Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Looks great guys. Appears to be much speedier than before!

Hi Diane,

Yes, I would suggest adding the above code I suggested and customizing it to the page.

The rich snippet testing tool indicates that authorship is working for your page but there still must be something which is incorrect -

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.in2town.co.uk%2Ftrip-advisor%2Ftop-american-ski-resorts-for-over-50s&html=

Let me know how you get on,

Mark

Hi Diane,

• Apply Authorship markup for the person who has written the article.
• Apply publisher markup (your brand Google + page) to the homepage of the site.
• For the logo, just link it to the homepage. I'm not sure what you mean by text in regards this.

Best wishes,

Mark

Hi Diane,

I thought I wold jump in as no one else has so far. My suggestions are noted below -

• Apply Google + authorship markup to all of the articles on your site.

If we take the article you just linked to as an example, you can see that markup has no been applied to it.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.in2town.co.uk%2Ftrip-advisor%2Ftop-american-ski-resorts-for-over-50s&html=

If you can't find a suitable Joomla SEO plugin (apologies, my Joomla knowledge is poor so I can't recommend one), you need to add the below HTML to each article and tailor it.

| |

• I would also suggest improving the content a little bit. The title of the article is 'Top American ski resorts for over 50s, but the content of the article doesn't make it clear what the top resorts actually are. The body of the article would benefit greatly from more information about the resorts in a clear format, and possibly with added images.

• The alt text for the image seems a little spammy - 'skiing holiday ideas'. The alt text of an image should reflect what the image is about.

• Random suggestion, I find it strange that your logo doesn't link to the homepage

• The title tag of your site doesn't contain your brand name. Worth putting at the end of the title tag.

I could go a lot deeper but hopefully that's a starting point for you Diane.

Any more questions then just shout!

Best wishes,

Mark

Hi Alan,

I noticed this earlier today. We lost 25% of the +1's across each of our business pages. It seems to be a common problem at the moment and hopefully just a glitch.

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-plus-discuss/dBaF3946f2A

I'm remaining hopeful that this will be fixed as everything was fine yesterday.

Hope this helps,

Mark

Apologies - My linked source was a little outdated but it did indicate it would become more widely adapted

It's not surprising really. Yahoo uses Bing to pull in organic search results and has been doing so for quite a long time now.

http://searchengineland.com/yahoos-transition-to-bing-organic-results-complete-49228

It makes sense that you would be seeing the same results across both platforms.

If a keyword is ranking for poor quality content..then it's not a keyword worth having.

So for this reason, I would remove the comments. If they haven't already been picked up by Google's Panda update,  then expect it to happen shortly.

Even if you take a hit with rankings for these keywords, it's better disposing of the generic comments now, rather than them having a negative impact on your whole site in the future,

Hi  Mubashir,

I would suggest you begin by focusing on the on-page SEO first.

I'm not sure what level you're at in terms of your SEO knowledge but for a re-cap, the SEOMoz beginners guide to SEO is always great - http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Once you have the structure, content and on-page optimization correct, you can then consider who your audience is, where they can be found online and appropriate methods for putting your site in front of the right people.

With this in mind, you can then begin to build relationships with the influential people who will allow you to put your site in front of their audience.

Hi guys,

I'd appreciate any advice with this one.

At the moment I'm in the process of arranging a URL re-structure. I was wondering what the best way would be to track the performance of the old URLs against new ones?

We will be ammending the URLs for any new property pages which go live on our website but leaving the old URLs in play for any old properties listed. We're taking this approach for the moment so we can conduct analysis on the change.

It has been mentioned to me that placing a 'setvariable' in the code of pages with the old URLs and ones with the new URLs would be a way of tracking performance. However, my knowledge in this area is a little bit grey.

Any advice?

Cheers,

Mark

My instant reaction to looking at that website is that it's a very poor quality directory site.

It looks like a paid directory and a low quality one.

I struggle to understand why people chose to pay for these. They hold no weight anymore.

What a waste of money. Avoid.

A lifetime link? You'll maybe soon have to pay extra money to get the link back off of that site.

This type of directory is no longer effective at all. I would highly suggest keeping your money.

I'd still be slightly cautious. That blog post is two years old. A lot has changed in two years about the success of such tools.

I would still highly suggest you follow the tips in that other article and earn the link.

Hi there,

Nope, I haven't heard of it and I'd highly suggest you stay away from it.

You need to do this all manually.

Identify the blogs you wish to be on. Build that relationship. Build that trust. Earn the link.

An excellent article was posted here yesterday - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-blogger-outreach-equation

I dropped a comment on it as well. I'd suggest you read the article and take note of the points. Forget about using anything that makes things easy.

I hope this helps. Need any other help then just shout.

Mark

Hi Arlene,

I find this hard to understand though. If you added a product right this minute, would the duplicate site have the same product listed within a matter of minutes?

