Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
You could report them to Google, or do something better with your time, like beat your face against a wall.
No, seriously, Monster.com provides Google a great deal of traffic. They might possibly have an agreement as many of the biggest publishers do.
I am fairly certain Google does not penalize sites for watermarking images. However, losing shares of those images could potentially lose rankings.
One opportunity would be to include a section of your images free of charge with a link attribution policy. This would get you a nice link (don't manipulate the alt text, just the name of the image or your service)
Also, have you checked to see how often your images are being stolen? You can use a service like tineye.com to do this.
I concur mostly with what Greg said, but I must add that it is no longer simply about %. Keeping a safe anchor text threshold has been a staple of quality SEO firms for the last 5 years. Instead, what is more likely going on, is that particular links get flagged based on some metric which, in turn, triggers some sort of deeper review (perhaps getting lumped into the next Penguin analysis).
Thus, it is not solely in your best interest to maintain a safe percentage, it is even more important to ensure that none of the links you acquire or have acquired in the past might be one of those triggers. This means avoiding any known networks, only doing in-content links, etc.
1. Most of your link juice should flow into the home page. This is how most sites work, as most links out there are citations (ie: citing the source, which is your domain, not your page). Google normally can figure out the most relevant page.
2. Make sure you have excellent internal linking just to make sure any link juice going to the home page flows well.
3. Your % is no longer relevant. You will trip the filters getting a single bad link if you/re unlucky, regardless of the threshold. Focus on your own brand, at least for the foreseeable future, and build a site that can sustain itself on long tail traffic while waiting for the big ones to hit.
There are a whole lot of potential factors:
1. Seasonality: Take a look at your products and see if certain ones stopped selling.
2. Browser Updates: Take a look at your sales by browser-type. You do have goal tracking in Analytics set up, right :-). It is possible that an update to a browser made a particular part of the checkout stop working.
3. Errors in the Funnel: Run through your checkout process again and see if anything is screwing up.
4. Look at your Users: Are more of them coming in via Mobile?
Matt Cutts has discussed this pretty well. Cloaking means specifically showing something different to Google than to the user. Hidden content is not specifically cloaking, it is a different issue altogether.
If I had to choose between the two options, I would choose the second. The 302 redirect can be problematic. You should assume that Google is going to find BOTH of these and execute the javascript appropriately. Just don't make anything on your site behave differently specifically for Google.
LivingSocial and Groupon both do javascript redirects and are not suffering the consequences, so I think you should be fine too.
It is possible, but unlikely. If you are fairly focused on the UK, you might want to set geotargeting directly in Google Webmaster Tools to be certain.
Just worth a follow up, there are now multiple tools and services that help with this. I wont link to them because I own one of them, but just search google for either bad link removal tool or bad link removal services to find a bevy of companies assisting in the process.
We have seen this phenomenon related to Penguin - sites retain their top keywords but get gutted for everything else. Weird, we don't have a resolution for it yet.
Take a look at the SEOMoz recommended list, that is always a good place to start!
Having the exact date would be useful. You can then compare it to http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change
Did you get any unnatural link notices in GWT? You can PM me if you want me to take a look.
My company, Virante, studied this question about a year and a half ago. It appears that string distance measurements like Levenshtein Distance or Jaro Winkler Distance correlate well with rankings - this means that it might be nice to have ikeyword.com or ekeyword.com, but not keyword1keyword2.com. You quickly start to lose value at that point.
My vote for them would be to build a brand in this case, unless they can get a true EMD.
Google announced several changes the day before this, but that does not mean they necessarily rolled them out that day. My guess is that you received some sort of penalty, but we would have to know the site. You can private message me if you are interested in me taking a look.
My guess is they spider the way Googlebot spiders - finding links on your home page, following those links, and finding more links on the subsequent pages, so on and so forth. I doubt they look at the sitemap, since it rarely reflects the true importance of pages on your site, which tend to be linked to more often.
We have been seeing issues with nearly every ranking check software out there - only our home-brewed solutions seem to be working at the moment.
When did you lose your rankings? You may have lost your rankings in the myriad algo updates, panda releases, etc. in the last month or so.
