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Always!

That said, I haven't noticed anything big in my SERPs.

Few things going on here.

I agree with kyle that the user experience is poor due to those ads and that will absolutely hurt things. Slow load times are a huge problem as well.

Beyond that, your link profile needs some work. It's quite skewed. There are 22,000 links coming from 25 domains. That's a huge disparity that really shouldn't happen. Also, as far as anchor text goes I notice a huge number of links pointing at sports news and <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text." data-text="športové novinky" data-id="39055838023">športové novinky (which I'm assuming is sports news)</a> <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text." data-text="športové novinky" data-id="39055838023"></a>

This could be a potentially bad thing.. even though they're only coming from a couple domains. But you really want to make sure your anchor text is branded and not forced with keywords at all times. A few here and there is good, nay great, but all of them being targeted keywords is begging for a Penguin penalty.

Have you received any unnatural link warnings in GWT? Definitely check if you haven't..

And then check out all of your on-page reports here at Moz. There are a ton of onsite things that I'm sure could be done to this site and the Pro Tools here will help you discover what the big ones are for you.

Most of all.. you just need to build some high-quality content and become an authority on all thinks sports news all the while gaining relevant backlinks organically.

Can you expand on that last notion?

I understand that I don't want to cram a full site's worth of info onto one mobile design.. My idea is to have a scaled back simplified version of our site with the most popular content covered as well as the blog feed updated and currently pulled from the live site.

What else am I missing?

Thanks to everybody so far you've all been incredibly helpful.

this community

So I was looking at this as it was the top organic google result and got worried when I saw the limitations of a "free" account. It seems to host on a monthly basis and I don't really love that concept. I want to be able to host the site on our own servers in-house. The company is a SaaS company so our login pages will need to be embedded and there are security issues when operating outside of our own servers...

*(I'm already going to have to talk with engineers about the mobile implementation and I just know they'd freak if I told them we were hosting offsite.)

Still I love the simplicity of the formatting and already saw a template I would want to use here... Anybody know of a tool like this I can purchase one-time and host the files on my own server?

I did look at that first link briefly and didn't really love the templates they were giving me. Looked pretty cheesy but perhaps there was a way to customize this and I just didn't dig deep enough. Still, the howtogomo link is awesome and I will definitely be bookmarking/referring to this site as I go.

Thanks!

Moz only updates campaigns once a week. This usually happens on a Monday, but chances are your campaign has not been updated yet. It should tell you on all of these pages when exactly the last update was done so you can confirm, but I'm sure this is your issue..

You'll get an email notification when your campaign has been updated and is ready for you to view as well.

I've been tasked with re-building our company's mobile site and honestly have zero experience doing so. I know my way around HTML pretty well and have built several websites but never for mobile.

Does anybody have any recommendations for me as far as tools to use to construct a proper mobile site? I basically want a simple page with four buttons on the front and a little drop down menu in the top corner. (not that this matters terribly but just saying, shouldn't need to be overly complicated.)

Thanks in advance!

Oh my.. Perfect! What you need to do is create a blog!

There's no reason you can't have a blog. I don't care if you sell kitty litter, toiletries, or butcher tools. Everything is blog-worthy. Become the source on why your product is useful. What new products just came out. Why your store is the best resource to get them from. And what exactly you can do with this product. Tie all of these together and you've got yourself a ton of link building opportunities.

And yes, host your infographic on your domain and spread them out to places like visual.ly and other infographic sites.

Why do you need the link pointed to your homepage? What difference does that make? The link juice passes to your domain no matter what directory/page/image internally it's pointed at. And the brand is then furthered. Drop your URL in the description or small at the very bottom of the infographic if you'd like and you might get some direct referrals.. But really as a link-building/SEO tactic the exact route of your linked content doesn't need to be all to your home page.

As EGOL said, Build an info site with a store! DO THAT!! You will succeed.

THIS is inbound marketing in 2013.

• Infographics
• Video
• Memes
• Interesting/Engaging/Authentic Content!

If you have the content, the links will become easier to find. Yes it's a daunting task going up against the likes of what you're suggesting, but you'd be surprised. Sites with thousands of links like that don't always win on sheer numbers alone. In fact, sometimes those numbers hurt them. It all depends where those links are coming from of course... but I digress.

The interviews are a great idea, keep that up. Maybe you can publish a survey and offer a nifty prize, then at the end of the survey post your findings. Keep it relevant to your niche and people will be interested in your charts/graphs/stats. This could gain you a whole bevy of links.

At MozCon Wil Reynolds talked about creating one infographic that changed his life. It was shared all over the stinkin' place and picked up by all sorts of media. All it takes is a hit like this and you'll be off and running quicker than you realized was possible.

