasons. They have employed the following code to check the browser The client are keen to know how many times in a period this message is shown to users. Any idea how one would go about tracking this please. Would it involve some custom GA work, would I be able to track the hits on https://wxxxx.org/javascript/update.js in GA? I'm a little stumped. Obviously I can tell how many people loaded the page but not sure how to work out what % of them see the javascript Many thanks for your help Carl

Hi all Could do with a second opinion on this one if anyone has a moment please. Recent Google updates have targeted overally optimised backlink profiles as they are clearly for seo purposes and not natural. The question I have is how does this relate to an ecommerce website? If I sell 'blue 1980 aged cheese' (I know nothing about cheese so perhaps not the best example!!) and I have a url on my shop domain.com/store/blue-1980-aged-cheese with the product name as the page title along with the domain name.  If I were to get backlinks pointing to this page using the anchor of 'blue 1980 aged cheese' (and other variations of that, blue cheese, aged blue cheese etc) would this be considered to be too optimised? Given the page is about this item then surely it could be considered natural that people link using the product name, as well as using the site name and the domain url Any thoughts please Thanks, Carl

Hi all. Could do with a second opinion on this please... At present a client of ours owns two shops (both doing the same but in towns about 20 miles apart - they sell flooring, but using different names) and has a website for each. The plan is to rebrand both of these stores the same and merge both websites into one. The problem comes that both of the individual websites rank very well in their respective Google Local search results and I fear that killing one of the sites will mean that one store will vanish from the local listings. One domain is a DA 45 and the other a DA 11 so the plan is to use the stronger of the two domains. The question I would like to ponder with people wiser than myself is how can we ensure that the new single domain ranks for both locations in the local?  Would the easiest solution be to have pages such as domain.com/store1 and domain.com/store2 with full listings for that store inc name, address, phone number, customer reviews etc? At present the DA 45 domain ranks very well in it's Google local so we need to find a way to change the homepage of that to have both the stores phone numbers but without affecting the local listing. I was considering adding the second phone number as a text based image so that it's visible for people but not for bots Finally, would 301 redirecting the now unused store to domain.com/store2 help with ensuring that we do not lose any local listing for that keyword? If not, are there any suggestions people could offer up Many thanks for any help and sorry for the very long question Carl

Hi I see there a lot of webinars coming up in the next few weeks, are there plans to record these so people unable to make the webinar time can view them at a later date? I see webinars from July have been recorded but nothing since. There was a webinar last week which I was unable to come to but cannot find a recording of it

Hi, looking for a second opinion on this please.... I own a couple of web stores, one targets UK and the other USA (they are both the same store more or less just different products targeted at different location). The uk runs on a .co.uk domain and the US on a .us domain.  Is there a safe way that I could auto redirect search engine traffic to the right location? Let's say the toys page of the .co.uk is ranking well in google uk and appears high in google us too, obviously I would want the USA users to visit the toys page for the US store rather than the UK one. Ideally I would employ a geo redirect script so if a USA user clicks on the UK domain they are redirected to the USA site but would Google frown on that? Hope that makes sense? Thanks

Hi Been with this tool for a few days now and enjoying it so far. I do have one query though. In the campaigns section we have various tabs of data, including Social. However while all the other data is exportable in the created report, social is not available to add to the custom reports. Why is this? When I click on the social tab I can download it in CSV but it would be good to be able to export the charts in pdf as per the other analysis data. Would make it much easier when sharing reports with clients. Are there any plans to make the social metrics addable to the custom reports one can create?