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Questions created by Marcus_Miller
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Penguin 4.0 and homepage level penalties
Hey folks Looking to get some input from what other people are seeing with Penguin 4.0 and historically penalised sites. We have three sites we are looking at currently - all had historically brutal penguin penalties. All have done extensive clean up and are respectable businesses and have seen some manor of recovery or improvement. However, we are seeing issues at a homepage level with these three sites in that the homepage currently does not rank for the main terms but an inner page does in it's place (but not as well as we would expect given everything else). This applies to a single keyword on all three of these sites - add a modifier to that keyword and they rank top of first page (often 1st place). Example of modifiers being 'installer', 'uk', 'supplier' etc. That main keyword though only ranks top of 3rd page in this instance and it is an inner page and not the homepage which is the best fit for the targeted term. Question Is anyone else seeing this? Sites that have gone from no visibility in top 50 for a previously abused term that are now seeing some visibility page 2 / page 3 for the big terms and top of page 1 visibility for those terms + modifiers. Thoughts This seems a bit odd to me and hard to understand in light of the Penguin 4.0 announcement if there is no demotion and only devaluation of bad links then why would a single page still be seemingly so heavily effected how can an algorithm that focuses on devaluation of bad links still be granular as this seems to be a penalty of sorts that effects a specific page for a specific keyword (the one most abused historically in terms of link building). two of these are big companies, biggest in their industry in the real world with lots of high visibility clients like TV shows, IKEA etc. Lots of natural highly authoritative links, good content etc - we are digging in further but certainly looks like they have their house largely in order. Note We have one other client that I believe is seeing something similar on an internal page and that page was the main link target for spammy links of old that are now removed. However, it appears Google has a memory regarding even these removed links. I mention this primarily as I don't believe this is homepage specific but rather that is the case as the homepage was the main link target historically. Summary These sites are seeing movement - huge movement. Not exactly what we would expect though given the extensive clean up and talk around how this release of the algorithm works. Be interested to see what you are seeing out there folks and if anyone has seen anything similar. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marcus_Miller
Marcus0 -
Local SEO Issue or Penguin? Or both?
Hey folks I have a fairly complicated SEO issue we have been looking at for a few years now. There are two parts to this problem so would be interested to get the input of the community here and any experienced in Penguin and Local SEO issues. I am going to have to change the names to protect the innocent a bit here as some of the issue relates to a competitor and a shared address. History My client originally worked for company A which we will call Events R us. He then set up on his own at a new address and lets call his company Fantastic Events. EventsRus never had a good website or SEO Fantastic Events set up a great website and really focused on adding tons of relevant content for all the myriad event options available and subsequently did really well. This is a few years back and they were also doing some article marketing on sites like ezinearticles.com to build links (1). As time went on they did get a bit carried away with these low quality links and were buying $5 spun content articles and other low quality links. They ranked really well for a few key terms. There was a suspected local SEO issue as fantastic events used the same office as their fathers business called fantastic finance and the citations / phone number issues etc all had to be cleared up (2). Fantastic Events and Events R Us remained friends and over time Fantastic Events moved to the same farm address as Events R Us so they could offer a wider range of services based on the farm (and ran by fantastic events) and to some extent run away from the address confusion with the same office and very similar name to the other fantastic finance business. Events R Us wanted some of the Fantastic Events success and built a new website and largely copied the website of Fantastic Events - at times even lifting entire pages of content but certainly mirroring the structure of the site. Fantastic Events tussled with them for a few years over this and over time they updated the content but the structure and services and address all pretty much mirrored what was offered on the Fantastic Events site. (3) Two companies - same address (it's a farm so whilst there are different barns I believe Google can only get as far as the farm gate so same address to all intents and purposes. Same services give or take. Events