"domain.com/blog" all the way. Jonathan was spot-on.
Posts made by jesse-landry
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RE: How to best host a blog - standalone or on the site?
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RE: What is the best tool to track US positions from the UK?
Well... I'd use the Moz Rank Tracker but that may be too obvious seeing as how we're on the Moz forums and all. But just in case: http://moz.com/researchtools/rank-tracker
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RE: Redesigning a Site - What Optimizations are "Must Haves"?
I came here to vote for responsive design and you're already all over it. This means you will succeed in my book!
Have fun, I'm kinda jealous
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RE: Help! Unnatural Linking Partial Manual Penalty
Yeah I'd have to agree with Marie or at the very least that other domain bringing in 60,000 of your 75,000 links.. why wouldn't that be a factor? Just because it's a "lawyer's site?" What does a lawyer need 60,000 referring links for? That's pretty intense...
Still I'd look closely at your anchor text profile and do a full audit as Marie is suggesting here.
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RE: How to track click on phone number on mobile device in GA as a goal?
Well I'm assuming you have a "Click to Call" button setup meaning you have a separate mobile site?
If so, I would simply add a Google analytics event to said button on your mobile site and label it something like "mobile-call" or whatever. Are you familiar with Event Tracking? If not, go here - https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide
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RE: Help! Unnatural Linking Partial Manual Penalty
Interesting Kurt, thanks for sharing.
Yes I'm sure it can go either way that makes sense as it's basically what the message says. Something along the lines of "some rankings/keywords/pages may be affected," right? I guess if your ranking is affected though you'll be all over this.
Like I said though it's always a good idea to clean up your link profile. Even if no manual action has been taken you may be surprised what sort of improvements you could make escaping any algorithmic penalties.
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RE: Help! Unnatural Linking Partial Manual Penalty
Yes I was going to say pretty much exactly what ChilyDigital here is saying. Check your anchor text disparity using ahrefs.com or OSE.
The thing about these partial match penalty warnings that I've found is that while it is good to try and address the root of the problem so as to avoid further problems in the future, Google doesn't really seem to be asking much of you. I'm 99% certain what happens in these situations is Google decides to "disavow" the links in question from their end and not pay any attention to them going forward.
Now if these types of links continue to get built in a major way, then you might be facing a larger site-wide penalty. But so far the "penalty" is doing nothing more than discrediting the poison-links it has identified. This is my current theory anyway based on experience with the same message.
When I got this message, I never saw any ranking or traffic fluctuations. I did some more work removing links and cleaning up my link profile and it went away.. "KIND OF." It was weird, the message still existed but when you clicked it no text was present so I'm assuming the message got bugged but either way I never had any actual noticeable/tangible penalties.
Hope this helps..
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RE: Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google
Yes the 301 will solve it but not necessarily any quicker than the robots.txt update. It will still be indexed until Google crawls it again, which doesn't really matter too terribly (especially if you're redirecting)
Chances are your site won't populate for any high-volume keywords since it's new... And it would be de-indexed eventually if you blocked it from the robots. In any case, all of these options will work and you should be fine.
Good luck!
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RE: Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google
That would be a good way to do it. The other way would be to block it in the robots.txt file on the root directory. Although be careful you aren't blocking both since it's a subdomain.
You could also add a noindex, nofollow tag to each dev page but then you have to remember to remove those when you push them live to your real domain.
I'd probably go with the Robots.txt option since using the redirect will not allow you to view the site live which I'm assuming would take away from the whole point of having this "staging" sub-domain.
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RE: Domain Name Redirect Question
The keyword in your domain won't really add much because of the anchor text itself, if that's what you're inferring. The link's placement and relevance is the more important factor, always.
Even if they did, the last thing you want is a keyword-heavy anchor text profile... That's the short version of the way I see it.
Anyway I guess I still don't understand what you're asking in this topic. In the original post you mentioned that the "franchisor will not allow the keyword-domain.com to be their primary domain." But then you said people will be landing on keyword-domain.com?
So is it the other way around? the franchise-name.com will be redirecting to keyword-domain.com? If this is the case, have at it! I guess what I'm saying is I advise against building links to the domain that's being redirected and instead all links should be built to the final destination.
