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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.

Dmoz? Please explain. Also the description I had was very relevant to the page,more relevant than what Google pulled. Now the meta description makes no sense at all.

For some reason Google is not pulling the meta description for one of our key pages. Instead it just takes the first sentence from the page which makes the description horrible.

Why would it be doing this if the meta tag field is populated?

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.

We are a member based company. Membership is by business not individual. So for instance if your widget business is a member anyone with a johndoe@widget.com email address can sign up and use all our content, portals, etc.

I want to take emails and figure out if they are on Twitter. I know Twitter allows you to search your contact list but this wouldn't be that. It would be a list of emails I create. Are there any tools or suggestions to do this in a efficient way besides searching each individual name on Twitter? Thanks for the help.

Thanks so much. I'm more focused and knowledgeable about on page SEO and haven't had to deal with clean up of bad practices before so dealing with directories ,paid links and other black hat stuff is very new to me. Page Rank is a great simple tip Takeshi.

The person in my position previously had quite a few paid directories our site was listed on. What is the best resources you guys have used or know of to figure out which ones are good to keep?

For instance one that is up for renewal this week is site-sift.com. I know the person previous to me did some not so ethical stuff and I'm trying to clean up messes. Any advice on directories would be much appreciated.

I need to do a voice of customer survey on one of our key webpages. It's  basic questionnaire of why did you come here today, did you complete your task, etc. The company we were using last time Ipercetion has gone up tremendously in price and I was looking for another vendor with same attributes of easy to build survey and simple code that can be put on page easily. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

Where I work we use Cogix to do in-depth surveys and I'd like to do as much indepth tracking of the survey as possible. My code experience in Analytics setting up code and tracking events is limited but my IT department could help if I knew which direction to go in.

Basically what I want to do is on a survey we have like this http://surveys.apqc.org/ViewsFlash2/servlet/viewsflash?cmd=page&pollid=OSBC!HCM_Recruiting_2013

What is the best way to set up tracking so I could know where they abandon survey? Would it be event tracking or something else?

It means for my site (APQC.org) for example if a site links to one of our pages the anchor text for the link is American Productivity & Quality Center and not 'site focused on productivity and benchmarking'

Branded keyword anchor text is Coca-Cola regular keyword anchor text is soda.

Get it? Believe me I know all these SEO terms and stuff can make your head spin. Hope this helps.

I have no evidence to prove this theory but here goes: I think Google is beginning to weight brand centered anchor text higher and so it's really helping a site like mine whose links have brand anchor text.

If your anchor text on high value links isn't branded text that could be issue. Once again it's just my theory and feel free to punch holes in it if you like.

Since your site is new that could be a reason for rankings swing. If you did something with title tags that could be an issue. In my experience Title tags have been a huge problem and a huge area for gain once we got them fixed and well done.

Also are your Bing/Yahoo rankings very different from your google rankings? Our yahoo/Bing rankings are all over the place the last 4 months while google has been stable but I've had the opposite as well.

I just wonder because we rank in top 10 for benchmarking on Google but Bing and Yahoo are 49/50. Your explanation makes sense except the yahoo/Bing rankings are all over the place. From 50 to 90 to 10 while Google has been steady.

If you have a Top ranking for keyword in Google but for Bing and Yahoo you rank considerably lower how do you balance the desire to rank better in Yahoo/Bing with not wanting to damage your Google ranking?

Have people found certain on page SEO tactics help one but damage the other?

Does anyone else have great Google rankngs for keywords but Bing/Yahoo are mediocre to poor?

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 completely agree and as a general rule I only focus alot of energy and time on meta description if a keyword ranking has shown a significant increase in ranking but has hit a wall. Say you have gone from 45-19 in Google but the extra links and social media don't seem to be helping. Then it's time to really focus on Title Tag and Meta description because the click through rate is going to really help you get that last mile to get on page one

whenever I an confronted with going off into the weeds trying to decide how to balance text/keywords on a page a always go back to non SEO thoughts

1.) What does a visitor want to do on this page?

2.) What Is my goal for them to do on this page?

Yes they have landed on your page for keyword 'Indian bridal sarees' but do they want to know what it is, buy it, rent it, get it cleaned..etc.

Write towards those questions and slide in keywords second. I know it's crazy and makes things harder.

I believe the meta description is a hugely underrated and valuable tool you can use. Especially once you get your on page SEO and link building set on a good course.

An example would be my company wanted to be on first page of SERP for benchmarking. and the change in Meta Description in title tag allowing me to mention member names has improved click through rates dramatically and gotten us to page #1.

I always try to tie in my company's biggest selling point in the title tag. I talked to the sales staff and asked, "What's your closing move to sell so you don't finish second and win a set of steak knives?"

