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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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
Baron,
I believe what Michael meant (correct me if I'm wrong Michael), is that OSE runs off of Moz's crawler. If there crawler hasn't come across your YT and G+ pages, then they wouldn't have picked up the links to your site from those pages either.
Either way, I assure you that Google knows about those links due to their more robust crawling ability and the fact that they own both of those products
I agree with Ryan. The one thing to consider is whether redirects will help or hurt your site. Even websites that are appropriately redirected lose some link equity in the process. See Matt Cutts' video here which says that roughly 10-15% of PageRank is lost through redirects and outgoing links. Therefore, if the site has existed using the format domain.com/post-name for a long time and attracted links to those URLs, then the small benefit you get from redirecting to domain.com/keyword/post-name may be outweighed by the natural loss of link equity.
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!
Two things:
if you search for "site:digitalcameragear.com.au", you'll see the title as you entered it for the camera filters page. Not sure why it's showing up differently for your search. At first, I thought it was taking some content from the page, but the word "range" doesn't appear on the page anywhere. Very strange. As others said, perhaps in an incognito window it shows up normally.
Totally unrelated: the site seems to have issues with duplicate content on http://www.digitalcameragear.com.au/ and http://digitalcameragear.com.au/ (without www). There are no canonical tags, so you should either add canonical tags or redirect one version to the corresponding version across the site.
I'm actually not totally shocked by that. Google's results are getting more personalized by the day. It looks like Perfect Profiles' two office locations are both quite far from Manchester. It makes sense to me that they rank lower in locations that are further away.
Regarding B), one thing to consider is whether redirects will help or hurt your site. Even websites that are appropriately redirected lose some link equity in the process. See Matt Cutts' video here which says that roughly 10-15% of PageRank is lost through redirects and outgoing links. Therefore, if the site has existed using the format domain.com/post-name for a long time and attracted links to those URLs, then the small benefit you get from adding the keyword to the URL may be outweighed by the natural loss of link equity.
For C), an introductory blurb could help, but make it good quality content, not just for keywords. Especially since this text will push down the actual blog posts, it needs to be worthwhile for people to read or it could increase bounce rate.
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.
I agree with everything besides for the authorship markup bit. Authorship markup is not being tracked by Google anymore - see http://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google-authorship-201975.
That said, the larger point about being the first content to go up is a good one. If we can all figure out where the original is from, assume that Google can too.
Short answer: if your data is indeed out of date, then competitive analysis based on that data isn't going to be as useful as it could be.
However, it could be that the report is just giving you different data than the data you're looking for. Can you post what report you're using and the site you're looking at so we can take a deeper look?
In addition to what Becki said (all correct), I feel like it's important to note 2 other things:
Even websites that are appropriately redirected, lose some link equity in the process. See Matt Cutts' video here which says that roughly 10-15% of PageRank is lost through redirects and outgoing links.
With regard to the blog problems, I'm wondering if perhaps the blog being down for 4-5 weeks had something to do with it. If there were historically some links pointing to the blog that were boosting the site, those pages 404ing would effectively remove the links from the link graph.
Still, it seems there's some sort of penalty here because you mentioned them not even ranking for the brand name anymore. I've never seen that unless there was a penalty. Have you checked Google Webmaster Tools' manual action viewer?
With lack of information, you should certainly ask for references, portfolio of work, etc. Have them provide you with a basic outline of what they recommend and how they are going to move forward, and get a second opinion.
In the end of the day, find someone you trust and you believe you can rely on them, from word of mouth, reputation, and references. It's like going to a doctor, you don't know the information yourself, but you know you have someone you can rely on due to their expertise.
I would also recommend getting a basic knowledge of SEO - you can read the beginners guide here on Moz. There are lots of great resources to get an elementary understanding so you'll be more educated and capable of guiding the SEO company you work with.
If all else fails, take some of their recommendations and ask here on the forum or on similar sites what the community thinks about the recommendations and advice you've received.
Good luck!
If none of these pages are indexed, you can block them via robots.txt. But if someone else links to a search page from somewhere on the web, google might include the url in the index, and then it'll just be a blank entry, as they can't crawl the page and see not to index it, as it's blocked via robots.txt.
Blocking the pages via robots.txt prevents the spiders from reaching those pages. It doesn't remove those pages from the index if they are already there, it just prevents the bots from getting to them.