But it sounds like that's what you are doing. Forgive my confusion here, I've had a stuffed head all week!
Yeah I don't love exact match domains and I can all but guarantee their effectiveness will be going away. Google has addressed this multiple times publicly and made no effort to conceal the fact.. Nonetheless I think the most important factor is the quality of the site's content and the authority/relevance of the links coming in.
I wish you luck!
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RE: Domain Name Redirect Question
I am against this whole keyword-rich domain name thing you seem to be pushing here. I would want the domain name to be branded as the company. Your SEO campaign should be more than enough to get the brand ranking for whatever keywords you are targeting.
That being said, whatever you redirect to, be sure you are building links to the final domain (aka the domain you are redirecting TO.)
Reason for this is as 301s do pass link juice, there is a slight degeneration there. Even if it's less than 1%, what would the point be of losing that juice?
Not to mention the fact that if you are correctly building links and the anchor text reads www.keyword-domain.com and then the user who clicks it lands on www.branded-domain.com they will be ultimately confused. This is unnecessary and somewhat deceitful. You should focus on building initial trust with your users, and this is a bad first step in doing so.
That's my two-cents on the subject. Good luck!
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RE: Hot Linking
NO Kidding?! That's amazing. Learn something new everyday. There ya go, there's your other option Tony. Good luck!
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RE: Hot Linking
Okay so what's wrong with altering the directory where you store your image files?
Assuming a cease and desist letter isn't working, what other options are there?
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RE: Hot Linking
Maybe I misunderstood what is being hotlinked exactly. Normally I think hotlinking refers to pulling a source file from your server as opposed to housing it on their own.. Typically done with images. So are you saying your primary domain is "hotlinked?" And do you mean just that there's a link to your domain?
Please elaborate and sorry if I'm confused.
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RE: Hot Linking
Can't you just rename the image file or whatever is being hotlinked? Or move it to a different directory or something? Basically 404 it on them?
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RE: Our root domain is no longer appearing in search results
ha! Silly me. That's what I get for not taking time and jumping to conclusions.
I'll blame the head cold I'm currently battling on a dreary Monday
in other words - yeah definitely that no index tag.
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RE: Our root domain is no longer appearing in search results
Yeah I see what you mean. Just googling "roadtrippers" shows me what you're describing. Your blog seems to populate first, which sort of makes sense as it has the most content.
Beyond the redirect issues, there may be a thin-content issue going on since there really doesn't appear to be a ton on that home page. Have you tried fetching as Google to see what they're seeing? What does it look like?
This is interesting I'd like to see what other people say. Cause your site looks awesome.. now how do you get it indexed beyond the blog...
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RE: Does this mean my pages are ranking better?
I wouldn't be looking/analyzing clicks and impressions through GWT much if at all to be honest.
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RE: Does this mean my pages are ranking better?
Why not just check your rankings?
Or start a Moz account where they can track that for you
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RE: Dofollow Links on Press Releases: Good or Bad?
Well said as usual, Takeshi.
Hell I'm thinkin' about skipping the PR all together now and just sending this article out to some online publications instead... we'll see.
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RE: Dofollow Links on Press Releases: Good or Bad?
Excellent advice and I lean white-hat 99.9% of the time. I think this is a bit grey-hattish though.
The conspiracy theorist in me would say that Cutts would emphasize this even if it wasn't an actual target of their algorithm. I think at this point he has everyone scared and there's a chance that he could say this and not put anything into action. Maybe he'll come back and check it out again 3 months later and see if there has been progress made.. You know? Again, conspiracy at best.
The sites I'm referring to have incredibly thin content and a terrible link profile. Yet they're ranking on page 1 for pretty competitive keywords.. Best content I see on there is prweb or marketwire and it makes me go O_o
Thing is we do build links naturally and appreciate doing so. Our Press Release is actually news-worthy as far as our company goes (it's the release of a new service we've been developing) and if we never read any of this stuff we wouldn't think twice of just throwing a link to the relevant page discussing our new service offerings.. bah.
Nonetheless I think your points are sound and I'm leaning toward playing it safe as well.
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RE: Dofollow Links on Press Releases: Good or Bad?
