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So i have stumbled across an interesting issue with a new SEO client. They just recently launched a new website and implemented a proper 301 redirect strategy at the page level for the new website domain. What is interesting is that the new website is now indexed in Google BUT the old website domain is also still indexed in Google? I even checked the Google Cached date and it shows the new website with a cache date of today. The redirect strategy has been in place for about 30 days. Any thoughts or suggestions on how to get the old domain un-indexed in Google and get all authority passed to the new website?

Does anyone have a suggestion for the best keyword rank tracking software in Baidu? The keywords would be in Chinese. We currently already have keyword rank tracking software for Google/Bing/Yahoo so we just need to expand to Baidu. I am looking forward to comparing my research with what the Moz community has to say! Thanks!

As we are building a hreflang sitemap for a client, we are correctly implementing the tag across 5 different languages including English. However, the News and Events section was never translated into any of the other four languages. There are also a few pages that were translated into some but not all of the 4 languages. Is it good practice to still list out the individual non-translated pages like on a regular sitemap without a hreflang tag? Should the hreflang sitemap include the hreflang tag with pages that are missing a few language translations (when one or two language translations may be missing)? We are uncertain if this inconsistency would create a problem and we would like some feedback before pushing the hreflang sitemap live.

Okay, kind of silly question but i am looking for some help interpreting an analysis done by John Doherty almost a year ago: http://moz.com/blog/what-kind-of-content-gets-links-in-2012 In the document he mentions the correlation that longer posts on average receive more links but the graphs were really hard to interpret (for me). Based on the data what is the correct size we should shoot for (most graphs were missing labels). Any one have any insight? Should i shoot for 300 words per post, higher, etc? Thanks! Kyle

I have a new client who has been fighting to get past an unnatural links penalty. One of the biggest reasons behind it was that they paid to get a followed link/ad on a blog network, well this ad ended up being a site wide link which ended up giving them thousands of back links within a few days. After getting the owner of the blog network to remove the link i manually spot checked a handful of pages and used screaming frog to crawl looking for a link referencing their site. From what i can tell they are all gone. However they are still in Google Webmaster Tools as well as Google's index and it has been a couple months since they have been removed. Does anyone have any advice on getting them removed from Google's entities even though they are already off of the website? Thank you in advance,
Kyle

The Scenario:
Currently one of my clients has 7-8 products that they sell on their website. For each product they have two different pages one with the product info and one with a video demo. So the pages began to split their authority as they began receiving new links. Since only one of the two pages for each product rank i suggested that we combine the two and redirect the video page to the product page to increases it's authority and rank. The Clients Response:
After explaining my reasoning and next steps the client mentioned that he thought a site's size was a ranking factor. I had never heard of this before so i told them i would do some research to prove my point, after a little digging around i am now even more confused. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-size-ranking-17044.html http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4591155.htm The Question:
Does a websites size/amount of content indexed in Google actually effect your sites ability to rank? I look forward to everyones feedback, thanks Kyle

So i have been working with a company running their SEO for close to two years now. Since i started to engage with them they have always used a very simple pop up for the first time an end user visits their website (via javascript and cookies). The pop up simply ask them if they would like to download a solutions brochure  from their website. So as far as pop ups go, it is at least relevant. The client loves this pop up, i do not. For a while we have always held spots #1-3 for a lot of our keywords but we have started to drop to lower on the first page. So i have been researching to see if some of the new algorithm changes are targeting sites with this type of functionality. If i have some data i could definitely get them to remove it. So the question is, do pop-ups hurt your organic ranking? Thanks for the input! Kyle

There were a lot of questions and data on this a few years back and nothing terribly recent so i wanted to get the discussion going again and see if any new data has been published. Is hosting your website on a shared host like Godaddy or Network Solutions going to hurt your rankings because their holds a chance that you could be on the same IP as spammy websites? My gut feeling is no primarily because almost 90% of the worldwide web is on shared hosting but i do not have a lot of data to back it up. Id love to hear some feedback. Cheers - Kyle