If you want these pages removed from your index, and not to impact the size of your index in the search engines, ideally you remove them with the noindex tag.
Can you give us the URL of the site in question to take a peek ourselves - I'm know rather curious about what is going on here
Other tools to do this also, but they aren't cheap, like SEM Rush, Searchmetrics, etc.
Tom Anthony had written a great blog post here on Moz a while back with a Google doc for doing this, but I'm not sure it's working anymore - you can check here
Following what Daniel suggested, you should check your links and mentions in Open Site Explorer and Fresh Web Explorer, and check if any anchor text that seems suspicious is popping up. I would start there.
You can also go to your analytics, and check the referring sites - do a glance at the domains, and see who is sending traffic to you, and do any of the domains sending traffic to you seem like a good target to check.
Moving further, you can also use Google advanced search operators to find out who is talking about you on the web - search for your brand name, with -site:yourbrand.com query as well. This may find someone talking about your brand but not on your site that you weren't expecting. But I would start with the backlink tools available to you and check there. It may be easier to run an export of your backlinks, and then filter for relevant anchor texts. I always prefer to do this type of analysis in Excel - much easier and quicker to do manually.
Good luck, and let us know what the culprit was in the end.
Sincerely,
Mark
You can check the cached version of that page to see what they have in the cache - is it a recent version of the page or something pretty old, and they haven't reindexed that page in a while.
Either way, I think these notices are more recommendations and helpful tidbits they think will assist webmasters than crucial information that will influence rankings. So if the message isn't relevant anymore, I would ignore it and move on building a great website for your visitors!
Hi,
I work with a client who has a large affiliate network pointing to their domain which is a large part of their inbound marketing strategy. All of these links point to a subdomain of affiliates.example.com, which then redirects the links through a 301 redirect to the relevant target page for the link. These links have been showing up in Webmaster Tools as top linking domains and also in the latest downloaded links reports. To follow guidelines and ensure that these links aren't counted by Google for either positive or negative impact on the site, we have added a block on the robots.txt of the affiliates.example.com subdomain, blocking search engines from crawling the full subddomain. The robots.txt file is the following code:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
We have authenticated the subdomain with Google Webmaster Tools and made certain that Google can reach and read the robots.txt file. We know they are being blocked from reading the affiliates subdomain. However, we added this affiliates subdomain block a few weeks ago to the robots.txt, but links are still showing up in the latest downloads report as first being discovered after we added the block. It's been a few weeks already, and we want to make sure that the block was implemented properly and that these links aren't being used to negatively impact the site. Any suggestions or clarification would be helpful - if the subdomain is being blocked for the search engines, why are the search engines following the links and reporting them in the www.example.com subdomain GWMT account as latest links. And if the block is implemented properly, will the total number of links pointing to our site as reported in the links to your site section be reduced, or does this not have an impact on that figure?From a development standpoint, it's a much easier fix for us to adjust the robots.txt file than to change the affiliate linking connection from a 301 to a 302, which is why we decided to go with this option.Any help you can offer will be greatly appreciated.Thanks,Mark
Hi,
From an SEO standpoint, ideally you should be implementing the hreflang tag - it indicates to the search engines not just the language of the page, but the relationship between the pages on the site in the different languages. It tells the search engines these pages are alternate translations of one another, and you should show the right page for the person in their correct language.
You can learn more about the hreflang tag from Google directly:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
I would ook to implement this first.
Good luck,
Mark
You can gather a list of domains and backlinks to this site that you think are spam and influencing this site's rankings unnaturally and then submit a spam report. This can help to speed up the process.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&pli=1
Hi Immanuel,
While I can't comment on the site in question and their backlink profile because you haIt ven't shared it, what I can tell you is a bit more information about weekendpost, the site you did share as one of the sites in this company's backlink profile. Looking at a random site with articles built for link building purposes, it is pretty rare that you find a site like this with a PR of 5 in this day and age. Many of these were smacked by Google in the various updates and penalties, with public PR often reduced as a public indication of this site's devaluation. However, the site you shared has a toolbar PR of 5 and a homepage authority of 57, clearly a stronger site than your usual hastily built article spam site.
Looking closer into the history of the site using the Wayback Machine, you can see that this site was once an actual legitimate site and source of weekend news. It started accruing links in 2011, and this is where much of the site's strength comes from. At some point the domain was likely dropped and picked up and converted to an article site for links. Whois further signifies that there was a change in registration of the site with 1 drop.
