Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for all the responses! Much appreciated.

Hi Mozzers,

We are looking at expanding our analytical reporting for e-commerce. I want to know more about what customers are doing on the website and how we  can interact with them. For example, how many customers make X amount of purchases and what their conversion rate is etc. I've looked at More2 and I know Analytics can give me some of this data but want to know more.

Anyone have any software ideas?

Thanks,

Karl

Thanks Keri, good to hear!

Hi,

I currently have a Moz Pro account, if I was to downgrade to a free account am I still able to ask and answer questions on the Q&A area? Also, would I lose my points accrued?

As the others have already said, it largely depends on the website and how much work you put into it. If you have a good PR team and are able to generate some buzz around the product/service you offer then there is more chance of you gaining a higher PA and DA.

Don't get too hung up on PA and DA though, they aren't the be all and end all of the quality of the website.

Good luck!

Google still crawls and indexes "hidden content" but from a user point of view if you have to hide it then it probably isn't worth reading. From experience, we use some css to dropdown extra content when the client insists on it being there but it is too long.

If it has to be there then I don't think it will be doing any harm but if you don't need it then get rid.

Hi Oleg,

That's right, so the website scales depending on the device you are looking at the website on but there is also a /m/ version as well. So we should redirect the /m/ versions to the standard URL's?

Thanks again

Hi Mozzers,

A website I manage has a mobile friendly version of their main website and a /m version as well. I was wondering if anyone had any experience in the best way of handling this? Should we just get rid of the /m version and tag the mobile friendly version?

Thanks!

No, it would be for the whole page. It's good practise to have the canonical tag on anyway though

What keywords are you bidding on? It could be that you are ranking for the same phrase in both paid and organic and people are just clicking on your PPC ad rather than your organic listing.

Hi John,

If they were doing articles and promoting them then this is why your website has been hit. Article websites took a major hit in the update prior to Christmas and the Penguin 2.0 update last night has more than likely reaffirmed any penalty you were going to receive unfortunately. Do a backlink analysis in OSE and find all the article websites with links on and get them taken   down (if you can, obviously if you have login details then this will be easier). If you can't then use the disavow tool.

Don't forget that any onsite changes that you make, you will have to wait for Google to come back and cache the website before you see any effect. Concentrate on creating great content and look to create relationships with those in your industry and concentrate on your outreach. 5 links on relevant, topical blogs are worth a million times more than 10000 links on article websites.

page authority and domain authority are a good measure of how good a website is (but not the only measure!). Think about where your post and link are going to be in the long term. For example, if you are guest posting, the post may be on the home page for a week or 2 but then it will be archived so you need to look the inner pages of a website and look at the authority of that page.

If a website has a much higher page authority than domain authority then it's a sign to me that it isn't that good. It'd be much better to have a higher domain authority than page authority because it will show that the website has been up and running for a while.

Also look at the last time Google cached the website and the inner pages, that way you will see how often Google revisits the website and the chances of your link getting cached. Look at some popular websites and look at the domain vs page authority scores, the home page maybe slightly bigger but not that much.

Hope that helps!

Hi Jonathan,

Have you looked at the links to the page you want to rank compared to the links to the other 2 pages? it may be that the other 2 pages just have better quality links to them. If that is the case then get in touch with the webmasters and ask them to change the link.

Alternatively, if you have been building heavily to the page you want to rank, the page may have received a penalty from Google (not accusing you of doing so by the way, just a possibility!). As Mark said, if you can supply us with the URL of the 3 pages then we can have a look into it for you.

Hi Lily,

I think the first thing you need to do is a full back link analysis because it sounds as though you may have been hit a little with the Penguin/Panda updates. Have a look through your links and be really strict about the ones that you know are quality and get rid/disavow the others. That will give you a good starting block.

The next thing is, what are you going to do with this fresh content that you are producing? You need to find websites where it will add value, it doesn't necessarily have to be about the ping test but it adds to your credibility in the industry. Make sure you have your Google +1 account setup. There has been a lot of talk about it recently with Moz directors getting a bit of negative comments from Matt Cutts but it will definitely help to have a G+1 account up and running.

Just to add...it is really important that you match your new urls with your old ones so that you aren't just redirecting every page on the old website to the home page of the new one. I use Xenu to find all the old URL's and then match them to the new urls. That way all the link juice will be passed to the new pages.

Totally agree with Devanur here...there is no need for any site-wide link. If there is a link between the two websites then I wouldn't take them off but i would no-follow the link.

Hi Ali, your link building tactics have got you the penalty, I'm surprised you didn't see this drop at the end of May when Penguin 2.0 was released. You need to act quickly and get rid of all those types of links that you have created and start to focus on non-automated techniques. Start to create content that your users and customers will find useful then look at influencers in the industry to share it with, that is your first port of call.

It is vital that you get rid of all those links (article, directory, blog commenting) because they are very spammy techniques.

Vary the anchor text that you use, this includes the 3 names you mentioned and the URL of the website as well. Just keep in mind that Google wants your backlink profile to be "natural" so if the company is called NLCPA then use that as an anchor text as well.

Whatever you do, DO NOT PAY FOR LINKS!!!! If the content you have to offer is quality then they will be willing to take it. Don't just guest post for the sake of links though, if links is why you are doing it then you're wasting your time because Penguin 2.0 was released to stop people doing exactly that!

Concentrate on writing compelling and interesting copy in your website and reach out to people using it as a way of getting people to visit your website where you can then sell your products and services. If you find a website that looks good, see what kind of stats they have. If they openly say what kind of visits they get then that's good, how often to they post, look at the cache date of the website and look at the quality of the posts.

A good place to start is to look at where your competitors have links on, especially nowadays with the changes, those ranking at the top are sure to have some good links.

I'd create a page for the top cities that you feel are important however don't just create pages just to target local search terms. If each course in each city is slightly different and you can tailor your content to match each city then it would be worth doing.

What I'd do is concentrate on building to the generics versions of the keyword and you should see the localised versions appearing in the SERPS.