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Okay so I've moved a site I work on to https finally... wasn't easy, but I won't go into the whys and hows of that. Everything is working fine on the site and my rankings are holding steady but when I went into the GWT today I noticed that my main site (www.domain.com) has lost inquiry and traffic data almost entirely. So I quickly added and verified the https://www.domain.com URL (even though it doesn't ask for the protocol when adding a site) and saw the traffic.. kind of. Only 2 inquiries and a few pages indexed. Now I realize I need to submit a new sitemap and am currently working on that but don't know which account to upload it to. Do I really need two GWT sites separately and why is the other one still getting the impressions and clicks? Basically I'm looking for somebody to shed some light on how to handle this migration from a GWT standpoint. I've attached 3 screenshots to illustrate what I'm talking about. Should be obvious what's what to those who read this post. The Analytics shot is to show that I haven't actually lost traffic in this time and eliminate the fear of penalty or anything of the sort. Thanks! wbPpwVw.png YJifLiR.png cRVgqRN.png

I'm noticing in several of the SERPs I track this morning that the domains that formerly had multiple pages listed on pages 1-3 for the same keyword are now reduced to one listing per domain. I'm hoping that this is a permanent change and widespread as it is a significant boon to my campaigns, but I'm wondering if anyone else here has seen this in their SERPs or knows what I'm talking about...? EX of what I mean by "duplicate domain listings": (in case my wording is confusing here) Search term "Product Item" Pages ranking: domain-one.com/product-item.html domain-one.com/product-item-benefits.html etc...

Okay so this morning I logged into webmaster tools and saw this notice of manual penalty for "unnatural links" affecting "some incoming links." (see attached photo) This is a different notification than I've seen before. Keep in mind this website had been building unnatural links up until I took over in December of 2012. I have since cleaned up a TON of them and thought I was making progress... Until this morning that is. So the next thing I did was head over to the incoming links in GWT. What I saw here shocked me. Whereas the last time I checked (maybe 2 days ago) we had approx 6,000 links we now had 195,565 !!! WTF?!?! Okay so somebody is screwing with us, right? But here's the real confusion: I can't find any of these links anywhere else other than GWT. As you can see on the other attachment I have included, Google is reporting some 39,000 links from a domain called "itbriefing.net" however when I search this domain I find absolutely zero of these links. There are a few mentions of our brand but not one single link. Also, looking through ahrefs.com and OSE I don't see any of the data that GWT is reporting here; everything looks normal to me. Now isn't GWT the last to report all of these changes? What could possibly be happening here? Am I losing my mind? We are still being indexed although I've been frustrated trying to get one of our main keywords to re-rank. This was one that had the most poison links built over the years so recently I gave up and changed the URL of the page completely sans redirect. This worked, and GWT reported a ton of lost links (99% of which were poison and the other 1% of which I regained with the new URL). But now this. Is this a GWT fluke? Am I under attack? What is going on.. Please weigh in on this one as I'm baffled. a78a6fe2fc774f9dfddf0f70b7f1e363.png 7279c71f2ed90d8134c6f4cac199d884.png

As the title says, I'm working on a YouMoz post and want to add captions to some of my images. Is this not possible? Since some are justified strangely, I can't just do it with the p tags they offer... I tried dropping a div styled in there and it broke everything, unsurprisingly. Any suggestions? Thanks!

I'm being outranked by a site that builds a ton of keyword-stuffed tumblr pages with 15+ links per page pointed back at their site with heavy keyword anchor text. What gives with tumblr SEO and their followed links? Anybody have any experience with this? Can there truly be this much value embedded in the tumblr domain?

Here's the Question: If a person clicks a PPC ad and hits the landing page, and the landing page has a form to fill out embedded in it without having to click, does that count as a bounce if the person leaves the page immediately after filling out and submitting the form or does the submission negate the bounce tally? Hope this makes sense and thanks in advance.

So I feel like I've almost convinced my boss to hire out a re-design for our website (which is SORELY needed.) I'm at the step where I need to start finding quotes and site builders. I want a responsive design site built modern and professional... Love the moz site but not responsive enough. My current favorite example is at www.hasoffers.com Does anybody have any suggestions of where to go? And as a bonus, if anybody is brave enough to ballpark what a site like this would cost that would be awesome. Doesn't have to be exact or even that close... Thanks for any advice given.

