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Thanks Hillary

Any tools you recommend for checking their site size and growth rate or just a manual inspection of their site for fresh content?

My thoughts as well. I didn't expect age (especially in this situation) to play a large role. The site in question is climbing fast against everyone in the competitive landscape.  OSE and AHREFS are not showing any new links (or at least none that they have picked up yet).

What else should I be examining? There has to be a reason for the push.

One of my clients competitors launched a new site in January 2014 (totally new site on a domain that had previously never been used). The competitor has very few backlinks (only double digits), most of which are directory links (dofollow and nofollow). Their authority level is good but not as high as others who rank on top pages with them and their on-page optimization is lacking in a few areas.

For all intents and purposes, the site should not be ranking where it is from what I can see. However, it is literally skyrocketing up the ranks faster than I would have ever imagined.

The only thing I found that this domain has going for it is age (roughly 4 years). Does this carry more weight than I think it does?

When compared to my clients site, we have more backlinks (similar mix), higher DA and PA and better on-page optimization for the same keywords. However, our domain age is only a little over 1 year.

Doesn't take much in this particular industry to rank. The competitors who do consistently well have a small number of backlinks and lower authority levels than the sites listed above. The client does have a few good back links and a nice handful of internal links.

What concerns me is the never bouncing back part. I have advised them of this and further advised them to start fresh but their is an emotional attachment to the brands that they can't let go (understandably so). My fear is that we will put in a great deal of time and resources into something that may be destined to fail now.

Would love to hear stories of others who were in a similar circumstance.

Hello Mozzers

A website of a new client (http://bit.ly/PuVNTp) use to rank very well. It was on the top page for any relevant search terms in its industry in Southern Ontario (Canada). Late last year, the client was the victim of a negative SEO attack. Thousands upon thousands of spammy backlinks were built (suspected to be bought using something like Fiverr). The links came from very questionable sites or just low quality sites.

The backlink growth window was very small (2,000 every 24 hours or so). Since that happened that site has all but disappeared from search results. It is still indexed and the owner has disavowed most of the bad backlinks but the site can't seem to bounce back.

The same happened for another site that they own (http://bit.ly/1tErxpu) except the number backlinks produced was even higher. The sites both suffer from duplicate content issues and at one point (in 2012) were de-indexed due to the very spammy work of a former SEO. They came back in early 2013 and were fine for some time.

Thoughts?

Thanks Moosa. Will take a look around the community. I have also been looking at Moz's recommended list of partners.

I should elaborate while here. Not necessarily looking for link building in its old school sense. More or less someone who is good with content strategies. The owners of the site in questions are very "hands off" and getting them to work with content (since they are the subject matter experts) is like pulling teeth.

No longer applicable.

Hi Gents and Ladies

Before I get started, here is the website in question. www.moldinspectiontesting.ca. I apologize in advance if I miss any important or necessary details. This might actually seem like several disjointed thoughts. It is very late where I am and I am a very exhausted. No on to this monster of a post.

**The background story: **

My programmer and I recently moved the website from a standalone CMS to Wordpress. The owners of the site/company were having major issues with their old SEO/designer at the time. They felt very abused and taken by this person (which I agree they were - financially, emotionally and more). They wanted to wash their hands of the old SEO/designer completely. They sought someone out to do a minor redesign (the old site did look very dated) and transfer all of their copy as affordably as possible. We took the job on. I have my own strengths with SEO but on this one I am a little out of my element. Read on to find out what that is.

**Here are some of the issues, what we did and a little more history: **

The old site had a terribly unclean URL structure as most of it was machine written. The owners would make changes to one central location/page and the old CMS would then generate hundreds of service area pages that used long, parameter heavy url's (along with duplicate content). We could not duplicate this URL structure during the transfer and went with a simple, clean structure. Here is an example of how we modified the url's...

Old: http://www.moldinspectiontesting.ca/service_area/index.cfm?for=Greater Toronto Area

New: http://www.moldinspectiontesting.ca/toronto

My programmer took to writing 301 redirects and URL rewrites (.htaccess) for all their service area pages (which tally in the hundreds).

As I hinted to above, the site also suffers from a overwhelming amount of duplicate copy which we are very slowly modifying so that it becomes unique. It's also currently suffering from a tremendous amount of keyword cannibalization. This is also a result of the old SEO's work which we had to transfer without fixing first (hosting renewal deadline with the old SEO/designer forced us to get the site up and running in a very very short window). We are currently working on both of these issues now.