All of the changes you mentioned above should not have had a negative impact.
A lot of "semantic" search technology is multi-lingual as it looks at factors like word proximity and collocation which still matter regardless of language. Moreover, I am fairly certain Google has teams of developers dedicated to search in multiple languages. While you can expect that they wont be quite as sophisticated in a non-english language search engine, whatever gains you might find in that Google isn't as "smart" simply means that more people can effectively compete against you.
Absolutely. There is no reason to believe that sites that were hit by Panda can no longer pass link juice.
Links links links. You have no links. Majestic SEO says your best link is this...
http://bangkok2night.com/links/ (slightly NSFW)
SEMPO would be a good start. Add into that things like Google Adwords, Google Analytics and Bing AdCenter certifications
You should direct this question to api@seomoz.org or put in a support ticket.
However, there are strict rate limits on the API, so there is the potential that you are making requests too quickly.
Not really. There are some ways to get at those numbers but none of them are going to be exact. If you had fairly steady rankings for that term over the last 2 years, you could extrapolate search volumes by looking at your analytics and estimating CTR. If you run Adwords you can use impression numbers.
You are going to see very little benefit from optimized anchor text on internal links. Use the anchor text that will most encourage your users to keep clicking through. This doesn't mean necessarily "read more", though. Think about calls to action in anchor text that are more compelling.
A gradual loss in rankings normally means that your competitors are slowly but surely beating you and/or Google is slowly but surely devaluing your links. I would have to look at your analytics to be certain, but the following lends some credence to that theory:
1. Your anchor text is over optimized for the keyword "hard drive recovery", approximately 58% of all of your links have this anchor text.
2. Your anchor text is over optimized for the keyword "data recovery", approximately 56% of your inbound MozRank comes from links with this anchor text.
3. You have a lot of questionable links - likely paid or rented - that Google is either devaluing or penalizing you for.
In addition, your site definitely needs a design refresh if it is going to compete with much more attractively designed sites like http://www.krollontrack.co.uk/
I really see no problem with this within reason. Your best bet is to start by separating layout code into external CSS and Javascript files, so the majority of the code on your page is just simple HTML elements and text. This is 90% of the battle. Reorganizing the content so that your unique, valuable textual content occurs towards the top of the code is the remaining 10%. However, there haven't been any formal studies to prove that this matters much at all. My guess is that unless this is a change you are making on hundreds if not thousands of pages, you will probably see almost no improvement.
If you use Raven Tools and they have tracked the keyword historically, then they will populate your rankings report with previous data. That is your best bet.
What is the keyword? Maybe some of the Mozzers here have that data.
There aren't any perfect tools for this. Virante has an in house tool for this purpose but it is by no means perfect - essentially we determine the footprints of many common forms of websites that link, then spider all of the backlink pages to see if they meet any of those footprints. However, even this is imperfect --- how do you easily distinguish a link from a comment vs. the body of a blog post? At best it will give you a high-level idea.
Do you have multiple categories on the site? Why not just collapse 1 category and see how it performs (give it a good 6 months though before making a final verdict)
Most likely. Unless the parameters are greatly changing the content on the page, rather than simply sorting, you will want to block them or just use a canonical tag.
Drop the canonical, leave the 301.
Use rel=next and rel=prev for pagination: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
The only thing I would double check is to make sure that there is nothing being parasitically hosted on your site that those links are trying to promote (ie: hacked wordpress and those links are promoting pharma pages injected into your site). More likely than not, it is nothing to worry about - maybe a scraper translation link.
BTW, which site is this for? your personal site or the VA site?
So, I would recommend you take a look at a piece i wrote called "The Wikipedia Model" http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-wikipedia-model a little while back. It doesn't look at the type of sites, but it does look at lots of link characteristics.
As for grouping sites by type, this is a little harder. We have done this before, but basically you will need to harvest the links to the sampled high authority sites, spider them, and use footprint detection to determine whether they tend to be certain types of sites. Not terribly difficult to do, but will be a lot of data.
