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I am seeing a pretty precipitous drop in search volume traffic (see link). My keyword rankings don't seem to have suffered too much over this period. In fact, my #1 keyword have actually increased slightly in this timeframe. Two questions... Is there some way to assess overall search volume across my tracked keywords (to see if this is just a case of overall searches dropping)? Is there a recommended plan of attack for investigating drops like this - beyond overall search volume, what other data might be important in identifying the cause of this. In short, I'm looking for some logic/structure for how I investigate this, using Moz tools and reports. Thanks. Mark omE1VPc

I recently joined a community related to Internet Marketing and I am finding it very useful. One of the topics that comes up a great deal is what tools folks use to investigate content gaps. I've been a Moz subscriber for quite some time and understand that, compared to many of its competitors, it's a high end solution. So, feel pretty well positioned there. However, one thing that appears to be lacking is what might be called a long tail discovery tool. I am well aware of Google's Keyword Planner and other free stuff (the problem there being... so are my competitors :)). But there are a number of tools out there - SEMRush, Long Tail Premium, Authority Metrics and so on - that focus very directly on that, with "scores" for keyword competitiveness that at least help narrow down to a possible set, using filtering. While I accept that one might argue the merits - or otherwise - of each of these specific tools, it causes me to wonder why Moz doesn't have such a capability. I see some very successful web site owners describing their processes in the aforementioned community and long tail analysis is a key part of that. It seems that Moz has a richness of features, including around keyword ranking. But it's not clear to me why it doesn't support long tail keyword discovery "directly" (as a specific feature). I really don't want to pay for another subscription 😞 Thoughts? Thanks. Mark

A key part of my content creation decision is identifying keywords that have been successful for competitors. Ahrefs has a feature that allows me to see the keywords that have resulted in organic traffic for a particular page. So, for example, I can identify CompanyA as a competitor, find their top pages and, for each one, find the keywords that drove the most traffic to each of those pages. The information reported includes the monthly search volumes associated with each keyword, plus the number of visits driven to the page based on that keyword. That is very interesting to me. I am a long time Moz subscriber and want to find a way to do this here. Is there any way to do this with Moz features? I can't justify both a Moz and AHrefs subscription so I have a tough choice to make if Moz doesnt' support this. I'm hoping I am just missing that here. Thanks. Mark

Over the last few weeks I have been focused on fixing high and medium priority issues, as reported by the Moz crawler, after a recent transition to WordPress. I've made great progress, getting the high priority issues down from several hundred (various reasons, but many duplicates for things like non-www and www versions) to just five last week. And then there's this weeks report. For reasons I can't fathom, I am suddenly getting hundreds of duplicate content pages of the form http://blog.<domain>.com</domain> (being duplicates with the http://www.<domain>.com</domain> versions). I'm really unclear on why these suddenly appeared. I host my own WordPress site ie WordPress.org stuff. In Options / General everything refers to http://www.<domain>.com</domain> and has done for a number of weeks. I have no idea why the blog versions of the pages have suddenly appeared. FWIW, the non-www version of my pages still redirect to the www version, as I would expect. I'm obviously pretty concerned by this so any pointers greatly appreciated. Thanks. Mark

I have recently moved to WordPress (from DNN) and I am very pleased with the change. As part of this switch I took the opportunity to totally revamp my posts, in terms of their URLs, titles, content, etc. I also put 301 redirects in place from the old to the new URLs. Despite the redirects, logs suggest I have tons of 404s to my site. My site has been around for 20 years this year so I am not particularly surprised by this. Many of these broken URLs are one-offs (and I have no idea why they come in :)) and I am not worried about them. But over the years I have apparently had various versions of the same content, with different types of URL structure. By way of example, if I look at .aspx requests with "human readable" URL (where the URL is obviously an article/post) I have almost 2,500 such requests generating 404s in the last week or so. My question is how much effort should I put into creating 301 redirects for these old ULRs? I see the recent changes as something of a fresh start so part of me wants to just ignore them and let search engines figure out the new URLs naturally (which seems to be happening). But I also wonder about how much SEO magic I am throwing away here - is it worth spending time reviewing these old URLs, identifying the new URL and implementing a redirect? That's a very time consuming process but I can make it happen if there's real value in doing so. On a related question, once a search engine detects a 404 is it "done" with that 404 for good? For example, if Google tries to access a URL and finds a 404, does it just wipe the URL and never try again? If so, that presumably means - for that search engine - there's no point in the redirect being in place. It's too late at that stage, right? Thanks. Mark