I have been in the process of trying to get past a "link scheme" penalty for just over a year. I took on the client in April 2012, they had received their penalty in February of 2012 before i started. Since then we have been trying to manually remove links, contact webmasters for link removal, blocking over 40 different domains via the disavow tool and requesting reconsideration multiple times. All i get in return "Site violates Google's quality guidelines." So we regrouped and did some more research to find that about 90% of the offending spam links pointed to only 3 pages of the website so we decided to just delete the pages, display a 404 error in their place and create new pages with new URLs. At first everything was looking good, the new pages were ranking and receiving page authority and the old pages were gone from the indexes. So we resubmitted for reconsideration for the third time and we got the same exact response! I don't know what else to do? I did everything i could think of with the exception of deleting the whole site. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Regards - Kyle

I want to start off with stating that i am truly an advocate of SEOMoz and the great stuff they have done for the inbound community that we all know and love. I've been an active member since July 2010 and a paying pro member since December 2010. The software has always been monumental in helping my clients achieve their goals. However, in the past few months i have received nothing short of buggy unreliable software. The keyword difficulty tool never returns difficulty results. The Adwords data has been gone since i can remember. The rank tracker tool is successfull close to 1 out of 5 times. OSE is updated terribly slow compared to competitors. Plus, I have had to write emails to get my campaigns to be manually refreshed to see new ranking data. I have simply missed deadlines because my data is always delayed or missing from the software. Am i an anomaly here? does anyone have these problems? I have been researching some new tools as a replacement but i have yet to find anything as robust as the old SEOMoz. I'd love some feedback. Cheers - Kyle

Okay, anyone else notice the resent UI launch in the Google SERPs? I was planning a trip to visit a friend in Dayton, Ohio and used the query "things to do in dayton oh" and i got a really neat points of interest bar and city stats. Anyone notice anything else neat with the UI change? Seems like some good stuff for local possibly. example-serp.png

Hey Mozzers, Recently i have been working with some larger corporations and i have quickly found that publish new content is a nightmare. Whether re-writing current content to be more targeted or getting brand new content published on their blog it goes through an insane approval process something like this: Approval from Marketing Manager (main point of contact) Revisions Approval from Legal/Quality Control Revisions Approval from someone on the C team (CEO or CMO) Revisions Depending on content, translation for other language sites Then go live With this crazy process i have barely gotten 5-10 pages of content approved and live since the launch of the project. Now I am getting the questions of why we aren't seeing any results. The quickest and most direct answer is - we aren't publishing any new content! But you can't always blame the client. Does anyone have any suggestions, approaches, or strategies to help slow moving clients speed up? Perhaps other techniques to show your value other than publishing new/targeted content? Cheers - Kyle

Okay - anyone else read about the new tool release from Bing especially the disavow tool? Very cool - id love to hear some chatter on what you guys think! Link:
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2012/06/27/disavow-links-you-don-t-trust.aspx  Here is to hoping Google will follow suit! Cheers - Kyle

Hey Mozzers - First off, I am well aware of what CRO is, its benefits, and why it is essential for any inbound or performance marketing campaigns. However i am a total newbie at the actual planning and implementation of CRO, so any advice/feedback on the questions below are much appreciated! When planning a CRO experiment/test what is the best way to document it? Should i develop the full plan ahead of time laying out each element? If so, what elements should i include in this plan? What are the KPIs i should report on? What tools should i use for reporting (i was thinking a blend of Google and Clicktale)? Any lessons learned through out your campaigns? Thank you all so much for your input! Regards - Kyle

Did anyone else get some really strange results in their weekly crawls this week with the campaign tool? Either my ranks sky rocked across three different sites or the tools is busted. Something to the tune of having 4 pages ranking in the top 30 to now having 15-16 pages ranking in the top 30. I'd love to find out it is just all the hard work paying off but i am worried it is the later. Regards - Kyle

Up until yesterday afternoon i had never heard of a .lbi file. It turns out it is a library file used by Adobe Dreamweaver. From what i can tell it works like a client side included but i am unsure of the technology behind it. The issue:
When running through a recent SEO audit for a new client i found these .lbi files being used all over there site for site wide callouts and even navigation. When viewing this content through firebug or in the browser you can see the executed  HTML content but when viewing the source or the page in seo-browser.com the content is nowhere to be seen. So my thought is this is not SEO friendly and is the same as displaying content in any client-side script like JavaScript or JQuery. Any feedback or thoughts on this subject would be awesome, especially if anyone has used these previously. Unfortunately i cannot share the client site but i would be more than happy to answer any questions if more detail is needed. Thanks in advance - Kyle

