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Hi Colin,
No you can archive as many as you like. What I do sometimes, is if I want to dig a bit deeper into some of my accounts then I will make them active for a few weeks, then archive them and make a different one active. This is because I don't need to track all of my campaigns at the same time, but I like to keep a hold of the historical data.
Matt.
No problem Gary, good luck.
Matt.
Hi Gary,
I would assume that this is the root of the problem. Google themselves have said the following:
"If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search."
Once you have addressed the issues, go into Webmaster Tools and go to your website. Then click on 'Health' then 'Fetch as Google'. Fetch your homepage and then click on 'Submit URl and Linked Pages to Index'.
Only do this once you have rectified your server issues though.
Matt.
I think that a lot of people are in the same boat as you so don't worry, many sites have began the road to recovery after the recent updates.
To de-index a URl from Google, go into Google Webmaster Tools for your website, then go to 'Optimization'>'Remove URLs' then type in the old URL and Google will remove it from the search engine completely. This mayy take a couple of days though.
I would also then create a new sitemap once you have done the new pages and submit this through Webmaster Tools also.
Matt.
Hi Gary,
Yes that sounds like a server error. If you are getting a lot of 500 errors then Google will punish your website for this as they will assume that it isn't functioning correctly.
Take a look into the pages that are getting 500 errors and have a word with your web hosting company to see if they can look into the root of the problem with the server.
Once you have managed to sort out the issues with your server, go into Google Webmaster Tools and ask Google to fetch your site using Googlebot, then if there are no errors, re-submit the site to be crawled and indexed.
Hope this helps.
Matt.
What I would do is to delete the old page and then create a whole new page. Because the old page is no longer on the server it shouldn't be punished for duplicate content. Just make sure that you ask Google to de-index the old URL and index the new one.
Bear in mind though that this is really a last resort method. But if you are having no luck at all with recovering from Penguin then this method could be more effective than just waiting it out.
Let me know how it goes and if you need any more info then just let me know.
Matt.
Hi Gary,
This could be for a number of reasons, bearing in mind that there has been a shed load of new algorithm updates from Google recently! The first step to take is to try and identify the rough date that you started to lose rankings.
This way you will be able to understand which update may have affected your website. Go into your Google Analytics and have a look at the organic search traffic coming to your website; if it is showing a dip around the end (24th) of April, then you may have been hit by the Penguin update (like a lot of us).
The Penguin update punished a lot of websites for their linking methods, i.e. having a lot of the same anchor text on links back to your website, having links in the footer areas of websites, duplicating links across single domains many times, linking from link-network websites, etc. If you think that your website may have any links like these then you may be at risk.
Take a look at your Google Webmaster Tools as well as http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ and take a deeper look into your linking profile to see who is linking to you and how they are linking. If you start to see a pattern emerging, contact the sites and see if you can get those bad links changed.
If you think that everything in terms of links looks good then let me know and I will try to help find what else it could be.
Matt.
Hi There,
I have been having trouble with the same thing and have found some good advice throughout the process of recovering.
One method that I have heard people suggesting was to change the URL of the page that is affected and then set up a redirect to the new page. From personal experience, I can tell you that this doesn't work. It is simply a very short-term fix (i.e., a few days if your lucky), then Google will start punishing you for the redirected page.
If it is only specific pages on the website that are being affected, try to pin-point the exact aspects of those pages that could be deemed as black/grey-hat. If it is the case that some of your webpages are ranking then you can take solace in the fact that your whole website hasn't been banned. So there is still hope to recover.
Try using OSE to check out all of your different anchor text and links, as well as looking through webmaster tools. If you can, contact these websites to have your link completely removed because at the end of the day, if your not ranking because of these links then they may as well be removed completely.
You could also attempt to remove your old pages that have been punished and create new URLs completely (don't redirect the old pages, simply delete them altogether) and just use the old content that was on them. This way you will get rid of all of the links to the punished page, and start a fresh new page with your old content. Re-index the pages through Google and slowly but surely, you will eventually start ranking again. Obviously this is not possible for your homepage, so maybe use this methods for some of your other pages and then put most of your effort into sorting out the linking profile on your index page.
I hope this has helped slightly and good luck!
Matt.
Hi Shaz,
I have also started noticing that this is happening over a couple of my accounts. I think that it may have something to do with the recent Google update (however, I could be wrong).
Hopefully this is just a glitch from Google. If anyone does have any info, I'd really like to know as well!
Matt.
Taking from a recent blog post that I wrote today, here are a few tips:
Hope this helps guys,
Matt.
Hey 
These are the top social bookmarking websites that I use:
Twitter
Digg
Stumbleupon
Tumblr
Reddit
Inbound.org
Pinterest
Buzzfeed
Delicious
Fark
Slashdot
Newsvine
Burpalicious
Technorati
Blinklist
That's just to mention a few! Hope this helps.