Do I think Google will eventually catch up with this site and devalue its links if they haven't already? Certainly. But in the short term, links from this site may be boosting up other sites. I don't think this is a good long term solution, but I can see the benefit from links from a strong site (according to metrics at least) like this in the short term.
Mark
Hi Paul,
You can disavow the entire blogspot domain, but you may have some good links in there from legitimate blogs on blogspot. I would start first with looking at the links provided to you in webmaster tools. Download the list, filter for blogspot subdomains, and then manually review each of these subdomains. Anything you think in there that should be removed, try finding a contact email of the person who set up the subdomain - if you find it, great and contact them for cleanup. If not, just add it to the disavow list.
I would also do this for other potential spammy large sites that allow you to set up sites on a subdomain, like wordpress.com. I would look closely at those subdomains and decide what you want to cleanup and disavow.
Good luck,
Mark
The form could trigger a google analytics event on successful submission without having to take you to a confirmation page. You often have ajax forms that don't load a new page, and you can track success of the form with a google analytics event and a not a pageview of a thank you page. A very popular solution that works this way on Wordpress is Contact Form 7.
When your form "wipes the data" as you said and shows the customer the successful form submission, you can trigger a Google analytics event then.
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
A different tool, one not specifically built for SEO purposes but which can solve your problem is the Xenu Link Sleuth. I like screaming frog much better, it's just the free version is limited, whereas Xenu is free. Xenu Link Sleuth
Another free option you can try is the IIS Toolkit, which you can install in Windows - http://www.microsoft.com/web/seo
Good luck,
Mark
You don't need to modify your tracking code for ecommerce throughout the site. You need to set in Google Analytics in your profile settings that you want to track ecommerce. On your checkout page, if the system doesn't do it automatically, you need to pass the relevant parameters to analytics so they can get ecommerce data on the checkout page.
Edit - correction to what I wrote above, which was for the old version of analytics- see this info for ecommerce tracking with the new universal analytics code for developers published from google:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/ecommerce
Mark
Sure - you have urls that are being blocked by robots - you have this line in your robots.txt -
Disallow: /questions/search
It is thus preventing urls from within that folder, questions, which start with the word search from being crawled. What are you trying to accomplish with this block? If it's the folder search, within questions, it should be /questions/search/.
And the other warning is telling you these pages take a long time to load - check your server or these individual pages and see why that is taking so long.
As Saijo said above, the meta robots noindex tag is the way to go. When you block a folder via robots.txt, you prevent Google from visiting and crawling that folder and any content within it. If Google has already crawled the content, they won't remove the content from their index just if you block it with robots.txt. The old version they have of the page will be stored and saved in their index, and they just won't be able to show you an updated snippet of the page due to the robots.txt block.
To remove the pages from the index completely, you can do one of 2 things -
In general, I would recommend using the meta robots noindex directive over the robots.txt, because it should work for all search engines, and you won't have to go into webmaster tools for each one. You also will ensure that you don't accidentally block other urls.
From your example above, if you just blocked the folder /search/, a page that includes the word search in the url but isn't in the blocked folder shouldn't be blocked from the search engines because of that line - I would check in webmaster tools the robots.txt section, because it doesn't look to me, based on your robots.txt file, that any url with search in it should be blocked.
Good luck,
Mark
Not sure why this is growing recently, but when learning regex for Google Analytics with the awesome LunaMetrics regex guide, I remember coming across the need to write brand names for advanced segments and to cover the possibility of two words being written with or without a space. Don't remember exactly where I saw it, but since then I've been writing them this way (\s|+), if I were writing seomoz for a brand advanced segment, and wanted to cover seo moz and seomoz, I would do it seo(\s|+)?moz
Basically, the regex for a space is \s, but analytics sometimes treats spaces as +, so to cover your bases, you do it either with a \s or a +.
My point is, this has been around for a while - not sure why the sudden increase, but I know this has been around for quite a bit. Maybe try drilling down a bit and seeing if you can find a common denominator here about the traffic and what is causing it.
Mark
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
Hi Marc,
You've written out a very detailed question, and I think you are in the right direction with the disavow. You already stated how you have spent a significant amount of time on your link cleanup procedure, and have documented a lot of the work you have done and the outreach you've done to try and clean up your backlink profile created by your previous SEO. I would submit this to Google in your reconsideration request after doing the disavow - it can't hurt to submit the reconsideration request. But keep in mind, if you got hit by an algo penalty like Penguin and not manual action, the webspam team won't be able to remove the penalty. Only if the webspam team applied a manual penalty to your site or part of it will the reconsideration request help.