Good thread. This is what we are all striving to do.. (Or at least what we SHOULD all be striving to do. There are some who are still unsure what it means to be an SEO/inbound marketer in this day and age.)

You're on the right track, undoubtedly. Good luck to you/us!

Have you seen any signs of algorithmic penalties or SERP fluctuation? If not... forget it. Yes I would ask to have it removed if it's a garbage link from an irrelevant site. But I would avoid the disavow tool and use it as a last result. I don't trust that tool as much as others seem to... You can usually do well without it too. If you start getting manual penalty warnings and your SERPs are dropping without any response from the webmasters... then it might be time to break out the disavow.

Whatever you do, DOCUMENT it! All emails, contacts, discoveries.. keep these documented in a separate folder in case you ever have to submit a re-inclusion request to Google.

That's all I can really say.

I just don't trust that disavow tool yet. So if you are going to do that have your resubmission package prepared and watch for notices in GWT.

You are doing exactly what you should be doing as far as dealing with the poison links. Continue contacting webmasters (as politely as possible..make it seem like doing this will help them as well as you) and document ALL of it. Check your GWT and make sure you haven't been issued a manual penalty. If you have, prepare the disavow tool and submit all of your documented efforts with the re-inclusion request you will file.

If you don't have a warning, continue building proper and relevant links. This is the best thing you can do. Make sure they are coming in organically. They should essentially be the results of killer content created by your team for your site. This will help more than anything and more immediately (again assuming you have no manual penalties.)

This is the best advice I can offer. Hope it helps.

This makes perfect sense and is relevant to my interests. Unfortunately we track any and all, but are also a SaaS company with skewed analytics due to logins. We normally just rely on the new visitors numbers, but it would be kind of nice to separate the returning clients from new visitors entirely.

In other words, I don't have an answer (haven't really looked into it) but am tagging this thread to see what folks say.

Can we expect to hear of any sort of timeline on these new tools at MozCon next week?

Hey that's a great story! Thanks for sharing, it's nice to hear that these things are resolvable.

Nicely done.

ooooooooooooooooo

I love Easter eggs!

Not sure about the first part, but the Keyword allotment is setup across all campaigns. Therefore if you have 172 in one campaign and 200 in another and 203 in another and so on, they all count towards your grand-total.

As for the "inaccurate numbers" I'm not sure what you mean... But maybe what I explained is factoring into it??

it's only bad if you want those pages to get ranked and there are links (internal or external) pointing to the referring URLs.

In other words, 302 redirects do not pass link juice as a 301 does. Unless you are no-indexing these pages anyway, it's just not a good idea. If it were me I'd wonder why we were using 302s at all? I've only ever used one once and that was because I didn't want the blackhat-SEO links coming over to the new domain... But this is a different case.

"I haven't built any sort of links whatsoever"

Well.. that's your problem right there! You need to be building authoritative, relevant links to strong content created to promote and market your site. Pages don't get ranked based on page title and content alone. Google needs to see that your site is somewhat of an authority on the keywords in question.

Get to marketing and watch your SERPs climb!

Yes Carla it does make sense and thank you for the explanation.

I too am working in an industry where all of my competitors who outrank me are using blackhat tactics and they haven't been penalized for it at all. It's quite frustrating and I'd be lying if I hadn't considered submitting them to the Webspam team. However I worry that this will somehow come back to bite us later on so I haven't done so and probably never will. Instead I continue building quality content and trying to organically build authority.

That all said, I'd love it if you kept us posted. I'd really like to know how this all works out for you. Even though you are in another country, it might be a great indicator of the potential problems/benefits to this tactic.

Thanks

I use Google Plus far less but am interested in changing that so I joined. Good idea!

I can't wrap my head around why you would want to do this and what you seek to gain from it..?

Tuzzell is right, the answer is no.. but I absolutely am dying to know why you are leading the Spam Crusade? (I'm not against it.. nor am I for it.. I'm totally neutral so far just curious why)

Yeah not to get preachy here but this is something I notice often on this forum. People come and say "why is my site _____" or "am i being indexed?" or whatever and it's impossible to say without any information other than the question being posed.

It's like calling up an auto mechanic and saying "hey my car stopped working can you tell me how to fix it?" and expecting an answer without further details.

Anyway I'm sorry don't mean to jump on your case just trying to help others further on that make the same mistake.

What I notice is that the people who provide more information in their Questions get better Answers and more help.

oh you are SO right.

Publishing press releases is essentially expensive black hat in this day and age. That's not going to help you. Probably won't destroy you, but might knock you over the edge if you were on the verge before.