Matt.
Hi Georg,
It really depends what the link directory consists of.
From what you have said, as they have their individual page with all of the information about the website, title, etc, then this seems like a very legitimate directory.
What I think your task should be is to police the information on the individual pages. Look to see if there is use of the linking website's keywords on there, and if so, remove them. Keep only content that is relevant to the website that is being linked too.
You could add on the 'nofollow' tags to the links if you like, however, I think the most important thing is to just manage all of the pages to ensure that they are serving their purpose as a directory and not just a link network. If this is done then it should be perfectly fine.
Hope this helps
Matt.
Hi,
Very interesting. I've never really considered pinging much at all to be honest!
I would probably say from reading the article and what I know about pinging from the past, is that it is more about having just a couple of sites you ping that are of a high quality.
I don't have any lists that work particularly well but would certainly be interested in any that anyone has!
Thanks for the info again
Matt.
Hi John,
Here is a list that I have given to a client before to show what we would do in terms of some SEO:
In terms of what you need to do, I would first start with the on-page work, which would consist of (not exclusively):
These are just a few things but will hopefully get you on your way.
Let me know if you need any further help
Matt.
Yes, that's what I would advise.
I think a lot of us have been hit with this. Just try and comply with Google as much as possible, and I think the first port of call is all the on-page SEO.
Matt.
Hi Georg,
I have had the same problem. It is because of the latest update by Google around 'over-optimisation'.
Don't worry though, all is not lost! There are a few things that you need to change:
Make sure that your webpage titles are not over-optimised (i.e. 'Free Shoes, New Shoes, Sports Shoes - Shoe Company'). Make sure that they read properly and don't look spammy. Try not to repeat any of the keywords more than once, if at all.
Check that all of the links on the page are not suspicious. For example, having loads of anchor text linking to the same page.
See what your keyword density is on your webpage and see if you have maybe be keyword stuffing (Google is being a lot harsher and stricter on this now).
Go through your img alt attributes and check they are all relevant and not just blatanet attempts to fit in long-tail keywords.
Once you have done this, resubmit the pages to the Google index and hopefully, after a few weeks, you should start regaining some ground. Unfortunately its a bit of a waiting game now, but make sure you do everything you can to show to Google that you are not over-optimising and you should be OK.
Also, take a look at Rand's recent whiteboard Friday which goes over this.
Good luck!
Matt.
Hi Cormac,
I have had a little look around and this website seems to do what you need (and its free!):
http://www.further.co.uk/free-website-spellcheck/
Hope this helps
Matt.
I see.
I would presume that these guys have been penalised then. It may be that they are now trying to reindex their site and are still appearing in the listings but much lower now.
There isnt really a definite way of knowing if they have been banned, but as good practise, I would try and get any URL removed from a website that I had any doubts about.
You could maybe try contacting the Google Webmaster team to confirm this, but I don't know how useful they will be. Then again, its worth a try at least.
Matt.
Hi Morgan,
The website will show in Google if you do a site:www.domain.com search.
If you searched for 'domain' (replace this with their website name, i.e. seo moz) and they don't show up in the top few listings thn you can be pretty sure that they have been banned.
As soon as this is the case, I would either contact the webmaster or manually delete the link if you can.
Good luck!
Matt.
Hi Morgan,
Unfortunately, there isn't a quick way to do this.
What I have done is use Open Site Explorer and downloaded the .csv file of all the linking domains to my website.
Now that I have them in a spreadsheet, it is a bit easier to filter through them. I have been drilling down on links from blogs with a particularly low PA or DA. Then just doing the hard task of checking to see if they have individually been banned by Google. You can do this by searching for their domain to see if they appear.
This is a slow process, but better safe than sorry, eh?
Hope this helps.
Matt.
Hi Victoria,
I wouldn't use names like 'Online for Equine | Horse Riding Clothing | Just Togs Latina Jodhpurs'. They are what your web page titles should be like (be aware the recent over-optimisation changes Google is making though).
Your image names should all be different and should be a couple of words long, just like i suggested before. So this could be:
'Riding Clothing'
'Equestrian Breeches'
'Equestrian Clothing'
Try to make sure the image names are in context though or you're in danger of being penalised by Google.
Another thing to look into is creating an image sitemap. This can help a lot with your image SEO.
Matt.
Hi Victoria,
This would probably be seen in a bad light by Google so I wouldn't recommend this.
Image SEO has several things that affect it. One factor is the filename of the image, another is the alt attribute, and another is the text around it.