I am in the midst of moving my site to a new platform. As part of that I am reviewing each and every article for SEO - titles, URLs, content, formatting/structure, etc, etc. I have about 200 articles to move across and my eventual plan is to look at each article and update for these factors. I have all the old content moved across to the new server as-is (the old server is still the one to which my domain's DNS records point). At a high level I have two choice: Point DNS to the new server, which will expose the same content (which isn't particularly SEO-friendly) and then work through each article, fixing the various elements to make them more user friendly. Go through each article, fixing content, structure, etc and THEN update DNS to point to the new server. Obviously the second option adds time before I can switch across. I'd estimate it will take me a few weeks to get through the articles. Option 1 allows me to switch pretty soon and then start going through the articles and updating them. An important point here is the new articles already have new (SEO-friendly) URLs and titles on the new server. I have 301 redirections in place pointing from the old to new URLs. So, it's "only" the content of each article that will be changing on the new server, rather than the URLs, etc. So, I'd be interested in any suggestions on the best approach - move across to the new server now and then fix content or wait till all the content is done and then switch to the new server. Thanks. Mark

I am in the midst of a major redesign of my site, including revamping existing articles . I have a couple of hundred articles and I am reviewing all aspects of these articles, including titles, URLs, content, etc. I am putting together a process as I move each article across to the new site and have SEO very much in mind. I'd appreciate any feedback on this. First off, let me be clear that I consider the quality of the content paramount. Anything suggested below is considered "supporting" (that content) from an SEO perspective. But, since I am moving this content across, I may as well take the opportunity to clean things up. The existing articles don't have particularly good SEO-related attributes, in terms of their titles, URLs, use of keywords and so on. So, I plan to do the following for each article. For illustrative purposes (our site serves the wedding industry), I will use an article about how to involve children at a wedding. Questionsunder each bullet. Use the "Keyword Difficulty" feature on Moz Pro to research a specific keyword for each article. In the example case I used "involving children in our wedding". Honestly, I am not really sure what to do with this feature 🙂 I've read everything from "focus on the long tail" to "don't fear highly competitive keywords". So, my current thinking is merely to use it as interesting information for they keyword I choose but not actually make any specific decisions from that ie. make sure the keyword is relevant to the article as the first priority and use the tool to check out search volume. Not sure what I should read into a zero for recent Bing searches. Is that really an important factor? I'm assuming the Google information is not available from Google (it would be displayed here otherwise, I'm guessing) Use a title that uses these keywords. In this case, I simply went with "Involving children in our wedding". Same for URL - /wedding-guests/involving-children-in-our-wedding If I have a reasonable, short and human-friendly term like this (I can do this with virtually every article quite easily), is there any reason why the URL and the title should not be the same? In short, the title and URL are both a relatively concise "mini-sentence" Make sure the meta description of the article is easy-to-read (for humans) and uses the keyword (sentence) Make sure that the theme (we are moving to WordPress) uses H1 for the page header/title and H2 for sections within the document Implement 301 redirects from the old URL (old site) to the new URL This seems like a pretty obvious approach for articles where the URL has changed (which will be most of them). But what do I do with articles that I am going to remove. Should I redirect (301) to a related article (so at least the visitor ends up on a page that is generally relevant) or just let this "fall through" as a non-existent page (401)? As I say, I have 200+ articles to go through I want to make sure I am taking this advantage to clean things up. Anything leaping out as missing/problematic? Thanks in advance Mark

