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Hi Lara,

Sorry for the delay.

You're right that the string inverter page definitely has more than 12 internal links.  Moz seems to have picked up on the changes now, because OSE shows 50 now.  However, even that may not really be all of them because Moz's index was already small, and Rand said it might be getting even smaller soon - see http://moz.com/community/q/what-s-the-story-on-mozscape-updates

Hope that helps!

Mark

Hi Glen,

I don't have any specific insight regarding Venezuela, however a few notes:

1. In general, Analytics data is viewed in the industry as MUCH more accurate than Webmaster Tools data.  If Analytics is implemented correctly (I'd start by checking this with the Google Tag Assistant plugin for Chrome), then I'd simply assume an error in WMT reporting unless I saw other evidence that might convince me that WMT is correct.

2. I think you may have misunderstood how secure search works.  Secure search doesn't mean that the visits aren't tracking, it just means that you won't get keyword data for those visits in Analytics.  If your hypothesis that you have way more visibility in Venezuela is correct, that would show in Analytics.

Hope this helps! Feel free to message me if you have any other questions

Mark

Hi George,

When I search "Withdrawal Ease", I see your site ranked second behind http://www.drugs.com/forum/need-talk/has-anybody-tried-opiate-withdrawal-ease-56163.html (though you do have sitelinks for some of what Google perceived to be your main pages).

Looking into it, the reason for this appears to be that drugs.com is a very powerful domain with a page explicitly about your product. One reason it appeared now may be because the thread recently came alive again with 2 new posts at the end of March, and Google now sees it as timely and important information for users.

Additionally, your screenshot shows that time spent downloading pages has almost doubled in recent weeks, leading to a decrease in kilobytes downloaded and thus pages crawled per day.  I might try to optimize your caching settings to make sure that Googlebot's crawling resources are better spent on your site.

Feel free to message me with any questions,

Mark

Hi Gary,

While I wouldn't advise dabbling in black hat (the things you mention are all against Google's guidelines), my experience from cleaning up other SEOs' messes has always been that doing things like this won't get you in trouble if you do it right.

2 factors to keep in mind:

1. Don't do it at scale.  1 Sponsored Post may help, but if you try to do 100 of them, you're creating a clear pattern that Google will pick up on sooner or later.

2. Don't do this on sites where they disclose that the post was sponsored (either on the post itself or on an "advertise with us" page.  Google can crawl that text and thus knows right away to discount those links.

Again, this is ALL black hat, but if done right in the past, I wouldn't even disavow because the link may actually be providing value.

Let me know if you'd like to discuss further!

Mark

Hi Marty,

I don't think this will hurt your SEO, but I'd think of this more in terms of user experience and your goals for the website.

For instance, if the site is primarily an ecommerce site, perhaps driving traffic from the money pages to the blog is not advisable.  On the other hand, if brand awareness and the blog are a big part of your overall strategy, then maybe driving traffic to recent posts makes more sense.

For user experience, recent posts may not be relevant to all pages like you mentioned, so you have to make a judgement call regarding how many pages they will provide value and how valuable they will be on those pages vs how much value they take away on other pages where they aren't as relevant.

Make sense?  Feel free to message me with any other questions

Mark

Like Patrick said, schema is still important in general.  However, since video snippets for private sites (all but YouTube, Vimeo, etc) died a while back, it might not be worth your while to pursue implementing this markup.  I might focus my efforts elsewhere (beefing up content, building quality links, etc) in order to get the best results from my work.

Hi Justin,

Both PA & DA are based off of the links that Moz's link index detects to your site.  Do the other two domains have as many links as the .co.nz site?  If not, that's why.  If so, it probably just means that Moz's index hasn't crawled the other sites' links yet.

Hope this helps!

Ari

I agree with Calin.  Just a canonical would not be ideal because Google is not good at removing things from the index without a redirect or an explicit request in Webmaster Tools.  Canonicals don't stack up in this regard.

Homepage authority is almost always going to be better than inner page authority.  That just has to do with natural linking behavior.

From Google's perspective, they want to show the most relevant page to the search.  Presumably, since the inner page has more of the relevant keywords in its URL, Google is saying it would rather send people there.

I tend to think something bad must be happening here since it's been almost two months.  If it's just re-indexing, it should have been over long ago.

My question to you - why do you want to blog about candles? Is this as a hobby, passion, or is this a method of bringing in customers to ecommerce site. You have to look at your goals for blogging - branding? Customer acquisition? Positioning yourself in the industry as an expert?

If customer acquisition is important to you, I'd recommend building the blog on the site itself, in a folder called /blog - this way, as an expert in your niche, you've positioned yourself in that manner, and people will want to buy from you due to your expertise.

From an SEO perspective, your high quality blog should naturally gain links, and can certainly be promoted through outreach and gather links in that way. This will help your ecommerce site's visibility and reach in the search engines, and will strengthen the domain as a whole. You don't get this if you blog offsite on a different domain - you won't be gaining this link strength for your site, which should be an important consideration.

Mark

I'd go with Business Name, because it's more likely to be searched.  Searchers like to see content that matches their exact query.

Also, personally I hate when people use copyright / trademark annotation in copy when they don't have to.  Others may disagree, that's just me!