"Remember the main aim of your press release is to gain your brand exposure"
WELL SAID SIR!
I really like this the most.
As for whether or not to nofollow, I'm entirely on the fence here. I know what Google says but I don't know what Google does. Tom Roberts, where are you? I saw your comment on the seland thread referenced here and am wondering if you went and built those thousand free PR links for your client??!
I see SO so many sites ranking with nothing but press releases and garbage article submissions... What does it all mean? I don't know. But I do know we are working on a press release to go out this week and I need to make a decision on this...hmmm..
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RE: Why not buy +1´s?
Totally agree with Thomas here.
+1s and likes aren't gonna do that much for you and the negatives far outweigh the positives.
Honestly it shouldn't be that hard to start getting them on your own if you actually engage in a social community relevant to your field. They exist and if your site/page has something worthy then people will like it. Plain and simple. *(Also this will force you to create strong content which will help you succeed in the long and short run.)
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RE: Starting keyword research without a direct competitor to analyze
Adwords. Create an account and use the Keyword tool, then just start typing in every possible keyword combination you can think of and looking at monthly search volumes for each. It will also suggest some ideas based on what you're feeding it to help you think of more.
Good luck!
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RE: Subdomain blog vs. subfolder blog in 2013
Well yes. I mean it's quite simple - Linking to a subdomain does not pass authority to the root domain. It's easy to test on any site you can find me that has a subdomain. Plug it into OSE and you have yourself two different DAs for that very reason.
It's something I don't see ever changing. There's a reason sub domains are treated separately in terms of incoming links; they are their own entity and I believe this will always be the case. Can't think of why it wouldn't.
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RE: New Google Update In The Past Two Days???
There are always updates and algo changes incoming. Check out http://mozcast.com/ where they're tracking the patterns of flux
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RE: What does it mean that "too many links" show up in my report - but I'm not seeing them?
Yeah Mike is right on as usual here.
I just want to point out a quick way to find out how many actual links are sitting on any given page (keep in mind this won't be exact but it'll be close.)
USING CHROME:
- Right click the page and select "View Source"
- Hit CTRL+F
- Type in<a href <="" span=""></a>
<a href <="" span=""></a>
<a href <="" span="">Boom. You'll have yourself a number of results and that's how many links you have, cloaked or not cloaked, give or take.
This is easier to look at I feel like and a fun little (maybe obvious, sorry if so) tip.
Good luck!</a>
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RE: Subdomain blog vs. subfolder blog in 2013
Using a subdirectory will cause all of the potential link juice to flow to your root domain. If you go with a subdomain, the potential links gained from awesome blog content won't do your actual domain any good as far as ranking organically for your targeted keywords.
That's the short version. Subdirectories all the way (assuming this is what you're gaming at of course.)
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RE: Traffic Down - May Need Outside Help
start with redirecting your non-www to the www version. get a 301 in place asap. i looked at this, saw it, and stopped checking. this is the first thing to do but i'm sure there are plenty more...
edit: although you do have a canonical tag so that's good. still it will help to do as i suggest as canonical does not guide incoming links only keeps you from getting panda penalties and guides Google to index the proper version of the duplicated content.
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RE: NoIndexing Massive Pages all at once: Good or bad?
No negative impacts here as far as penalties or otherwise. Just make sure it's really what you want to do. If the page would ever be searched for by a user then keep it indexed regardless of how thin you worry the content might be. Or beef it up.
Also consider using your robots file instead of having to add that tag to all these pages...
-my two cents.
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RE: Negative SEO
Take good notes! Download CSVs from GWT, Take screenshots, document ALL findings. You will need all this should you have to put together a resubmission package for Google.
There's really no way to stop it, unfortunately. I've tried sleuthing a few of these instances in the past and have yet to be successful in getting results. I'd really really like to though (hey if anyone wants to join the fight let me know!)
Good luck, keep us posted.
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RE: CSS Float Top Left Image not displaying
Yes exactly. Assuming you're on an Apache server, of course.
Just to clarify, I ran both URLs through Open Site Explorer and sure enough two different Page Authorities returned:
www.just-insulation.com has a PA of 32
www.just-insulation.com/index.html has a PA of 15
Showing that in fact your link juice is splitting there when ideally you will want it combined.