I need some sort of awesome marketing related book. It could be SEO/SEM related, it'd be nice if it focused on content creation, or it could just be broad and business-y. Wil Reynolds got me thinking I'm not reading enough, and I wasn't lucky enough to grab one of his books off him at MozCon. So now I need some suggestions. It's just too overwhelming searching through these broad keywords for the right book. So if anyone knows of any that might fit, let me know! Thanks Moz Community. You guys rock.

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!

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 know Cutts addressed this as a potential future update to the Google algo but it's driving me bonkers.. My primary targeted keyword has one of our competitors listed 4 times in a row on the top of page 2. Some of the pages have duplicate page titles and the content is relatively thin. The site has a PR of 2 and a DA of 35. Why on earth are they able to suck up a whole half of a results page?!?!?! I don't know that there's anything anyone can tell me that will help, but if there's something I missed about this update please let me know. 'snot fair. 😞

So I just read an interesting Tweet: #SEO Tip: #Google takes into account the location of the server (the IP) when projecting the search results #web This is something I had not thought of. I suppose my question then is HOW does it factor this information into it's results? For some reason, one of our sites is hosted on a Canadian server. We are a cloud hosting company and we serve all of NA with data centers in the US and Canada... For whatever reason we've used the Canadian server farm for our web server. Could this possibly be hurting our NA google SERPs? Anyone have any thoughts on this?

So I'm working on cleaning up our backlink profile and discovered that a few of our blogs are clogging things up... Google reports that one in particular is responsible for 454 links...
So I ran a quick sitemap to try and get a better understanding where these are coming from and discovered that all of the stupid tags and categories that the former marketing person posted her blogs to were creating new pages and counting new links from the footer found on each. So there were 370 pages counted by the sitemap generator. This explains why all the links. Now my questions 1.) how hurtful are all these links? 2.) what's the best way to handle links on company-sponsored blogs.. in sidebar widgets or embedded in the text? 3.) what is the purpose of those categories and tags? My boss seems to think they help in SEO efforts but I am insisting they are worthless and would like to remove them all. He thinks we should keep a couple per post... bleh Any advice here would be lovely. Thanks

As soon as I began working in my current position at my current company I noticed my predecessor's tendency towards buying link packages from blackhat companies... I knew we were being penalized, and had to prove to him that we needed to halt those campaigns immediately and try our darndest to remove all poison links from the internet. I did convince him and began the process. There was 57% of our backlinks tied to the same anchor phrase with 836 domains linking to the same phrase, same page. Today there are 643 of those links remaining. So I have hit a large number of them, but not nearly enough. So now I am getting messages from Google announcing that our site has been hit with an unnatural link penalty. I haven't really seen the results of this yet in the keywords I am trying to rank for, but fear it will hurt very soon and know that I could be doing better in the meantime. I really don't know what to do next. I've tried the whole "contact the webmasters" technique and maybe have had 1/100 agree to remove our links. They all want money or don't respond.. Do I really need to use this Disavow tool?
I hear mixed things about it.. Anybody with experience here like to share their stories? Thanks for the moral support!

Hello, My question today is regarding sitemaps. I'm often confused by this and because I am a bit obsessive I believe I may be giving myself more work than needed.. Basically my question is, do I need to update and/or re-generate my sitemap every time I make a change to the site? I mean, I must have to if I add a page, correct? And so in Google's Webmaster Tools, do I just delete the current sitemap and re-upload a new one for Google to crawl? Is it possible to overdo this? Any sitemap suggestions would be fantastic. I feel like there's been a few weeks where I've updated the sitemap daily and re-submitted it and I worry that might be hurting my site. Thanks!

I came across a few blogs which got me started here on an SEOmoz Pro account and now I am working on building a competitive link analysis spreadsheet in Excel in order to identify how are competitors are beating us in Google rankings for specific keywords. One article I came across seemed to do exactly what I wanted, but the images are all broken and the downloads require a membership to some service I am not interested in: http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/how-are-they-beating-you-quick-seo-analysis-tools-part-1/ Anybody have any resources like this they can share? Thank you.