What I've found is that any site that goes to such lengths is typically a competitor wishing to go down the black hat route of trying to have your website penalized. I have witnessed this and it wasn't pleasant. Thankfully we were able to have the duplicate site shut down within 24 hours.

I would stress how urgent this is to you. This site needs to be deleted immediately.

Hi there,

I think is a lot more serious than using the Disavow tool. They have an exact duplicate copy of your website. This is a major concern.

You need to file a DMCA takedown request.

It's also worth reading this - http://support.google.com/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1386831

You can contact Google - dmca-agent@google.com

I would suggest you make this a priority.

Hope this helps,

Mark

Hi Amreen,

When was the link added to the Yahoo Directory?

No problem Nadejda, I'm glad to help

Hi Nadejda,

Do you mean your content has been stolen? Sorry, I may be misunderstanding you.

My post from another thread -

If you wish to remove poor quality backlinks -

Use tools such as Ahrefs, OpenSiteExplorer, MajesticSEO and Google Webmaster Tools to identify the poor quality backlinks.

• Contact the relevant website with a suitable email and request the link be removed
• If no response after a week or two, try them again with another email, or via Twitter, Facebook etc
• If every attempt has failed to contact them, still note it down in a spreadsheet for future reference.
• Then, consider using the Disavow tool from Google but **only **if all other methods of contacting these sites fail.
• Unless you have a warning within Webmaster Tools about unnatural links, you won't need to do a re-consideration request. And even then, be cautious. A reconsideration request puts Google's target directly on you.

Hope this helps,

Mark

Hi Barnabas,

I respect your opinion but what I've found with many SEO tools in the industry is that you could pay $99 for just one tool per months. SEOmoz has a vast toolset at your disposal, along with this community forum and the ability to ask a private question directly to the staff here.

The cheaper PRO package (which I'm also on) is for people to utilize the tools for a small/medium site or just smaller projects in general.

What you're asking for with logos is more of a bespoke service so the cost would typically be higher.

That's not just for Moz but for the industry in general.

Hi Barnabas,

In the help section it states -

How do I add my logo or get white labeled reports?
If you have our PRO Plus or PRO Elite, you can upload a logo from your campaign settings page. This will add your logo to the top of PDF reports downloaded from the web app. This is a great way to show off our excellent data with your awesome branding. Enjoy!

Standard PRO accounts don't have this feature.

I hope this helps,

Mark

If you don't wish to share your clients site URL publicly, mind dropping me a PM?

I'd be quite interested to take a look for you.

Hi Doug,

Great points.

These links were never manually built by us. To-date, we haven't done any form of link building. Any links which point to our site have occurred naturally.

In the case of this website linking to us, they are scraping content  to inform users of their site about price drops in the property sector.

All of the links they have are pointing to individual property pages on our site.

To me it seems like they're just using the meta-descriptions as anchor text.

Mark

Hi guys,

I know this is an easy question and I'm already quite sure of the answer for it but it would be good to get some other views.

This website - http://www.collapso.net/ have 261,923 backlinks to our website according to Ahrefs.

They have 1000's of pages like this - http://www.collapso.net/countiesnew/Cork.html which link to our site.

43.95% of the backlinks to our site are from these guys but we've been fortunate enough to never receive any warnings via WMT or ever experienced drop offs in traffic.

My question is - Do we have this site remove all the links to our site or leave them alone?

Given there's such a large quantity of links, I'm not exactly sure what the impact would be on us.

My instinct says get rid of them. Although part of me questions what such a massive drop in our link profile would look like to Google.

Hi JSOC,

It's not something I've experienced. Do you mind sharing the URL to the website so I can take a look?

Cheers,

Mark

Hi guys,

I was wondering what would be the best approach to track the success of a URL restructure?

What we plan to do is to implement the URL re-structure slowly by only having it on new pages which go live for property listings. Any previous listings will use the old URL structure. I thought it would be best to limit any potential problems by testing it on a smaller number of pages.

So my question really is, what metrics should I be looking at to determine the success of this given the fact that we remove any property listings once they get rented or sold?

When you search for the keywords on Google, are you logged in? Are you checking in private browsing/incognito window (Chrome)?

Has your keyword tracking on Moz campaign been set to check the same region? e.g. .co.uk/.com etc

I think we need a little bit more information Benny?

Hi there,

You can use SEO Tools for excel -

http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/

It will then pull in the social share data for each URL.

Hope this helps!

Meta-Keywords have no impact on ranking though.

Kathy, you will need to add more content to the pages that are public. Focus on the specific keywords you wish to rank for and improve the on-page SEO for these terms.

Also, from what I can see, there are no backlinks pointing to the site. You should focus on attracting links from high authority websites within the sector.

Agreed - A full audit covering SEO related issues and usability is required.

I do feel that focusing on SEO when there are much more glaring issues would be a pointless exercise.