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RE: If our link profile is too "blog link" heavy, will that be all that bad?
Oh you'll be fine. Google isn't necessarily going to differentiate a blog page versus just a web page. To the Google bots they see an HTML page and that's it that's all. If the sites themselves are relevant, the anchor text isn't all the same keyword, and the links aren't appearing 1,000 at a time you will be just fine.
Basically if your links come naturally then you're good. And this is a pretty natural way of gaining them. Some will say that sending out free product in hopes of a link is potentially against webmaster guidelines but I disagree with that. The fact of the matter is you are gaining sales from these reviews and that's all that really matters. So good job! Sounds like you're kickin butt, keep it up!
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RE: CSS Float Top Left Image not displaying
No problem.
While it is good you have the canonical tag present, you should still redirect one to the other. The canonical tag will prevent any duplicate content issues with your site so at least you don't have to worry about that. But not redirecting can still have some unwanted effects on your page.
Basically it can split your PR/PA between two URLs. If somebody links to yourdomain.com and another somebody links to yourdomain.com/index.html these two links are now receiving juice separately. The canonical tag does not carry link juice. That is why you want to 301 the index.html page to your root domain. Your hosting provider should be able to do this easily for you, or go ahead and google it if you have your own server. (the process changes based on whether you're hosting via Apache servers or IIS servers.)
I would still focus on getting that redirected. It'll save you headaches in the future.
Good luck!
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RE: Domain authority dropped 4 points in a week!
If your traffic is up then forget about your DA. You are winning! If my traffic is climbing I don't care if my PR reads banana and my DA reads apple, I'm gonna shout it from the rooftops and go out for sushi! (not banana/apple sushi though cause yuck.)
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RE: Seo and ads for Baidu (china)
WOW there are 916 views on this topic? Weird. Anybody know why?? I'm very curious.
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RE: OMG. RAND IS ATTACKED! (in a blog post)
I did! Thank you!
I wasn't intending to lump you in which is why I kept saying things like "he" and "his post." Sorry for the confusion there.
I felt like branding and content had a lot to do with the conversation. I see we agree on this point and I thought we did from the get-go. I don't think the blogger in this case was trying to talk about the micro niche sites that you reference. At least that wasn't the vibe I gathered. He talked about branding and content building and those two things don't seem to match. I agree that what you say blackhat works for is a great example of where it "belongs" or "works" in the short-term.
Anyway thanks.
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RE: OMG. RAND IS ATTACKED! (in a blog post)
I don't think your points were wrong Robert no matter your delivery and I hope this experience doesn't deter you from contributing again in the future. People get sensitive on the internet and there is a line but it's easy to cross as we all have different intentions and different ideas of how others perceive our intentions. You got 6 thumbs up on your original post. Seems like it was well regarded as a good one...
Keep on keepin' on everybody! This has been a pretty healthy conversation as far as forum-arguing goes. I've seen some pretty strong examples of how not to do it and this isn't one of them!
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RE: OMG. RAND IS ATTACKED! (in a blog post)
Oh my. I think I might cry. I just wrote the longest most thoughtful post in response to this thread addressing everything in an awesome manner, edited it carefully, went to Post it and BOOM! "YOU Don't have Access!" I had been logged out and my post was gone. HOLY COW! This is terrible. I'm going to try and re-hash it but honestly I'm not sure I can get it across the same. Here goes:
Sheesh. I almost liked it better when I wasn't getting email updates to this thread!
First off, my original post I feel may have been misunderstood by you, VIPER. What I was trying to say is that this thread itself was a bit of silly sensationalism. I didn't feel that it was an attack at all which is why I started it off by saying exactly that. When I finished the post with "Silliness" I was more responding to the thread and it's title. I did see some silliness in your blog post as well but when I say "Anyway, silliness" I meant to refer back to my first point which was "hey this isn't an attack at all it's far too soft for that it's simply a counterpoint." Perhaps I should have said that. I thought this thread would go away faster... silly me!
