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No problem.
You can edit the canonical links through Yoast's SEO plugin, just go into the page/post and then navigate to the 'advanced' tab within Yoast - you can then set the custom canonical link.
Regarding your links that point to you with no trailing slash, WP automatically redirects any URLs without a trailing slash to one with one - this will then flow the PageRank into the correct URL, so don't worry.
Hi Will,
A C-block is part of the IP address of a website (xxx.xxx.CCC.xxx), for example, with my blog, the IP address is 173.248.188.141 - the c-block is 188.
Usually, websites that are all hosted on the same server have the same c-block. This is a way that Google can detect link-farms, where loads of sites are set up on the same server and used to link to your website. This is why it is good to have diversity in the amount of linking c-blocks.
Inevitably, you will have some identical c-block links but that's ok (and is completely natural). In terms of the links to your website, you have links from 130 root domains that are made up of 70 unique c-blocks. This ratio is perfectly fine, so don't worry.
Hope this helps.
The canonical tag should be used to redirect Google bots to the original page without affecting actual site users. If your /?page=kontaktine-forma is a duplicate of your homepage then yes, you should have the canonical link pointing to the homepage - if this is the case, you don't necessarily need to do a 301 redirect, unless you dont want your users to visit the page.
In short, you don't need to do both a canonical link AND a 301 redirect, either one should be fine - 301 redirects should be used more for user experience, so bear that in mind.
Hope that helps.
This is definitely the best thing to do. Whenever a page goes to a 404 you should be consider a redirect of some sort. I would take into consideration user experience when you're doing your redirects as a priority.
In general, when I work with e-commerce website, I will 301 redirect old product pages (now 404 pages) through to the main category pages. This provides a good user experience and any links that were pointing to that product page can be flowed into the category page (you'll be surprised how much traffic you lose from not doing this).
This really depends on your CMS, but I have had some experience with this in the past so might be able to help out. Firstly, I would recommend having a good think about going with the solution... lightboxes have become a lot harder to use from a user point of view since the uptake in mobile device usage. If you're using one, make sure that it's responsive.
Take a good look at this article before you do anything - http://www.businessol.com/blog_posts/seo-javascript-lightbox-js-content/. It explains the SEO implications of using lightboxes and also gives some examples of out-the-box solutions that can be used.
I have used the following plugin before that has worked well:
Hope this helps!
Matt
Hi Laura,
If you're looking for the the counter on your social media buttons to update to show the original number of social shares then it's not going to happen, I'm afraid.
When you move domain, all of the social media buttons will reset their counters and show '0' for all of your articles. Having said this, you need to make sure that you set up 301 redirects from all your old pages to the new ones. If you are just doing a straight domain swap (i.e. all the URLs will stay the same except for the domain name) then you can add the following code into your .htaccess file:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} \olddomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
You will need to replace 'olddomain.com' with your old domain name and 'newdomain.com' with your new domain name. A word of warning here is that making changes to your .htaccess file (if you don't really know what your doing) can end badly, so make sure you pass it on to your developers - otherwise, you can use that plugin.
All of the SEO benefits that your previous pages have gained (links, social shares, etc) will be stransfered to the new domain, but your social shares counters won't be updated. I would recommend giving the following article a read before moving to a new domain:
Hope this helps!
Matt
Rich snippets can be fairly tempermental. They don't always show up in the search results and Google have came out and said this (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1093493?hl=en).
I have some snippets that show on my travel blog that have been there for months and then just vanish - it's pretty annoying, but one thing I would check is that they follow Google's Webmaster guidelines (you can see them in the link above).
Hope this helps.
Matt
Hey Kelly,
I've worked with a lot of companies within search engine recovery projects over the past year or so.
I've taken a look at your backlink profile and you do actually have a lot of good links in amongst the spammy sidebar links. My advice would be to start looking at getting some of those low quality links removed. Now, if you don't have a good understanding of how to go about this then my advice would be to stay clear of doing it yourself - get a professional to look at it.
Start with removing the low quality links and then move forward to create some new high quality links to balance out your link profile. I'm not going to go into all the details of 'how to build good links' but what I would say is that this site is by no means 'a lost cause'.
In terms of how the site looks, it seems really good. The only one thing that I would say (and this isn't major, just an observation) is that the site would look a lot less like a template-style site if you had a company logo within the header. I know that you have 'SiteBoss' in text but it seems like that is almost just the default text there, so having a subtle logo might just reinforce the brand a little more. Just to confirm though, this has no effect on things like search rankings, etc - I'm just thinking about user perception.