Make sure that you name your image with a relevant keyword, for example, 'Riding Clothes', then you can also name the alt attribute this. Next, any text that wraps the image, try to make sure that it is related to the image. For example, use semantically similar words, like 'some of the riding clothing that is...'.
This will help you're images rank well.
Hope this helps.
Matt.
Hi Victoria,
This would probably be seen in a bad light by Google so I wouldn't recommend this.
Image SEO has several things that affect it. One factor is the filename of the image, another is the alt attribute, and another is the text around it.
Make sure that you name your image with a relevant keyword, for example, 'Riding Clothes', then you can also name the alt attribute this. Next, any text that wraps the image, try to make sure that it is related to the image. For example, use semantically similar words, like 'some of the riding clothing that is...'.
This will help you're images rank well.
Hope this helps.
Matt.
I have now solved the problem. Thank God!
Just in case anyone is aving the same probllem, I used the following Joomla! plugin to generate the canonical links:
Hi Justin,
Thanks for that. I have been trying to find a plugin that will work to do the canonical URLs for Joomla 1.7 and having real problems. Ideally, I want a free plugin as well. The one in the blog post you sent is a paid one, and that is just for SEF URLs and doesn't do the canonical tag.
Thanks all the same though.
Matt.
Hi Guys,
Having a really frustrating problem with our website. It is a Joomla 1.7 site and we have some duplicate page issues.
What is happening is that we have a webpage, lets say domain.com/webpage1 and then we also have domain.com/index.php/webpage1.
Google is seeing these as duplicate pages and is causing me some real SEO problems. I have tried setting up a 301 redirect but it wn't let me redirect /index.php/webpage1 to /webpage1.
Anyone have any ideas or plugins that can be used to sort this out?
Any help will be really appreciated!
Matt.
Hi Martin,
I wouldn't hold too much importance towards Dmoz as part of your link building because, with any directory, there are loads of outbound links on the site, which means less link juice.
I would suspect that the reason why your link is not showing on open site explorer could be that Dmoz takes a little while to upload the link onto their website so it may show up in a couple of weeks.
My advice would now be to try having a look into some other directories that are focused around the specific industry that your website operates in. You can easily find these by doing searches in Google like:
'yourindustry' + inurl:directory intitle:add
Replace 'yourindustry' with a keyword related to your site and this should show you a few quick wins that you can submit to. Just remember that directory submission is only a very small part of your link building, but it still helps.
Matt.
Hi Vinku,
Firstly, I would create and submit a video sitemap for your website to Google. This will help them to index the videos on the website and will throw you up the search rankings. You can either submit a separate video sitemap or add some extra code onto your exisiting one for this.
I would advise you to make sure that you are embedding either your vimeo or YouTube videos direct to the website so that you don't get duplicate videos as these will just compete with each other and be detrimental to your SEO efforts.
Hope this helps.
Matt.
Hey there,
Measuring or calculating the value of rankings is always a tough one because each keyword can provide completely different traffic levels when at a number one listing.
The way that I personally do this, to get a rough estimate, is to look at the total monthly local searches figure for the search term. This will give you an idea of how many searches will be made using this keyword each month. Now that you know that, take a look at the total results within Google, as well as the total results with the keyword in their webpage title (using the intitle: operator). This will then show what kind of competition you are up against.
It has been found that around 70% of all searches are clicked through on the top 3 results so you could take 70% of the global monthly searches, then multiply this figure (estimated click-throughs from the search engine) by the website conversion rate. This will then give you a rough estimate for what kind of potential revenue you could expect from getting a #1 ranking listing.
As I said before, this is a very rough estimate as there are many other factors, but this can be a good starting point.
Hope this helps.
Matt.
I would recommend just keeping a consistent backlink campaign going and it will give you stability in the listings eventually. Look for some high quality directory listings as well as putting together some PR worthy content that is likely to gain some permanent links from some higher authority websites.
These things take time so don't worry, you will get there eventually 
Matt.
Hi Nik,
I have had similar problems in the past. The likelihood is that you are challenging for a competitive keyword (correct me if I am wrong) and there are many other websites battling to get up in the search listings.
Your website doesn't have a particularly high authority/PR either, therefore it is going to susceptible to rank fluctuations. My advice is to just keep working on your SEO around the chosen keyword, regularly post fresh new content around the topic and make sure that you are reviewing the performance every week or fortnight.
Try to avoid looking every day at the rankings a making changes based on 24 hours of activity. Let a week go by before you do anything drastic and then make slight changes here and there.
Hope this helps.
Matt.
Hi Adam,
I wouldn't worry too much here. What it probably is, is because you have set up new a new URL architecture, Google is now having to index those new pages into the search engine. As a result of this, you may not be appearing in the search engines for such a high spread of different keywords than you previously were.