As for the comments on your appearance, I did and do continue to apologize. But I'd like to talk a bit about profiling for a second. We are all guilty of doing it and have all been on the receiving end of it as well. You can try saying you don't ever profile people but the fact is we all do; it's human nature. Whether it be deciding which person to get behind in a grocery-store aisle or deciding that the oldsmobile in the left-lane of the freeway going five-under with their left turn indicator perpetually blinking is most likely a little old lady, we are guilty of it. SO when I see a thread written by a guy named "VIPER" with a picture such as yours and pro-blackhat content I must admit that I found it rather easy to lump you into whatever category. I apologized for this and stand by my apology. Nonetheless, the comments were made in jest and I never saw this thread going as far as it did.
---- Hang on though: as an aside, don't you worry that your name and your appearance might lose you a potential client or two? I'm asking this man-to-man and am not judging at all. I'm truly curious. I may sound like a Dad here (oh wait I am a Dad now!) but where I come from I was always told to take off my hat and glasses and pull up my pants before I went out looking for a job! Again, I am truly curious on your thoughts/experience here. You have clearly seen great success in the SEO world so I mean no disrespect. ----
But I digress, that is not what I wish to talk about here. Again as I said my original post was deleted and I went into greater detail about the nuts and bolts of this thread. I'm afraid I won't be able to do it as well this time around but I'll keep trying -
What I want to touch on is this whole notion of branding and content vs link-building and ranking. I very much am of the opinion that branding and marketing is everything and that a good campaign in the latter will build your SE ranking. Your blog seemed to go against that even though you claim in this thread that it did not. Allow me to quote you a couple times here:
In your blog you wrote:
_ "While I can understand that preaching “build good content, focus on growing your brand’ sounds great and it’s what people want to hear, for a HUGE percentage of search phrases, this is just no longer relevant."_
In this thread you wrote:
"I have never said that building a brand is bad and I still highly advocate writing good content"
See my confusion? This seems incredibly contradictory to me. So in my opinion yes, your blog was in fact saying that building a brand was not helpful. In this I agree with Rand, but I do not fancy myself a Rand-fanboy.
I do agree with his concepts often. That all said I think you are trying a bit hard to be a victim here saying things like "the argument is very one-sided here. No matter what I reply it will be nit-picked apart in defense of Rand." There are multiple posts on here defending your concepts and I think it is unfair to claim that this site is biased. If this site was truly biased you wouldn't see so many people come on here and say "USE MAJESTIC (and sometimes OSE)" in response to threads titled "How do I check backlinks?"
I do understand that blackhat SEO tactics still work. If you looked through my many posts on these forums you would see tons of them complaining about being outranked by blackhats and how they succeed and beat sites that don't use that tactic all the time. It drives me bonkers! But what I don't ever find is these blackhat sites outranking well-established brands with excellent content. I keep seeing claims of this happening thousands of times but don't see examples.
I hate to use it as an example but I can't think of a more apt one: Moz happens to rank number 3 for "SEO" and they have done exactly this...(built a brand with awesome content) Meanwhile there are thousands of blackhat SEOs out there trying to rank for the same term, are there not? Seems like a great example to me...
But I digress. I have to wind down now. I had more things to say and they were all along the lines of "dude I think you're a good guy and I respect your opinions and even agree with some of them! Let's chill!" The thing is I thought the topic title itself was sensationalism and then your blog post carried that same trend. I think you were going for that and I think you succeeded! I know you claim you weren't but if you truly were you don't have to admit it. I'd still like to congratulate you. I think you did well and I'm sure this is actually your opinion on top of that making it a fair topic by all means. But in using Rand's name and the Moz brand you are clearly trying to get the attention of their readership... Right? Cause that is what happened. And since we all know how the internet works, we know that the result is not all that uncommon..
It works! This is a great way to gain some traffic and readers. I for one will most likely visit your blog again in the future and read more of what you have to say.
With that said I truly would like to see more of you around these parts. Regardless of where you stand on link-building concepts the fact is blackhat does work. Short term, long term, that's up for debate on what's better but I think your opinions would lend well to discussion on these forums and I wish you had been a part of many threads I've been in to help better my understanding of why tumblr blog spam is outranking my sites!
Please don't take offense to any of this. I respect you and your opinions and I think everyone else here does as well.
I do think this topic title should have been called something different.. But hey it got the ball rolling on a (maybe)healthy conversation!