R Us was the older company overall by several years and was at the farm address many years longer than Fantastic Events (4). Fantastic Events starts running a blog and adding regular, useful event orientated content. The first true team building blog out there as far as we could tell and traffic tripled over a six month period. Penguin hits and Fantastic Events loses a lot of traction - this gets worse with Penguin 2.0. Both the homepage and the evening events page lose visibility and traction. The owner gives up on the blog to a large degree. Subsequent clean up happens and is rigorous - all bad links are pretty much removed and the remaining elements are disavowed. (90% of it is actually gone by now). Penguin 3.0 comes and no recovery at all. Nothing. If anything it gets worse and the once strong blog is now losing traction. Events R Us starts to do really well in search for exactly the same terms that Fantastic Events used to do well for. In particular one page ranks for exactly the same keywords and in exactly the same position (#1) as what was believed to be the primary traffic driver on the Fantastic Events site. It is almost like they exchanged positions and Events R Us went from nowhere to a strong footing with some national and local keywords and Fantastic Events fell from grace. A new website is built. All content is refreshed and bought up to date. Some light investment back in the blog. Some light link building is done around digital PR and infographics. Some initial movement in the right direction but overall this did not move the dial. Certain pages on the site that used to rank are nowhere - looks very much like a page level / keyword level penguin penalty. These same pages rank great, often first on the competitor site (an exchange of positions to some extent). Advice from myself and other esteemed consultants was to clean up, build some good links and wait for Penguin 4.0 to remove that eventuality. Also that the address issue could be causing some local SEO issue where Google believes the two businesses are one and has somehow merged the two with some local SEO filter or some such (same business with multiple websites at same address). Penguin 4.0 comes along and no improvements. Events R us sit pretty. Feeling is that the local issue must play a part here now that Penguin should be eliminated due to the extensive link clean up etc and there must now be some action to resolve this address / local issue. Issues low quality links - but cleaned up 100% now. same business name and address as fathers business initially older business copied the structure and content of newer business moved to same address as older more established business with very similar content older business now seems to have taken all the exact keywords and positions the newer business used to occupy Penguin 4.0 and no resolution. Local SEO issue seemingly remains Summary So we are left in a difficult position. The business does not want to move. But if there is some filtering or merging going on here then how can we get around this? The client is likely collateral damage to an algorithmic component designed to stop single businesses having multiple websites. I know there are reports of this happening but I have never seen such a thing for an innocent business like this but the nature of the address (two separate barns on a gated farm) and the history and similarities between the businesses makes this difficult. Things are somewhat desperate though - a move has to be made now. Even if that is a physical one. The client has considered a virtual address to take that variable out the picture but I have advised caution. I am even cautious about a change in physical address. Google has a long memory. If such a move was made at considerable expense would it help or would the other business retain Is the best option a new start? New brand, address, website, services etc - cut all ties with the historic Fantastic Events brand and by association the Events R Us brand. This is not a recommendation I can quickly or easily make so would be really interested to hear the feedback on anyone who has come across such a multi faceted and complex issue before. This is a tough one. We know what we are doing on the local front. We know what we are doing on the Penguin front. We know how to build links and authority. We are doing this work of the clock to help a long term friend / client get back to where they really deserve to be. The history is not spotty clean but the good work and effort far outway a short spell building dodgy links several years ago now. As an SEO consultant I don't want to advise for the company to rebrand and move offices at considerable expense but whilst I have a theoretical understanding of the issue how can we prove it and be sure this is the best possible advice? Thanks folks - hope this at least makes for interesting reading. This is something of an edge case. A good business likely caught up in a filter designed to stop abuse. Cheers
Local Listings | | Marcus_Miller
Marcus1 -
Homepage not indexed - seems to defy explanation