Well, from what everyone is writing about Penguin, it's an algorithmic update. Meaning you need to fix whatever issues are there, wait for the algorithm to process again, and then if you've solved the issues, you should theoretically restore the rankings. That's much easier said than done. You don't know exactly what the issues are, and we don't know when the algo will process again.

I think the timeline you have set is highly unrealistic and you should aim to set expectations with the client that this process can very well take much longer. If this previous SEO company built problematic links, I think you'll have to deal with them. I don't think pointing good links into the site will get rid of the issue with the problematic links and clear you of the algo. I think you're going to have to go through the tedious work of cleaning things up. The good news is that a bunch of people have written about what to look for. Check in WMT tools for sitewide links, check your anchor text pointing into the site. Export your external links from OSE and then upload them to Linkl Detective- http://linkdetective.com/- let it do the hard work for you, classify a lot of the links, and then you need to go through the process of trying to clean things up, doing as much as you can, and then submit a reinclusion request (may help, may not), hoping Google will discard the other links.

Good luck - really try to demonstrate to your client the complexity of the process and extend the timeframe of the project - that's my ultimate recommendation

You can absolutely outrank them, but you are starting out behind.  Despite the EMD update, EMD's do still have some advantages from my experience.  Specifically, they can get more keyword rich anchor text links "naturally" because people tend to link using the site name.

That said, if you have better on-page SEO or significantly more links than the EMD you're competing with, you should ultimately come out ahead.

You can add noindex to the whole subdomain, and then wait for the crawlers to remove it.

Or you can register the subdomain with webmaster tools, block the subdomain via the robots.txt with a general Disallow: / for the entire subdomain, and then use the URL removal tool in Webmaster Tools to remove the subdomain via robots.txt. Just a robots.txt block won't work - it won't remove the pages, it'll just prevent them from being crawled again.

In your case, I would probably go the route of the robots.txt / url removal tool. This will work to remove the pages from Google. Once this has happened, I would use the noindex tag on the whole subdomain and remove the robots.txt block - this way, all search engines should not index the page / will remove it from their index.

Mark

Some of what you're doing sounds ok, but I'd definitely stay away from the article spinners and the article directories. In short, don't pollute the web with crappy content that no human would ever read - Google is catching on more and  more and punishing those who do.

For link building ideas and tactics, Jon Cooper recently put together an awesome post of tactics - http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies - be sure to check that out.

Also, I'd focus on making onsite improvements - make sure your titles and meta are written well, aren't keyword stuffed. That your internal linking is solid and your pages are crawlable and configured properly. Try to improve on things like site speed, and markup your data using schema.

Bottom line is - try to create awesome pieces of content for your sites, and build relationships with others to market them and spread publicity.

Hope this helps

Mark

I don't think this should be counted as a bounce, because the visitor converted by filling out the form, but analytics may track it as a bounce, because they left after one page and the form submission may not be counted. I would trigger the form to fire an event upon successful completion, the event by default should count as an interaction and thus not as a bounce on the site.

See this resource here from Google Analytics - https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide#non-interaction

Particularly, this sentence - they're talking here about the default consideration of events, as long you don't specify it's a non-interaction event - "a single-page session on a page that includes event tracking will not be counted as a bounce if the visitor also triggers the event during the same session."

So set up an event to capture form submission, and this should solve your one page visit/form submission/bounce rate quandary.

Good luck,

Mark

Why not write the content normally and use css to style the text to force lowercase - this way it shows up in the engines and to other crawlers as readable and normal text, while it displays in the browser to humans as lowercase? that's what I would do

Mark

Ok - so a few things - I'm not worried about the sitemaps - those aren't a big deal (should be fixed, but not first priority).

In my eyes, you need to do 2 things pronto:

1 - remove the old.toughtimeslawyer subdomain - do this by blocking the subdomain via the subdomain's robots.txt - do a disallow: / in the robots file, and then go into the webmaster tools for the subdomain (which you should set up if you haven't already), and use the URL removal tool to remove the subdomain from Google. Once this is done, and the subdomain is no longer indexed, add a noindex meta tag to all pages and remove the robots.txt block - this should get rid of the subdomain permanently from the index.

2 - you need to get a handle on the 301 redirects - crawl your current site structure, and redirect any old URLs to the new URLs - you should keep a close eye on the 404 errors and soft 404 errors sections in Google Webmaster Tools, and make sure to fix those errors as they pop up. This can be time consuming, but it's key. Set up a redirection plugin for your wordpress - the redirection plugin can also track 404 errors and then you can tell them where they should redirect. While this should have been done in advance and is key to any properly planned and organized site migration, you can do this after the fact and try to catch as many of these 404s as well. I'd also look at your inbound links from OSE or some other tool, and make sure those pages are redirected to their proper location, so you preserve the inbound link juice.

These are the key things in my mind you should do according to your post. Good luck!

You'll want to configure a custom variable at a session level - you need to have your site fire the custom variable when users log in or are logged in in their sessions, and then once you have this configured, you can look at logged in vs non logged in behavior and all of the other goodies analytics provides.

You should refer to this information here - https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/gaTrackingCustomVariables#examples

It's not just a quick change in analytics, but will require some dev work on your end to make this work, but it should solve your questions and give you new insightful data that you can action to improve your site and your users' experience on it, so I would recommend doing it.

Good luck,

Mark