Hope this helps!
Matt
Hi Daniel,
My advice here would be to learn the basics through online resources. Subscribe to things like DistilledU, which is a great online resource and can take you through all of the basic steps in barely any time at all. Make sure that you follow all the major blogs and are always dedicating some time to reading up on SEO related stuff.
The next stage can then be looking for a mentor. Personally, I would suggest reaching out to well-known industry SEOs to see if they would be interested in doing it; you will often find that having a mentor that is currently working within the industry will give you the most value.
I personally do this kind of thing and have had most of the people that I mentor simply get in touch with me after reading some of my content. The way I charge is through an hourly rate for my time, hence why I suggested learning a lot of the basics through online resources (because it will be a lot more cost effective). Alongside this, you need to decide on what it is you want to get from the mentor - do you want to get an overall view of SEO or would you like to focus on a specific area? for example, link building, technical SEO, local SEO, etc.
If you want some more info on how I can help then drop me a private message through Moz, or just email me (my email is visible in my profile). Bare in mind that I'm based in the UK though 
Hope this helps!
Matt
Hi Lauren,
What I would say is that it looks like you're doing everything right with your redirects - redirecting dynamic URLs through to keyword relevant URLs will work much better for SEO.
Regarding the on-page links... if you have a lot of on-page links, it means that each of the links passes a smaller proportion of PageRank around the website. This is particularly important for your internal links. For example, if you have 10 links on a webpage, each of the page you link to will be passed 1/10th of the PageRank value. This can be really important on your homepage to try and pass as much of the PageRank to your key pages of your website. If you instead had 100 links on the page, you would only be passing 1/100th of the PageRank to each page.
Having minimal links on a page is important, as long as it doesn't interfere with user experience. I would say a health number is between 20-40.
Hope this helps.
I think the Moz bar is just being a little glitchy at the moment - I've been experiencing this too. I'm sure the Moz team are on the case though so I wouldn't worry. Just use OSE in the meantime.
No problem - if you have any more questions then just drop me an email (my email is on my profile page). Good luck!
No problem, Gareth.
Regarding the distribution of PageRank. I gather a list of all the referring domains to the website in questions, then I lookup the PageRank for these domains (sometimes I use Domain Authority or Citation Flow - depends on your preference). Once I have a list of all the domains and their PR, I create a graph (bar chart) that shows the number of links coming from PR0 domains, PR1 domains, PR2 domains...
This is a nice visual display that you can see the kind of links coming to the site and usually gives a good signal of the quality of links coming through to the domain. Here's an awesome post by Pete Myers that goes through all of this - http://moz.com/blog/link-profiling-with-open-site-explorer
Now, in terms of what indicators I look for with regard to toxicity... I look for the following factors:
These are the key factors that I look for but once you start analysing your link profile, you will be able to detect a pattern in the links.
Hope this helps
For the link audits that I do for my clients, I use a variety of different tools. With link analysis, the more tools the better really. The tools I use are as follows:
I compile all the link information from the first 5 tools mentioned and then import them into Link Detox tool. I can then start manually analysing the links and highlighting any potentially toxic links. Next step is using BuzzStream to find the contact information for the toxic links and then I compile a separate spreadsheet for this. I also put together a graph that shows the distribution of PageRank from external links within Excel - this is a good visual cue for the client.
Hope this helps.
I think there has certainly been a decline in business for Middle-Eastern 'link building' companies. The reason for this is that automated link building has been cracked down on heavily by Google. Link building now costs a lot more to do and requires much greater resources, skills and expertise.
I'm sure there are still companies in the Middle East that provide good services but just remember, with link building you get what you pay for. If you go in purely on price then you are asking for trouble in the future - do your research and have a look at companies local to yourself - that would be my advice. Being able to sit down and talk to your link building agency can be a great way to ensure that you understand the activities that they are carrying out and what you're getting for your money.
Hope this helps.
As far as I'm aware, you would need a separate version of your page to be displayed. You can then geo-target these pages within Webmaster Tools or use the rel="alternate" hreflang="x". Check out this for more info - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
Hope this helps.