Hey folks Hoping to get some more eyes on a specific problem I am seeing with a clients site. Site: http:www.ukjuicers.com We have checked everything we can think of and the usual suspects here are not present: Canonical URL is in place Site is shown as indexed in search console No Crawl, DNS, Connectivity or server errors No robots.txt blocking - verified in search console No robots meta tags or directives Fetch as Google works Fetch & render works site command returns all other pages info command does not return the homepage homepage is cached and cache has been updated since this issue started: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ukjuicers.com homepage is indexed in yahoo and Bing all variations redirect to the www.ukjuicers.com domain (.co.uk, .com, www, sans www etc) The only issue I found after some extensive digging was some issues with the HTTP and HTTPS versions of the site both being available and both specifying the canonical version as themselves. So, http site used canonicals with http and https site used canonicals with https. So, a conflict there with the canonical exacerbating the problem it is there to solve. The HTTPS site is not indexed though and we have set this up in webmaster tools and now the web developer has set redirects to ensure all versions even the https now 301 redirect to the http://www.ukjuicers.com page so these canonical issues have been ironed out. But... it's still not indexing the homepage. The practical implications of this are quite scary - the site used to be somewhere between 1st and 4th for keywords like 'juicers', 'juicer' etc. Now they are bottom of page 1 or top of page 2 with an internal page. They were jostling with the big boys (amazon, argos, john lewis etc) but now they are right at the bottom of the second page. It's a strange one - i have seen all manor of technical problems over the years but this one seems to defy sensible explanation. The next step is to do a full technical SEO audit of the site but I am always of the opinion that with many eyes all bugs are shallow so if anyone has any input or experience with odd indexation problems like this would love to get your input. Cheers
Technical SEO | | Marcus_Miller
Marcus0 -
Spacing after list items in Q&A
Hey Moz The Q&A interface lacks any spacing after a HTML list item so it makes things look a bit messy. It looks right when being edited but wrong when posted so. example list more list list keeps going Paragraph after bullet list with no space. example list more list list keeps going Paragraph after number list with no space. Any chance of fixing that? It will make posts more readable and satisfy those of us fussy enough to go back in and edit posts so they are laid out correctly. (Sorry, I am English, I can't help myself). Cheers!
Moz Pro | | Marcus_Miller
Marcus1 -
One site, one location, multiple languages - best approach?
Hey folks, Has anyone created a multilingual site targeted at a single location? I have a site that I need to create which is targeting users in Spain. There are going to need to be English and Spanish versions of the text. My thoughts would be to handle it this way: 1. Geolocate the entire site to spain 2. Have the english content in a folder /en/ 3. Have the spanish content in a folder /es/ As far as I am aware the same content in another language is not considered duplicate content and Google should handle folks searching in spanish or english and show them the correct landing page. Sounds easy enough in principle but I also have these other options to seemingly solidify the approach: 4. Add: rel="alternate" hreflang="x" (3) 5. Add language information to a sitemap (4) Again, none of that seems terribly difficult but would welcome any feedback and particularly experience of multilingual sites targeting a single location. Thanks all Marcus References and info 1. Multi Regional:
On-Page Optimization | | Marcus_Miller
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html 2. Multi Language:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/how-to-start-multilingual-site.html 3. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 4. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=26208650 -
Stolen Content and a Panda Penalty
Hey Folks Question for those folks that have spent some time helping people with the recent penalties and the like. I have a client who has a clear Panda Penalty, huge drop in traffic on the initial Panda date and a further drop on the second date. Much smaller incremental drops on subsequent recent updates as well. From digging in it seems fairly cut and dry - copyscape shows another 250 or so sites with content from this site and there are nearly 2000 external URLs with duplicate content across these sites. We are talking complete, shameless copies of all of the text, sometimes the images as well. The client claims the content is all 100% unique and is his content and that the other blogs must have stolen his content resulting in the penalty - which, if it is true, and I have no reason to suspect otherwise, kind of sucks. Now, many moons ago, way before Penguin or Panda (maybe around 2006) I had a client that had suddenly lost all traffic and their historical rankings. No funny business, it was a small company, had been online since around 