Personally, I don't pay too much attention to impressions as I focus more on actual click-throughs to the website. If your Google Analytics data is showing that you are maintaining web traffic levels to the website and you are getting good traffic through the organic search listings then everything should be fine.
Give it a month or so and you will find that your total impressions will rise up again. Just keep an eye on web traffic and actual organic search visits for now. I would anticipate that you would get a slight drop for a new site in the short term anyway.
Hope this has cleared things up.
Matt.
I think for your purposes, SEOmoz would more than be enough. You can carry out all of your keyword analysis, SERP rank analysis, etc all from here.
Alongside that, there are many free tools that you can utilise, most of them from Google. So Google's analytics, webmaster tools, website optimiser, etc, all work great and are free.
One area that I find particularly useful within the SEOmoz subscription is the open site explorer so make good use of that!
Try some of the free plugins that you can get for your web browser as well, they can come in extremely handy. SEO book do a great one for Firefox, and Mozbar is another great one.
Hope this helps.
Matt.
Hey there
In terms of your question of 'will it take away from the 'Audi A4' term if you put in further characters to the page titles, the answer is no.
The page titles should reflect the page content, and should also not be too short, as well as too long.
By putting in extra words after Audi A4 will only increase the amount of possible search terms that can gain entry points to the webpage. As good practice, aim to get your webpage titles between 40 and 65 characters as this is the optimum amount.
As my suggestion, go with option B, however, try doing a bit more keyword analysis to find what users search to find an Audi A4. From a brief look on Google's keyword tool, I can see that there are many searches for the product name plus engine size, i.e. Audi A4 1.9 tdi (49,500 monthly global searches). Judging by this, it may be good to put in the brief specification into the webpage title.
Hope this helps
Matt.
Hi Guys,
We have recently created a new website for one of our clients and replaced their old website on the same domain. One problem that we are having is that all of the old pages are indexed within Google (1000s) and are just getting sent to our custom 404 page. We are finding that there is an large bounce rate from this and also, I am worried from an SEO point of view that the site could lose rank positioning through the number of crawl errors that Google is getting.
Want I want is to set up a 301 redirect from these pages to go to the 'our brands' page. The reason for this is that the majority of the old URLs linked to individual product pages, and one thing to note is that they are all .asp pages.
Is there a way of setting up a rule in the htaccess file (or another way) to say that all webpages that end with the suffix of .asp will be 301 redirected to the our brands' page? (there is no .asp pages on the new site as it is all done in php).
If so, I would love it if someone could post the code snippet. Thanks in advance guys and if you have any other ideas then be my guest to suggest
Matt.
Thanks Mark,
I have been spending quite a bit of time looking through my competitors' linking sites so it is good to know that that wasn't in vain.
I completely agree with you about linkbait, it can be very hard work and the success rate is very different each time (which can be great at times but extremely frustrating at others!).
One thing I have always wondered is that a lot of SEO companies will offer, lets say, 500 directory submissions to clients each month. Do you think that a lot of these links are just worthless links, and if you don't mind divulging, how many directories would you say you submit to on average each month? (just so I can get an idea of the scale of what I should be aiming for).
Thanks again.
Within your title tag, you shouldn't generally use connecting words like 'and', 'is', etc. Stick to just using 'Holidays Ireland' within this part of your webpage.
For the META description you should then use connecting words to make it coherent and understandable to users. The META description doesn't actually play an effect on your SEO rankings but remember that it will show keywords in bold if a user has searched for 'Holidays in Ireland', which will increase your click-through rate.
Hope this helps
Matt.
When you get a link through from Twitter (i.e. through someone tweeting your blog post or re-tweeting your tweet with a link to your website), the root domain that it will appear as will be 't.co'.
't.co' is a link shortening service that Twitter uses so any links to your website showing in open site explorer coming from this root domain are from Twitter.
Hope this has helped.
Matt.
Hi Guys,
One area of my link building that I carry out is looking for online directories and social bookmarking websites to submit my website to. I do this in order to gain some backlinks to my website. What I want to know is are they really worth my time, and if so, which types would you say are the most important?
I have obviously been through many directory lists, both on SEOmoz and on other websites, and also performed various searches to find relevant directories to my website. I just feel that posting up a link that lies deep in a directory online that, more often than not, have very low PA and lots of outbound links will offer very little in terms of SEO. If anything, this could really bring down the quality of my links and be detrimental to my website, right?
This is a subject that I have been thinking about for a while and especially with the recent algorithm update from Google and the attack on many web directories that are, lets say, 'not playing by the rules', I'm worried that this will have a negative impact for my website.
Let me know your thoughts guys and if you have any tips on how to get higher quality links from these kind of submission then I'm all ears!
Matt.