Yeh, tbh, you don't need to worry too much about nofollow links. The only thing that I would do is check through some of the nofollow links to see if they are all blog comments that have been done with an automated system. If this is the case then there could be duplicate content issues that are leaving a footprint back to your site (i.e. within the spun comment). This isn't a major concern but worth a little look - but as a general rule, you don't need to worry.
Matt
I would go with a title like this:
In2Town: Online Lifestyle Magazine - Health, Lifestyle and Style News
Reads a bit better (which will help CTR) and you are getting all of your keywords within it.
Regarding the intro content, yes, content above the fold is much better and I would probably advise that you place it just below the navigation menu. I only mentioned the footer area in case that wasn't a viable option from a user experience point of view.
Matt
Yeh, I would recommend using Buzzstream for the data gathering, it saves a heap load of time - I also outsource it to freelancers on oDesk - you can do this for a very l;ow budget and just speeds the whole process up.
With the Link Detox tool, importing all of your other link data is vtial towards getting a good reflection of the links. Good luck
If you get really stuck, email me (my email is on my Moz profile) and I'll help you out more where I can.
Matt
Hi Carl,
First step is to identify all of the links. Pull off the full backlink data from OSE, Majestic SEO, Ahrefs and WMT. Compile all of them into one master spreadsheet and then upload these to the Link Detox Tool (http://www.linkdetox.com/). This will give you a starting point for finding all of the toxic links - bare in mind that this is just a guide and you will still need to go over the link manually.
Start gathering webmaster details and record EVERYTHING in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Record the webmasters' contact details, URL, date you contacted them, the date of the response, any action taken, etc. Spend a good month on link removal to get as many removed manually as possible.
Once this stage is complete you will need to Disavow the rest of the links. Be careful here not to Disavow genuine good links. When it comes to the likes of SENuke links, you will want to Disavow them on domain level, i.e:
domain:jonnyhetherington. com
After you have submitted a Disavow, submit a reconsideration request and let Google know all of the bad links that were pointing to the site, why they were there and what you have done to rectify it - be explicit. Also, link to the Google Docs spreadsheet with all the details in.
If you get a negative response back then dig a little deeper with the links to Disavow - most reconsideration requests get knocked back the first time but ignore those that say 'you can't recover', because you can. Just make sure that your client understands the implications of everything. They will have further dips in rankings and traffic before it gets better.
Hope this gives you a good starting point.
Hi Tim,
What I would recommend is to have an intro paragraph, like you've said, on the page in one way or another. This could be in the footer if you have nowhere else (however, I would get rid of those spammy location names that are currently there). Try to get a couple of hundred words if you can (but this isn't always the case.
I'd also have a look at your internal linking to see if you can link back to your homepage with your keywords within the deeper articles within the site. I wrote a full guide on on-page optimisation that you might find useful - http://www.wowinternet.co.uk/blog/on-page-optimisation-with-a-view-to-the-off-page-seo/
I'd also revise your current title tag on the homepage to get some more keywords in there.
Having said all of this, it isn't always possible to optimise the homepage of a site with lots of the keywords so I would place a lot more of your focus towards building relevant links to the site. Get a load of social signals pointing to the articles and, where possible, have some exact match anchor links going to the homepage from relevant websites.
Hope this helps.
There is a solution for this by using server-side PHP tracking to monitor your PDFs, even when they're on subdomains - here's an awesome tutorial that shows you exactly how to do it - http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2013/06/04/tracking-pdfs-google-analytics-server-side/
Hope that helped
Hi Kathy,
I had a client that we recently did this for and I can say that this isn't true. What could have an effect on your rankings would be if you update to the new version and change all of the URL settings and page title settings, etc. Just make sure that you make a backup and keep your existing settings intact.
I've had a little look through the website and the link profile and everything seems ok from that end. None of the pages are set to 'noindex' and the robots.txt isn't blocking any of the search bots.
Usually I would ask if there has been an unnatural links warning come through Webmaster Tools but there are only a few links pointing to the site (all of which go to the homepage), so I doubt this is the case. What I would recommend is that you start building some links to the deeper pages on the website - also, set up a blog or something similar and start placing some new pages on the website. Once you build some new content a little more reguarly, Google will start indexing the site more frequently. This should clear up the issue a lot quicker.
I would put a bit more of a focus into building some deep links on the site though. Once you've done that I'm sure you will start seeing some results.