My site serves a consumer-focused industry that has about 15-20 well recognized categories, which act as a pretty obvious way to segment our content. Each category supports it's own page (with some useful content) and a series of articles relevant to that category. In short, the categories are pretty focal to what we do. I am moving from DNN to WordPress as my CMS/blog. I am taking the opportunity to review and fix SEO-related issues as I migrate. One such area is my URL structure. On my existing site (on DNN), I have the following types of pages for each topic: / <topic>- this is essentially the landing page for the topic and links to articles</topic> /<topic>/articles/ <article-name>- topics have 3-15 articles with this URL structure</article-name></topic> With WordPress, I am considering moving to articles being under the root. So, an article on (making this up) how to make a widget would be under /how-to-make-a-widget, instead of /<widgets>/article/how-to-make-a-widget I will be using WordPress categories to reflect the topics taxonomy, so I can flag my articles using standard WordPress concepts.</widgets> Anyway, I'm trying to get my head around whether it makes sense to "flatten" my URL structure such that the URLs for each article no longer include the topic (the article page will link to the topic page though). Thoughts?

I have a web site that has been around for a long time. The industry we serve includes many, many small vendors and - back in the day - we decided to allow those vendors to submit their details, including a link to their own web site, for inclusion on our pages. These vendor listings were presented in location (state) pages as well as more granular pages within our industry (we called them "topics). I don't think it's important any more but 100% of the vendors listed were submitted by the vendors themselves, rather than us "hunting down" links for inclusion or automating this in any way. Some of the vendors (I'd guess maybe 10-15%) link back to us but many of these sites are mom-and-pop sites and would have extremely low authority. Today the list of vendors is in the thousands (US only). But the database is old and not maintained in any meaningful way. We have many broken links and I believe, rightly or wrongly, we are considered a link farm by the search engines. The pages on which these vendors are listed use dynamic URLs of the form: \vendors<state>-<topic>. The combination of states and topics means we have hundreds of these pages and they thus form a significant percentage of our pages. And they are garbage 🙂 So, not good.</topic></state> We understand that this model is broken. Our plan is to simply remove these pages (with the list of vendors) from our site. That's a simple fix but I want to be sure we're not doing anything wring here, from an SEO perspective. Is this as simple as that - just removing these page? How much effort should I put into redirecting (301) these removed URLs? For example, I could spend effort making sure that \vendors\California- <topic>(and for all states) goes to a general "topic" page (which still has relevance, but won't have any vendors listed)</topic> I know there is no distinct answer to this, but what expectation should I have about the impact of removing these pages? Would the removal of a large percentage of garbage pages (leaving much better content) be expected to be a major factor in SEO? Anyway, before I go down this path I thought I'd check here in case I miss something. Thoughts?

I have some tough decisions to make about a web site I run. The site has seen around for 20 years (September 1995, to be precise, is the date listed against the domain). Over the years, the effort I've expanded on the site has come and gone, but I am about to throw a lot of time and effort back into it. The majority of the content on the site is pretty dated, isn't tremendously useful to the audience (since it's pretty old) and the site design and URL architecture isn't particularly SEO-friendly. In addition, I have a database of thousands vendors (for the specific industry this site serves). I don't know if it's a factor any more but 100% of the links there have been populated by the vendors themselves specifically requesting inclusion (through a form we expose on the site). When the request is approved, the vendor link shows up on the appropriate pages for location (state) and segment of the industry. Though the links are all "opt-in" from vendors (we've never one added or imported any ourselves), I am sure this all looks like a terrible link farm to Google! And some vendors have asked us to remove their link for that reason 🙂 One final (very important) point. We have a relationship with a nationwide brand and have four very specific pages related to that brand on our site. Those pages are essential - they are by far the most visited pages and drive virtually all our revenue. The pages were put together with SEO in mind and the look and feel is very different to the rest of the site. The result is, effectively, a site-within-a-site. I need to carefully protect the performance of these pages. To put some rough numbers on this, the site had 475,000 page views over the last year, with about 320,000 of those being to these four pages (by the way, for the rest of the content "something happened" around May 20th of last year - traffic almost doubled overnight - even though there were no changes to our site). We have a Facebook presence and have put a little effort into that recently (increasing fans from about 10,000 last August to nearly 24,000 today, with a net gain of about 2,500 per month currently). I don't have any sense of whether that is a meaningful resource in the big picture. So, that's the background. I want to totally revamp the broader site - much improved design, intentional SEO decisions, far better, current and active content, active social media presence and so on. I am also moving from one CMS to another (the target CMS / Blog platform being WordPress). Part of me wants to do the following: Come up with a better plan for SEO and basically just throw out the old stuff and start again, with the exception of the four vendor pages I mentioned Implement redirection of the old URLs to new content (301s) Just stop exposing the vendor pages (on the basis that many of the links are old/broken and I'm really not getting any benefit from them) Leave the four important pages exactly as they are (URL and content-wise) I am happy to rebuild the content afresh because I have a new plan around that for which I have some confidence. But I have some important questions. If I go with the approach above, is there any  value from the old content / URLs that is worth retaining? How sure can I be there is no indirect negative effect on the four important pages? I really need to protect those pages Is throwing away the vendor links simply all good - or could there be some hidden negative I need to know about (given many of the links are broken and go to crappy/small web sites, I'm hoping this is just a simple decision to make) And one more uber-question. I want to take a performance baseline so that I can see where I started as I start making changes and measure performance over time. Beyond the obvious metrics like number of visitors, time per page, page views per visit, etc what metrics would be important to collect from the outset? I am just at the start of this project and it is very important to me. Given the longevity of the site, I don't know if there is much worth retaining for that reason, even if the content changes radically. At a high level I'm trying to decide what questions I need to answer before I set off on this path. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