2000 and they were pretty much the first of their kind and always did very well from organic search. As it turned out, the content from the site had not really changed since it was set up and as lots of companies had sprung up offering a similar service they had seen their content copied wholesale, across many sites, all over the world. We attempted to contact many of these sites and got some results but many were just old, abandoned copy cat sites on advert supported hosting that had ceased to trade so we maybe got rid of about 20%. Well, in the end we just decided to rewrite the content, we did this and sure enough, the site bounced back to it's previous standing and has been pretty much there ever since. Now that was kind of easy, the site had maybe 20 pages, and it needed a sprucing up but in this case the site has around 500 pages so doing a rewrite is not going to be so easy. Problem is, I don't see removal requests being particularly successful either. So, I see the options and steps as being. Contact all the sites and request the removal of the content use the Google content removal facility:
Content Development | | Marcus_Miller
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals File a DMCA takedown for anything remaining Report Scraped Pages to Google:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGM4TXhIOFd3c1hZR2NHUDN1NmllU0E6MQ&ndplr=1 Submit a spam report for all sites involved ? Submit a reconsideration request to let Google know what we have been doing (unlikely In a nutshell, do everything we can to get this content removed and then documenting this to Google in the hope we catch hold of someone who hears our plight. Interestingly enough, this is a sensitive one, so no URL but I would welcome any thoughts or experiences any of you may have had with similar problems. There is a little extra info here from Matt Cutts + Barry Schwartz that kind of tallies with my approach above but would really like to hear any feedback. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-stolen-content-13243.html Cheers all Marcus0 -
A Simple(ish) Q&A Improvement
Hey Roger, In the posting etiquette it states that users should 'find out if someone has already posted your question before adding it' but we all know that is never really going to happen. So, we tend to see the same questions asked again and again when there are already top class answers in the Q&A. So, could you not implement some kind of suggested answer system? So, user posts a question, you analyse it, list potential answers that may provide the answer based on the content of the question itself. If nothing matches, the user can then go on to post the question but in many cases, they would get a top notch answer instantly. I have seen this on other sites and it would certainly cut down on the amount of duplicated questions and the suggested answers could all be hand picked to some extent (good answers, lots of thumbs up etc). So, the Q&A would have less duplication and users would get directed to the best possible answers for a given question in a shorter time frame. Good for those that do the answering, good for the people who have questions - everyone is happy. Just a thought, my tuppence, 5 cents, etc. 🙂 Marcus
Moz Pro | | Marcus_Miller2 -
Link Placement and Trust
Hey all I am looking at a new SEO campaign and am just starting to have a look at the competition and their links. This is a client in the website design industry who operates in a given city in the UK. Taking a quick look, the competition seems well established and there is plenty of companies ranking on the first page for all of the key terms. When I start to dig a little deeper though it gets a little more interesting and this maybe relatively unique to this industry but I think it also applies to spam links and any company that supplies white label website based services. Basically, the competition have lots of links. I have reviewed the top 10 competing sites across various terms and there is no shortage of links and lots of anchor text variations. Here is the stats from open site explorer for the one site that commonly comes up again and again. Page Level 61 - Page Authority 6.78 - mozRank 6.13 - mozTrust 30,144 - Total Links 30,064 - External Followed Links 33 - Internal Followed Links 325 - Linking Root Domains Domain Level 53 - Domain Authority 5.13 - Domain mozRank 5.10 - Domain mozTrust 47,969 - Total Links 44,788 - External Followed Links So, this gives us lots of nice metrics and the new deep analysis tool in keyword research easily allows us to get some more data on what exactly is driving the ranking of this site and the others who all rank in a similar way. Link Quality This is where it gets a bit more interesting and this applies to all the sites in the first ten results for the various keywords we are interested in (general keywords for the homepage at this stage). The links are primarily domain wide and in the footer. They are things like: website designed by x
Link Building | | Marcus_Miller
web design by x
website design
website design in <area name="">
<area name=""> website design