Google won't be able to read or index the flash part of the document but ether will be able to index the PDF itself. Just be sure to add document properties to the PDF first (using NitroPDF, or a similar tool).
I'd start by setting up a blog on the website. I'd then write up articles related to any current offers that specific companies are running and embed the coupon code within them. Also, utilise socoal media as much as possible - get in touch with the companies that you list coupons for and see if you can run joint competitions across social media. Another great way would be to do some guest posts on other sites about topics like 'how to save some money through using coupons' etc and gain some links back to your site.
Hope this gives you something to go on!
Google would probably look at that as an 'exact match' but bare in mind that this isn't really the be-all and end-all of your SEO. Google is weakening the value given to matches like this so I wouldn't worry too much. Focus on your links
Hey James - been a real nightmare since the API update as the plugin that I used doesn't work anymore. Tried your plugin out and it works great. The only thing that I real really annoying is that you have to I purchase the pro version to select how many tweets to display. Quite rare to see plugins like this that aren't free so wondered why you went down that route (as I can imagine it putting a lot of people off - even if it is really cheap - because of the extra hassle of putting in payment details, etc)?
There isn't a tool that I'm aware of that does exactly this bit Followerwonk comes closest to it. You're able to analyse quite a lot about your tweets on there so would recommend checking it out. Also, Sprout Social is another good tool for Twotter analysis.
For SEO reasons I would strongly recommend that you don't show a splash page to visitors because this is going to cause crawling issues for the search engine bots. I would load a popup (like you mentioned) and then when the user accepts the warning it stores their response on a cookie.
Personally, if the existing listings are bringing in some good levels of traffic then I'd avoid removing them. What I would do is start to build more local citations to the new office address so that over time you can filter in enough traffic to be able to remove the old addresses - essentially build a enough new traffic to warrant the removal of the old addresses.
Is there a particular date where you saw a drop because the recent Penguin update (think was 22nd May) took place. If you're noticing a drop here then you may have been hit by Penguin and need to take a deeper look into your link profile.
What's your URL?
Hi Michael,
It happens sometimes with Moz because they run results much slower than many other scraping tools. They don't scrape the SERPs so it will always be a bit slower. If you're looking at Moz raking stats then I suggest doing this on a monthly basis and then using a different tool (like RangRanger) for more regular, up to date listings.
Hope this helps
Matt
Hi Manoj,
You have to be really careful here, Matt Cutts came out and said:
“If a link in a paid post would affect search engines, that link should not pass PageRank (e.g. by using the nofollow attribute).”
If you're paying for an article to be placed then make sure that you nofollow the link because, like with the big InterFlora case, you will get punished.
Matt
Hi John,
This depends on what CMS you are using (if any). If you're using WordPress then you can do this pretty easily by using a search engine friendly URL permalink (which you can often get plugins for on most CMS's).
Let us know what platform you are working on and it will be easier to diagnose.
Matt
Hi James,
I'm not getting any issues there. The link went straight to my Skype with no 404. Maybe it happens when people don't have the Skype plugin for their browser. If in doubt, just remove the link.
Matt
Hi Tony,
It's important that you don't focus too heavily on having a link profile that is completely dominated by exact match anchor text. Realistically, one of your most used anchors should be branded text - which looks most natural (however, this isn't the case for every website). My advice would be to ensure that all of your landing pages are well optimised for the keywords and then the next stage can be including some local citations and co-occurance links.
Getting local citations from plumbing-related sites will allow the search engines to establish your site as relevant to those related keywords (it doesn't need to be exact-match). Also, if you are having some article links done then you could look at wrapping keywords around your anchor text link, for example - on my blog I try get links that are like this:
Matthew Barby is an SEO specialist based in Birmingham, UK. He enjoys ...
In the above sentence, my name would be the only hyperlink but Google/Bing/Yahoo are intellegent enough to relate the surrounding text with me so that I can start ranking for the links of Birmingham SEO Specialist (get it?). Try looking into this and it will diversify your link profile nicely
Matt
Hi Robert,
You have a couple of options here - firstly, what's the issue with linking out to the third party website? It isn't going to have a negative effect on your rankings? Secondly, if you don't want to pay PageRank to the external website then you can still give a contextual link but just make it a rel="nofollow" link.
Hope this helps.
Matt
Hi Dana,
You need to probably flush out a load of your inactive users (which you can do using tools like Sprout Social or Tweepi). Looking at your current following I would say it needs to go down by a few hundred really.