Generating traffic to a website is not an effective use of time when the landing page isn't optimized for conversions.

I would suggest hiring a graphic designer for some freelance work and working with someone on a full audit to prioritize the biggest issues.

I'd be surprised if the site is generating quite a large volume of sales as it stands. It just doesn't convey trust and reliability from my perspective.

To be honest, the homepage is a bit of a mess. I know you rather not hear it but, your site needs a lot of work.

Visually it's quite off-putting and the very large section of text you have on the homepage is stuffed full of keywords.

This is how Google sees this page -

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TOKOKtpzdCgJ:monsterbins.com/&hl=en&gl=ie&prmd=imvns&strip=1

'Monster Bins' is bolded and used over 10 times.

It's not clear what payment method your website accepts and to be quite honest, I would be very hesitant to make a sale on there.

To be fair, Google will not send him an email to say he should use this tool.

If there was an issue, he would have received a message via WMT indicating there was quite a lot of unnatural links pointing at his site.

Ian, you can contact this site via Twitter -

https://twitter.com/Ourlipsarsealed

They last tweeted 15 hours ago so they are active.

Send message via Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/miguel.vg.399

Hi ian,

As a first step, it would be worth contacting the website directly and simply asking them to remove the links.

The tool is what you use if all other methods fail. It's obvious that such a large volume of links with identical anchor text from a site of that nature is not going to help you.

Use http://whois.net/ to find their contact details and drop them an email.

Hi Brian,

I'm pretty sure this can't be done. It would be worth deciding on which account has the greatest amount of influence and then messaging everyone on the other account to inform them that it will no longer be used.

Can I merge or combine two or more Twitter accounts into one?

• There is currently no way to manage multiple Twitter profiles from a single account or merge multiple accounts into one.
• We are unable to migrate data (Tweets, following, or followers) from one account to another.
• If you no longer want one of your accounts, we recommend that you leave one account inactive (or deactivate it, if you want) and tell your followers to find you at your preferred account.

https://support.twitter.com/groups/31-twitter-basics/topics/107-my-profile-account-settings/articles/20169956-how-to-manage-multiple-twitter-accounts

Hope this helps,

Mark

Without knowing what your site is and doing analysis, it's hard for us to say.

It could be a factor. It could also be due to other algorithm changes.

If you've dropped in position that much, doubtful it's due to competitors being aggressive in their strategies.

Glad you got it sorted Jonathan - Original spreadsheet opened up fine for me in Excel

If you don't mind Jonathan, you could drop me a PM with a link to the spreadsheet so I could take a quick go at fixing it up for you?

Hi Jonathan,

If it's simply Excel displaying the content incorrectly, you can follow these steps -

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/split-names-by-using-the-convert-text-to-columns-wizard-HA010102340.asp

If not, I can see if I can offer any other advice then.

Cheers,

Mark

There's several guides available which you can read to help you -

State of Search- http://www.stateofsearch.com/yet-another-way-to-reclaim-your-not-provided-data/

Cyrus Shepard - http://cyrusshepard.com/7-fantastic-seo-tips-for-googles-not-provided-keywords/

Searchengineland- http://searchengineland.com/turning-not-provided-into-useful-actionable-data-135800

I'm not trying to pass you off to reading external articles but they are pretty useful!

Hope this helps,

Mark

Do you mind giving us a link to your site?

Unfortunately there is no clear formula about how to improve page rank.

X Articles X Pages = ?

But as Jonathan suggested, if you can increase the number of links from high quality sites, it should have a positive effect for you as long as the on-age optimization of your site is pretty good.

Hi Dominic,

Maybe I'm mis-understanding.

You want the title tag to be 'A Place To Rent' ?

Or do you mean on category pages you will have 'Dublin | A Place To Rent ' ?

Sorry, you didn't explain fully what you meant.

One of the real questions would be - Why are you paying for a link?

Why not approach them with great content and work on building a relationship with them so you earn the link from them? You could save yourself money and it could lead to future links.

A one off payment for links isn't a good link building strategy.

Hi there,

Do you mean import a list of Twitter usernames to add as contacts?

I don't believe it can be done unfortunately from what I can see.

Hi Hiren,

Without going too much into depth with analysis, it's easy to see your title tag for that page is keyword stuffed.

Also the page hasn't got any great content on it.

In terms of the overall domain, a quick look at your backlinks reveals that you haven't done much off-page link building.

You just need to do a lot more work unfortunately.

Mark

Hi Mark,

Just to clarify, the complete number of backlinks to their site is 13500? I would be quite cautious about deleting 90% of them. I'm sure some of them stand out as more toxic than others. It would be worth focusing on them first.

I know a lot of people have mixed opinions about link cleanup (whether it should be done or not) but if you managed to delete even half of the poor quality links to the site, it should be a clear enough message to Google that you're taking the warning seriously.

If a re-inclusion request fails, you could go deeper then.