SERPs have been swinging violently since the transfer and understandably so. Changes have cause and effect. I am bit perplexed though. Pages are indexed one day and ranking very well locally and then apparently de-indexed the next. It might be worth noting that they had some de-index problems in the months prior to meeting us. I suspect this was in large part to the duplicate copy. The ranking pages (on a url basis) are also changing up. We will see a clean url rank and then drop one week and then an unclean version rank and drop off the next (for the same city, same web search). Sometimes they rank along side each other.

The terms they want to rank for are very easy to rank on because they are so geographically targeted. The competition is slim in many cases. This time last year, they were having one of the best years in the company's 20+ year history (prior to being de-indexed).

**On to the questions: **

**What should we do to reduce the loss in these ranked pages? With the actions we took, can I expect the old unclean url's to drop off over time and the clean url's to pick up the ranks? Where would you start in helping this site? Is there anything obvious we have missed? I planned on starting with new keyword research to diversify what they rank on and then following that up with fresh copy across the board. **

If you are well versed with this type of problem/situation (url changes, index/de-index status, analyzing these things etc), I would love to pick your brain or even bring you on board to work with us (paid).

Thanks for the response Francsisco.

I do not think this it the case but will test regardless. I am noticing some competitors who are not stuffing and they are also being hit by this.  At the same time, I am seeing a few competitors who are much more likely to be stuffing and they are not being affected.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-brand-title-appending-16432.html

Rand, where art thou? Help!

Dana

I read over at searchengineland that Google is testing something. I will try to find the article shortly. Also, it has been noticed by many that this is only affecting websites homepages.

Mat

Google is overriding the title to display as I mentioned above, regardless of how you have it formatted.

And yes, Mathew is the most awesome way to spell our name

Anyone else noticing this happening? In Google search results, many of my sites are now showing up in the following fashion...

"Site name: page title"

I read a few articles in the past few days that state that Google may be playing with the algo but have not read anything from Google directly.

I should add that I first noticed this on Feb. 21 and have seen it rolling out more and more since. I have only noticed it on a few competitor websites thus far.

Edit:Some links talking about the subject

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-brand-title-appending-16432.html

http://semandseo.blogspot.ca/2013/03/google-brand-title-in-search.html

http://www.designbigger.com/blog/seo/google-rewrites-page-titles-to-push-brand-over-keywords/

Search was run in Canada, exact match result on Adwords and for Google, Canada-English with SEOMoz.

For the most part, SEOMoz's keyword analysis tool has been in line with other tools like Adwords keyword tool with regards to competitive level. I have just encountered a keyword though that a client may choose to compete on that seems to be far off.

keyword phrase: online math games

Adwords competitive level: Low

SEOMoz competitive level: 80

This seems like a sizeable difference (I know the two compare all results vs first page authority's, but typically they are in line with each other).

With other related keywords for the industry in question, SEOMoz and Adwords seem to be in line. This one just got me thinking. I know the SEOMoz score is a sign of the strength of the top results and that the "low" score from Adwords may be a sign of much weaker results on the following pages (with a higher number of weaker pages vs fewer high authority outliers).

**Question: **

How accurate is SEOMoz keyword analysis tool and what other keyword analysis tools are you guys/gals using that you like? I have tried others but many provide duplicate insights.

I know that some of them are very questionable. The sites listed right next to this persons in some cases are explicit to say the least.

Others are very misleading and have no relevance to the company in question what so ever. These really bad ones I will work on manually removing. Others that seem to provide no value might go the route of a domain level disavow.

Has anyone used the Disavow tool yet? Any successes?

Need help/opinions from the SEO's out there. I am working with a site that in the past hired an SEO company out of India. Over the course of their time together, this company submitted the clients url to tens of thousands of link exchanges and directories.

Around the time of Penguin, the owners told me their inquiries dried up. Literally that same week they had a new website launched (designed by a local competitor) that really butchered the site. They were convinced the reduction in traffic/inquiries was due to the new site but I am convinced otherwise (suspect Penguin).

Not only does the site need to be re-structured but their link portfolio needs to be diversified.

Now on the plus side, the company caters and sponsors a number of events that earns them organic, relevant links. These are overshadowed by the tons of poor, irrelevant ones though.

I read a few posts recently on the Google Link Disavow tool and to proceed slowly due to the unknown nature surrounding it. I have a good idea of what links are problematic and which ones are well served. However, the number of problematic links in my estimation is quite high (thousands). I am very hesitant to dive into Google Disavow and submit such a large number of requests.

What are your thoughts? How would you proceed?

Hi Andi

To go off of what Nikele said, you can also use the SEOMoz keyword difficulty tool to gauge a little more about the competition.  I personally like this better than the Adwords Keyword tool since they only measure difficulty in high-medium-low.

Answered.