Sounds to me like you were penalized but I'd have no way of knowing without:

a.) your domain

b.) your targeted keywords

c.) your link-building history (what do you do to build links?)

What I can tell you is that's a hefty drop and the algorithm is updated all the time.

This forum is as good a resource as any for a pre-con meetup.

I'll be there. Let's get a drink and form a kickass SEO posse! WHO'S IN!

We could call it "The Posseo?"

Just spit-balling here

Follow me @SEOjesseO and maybe we can start a #posseo

Those are great suggestions Lynn, thank you.

I read the article about direct traffic and it made me feel a little better... My theory at this point is even if there are people out there bookmarking this URL (still not sure why they would and the % of new visitors is quite high on the direct source) they will find their way to the new one.

I do have a custom 404 page that is super helpful and should easily get people to their destination should they happen upon our old URL. It is a broad, site-wide 404 of course and not a specialized one for this page.. I didn't realize this was an option and it's an interesting thought. I will consider it. It does make me nervous. I want to get rid of every trace of this page as quickly as possible.

We are supplementing with a slight bump in PPC in the meantime. Luckily I have it in my budget to do so. And the thing is.. we are currently outranked by all of our competitors so it can't get much worse.

The real kicker here is all of our competitors are using blackhat tactics. It's extremely frustrating. Their links are coming from Bangladesh Travel Forums talking about hair products and linking to completely irrelevant pages with exact-match anchor phrasing. And there are thousands of them... It's been this way for many months and I keep thinking they'll get penalized but so far it's us falling in the rankings. Hopefully this makes a difference. We'll see --

One thing I do notice about the other blackhat sites is that they don't have any links pointing at internal pages, only the subdomain. Our former blackhat pointed at the internal page in question (and the subdomain as well) and while I've removed as many as possible it's still affecting us. The thing is, the other keywords I target that are just as competitive I am kicking butt in. Top 3 spots for several of them and they don't have any links pointing to the specific page targeting said keyword. So I hope that theory carries over to this primary keyword as well.

I'm babbling now. That's what I get for thinking about work on the weekend!

Thanks again and I'll keep the moz-community posted.

Okay so I've been working at resolving former black-hat SEO tactics for this domain for many many months. Finally our main keyword is falling down the rankings like crazy no matter how many relevant, quality links I bring to the domain. So I'm ready to take action today.

There is one inner-page which is titled exactly as the keyword we are trying to match. Let's call it "inner-page.html"

This page has nothing but poison links with exact match anchor phrases pointing at it. The good links I've built are all pointed at the domain itself.

So what I want to do is change the url of this page and let all of the current poison links 404. I don't trust the disavow tool and feel like this will be a better option. So I'm going to change the page's url to "inner_page.html" or in otherwords, simply changed to an underscore instead of a hyphen.

How effective do you think this will be as far as 404ing the bad links and does anybody out there have experience using this method? And of course, as always, I'll keep you all posted on what happens with this. Should be an interesting experiment at least.

One thing I'm worried about is the traffic sources. We seem to have a ton of direct traffic coming to that page. I don't really understand where or why this is taking place... Anybody have any insight into direct traffic sources to inner-pages? There's no reason for current clients to visit and potentials shouldn't be returning so often... I don't know what the deal is there but "direct" is like our number 2 or 3 traffic source. Am I shooting myself in the foot here?

Here we go!

I'm confused by what exactly you're looking for here, but to make my answer totally general I'll say this:

I think that a "long-tail keyword" is one that reads more like a sentence than a phrase. For example, if I'm searching for how to change a tire on my ford focus I could type in

"changing tire ford focus"

or

"how to fix a flat tire on a ford focus"

...The first might be short-tail in this scenario whereas the second would be longer. The second won't get as many searches, sure. But I might find that this drives in an extra click or two and all I had to do was sneak this sentence into my article. E.G. "A lot of people ask me how to fix a flat tire on a Ford Focus." or something...

No, definitely not. Either clear your cache CONSTANTLY or do as I said and de-personalize your results. Can't stress this enough. Cookies track your tendencies and skew your SERPs.

Each article's view pages are unique? Or are they all one page with uniquely propagated iframes? If it's one page, then add it to your robots.txt file as a disallowed page.

Otherwise yes you can no-index

OR you can add a rel="nofollow" to the links which might be a good idea anyway. Of course if the page is linked from anywhere else it could be indexed.

Or you could send them all to a unique directory and have that particular directory removed in the robots file. This would pertain if each article was given a unique page. Just have them go to url.com/article/view/thisarticle.html and disallow the view/ directory.

Hope this helps.

Nope. It doesn't do this at all. Might I suggest you run your searches over again and be sure to de-personalize your results.

Hint: add the code &pws=0 to the end of your Google Search URL string.