So this new project that i am working on is a redesigned CMS site using Wordpress (php based). Before i started on the project they made a few major updates that include: Changed from ID based URLS to SEO friendly URLS Added multiple languages in directories www.domain.com/en www.domain.com/fr www.domain.com/de etc... Due to the new languages they wanted to have the previous home page, www.domain.com, redirect to the proper language based on their IP address. Currently they are using a 301 redirect through a php header. So if i was visiting the site from my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio and i type www.domain.com into the browser. I would automatically redirect to www.domain.com/en and i would have the option to switch languages if needed. The issue: When i first added their site into SEOMoz the crawl returned a large amount of 302 redirects coming from their old homepage www.domain.com. So i took a look at the header calls using IE's webmaster tools and Firebug in Firefox. In both profilers it showed the same problem. Before the 301 header redirect there was a 302 redirect called first When viewing the response header it mentioned an x-pingback of some file that didn't even exist on the site: www.domain.com/xmlrpc.php This is obviously a huge issue because any link value from the old homepage will be lost due to the 302 not passing the value. I have tried search the almighty Google for help but it has gotten me no where. I have a hunch it is something to do with Wordpress but that is based on nothing but my gut. Any help is greatly appreciated. I got to get that 302 gone or changed to a 301 🙂 Regards - Kyle

If i turn an application off displaying a 503 error will that get my site unindexed from search engines?

Do URL shortener services like bit.ly act as 301 redirects? I was thinking about utilizing one for longer query based URLs and didn't want to risk losing link juice. Thanks for the insight! Regards - Kyle

Are URL shorteners like Bit.ly considered 301 redirects? I was thinking about using them for some longer URL's in press releases but i didn't want to loose any link juice through the service. Thanks for the info! - Kyle

I'm sure we have all read about the latest round of Google's algorithm changes also known as the "Panda 2.5" updates. This latest update seems to have hit some pretty large press release sites including PR Newswire and Businesswire (both of these have a great page rank and domain authority making them a great tool for SEO's in regards to inbounds links). Ultimately this update has directly affected their sites traffic, keyword rankings, and the number of indexed pages in Google. But what will this do to our smaller sites that benefit from these great links? Will these panda updates continue to target these content farms and lower their domain authority? Will that extrapolate out and effect the domain authority of our sites? What are your thoughts for those of us that utilize these services, should we re-evaluate our process? I look forward to a great discussion. Regards - Kyle

Hey Mozzers - i was hoping to have a discussion with you guys on conversion rates and would love any feedback on comparative metrics. I plan on keeping my client anonymous and feel free to do the same if you would like. Lets start with some background. This client is an online retailer selling golf training ads, the products range from $20-40, he is based out of the US and this site is targeting consumers (B2C). So far i have assisted him with some site analysis and setting up some pay-per-click campaigns. I feel like his site is doing pretty well conversion-wise but i have little experience with conversion metrics with ecommerce (mostly just lead generation, etc). Here is a quick break down on channel conversion rates: PPC: 0.8% - 1.7%
Organic: 6.8% - 15% 
Direct: 6.2% - 13% His overall site conversion rate is between 2-3% So my question is to you guys. Is this average, above, or below in your past experiences? Based on my research a site conversion rate of 2-3 is pretty good for ecommerce, however i felt like my PPC conversion rate is kind of low. Thanks for the insight - Kyle

My client just launched a german version of their site: English Version:
www.domain.com/en/.... Germain Version:
www.domain.com/de/.... Is there a best practice to get the new section of the site indexed in www.google.de? Are you able to submit a different sitemap to each Google domain? How do you go about doing keyword research, its got to be different search trends than google.com, right? A am complete beginner when it comes to international SEO so any advice would be greatly appreciated! Regards - Kyle

This is a pretty quick and simple (i'm hoping) question. What is the best way to completely block a sub domain from getting indexed from all search engines? One item i cannot use is the meta "no follow" tag. Thanks! - Kyle

