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Our direct traffic dropped 50% in October. Is anyone else seeing a drop in direct traffic in October in G4? It hasn't shifted to another source or unassigned it's just gone. Has anyone else experienced this and what might be the reasons?

My boss, alerted me that we have 7k in unspent budget for 2022. If you had extra 7k to spend on SEO tool/software/training or whatever, what would you purchase?

@AmritDubey thanks! it's definitely not a google rank issue. When we turn cookie banner on ...50% or higher drop in traffic. When it's off back to normal. So my question is what would the cookie opt out banner be doing to cause this? We only had about 10% opt out of cookies

@webduh can you explain?

We've had 50% drop in Google and Direct traffic post June Google update. Why would direct suddenly plummet as well? Could it be something with Google tag manager or our new cookie policy and cookie management system? Any help would be greatly appreciated as I am a disabled person and trying to figure out what is going on with our site

My organization is looking to do paid social on LinkedIn but we are having trouble locating a agency that can handle our unique needs. Does anyone have a recommendation for an agency that specializes or has had success with LinkedIn advertising?

Thanks so much Rand. We are hoping to up next Monday so it will only be a week. I was concerned because on conference call yesterday I was told 4 weeks(our offices flooded and we had not transitioned to cloud completely and our back servers had issues as well). I really appreciate the responses guys. It might not seem like alot, but it means a great deal to a guy stuck in his house, not flooded, but surrounded by water.

Moz is a great community!!

I'm a Moz member, mostly just lurk, and love the Moz community. I work at a non profit company that does benchmarking data and helps school districts improve process in education.

Our building flooded and our site is currently offline, is there anything we can do to stop/lesson any SEO page rank drop between now and when we are back up?

We have worked very hard to get these rankings. I know it is minor compared to all tragedy in Houston, but we have worked hard to get these SEO gains (YEAH MOZ!) and I'd hate to lose them because of Harvey.

Any suggestions, assistance appreciated!

Ralph

I'd like to be able to easily track blog posts by month but in Google reports when you set a date range obviously older blog post still appear and with amount of blog posts we generate without seeing the date in the title it's not obvious what was published and when it was published. For example if a Blog Title was "/dangers-of-sharing-KM-knowledge-01-11-15 would it hurt SEO?

The reason is I'd like to have a quick way to know how new posts do each month compared to older content

Over this past weekend Google switched the page which usually showed in search results for keyword benchmarking. It went from from http://www.apqc.org/benchmarking to http://www.apqc.org/benchmarking-portal/osb. Also on Google the Rankings for the keyword 'benchmarking' sank from 15 to 47 for http://www.apqc.org/benchmarking

Just looking for some theories or ideas or anyone that has had this happen to them.

This might not be exactly what you are looking for but here is what I've done to get noticed. At my company we aren't trying to do get guest blogging opportunities but have high quality people guest blog for us. For us we are are a ninche specialized market and the people who are experts and influence don't blog and told us no no no when we approached them to guest blog.

But when we asked for an interview..it changed everything. So we asked to do an interview over email. A simple INTERVIEW REQUEST in subject line did wonders. But remember if you are asking for an interview never send form email. It must be personal and show you know subject.

Remain calm.  You should be just fine.  It just takes time for Google to digest the new robots.txt.   I would be concerned if things didn't change in 3-4 weeks.  Adopt a rule to not freak out on Google until you've given the problem 14 days to resolve.  Sometimes Google moves things around and this is natural.

If you want Google to crawl your site faster, build some links and do some social media.   That will encourage Google to speed it up.

sigh

First, short-term changes aren't something to worry about.  Google could be reevaluating your site, topic, and niche to see where you should fit in.  It does this with high ranking pages.   It happens. Relax.

Second, deleting pages that Google doesn't know about isn't going to affect your rankings.  Especially if they were relatively useless pages. You might want to block these pages in robots.txt or with a htaccess password so it definitely isn't an issue in the future.

Third, why did you buy a URL to simply forward it over to a specific internal page?  That looks suspicious. It's obvious you purchased the URL in order to boost your rankings for that keyword.  If Google isn't on to you already, it will be soon.  A better solution would be using the URL to build a small micro site (10-12 pages) about the topic, make the micro site rank, then link out from the micro site (1-4 links) to the specific pages on your main site.

I'm a Moz member, mostly just lurk, and love the Moz community. I work at a non profit company that does benchmarking data and helps school districts improve process in education.

Our building flooded and our site is currently offline, is there anything we can do to stop/lesson any SEO page rank drop between now and when we are back up?

We have worked very hard to get these rankings. I know it is minor compared to all tragedy in Houston, but we have worked hard to get these SEO gains (YEAH MOZ!) and I'd hate to lose them because of Harvey.

Any suggestions, assistance appreciated!

Ralph

Where I work the big cheese decided we had to rank high for 'custom benchmarking' search volume is about 110 per month. Once the page was built and launched it took three weeks to reach #1.

I won't get into the whether it's worthwhile to focus so much on keywords with search volume you can fit in a large bathroom but in my experience it took 3 weeks or so.

I've seen this done on a project I worked on before.

First, we logged every query that returned 0 results with a little bit of PHP code. The code wrote to a .txt file that was easily readable.  After a month we had a significant amount of data.

The data was used to track what products were being searched for that weren't returning results. Then we used the data to decide if we should add those products or if our search wasn't returning proper results.  What we found was that many people searched for products that we did carry, but the search didn't return the proper results.  For instance, the search might not return a result if a search was for the BRAND of the item.  Though it should have, it didn't.  Also, a user might search for "widgets", but all the products were named "$brand $size widget". Because of the "s" at the end of the word our search would return 0 results, but we carried hundreds of widgets.

First we improved the search to pick up results of one character off.  Then we included any manufacturer / brands. We also had the search display results from the title of articles on our site.  This significantly improved the user experience and sales.

We then took the data left over and decided what the user was searching for and how to use that to our advantage.  Many users are too lazy to use the navigation on a website to find what they want.  If they search for "blue widgets" and 0 results display the users often assume we don't carry them - though we do.  So, this is a very good tactic to use to increase conversions.

It worked very well for us.   I hope this helps.

Absolutely a bad idea.  You should be using that h1 tag to promote the current page only, not the same keywords over and over.

I'm not sure there would be a problem, but why would you NOT want your prices in the Google results? The customer is going to eventually find out what your price is aren't they?

Dr. Pete,

I just ran across one of your webinars yesterday and you brought up some great ideas.  Earned a few points in my book

Too often SEOs see changes in the rankings and react to counter-act the change.  Most of the time these bounces are actually a GOOD sign. It means Google saw your changes and is adjusting to them.  If your changes were positive you should see positive results.  I have rarely found an issue where a user made a positive change and got a negative result from Google.  Patience is a virtue.

I don't understand why you insist on cramming SEO and Kingston in the title of every single page you make.  It isn't necessary.  I would suggest stepping back from SEO mode and going into functional mode.  Ask yourself what would really make your site the best site for information on SEO and SEO services in Kingston.   Build that site. Forget about Google and keywords.  Build a variety of pages related to SEO, but not necessarily about SEO.  You can break it up with information useful to readers like how to optimize a landing page, what UX converts buyers, etc.  And for Pete's sake, don't put SEO and Kingston in EVERY title or on every page.  Get as much information as you can and make each page informative and useful.  Don't focus on SEO at all - just build the site for people.   When you're done with this and you have a functional and informational site that people like to use, you can then go back and edit it for SEO.  It looks like you're obsessed with rankings and keywords.  This is going to get in the way of your overall goal - ranking for your keywords.

That's the best advice I have for you.  Good luck!