I am seeing huge fluctuations in the number of pages discovered the crawl each week. Some weeks the crawl discovers > 10,000 pages and other weeks I am seeing 4-500. So, this week for example I was hoping to see some changes reflected for warnings from last weeks report (which discovered > 10,000 pages). However, the entire crawl this week was 448 pages. The number of pages discovered each week seems to go back and forth between these two extremes. The more accurate count would be nearer the 10,000 mark than the 400 range. Thanks. Mark

As proposed by a number of people here, I have moved from WordPress.com to a self-hosted WordPress blog. I have also installed the SEO All in One plugin. This has been up and running for a month or so. My problem is that it is generated many (thousands) of warnings through my PRO Dashboard for Crawl Diagnostics. Specifically, I have a huge number of "Overly-dynamic URL" warnings. A typical URL is as folows: http://www.wednet.com/blog/2011/10/07/do-us-a-favor-dont/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=do-us-a-favor-dont This has three querystring parameters, all generated by WordPress automatically. Here's another significant issue. With the SEO All In One plug in I can control the SEO-related parameters for each post (title, meta description, etc). However, WordPress generates a ton of virtual URLs which I can't (as far as I know) directly control. For example, the following page is a category page with all the posts for a single category. This is generating warnings because the meta description is missing. However, I do not know how to control such parameters since the page is automatically generated. http://www.wednet.com/blog/category/ceremony/ These type of warnings dominate the stats I have through my dashboard. How can I resolve these? Thanks. Mark

I have had my site registered for a long time (since January 1995) and in that time we have built a good number of incoming links. We have a vendor database that we expose as a service to our visitors, which numbers around 5,500. These sites vary dramatically from low-end, Mom-and-Pop type web sites (some ugly in the extreme :)) to nationwide, established vendors. Back in the day, we had the basic tactic to request a link to our site if the vendor wanted to be listed in our vendor database. We stopped that practice years ago but still have many sites linking to us. The quality of some of these sites is very poor. I want to come up with a strategy for dealing with these. To that end, some questions: How "costly", from an SEO perspective, is a poor quality site that links to our site? What metric(s) should be used to assess the quality of sites linking to us? If possible, for the aforementioned metric is there a "bar" we might try to hit? For example, would it be useful to request removal of links where <metric>is less than x? What is x?</metric> Given that we have thousands to assess, is there any report I can create to identify these sites? Is it generally preferred to have vendors link simply to our home page or is it more effectice to have them link to particular pages on our site (each vendor can generally be associated with a "topic" on our site). In short, I am willing to go through this process if there is real value in it. Thanks. Mark

Once again the weekly crawl on my site is very slow. I have around 441 pages in the crawl and this has been running for over 12 hours. This last happened two weeks ago (ran for over 48 hours). Last week's crawl was much quicker (not sure exactly how long but guessing an hour or so). Is this a known issue and is there anything that can be done to unblock it? Weekends are the best time for me to assess and respond to changes I have made to my site so having this (small) crawl take most of the weekend is really quite problematic. Thanks. Mark