I have a client that has been optimizing for "print and apply" for the past 5 months. Yesterday they decided it was more grammatically correct to use "print-and-apply." There question to me was "is this going to effect our SEO?" So... I checked the difficulty using the keyword analysis tool, both keywords had the same broad/exact adwords traffic as well as difficulty percentage. When reviewing the top 25 listings for each keyword it looks like the same sites rank in the SERPs between 1-8 and then after that it is completely different. So, is there a better keyword to target? Are these two keywords different enough to truly have separate search results?
The top 8 results didn't even target "print-and-apply" in there content or title tags... Thanks for the input/discussion - Kyle

Have any of you ever purchased a directory listing with Absolute Directory (http:www.absolutedirectory.com)? I was thinking about suggesting it to some of my clients since it was inexpensive, had a good domain authority (58), moz trust (5.81), and didn't seem to be filled with any ads or obtrusive content. Any thoughts? Is this to good to be true? Regards - Kyle

I have always been under the impression that top level (or root) domains can hold different domain authority than that of a sub domain. Meaning that sub domain's and TLD can hold different ranks and strength in search engine result pages. Is this a correct or just an assumption? If so when i add a root domain and subdomain into the campaign manager i get back the same link information and domain authority? www.datalogic.com
www.automation.datalogic.com Have I made an incorrect assumption or is this an issue with the SEOMoz campaign manager?

So i have a client that sends me a link once a week about buying followers for social media profiles. Each time i tell him if it seems to good to be true... then its too good to be true! What are your guys thoughts, experiences, feelings? Here are a few examples: http://www.targetedtraffic.int.tc http://www.fbfandamonium.com

Quick question, can Googlebot (or other search engines) follow meta refresh tags? Does it work anything like a 301 in terms of passing value to the new page?

Along with the current crawl notices (canonical links, 301s, etc) you should add "meta refresh". Those are tricky to catch via the human eye unless you are paying very close attention and they definitely effect your SEO if not done properly. Thoughts?

Recently i have found that the data in the trifecta report is becoming less complete. For the last few sites i found that the report returned about half of the metrics it was looking for. For instance, it mentioned that one of the domains did not have a dmoz or wikipedia link/page even though they had both? Also, it rarely returns the Yahoo Site Explorer metrics even though when clicking to see the source the data is there? Are you guys planning on phasing out this tool, if not it seems like some work needs to be done on cleaning it up. Thanks!

I have a client that picked up a bunch of keyword rich domain names and he wants to point them to his current corporate site as domain aliases. Could this in anyway negatively or positively effect his SEO? or ranking? Thanks  - Kyle Chandler

I'm hoping this is a quick and simple question. Sometimes when using the open site explorer or the keyword difficulty tool i find that some pages have a higher "page authority" than the "domain authority." That seemed odd to me, is there a correlation between the two? You would think by default as you grow your page authority the domain authority increases as well? So i guess my question would be, what happens on a page to give it a higher page authority than domain authority?

A client of ours uses some unique keyword tracking for their landing pages where they append certain metrics in a query string, and pulls that information out dynamically to learn more about their traffic (kind of like Google's UTM tracking). Non-the-less these query strings are now being indexed as separate pages in Google and Yahoo and are being flagged as duplicate content/title tags by the SEOmoz tools. For example: Base Page: www.domain.com/page.html
Tracking: www.domain.com/page.html?keyword=keyword#source=source Now both of these are being indexed even though it is only one page. So i suggested placing an canonical link tag in the header point back to the base page to start discrediting the tracking URLs: But this means that the base pages will be pointing to themselves as well, would that be an issue? Is their a better way to solve this issue without removing the query tracking all togther? Thanks - Kyle Chandler

I had a client claiming his industry (replacement home windows) conversion rate was around 15% based on his research. In my research i could find nothing of the sort, and really couldn't find a single place that provided this type of information. Anyone out there have some advice on where to research industry conversion rates (averages) or tools/thought processes to explore? Thanks! (these stats would primarily be used for goal setting and competitive analysis)

I've been doing some site analysis for a new SEO client and it has been brought to my attention that their robots.txt file redirects to their homepage. I was wondering: Is there a benfit to setup your robots.txt file to do this? Will this effect how their site will get indexed? Thanks for your response! Kyle Site URL: http://www.radisphere.net/