(you get the picture) Quality vs Quantity So, whilst the competitors have lots of links, from a reasonable number of sites, they are pretty much all site wide footer links. This is fairly clear when we look at total links 30,000 from only 300 sites. My thinking here is that the quality of these links is not that great: poorly positioned on the page domain wide narrow anchor text and in some cases no 'click to visit' type links Content These sites are pretty much all dull as hell. Service pages, clients, jobs done, maybe a case study but really, nothing I would really class as interesting (hence only links from their clients sites hey). So, my question is Has anyone built a campaign with quality vs quantity? Do you have any tips, experience or feedback? Our strategy will be built around great content, promotion of that content and much more (not explored that) but at the foundation it will be a content and promotion strategy. Really, if I break it down, I am looking at the above as 300 links, from the footers of various sites. If we were to get 300 links from quality sources and then bulk it out with some similar footer style links from the clients clients (they are not 100% keen on this so we may not go that route yet) then... these established big boys really should not be too difficult to topple in my mind given enough time, content and effort. What are your thoughts people? Anyone conducted a quality vs quantity campaign like this? Any feedback? Cheers
Marcus P.S. SEOMoz - is there any chance that a link trust or quality metric could be built into the tools at some point in the future as sheer volume, is not always the best indicator and as times goes on I would imagine that to be even more true.0 -
Campaign Manager - Keyword Grouping
Hey, I was just thinking that it would be useful to be able to group keywords by page or some other factor in the campaign monitor keyword rank checking tool (I am sure it's called something better than that). Maybe it's just me, but I am struggling a little with this for relatively smaller sites so if I could tag each keyword and filter / group them by the tag it would be another useful tool for my seo utility belt. Fairly painless to implement as well I would imagine. 1. Create tags 2. assign tags to keywords with a drop down (optional) Would be a useful tool when exporting data to group by tag etc. Just a thought. 🙂 Marcus
Moz Pro | | Marcus_Miller1 -
Unanswered Questions
Hey SEOMoz I have been spending a bit of time in the Q&A of late and have noticed lots of questions never get answered. I also had a question of my own that I left open for ages and I figured it maybe a good idea to add some kind of email nag or on screen notification for people to close old questions. There are some that have had plenty of answers but that either never get closed & really, it takes away from the fun of participating if things are never closed off & searching shows the same old tired, answerd but not closed questions lingering around like a bad smell. 🙂 Not really a question, but a little tweak suggestion. 🙂 Cheers
Moz Pro | | Marcus_Miller
Marcus0 -
Article Marketing - still valid if done right?
Much of the work I do tends to be on a lot of small to medium sized company websites, the kind of businesses that do not have thousands of pounds to spend or the budgets to create reems of quality content. That said, neither do the competition so one approach that has worked well in the past has been article marketing. The approach would usually be to develop some relevant content for the site itself, even if that is just a range of service type landing pages or answers to relevant customer problems and then build links from the article marketing sites (primarily ezinearticles.com). An average approach would be to write articles that are relevant to the individual services, for instance, problems that can be solved by the service and then to link these articles back to the service pages with the desired keywords in the anchor text. Another approach has been to develop an article with the client that solves a common customer problem for their own site and then to write a few summarised versions of the article for the article marketing sites. Again, with the intention of gathering traffic, giving a basic answer and linking back to the main article with the main keywords we wish to rank this page for. For smaller sites serving a fairly tight geographic area this approach, combined with submission to some quality directories (local and niche) has been a strong combo historically. I know there is a lot of junk on the article marketing sites and there could be negative affects from posting loads of pointless articles but using them properly, to broaden the net, provide answers (albeit summarised) and generate links - is this still a valid approach post the Google Farmers update? It may be interesting to see how the article sites like ezine have to tighten up the editorial process now and if the content becomes better across the board, it may possibly strengthen this approach over time. Do any of you still use article marketing as part of your SEO campaigns? If so, what are your strategies and where do you use? Would love to hear your thoughts folks. Marcus
Link Building | | Marcus_Miller0