Mine started yesterday afternoon and it's now almost 11pm on Sunday. 30+ hours and still not finished (and no progress indicator). 438 pages quoted as being crawled. That's not normal - right? I have made a bunch of changes based on last weeks crawl so I have been eagerly waiting for this to finish But 30 hours?.... Thanks. Mark

Really quite disappointed with the response to this thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/possible-to-force-the-seomoz-ranking-report-to-update Three of us expressed an interest in this but the response was for (only) the original poster to create a ticket and the question was closed to any further discussion. Might I request that SEOMoz folks read the thread? There is a general question and three of us have requested some feedback. It is very clear that more than one person is interested in the answer Just asking one of those individuals to open a ticket and get a response for himself doesn't seem very customer-centric (well, beyond that first customer). I'd really appreciate an open and public discussion as to whether SEOMoz can support updates more than once a week and, if not now, whether it intends to in the future. Thanks. Mark

I recently identified an issue with our site whereby we had three different URL types for each article. As an example, we might have something like: /articles/my-article-name /articles/my-article-name.aspx /articles/My-Article-Name We've since taken action to address this by implement 301 redirects from the second and third formats to the first (so everything is without the .aspx extension and is in lower case). But the results have been disconcerting. Before the change, one of our articles receives 150 or so hits per day via the .aspx version. The other two existed but had very low traffic (1-3 per day). We decided the non .aspx and lowercase version was the version we wanted. Sure enough, when we introduced the 301 redirects on September 25th the traffic for the .aspx version just stopped (after a day) and the traffic for the non-.aspx version climbed. But not enough. After the change, the non-.aspx version is receiving about 60-70% of the traffic that we used to have on the .aspx version. So, instead of receiving 150 per day (to the .aspx version) we are receiving around 100 or so to the non-.aspx version. This pattern has occured across all our articles and, as a result, our site-wide traffic has dropped by about 40% or so. Since we are using 301 redirects I had assumed that the search engines would just update to reflect the non-.aspx version. I am sure I am missing something here. Any help would be most appreciated. Thanks. Mark

This is more of a technical question than pure SEO per se, but I am guessing that some folks here may have covered this and so I would appreciate any questions. I am moving from a WordPress.com-based blog (hosted on WordPress) to a WordPress installation on my own server (as suggested by folks in another thread here). As part of this I want to move from the format blog.<mydomain>.com to www.mydomain.com\blog. I have installed WordPress on my server and have imported posts from the hosted site to my own server. How should I manage the transition from first format to the second? I have a bunch of links on Facebook, etc that refer to URLs of the blog..com format so it's important that I redirect.</mydomain> I am running DotNetNuke/WordPress on my own IIS/ASP.Net servers. Thanks. Mark

I am in my 30 day trial and very interested in my results. I think I am probably in a small minority in having the same web site up and running for approaching 17 years (registered in January 1995 :)) but only now am I looking at SEO seriously (to the extent that I want to learn more myself, as opposed to having others promise great fortune!)). Anyway, before committing to SEOMoz on an ongoing basis I want to understand just how actionable the information on my dashboard is. With that in mind, here's the first of what is (hopefully) a series questions that about low-hanging fruit I might be able to check off quickly. I recently brought up a new blog on WordPress.com (note - hosted by WordPress, not a self-hosted implementation). I have had this blog running for less than a month and have just 18 posts. And I am being overwhelmed with thoudands of errors/warnings from SEOMoz. These fall into a few categories: Duplicate content: As I understand it, each TAG I associate with a single blog post creates a unique URL. For example, if I have a single post with tags for "flowers", "wine" and "cakes", I get URLs generated such as <blog url="">/flowers, <blog url="">/wines and <blog url="">/cakes. Obviously, tagging posts is a common scenario. Must I just accept these duplicate content warnings?</blog></blog></blog> Title element too long: These are self generated by WordPress.com and the default format includes the date the post was submitted (which takes a bunch of characters followed by the title used). Many of the posts are well over 70 and this seems really easy to do. Missing meta-description: As far as I can tell, Wordpress.com doesn't give me an option to specify these. So, must I just accept these issues if I use WordPress.com (which, again, seems like a very common scenario) and how negative is this to me? Thanks. Mark