It's been huge help.

Thanks, so when does a meta tage change usually begin to show up in SERP on all searches?

For a conference page marketing built the meta tag didn't have correct year and date of the conference. I updated and used webmaster tools submit to index to try and get it updated in google search quickly but meta tag has not updated.

Are there other avenues to get this corrected?

The H1 nested in the breadcrumb will disappear when we launch the site redesign in three weeks so I figured best to not ask IT to do the site wide fix when it will happen anyway.

The comments feature on our site is only used on the blog so is that something I should think about removing from most pages because it's affect on SEO is either bad or neutral at best?

Thanks this is very helpful. My SEO knowledge is good but I'm not nearly advanced as most people on this site. Thanks guys. This site is helping me tremendously.

New to company in SEO and they wanted a page to rank high for certain term : knowledge management on this page: http://www.apqc.org/knowledge-management

Ran SEO Moz optimizer and did suggested changes. Moved score to A and ranking was on google first page but now it's dropped considerably last 2 months as the bounce rate has gone through the roof.

I'm at my wits end and don't want the higher ups on me for the drop. I'm not sure what to try next.

I think the obvious answer here is using forums that are related to your niche topics.  That's far more important that mozrank or traffic.

It really depends on the page and the website.  But, as a rule, I think it's always smart to write a meta-description to gain the trust and attention of your potential visitors.   As you probably know, the meta-description usually shows up under the Title and URL in a Google result.  This bit of text could potentially set you apart from your competition.

It's true that Google will grab a bit of text and use that for a description of the page by default, but Google is a robot and probably isn't going to grab the most important text in the article. It will simply grab some text with the related keywords usually.  It certainly isn't going to put together a catchy sentence / summary for searchers to read.

To make this as clear as possible, let's take a search for "cheap headphones":

We have the #1 site that uses a meta-description -
"Cheap headphones and discount headphones, Get information on all types of headphones and find the secret to getting the best deals and what website sells them for the best price."

Then we have the #2 site that is letting Google choose its meta-description text.  It looks like this:
"20 results – Our top picks for the best cheap headphones around in 2010.

| $19.95 | sugg. retail price: $22.95 | Kidz Gear Headphones | Excellent ... |
| $19.99 | sugg. retail price: $19.99 | Koss KSC 75 |

Surprising high ..."

|

These aren't great examples because the #1 site has a description meta-tag that is too long.  But I think it gets the point across.  It's a lot nicer to read something that is concise and grabs the searcher's attention than to hope Google is going to pull the best information for the user.  Human wins vs. Google this time.  (for now).

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.

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.

I see your point, Back Burner.

I honestly think my response is constructive.   I stated my opinion and followed it up with my recommendations.  It's not like I called the guy names and didn't offer help.

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.

Ohh.  I get it now.

I really don't see how that would be violating Google's ToS.  You're doing reviews of products on your blog and you're linking out to the brands / products you review?  You're getting paid to do this?  I think as long as you're getting paid to do real, objective reviews I don't see how Google would care.    I think you have a reasonable defense if anything ever came up, but I doubt it would.  Google shouldn't pick on your site as long as you don't do anything silly.

This shouldn't last long at all.  Give it a few days to recover.  If the site has been down for a few days it will take a little time for Google to put it back in the index.

The best way to go about this is to actually do interesting tests and blog posts by people and bloggers in your niche.  One great way to drum up honest feedback is to send a blogger a sample of your product AND a sample of the competitions product and let them decide what product is better.  Either way you will get your backlinks and you will get honest feedback on how to make your product and service better.

I'm sure there are TONS of bloggers and forums that would love to review your service or product.

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?

The bad advice on this thread is rampant.

These are usually done by implementing Google Checkout.

I've seen this question asked a few times, but I haven't found a definitive answer.  I'm quite surprised no one from Google has addressed the question specifically.

I ran across this post the other day and it piqued my interest:

http://www.datadial.net/blog/index.php/2011/04/13/special-characters-in-meta-descriptions-the-beboisation-of-google/

If you're able to make your result stand out by using stars, smiley faces, TM symbols, etc it would be a big advantage.  This is in use currently if you search for a popular mattress keyword in Google.  It really is amazing how the special characters draw your attention to the title.  You can also see the TM and Copyright symbols if you search for "Logitech Revue"   Radioshack is using these characters in their adwords also.

Has anyone found any definitive answers to this?  Has anyone tracked CTR and long-term results with special characters in title or description tags?

Any chance of getting penalized for using this?

As a follow-up, it looks like you could also put check symbols into your meta-description tags.  That has all kinds of interesting possibilities.

http://www.seosmarty.com/special-symbols-wingdings-for-social-media-branding-twitter-linkedin-google-plus/