Okay I love it. This has been a fantastic experiment. I have a good feeling about it all.

Yes for this keyword I have. For the one I originally was posting about I've been all over the board and still am. Back to 15 today and was 10 earlier a few days ago..

But yes, this keyword historically sticks at 2-3 *(the dev added a new page that bumped us down). I guess I was testing to see if I could get multiple pages from my domain listed for this keyword as we were discussing.

HILARIOUS.

Just after hitting "Post" I went and checked once more. Boom, there we were sitting at the #3 spot (which is just as good. this keyword is for a software service and the site beating me out twice is the software developer themselves so that's fair.)

I swear though it had been a good hour and a half before I posted this. I did make one slight change to a page title in that 90 minutes but I doubt that made the difference in such a short time. Oh Google, you sure know how to get my heart-a-poundin' in the morning.

Well my initial test done on a secondary keyword linking 3 different pages describing three different facets of the service was working great until today.

Today my page is no longer listed at all in the SERPs for the targeted keyword. Yesterday it was number 2.

I'm hoping this is just one of Google's little fluctuations but have a feeling it's bigger than that... Can't for the life of me figure where I went wrong. Each page is about something different, titles are different, content is different, all pertaining to the same service sure but still. Basically it's like this:

1.) main service offering page

2.) blog article on statistics of popularity gaining for this service recently (linked to from high authority sites/socials as well)

3.) blog article on the newest version of the service's release which happened last week.

All 3 interconnected of course. Any ideas?

Have you looked into OpenCart? I don't have a ton of experience with e-com sites but I've heard good things about this from developer standpoints. It's claim to fame is being open source, anyway...

I would lean towards Magento for similar reasons to what Dennis said already. Also I just have had poor Wordpress experiences and feel like Google is out to get 'em. That last part is all in my head and completely made up but that's enough to sway me towards Magento.

maybe (maybe) sharing the URL will help..? hard to say, really, what the problem is.

I agree with Dennis. Sounds like it's time to bite the bullet and re-build. Take it as a lesson and move on.

In the meantime, have you considered driving in traffic through a PPC campaign? Might stop the bleeding..

I agree 100% with echo here. Google disavow makes me nervous as heck. I've yet to use it even though I've seriously considered it a few times...

If your impressions and traffic hasn't taken a hit and you have no warnings, I'd stick with it.

Either way, build content and gain links that are relevant. That's the only sure-fire way of keeping up with your SERPs.

It's an early result but I've tried doing this with my main targeted keyword and so far it pushed the offender down and me up.. Not sure if it was that which made the difference or all of my efforts combined but so far so good I'll keep you posted on my experiments..

Addendum - When I search for the name of your business, the Map it gives me is for the Irvine location and is correct. You should not be concerned about this.

Couple things here-

First off, why are you worried about SERPs from people Googling your physical address? If they are looking up a map of your shop, they are already sold on coming in to your shop. People don't just Google random addresses..

Secondly, their SERPs will be different than yours based on their set location, just as you said. If they are in Irvine, the results will display for Irvine. If they aren't, they will type in Irvine. That's how people use Maps...

I think this is a non-issue.

Not that I know of.. The company I work for deals with clients in Canada and the U.S. and I find that our Canadian leads all come through the same Google SERPs that the US ones do. Of course the terms they are searching for are a bit different and I have to optimize with that in mind but otherwise it's all the same to me.

I'll be interested to see anyone else offer any other Canadian SEO tips though as I can feel myself often neglecting the potential from our cousins up North.

I sincerely doubt it. Especially in regards to file names. Think of how many "about.html" and "index.html" pages exist... So what if the filename is the same? And meta content? I don't think Google factors that into their ranking.

Assuming this is even something they're ranking.. I'm pretty confident that none of this matters.

Yes I have seen a lot of this too. I'm in competition with a bunch of companies using blackhat link building techniques and they are outranking me (sometimes) using these. Literally they are just doing article/link submission blasts with keyword targeted anchor text and it's working. Part of me thinks perhaps it's because EVERY site fighting for that phrase is using blackhat techniques and part of me thinks Penguin just isn't working well.

Either way I'm frustrated and each Monday I come in thinking.. "maybe today I'll start some blackhat link building."

The clock is ticking!

Okay Egol you big magic wizard you - I've implemented a few changes and added some media in a method pretty much exactly as you described. So we'll be testing it out (for a different keyword but still highly targeted) and seeing what we can do to grab multiple listings on a SERP.

Just wait til my sales team finds out they're now selling brass widgets..

HAHA!

"EEEGGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLL!!!!!" (yelled like Kirk at Khan)

ugh. One of their pages has two sentences on it. Two.