In terms of the disavow, as shared by the webspam team (Matt Cutts, Joh Mueller), take a machete to your problematic backlinks - http://www.seroundtable.com/google-disavow-machete-16844.html. If you find domains that have problematic links on them, instead of trying to disavow each page with probleatic links, use the domain: operator and disavow the whole domain/subdomain. Don't be precise and surgical, but use a machete on those problematic domains and links. Once this has happened, I'd see what happens with the rankings.
In terms of Google carrying over the penalty to your new .com domain due to brand association, I wouldn't worry about this. If you were in fact hit by an algorithmic penalty based on links, if the links remain pointing to the old domain, and you don't give the search engines indications that they should replace the old domain with the new one (301 redirects, change of URL via webmaster tools), there should be no reason the engines would pass over the links and the penalty to the new domain. I don't believe the algorithmic link penalty is based on your brand, but rather on the specific site and that site's backlink profile. So if you do start from scratch and don't 301 redirect to the new domain, you are in effect starting from scratch. You many not rank in the beginning, but that's not because the link penalty transferred over, but your site may not have enough link equity on its own to rank.
Either way, good luck with whichever path you choose - I personally hope the disavow helps you and you can salvage your current site, so you don't have to put all of the hard work and effort you put into your old site in the trash.
Good luck,
Mark
When you block a page or folder in robots.txt, it doesn't remove the page from the search engine's index, it just prevents them from recrawling the page. For pages/folders/sites that were never crawled by the search engines, robots.txt can prevent them from being crawled and read. But blocking pages already crawled by robots.txt will not be enough on its own to remove them from the index.
To remove this low quality content, you can do one of two things:
I usually recommend option number 1, because it works for multiple engines, doesn't require webmaster tools for each engine separately, and is easier to manage and a lot more customizable exactly which pages you want removed.
But you are on the right track with the sitemaps - don't include links to the no index pages in the sitemap.
Good luck,
Mark
I would also look into sorting the data by the metrics you want, and using weighted sort instead of the default. Weighted sort takes into account other metrics as well - so this way, when you sort by bounce rate, it doesn't just show you 100% bounce rate at the top, even if that page only has 1 view and so is skewed, but gives you a much better idea at pages that are performing poorly and actually getting visits.
You can read more about weighted sort here on the GA blog - http://analytics.blogspot.co.il/2010/08/introducing-weighted-sort.html
Hope this helps,
Mark
In Excel, you create the formula once in the first row, and then double click on the bottom right corner of the cell and it should populate the rest of the data in that column with that formula. It's called the fill handle - double click it and it will fill the whole column.
I created a pivot table for you based on a kw export I did from adwords - you could play around with it a bit more, but basically, it groups the terms into groups of competition, and then sorts keywords by highest local US volume. This sounds like what you were looking for - hopefully it helps. Here is a link to the Google doc in Drive - good luck and let me know if you need help replicating it.
Thomas's recommendation of the Distilled Excel for SEO guide is spot on - I love that tool.
Mark
You could try this create a pivot table organized by competition score, group the competition numbers into groups - ten groups separated by .1 - then within those groups place the keywords, and sort the keywords by largest to smallest search volume. If I get a chance to play around with it, I'll try to create something for you in Excel.
I'm a bit confused by your question, because aren't the two different metrics. Search volume just shows the amount of searches (albeit rounded off) for a query. Competition & Approximate CPC shows value of a keyword to advertisers - a term may have very few searches a month but a high CPC due to its value for advertisers - exact match of personal injury lawyer in miami may be low, but competition and approximate CPC may be very high due to the value of these leads for lawyers in the personal injury space.
So do you think there is a relationship between search volume and competition/value of a keyword?
Try going to the soft 404 errors that webmaster tools is reporting, and see the HTTP status code you're getting. If the status code being returned is a 200, you'll know you're getting a soft 404. You can check the status code with the moz bar, in the page analysis section, under the page attributes tab, if you scroll down to the bottom, you'll see the status code of the page.
You may also want to emend the file reference in your htaccess file to be relative and just do /404.htm, and not the full path - maybe that will help.
Mark