Go to Google Keyword Suggestion Tool (first result: http://www.google.com/search?q=google+keyword+suggestion+tool)
Type into the keyword list your options. For example, if the service is "electrician" then try...
chicago electrician
electrician chicago
chicago il electrician
electrician chicago il
Then choose "Only show ideas closely related to my search term" and "exact match" on the left hand side.
Run the report. Do this for several cities and, in a spread sheet, determine which ordering gets the most exact match traffic. Use that directory structure for your whole site.
Hey John,
Shoot me a message directly and maybe we can figure something out that is beneficial to both our companies. We do extensive work both with the SEOMoz API and Google API (I assume you mean Google Analytics, but we have also worked with several of their other API options as well).
Russ
We've been pretty pleased with Wordstream. KeywordDiscovery.com is a decent alternative as well. The real question is what type of keyword research are you doing?
Are you researching keywords for expensive link targeting, where getting search volume and competitiveness accurate are very important? If so, I'd stick with Google's results or Wordstream.
Are you researching keywords for blanket content creation? You probably want a bigger keyword database like KeywordDiscovery.com
Depends on your needs, I suppose.
I'll do the SEO for you if you make your company a performance based wheel chair company. People get the wheel chairs for free and if they like them then they pay you. Sound fair?
You should look into using using Robots.txt to filter out specific querystring parameters
You can use asterisks (*) to match the URL type above...
Disallow: /index.php?a=reg
From my first look, you are trying to call Javascript variables inside apostrophes. Should probably look like below, but I am just guessing.
_gaq.push(['_addItem',
OrderDetails[X][0],
OrderDetails[X][2],
OrderDetails[X][3],
'',
OrderDetails[X][5],
OrderDetails[X][6]
]);
and the same would go for the other Order data.
You can find potential new backlinks to your site by monitoring all the referrers to your site. This will sometimes allow you capture links before Google actually indexes them, but it limits you only to links that actually bring traffic.
This is shady, but it probably would leave very minor footprints. It also would likely deliver you few if any quality links unless you create quality content. Good link building services come from good link building agencies. Go take a peak on the SEOMoz recommended list - http://www.seomoz.org/marketplace/companies/recommended
Nope. Don't worry about it. I just ran a more comprehensive internal tool that we have which not only looks at keyword occurrences, but also looks at the other sites ranking for that term to see if you are out of sync with them as well. You are within reasonable levels of keyword usage on the page to not be overly worried.
1. If you do want to re-balance, switch the links to use some obscure long-tail anchor text and see if you move up for that term. This is an easy way to find out if they are actually passing juice. Drop the ones that aren't.
2. Build out and balance your link profile. If you can't beat your competitors with less than 20% exact anchor text, then you need to increase your overall link profile.
Agreed with Ryan for the most part here - especially competitive short tail words like web design or web development. If you must, at least make it readable... "Graphic Web Design & Online Marketing in Ireleand"
I think the moral of the story is that unless you think you are going to get traffic from DMoz or Yahoo Directory, they aren't worth your time. You can get far better, more relevant, higher PR passing links than those for less effort.
I no meaningful way will that second link harm you. Even if it did pass on equal amounts of PageRank, the minute volume would be inconsequential. Go ahead and do what is best for your users.
If you are using any paid search services other than Google or Bing, I would strongly look into click fraud detection. The easiest way to do this is on your own end...
First, you want to make sure that it is a real user, not a bot. You can check the following...
1. Does the user carry a referrer?
2. Does the user accept cookies?
3. Does the user allow javascript?
4. Does the user allow flash?
The above are some simple tests - neither of them individually conclusive - that can test if it is a bot.
Secondly, you want to make sure it is not the same user over and over again, by tracking IP addresses.
Third, you should make sure that your clicks aren't being generated in small iframes or popunders - the easiest way to do this is with javascript and capturing the window size and/or whether self.window = top.window.
Fourth, you should track what users are doing once they reach your site. If your conversion rate is less than 1/10th of Google AdWords or Bing, you should be concerned.
You can always use a third party software like AdWatcher, which is pretty good. It can get buggy in large volumes though.
Good Luck.