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RE: CSS Float Top Left Image not displaying
Bravo, sir! May I make one more SEO related quick-suggestion:
Make sure you redirect your page with a 301 to avoid duplicate content. Right now you have two addresses (www.domain.com and www.domain.com/index.html) displaying the same content. These will both be indexed and should be redirected.
Also from a usability standpoint I feel like the images should be clickable... But there are a ton of these little nit-picky changes I'll leave to you
You might be kind of shooting yourself in the foot with the whole image name thing. You don't have alt tags or image names and that can affect your on-site optimization. However you won't rank for every product on one page anyway so in your case it might not matter terribly. Still I'd raise an eyebrow if it were my page..
Anyway good luck!
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RE: OMG. RAND IS ATTACKED! (in a blog post)
Ha! Hey I'm sorry if I offended you by linking his picture. It was meant mostly as a joke. The guy comes off as a sensationalist trying to draw attention. To me his picture screams that same thought. Perhaps it was off-base.
He claims he's not using Rand's last name in an effort to not rank for that keyword yet he uses his first name and SEOmoz enough times to rank for either. (How many other Rands do you know?)
This whole "SEO for the short-haul" technique baloney is just that: baloney. It only works some of the time and never builds business to last. Go down the list and show me of those "million cases" how many of them are established businesses that will be successful for years to come.
Your post, Yiannis, and this guy's blog post both had the same "I CAN SHOW YOU THOUSANDS OF EXAMPLES" yet none of them are showing me examples of successful businesses ranking and proving they have a place in the market for the long-haul. Not a single example of that provided by this blog.
YouTube video rankings, article rankings.. okay. I get the point. The timing and freshness of that content won out. But it'll go away as quick as it came and what will be left?
I know that blackhat SEO is working in many examples. It works in the industry I'm doing in-house for and it drives me bananas. But I also know that the companies it is working for are not succeeding based on this. Is this because they are not focused on brand-development and a modern marketing strategy? Maybe. That would certainly be part of it if you asked me.
Google is going to screw up and fail at what they set out to do. We know that to be true. But we also know what they are trying to do. What they are trying to do is get rid of these blackhat SEOs and dissemble their tactics from the ground up. They will eventually succeed entirely. They're Google, after all.
I don't know about you but I want to build a company that can withstand the test of time and the power of Google.
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RE: OMG. RAND IS ATTACKED! (in a blog post)
I see no attack here. This article was mostly mush imo. I agree with EGOL.
Building your brand is all that SEO should be if you consider that SEO is modern day marketing and your brand should be your number one focus. I looked at this guy's picture and that pretty much summed it up for me.
I also think he's completely missed the point of what Rand is saying. The idea is building a brand first to strengthen your business, gain a following, increase conversion and retention and thus gain organic SERP improvements.
Anyway
Silliness
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RE: If our site hasn't been hit with the Phantom Update, are we clear?
The thing is a lot of so-called "SEOs" these days are still using these types of tactics. I'm dealing with this regularly. And the real kicker is, sometimes blackhat SEO works. But in every instance it is temporary. Meaning no matter what that algorithm is going to catch up with those sites sooner or later.
So while yes they should have known better, there's a pretty good chance they think they can sneak past the Penguins and the Pandas out there.
Nonetheless this is a dying art and hopefully all of these "SEOs" go away soon so that us real marketers can maintain (or re-build) our reputation.
You're incredibly welcome for the input. Keep an eye on your Webmaster Tools account and your rankings. If you notice a penalty or things start to shift dramatically, it's time for a re-submission package. Should that day come, hop on these forums, read the moz blogs, and this community will help you through it.
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RE: If our site hasn't been hit with the Phantom Update, are we clear?
Yes.
You should be worried. This is blackhat SEO by its very definition and it is exactly the kind of stuff the Google Webspam team is going after. It's kind of like saying "Hey we just fired a bunch of chemical weapons even though we were told not to. Should we be worried?" Yeah, expect some cruise missiles headed your way.
Okay maybe it's not that drastic but I'm trying to be topical here
I would fire that SEO company and shame them in the process for giving us digital marketers a bad reputation. The Penguin (not Phantom) will come for you. It's only a matter of time.