Once you've done that give it a while and then you can start adding people - but do it in small chunks at a time.
Matt
This is very contextual. In basic terms, increasing your Adwords spend should just result in an increase in traffic levels. Now, this metric alone isn't always that helpful in your decision making process.
What is important is for you to be tracking conversions from PPC within Google Analytics. You can do this simply enough by just setting up a custom report in Analytics to see where your enquiries have came from and then comparing the PPC conversions over time.
What I tend to try to do is to then work out exactly how much one conversion costs me within PPC (on average, of course) and then compare this to my other online marketing activities, for example, SEO, Banner ads, social media, etc. Once you have done this you will be able to get a clearer idea on which medium is best to put more resources into.
Matt
Hi Niners52,
Personally, I like to use webconfs search engine spider tools (http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php) but there are loads out there that you can use and it is your own preference really.
Also, I use ScreamingFrog to do similar tasks.
Matt.
I see.
In my opinion, and from my previous experience, I would say to keep the exact same URLs as the old site. If there is no specific need for new URLs (which it doesn't seem is the case) then don't change them.
Keep the same structure as the current site along with the URLs and you will see the best results. Creating new URLs then redirecting to them is only going to cause problems.
Hope this helps.
Matt.
Hi Dusan,
I have worked on a number of projects such as this and I am actually working on a CMS migration at the moment. For this specific client we have decided to keep all of the URLs the same because they were all relevant and were ranking well in the search results.
The decision that you have to make here could be based heavily on the current state of the existing site. If your current URLs have been created very ineffectively, i.e. they are all dynamic URLs and have no keyword relevance to the page content then there may be a case for going down the 301 redirect option. What I would say is that if you go down the route of 301 redirects you WILL see drops in the SERPs.
By creating a 301 redirect to a new URL on the site you are essentially halving the PageRank going to the page from what was going to the old URL. This new URL will also need to be indexed by the search engines and if it isn't done fairly quickly then you are going to see some traffic drops.
If you let me know the URL of your existing site then I will take a quick look at it and let you know the potential risks, etc.
Matt.
Hi Craig,
You have a couple of option here. First thing I would do would be to analyse all of the links going to these pages. If there are any pages that you would say the links are actually of value then set up a 301 redirect to another relevant page on the site.
Alternatively, you could ask for the manual removal of links to the pages via the Google disavow tool. If there are only a couple of links going through to the old URLs then I wouldn't worry too much. I would just spend a while analysing and prioritising which pages need to be redirected urgently and then take a deeper look into their links.
Hope this helps,
Matt.
Hi All,
Looking for a bit of help here.
We are quoting for a big SEO project on a Russian website and need high quality Russian link builders to work on building the links to the website. As well as this, we need to have a little look at the on-page content (but that will be more of just straight translation stuff, nothing big).
If you're a Russian link builder and could help me here then get in touch. I only want ethical, white-hat and relevant links being built to the website so if that's not what you do, please don't waste my time
Also, this should really go without saying but I'll mention it anyway... you MUST speak Russian!
Look forward to hearing from you.
Matt
Hi Lorna,
Have you managed to find the file through FTP?
Drop me an email on matt@wowinternet.net and I will send you over some more info.
Matt.
Hi Lorna,
I have recently done this on a Joomla/VirtueMart website.
You need to go in via FTP into your website's root folder and navugate to the following file:
/httpdocs/components/com_virtuemart/themes/default/templates/product_details/vmj_ritz.tpl.php
Once you have got this file you will be able to edit the actual product details page within your shop. I recently wrote a blog on on-page optimisation and there was a section on open graph/schema code so if you follow my instructions on there then it should help you out:
http://www.wowinternet.co.uk/blog/on-page-optimisation-with-a-view-to-the-off-page-seo/
Hope this helps,
Matt.
Hi Ade,
Just thought I would chip in here.
Our website took a huge hit during the Penguin update for this (to the point where we now are moving the domain to a different one). The reason for this was that every website we made had footer text going to our website and they were all hosted on the same server, with the same blocks.
We removed nearly all of them and it seemed that the initial damage was too much to recover from. All of our websites were spam free and we only linked via branded keywords, so I think the IP issue is really important here.
We have made it standard practice from now on to set up all new sites on dedicated IP addresses.
Hope this is of some use.
Matt.