Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Sam

My bad! I thought I had updated it, but no, I hadn't! Thanks very much.

Neil

Hi

I asked a question on 22nd Sep and 16th October about Mozbar: "I have been exporting SERP results using the Mozbar, but I don't get PA and DA data even though this is shown in the SERP overlay. The data is shown in excel as being 'undefined'. Anyone else having this problem?"

I was told that this was a known issue and a fix would be available within weeks. Is there any update on when this update is likely?

Thanks again for your assistance.

Neil

Cheers Jon, thanks for the update.

Great - 3 is really quite limiting

Hi there,

I am trying to use MOZ Analytics but it keeps saying our Google Analytics has lost connection, if I then reconnect it says it is successful and then when I go to a new page it says it has no connection again.

Has anyone experienced this? Does anyone have a fix?

Thanks

Peter

Hi

I asked a question on 22nd Sep about Mozbar: "I have been exporting SERP results using the Mozbar, but I don't get PA and DA data even though this is shown in the SERP overlay. The data is shown in excel as being 'undefined'. Anyone else having this problem?"

I was told that this was a known issue and a fix would be available within 2 weeks. Is there any update on when this update is likely?

Thanks again for your assistance.

Neil

Thanks for the answer, much appreciated.

Yes, thanks for the answer.

Hi

Ignorant question, but is it possible to use Screaming Frog or the Moz crawler or any other reputable crawler for a site still in development i.e. it is yet to be indexed? If so, could someone provide some quick instructions on how this can be done.

Thanks in advance for any support.

Neil

Thanks Tim, great shout. Just checked and you were right. Bit slap on the wrists all round.

Thanks again!

Thanks Nakul - but the issue is with the 404 page itself being indexed (as it appears in the sitemap), then this page being used as one of the sitelinks for a brand search term.

I agree 301 should be put in place for any 404s seen on the site

I am little embarresed to say that the custom 404 page is appearing in a client's Sitelinks for their brand name search term.

I have demoted this page from Sitelinks for the brand term but it still appears

What is the best practise for a custom 404 page appearing in a sitemap and/or being blocked by robots.txt?

Thanks

Hello

I'd appreciate views of the various metrics I'm struggling with in GA:

I've run 2 different reports that provide 2 different outputs.

1. In Standard Reporting you can report in Traffic Sources on Organic Search by Keyword, which returns the number of Visits.

2. In Custom Reporting you can define the Keyword dimension and the Organic Searches metric, which returns the number of Organic Searches.

This returns 2 different numbers. For example, over the last month for a given term report 1 returns 77,306 visits whilst report 2 returns 52,589 organic searches.

I have found some definitions:

• "Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site."
• "Organic Searches: number of organic searches that happened within a session. This metric is search engine agnostic."

My understanding of these definitions is that report 2 should return a larger value than report 1 rather than what is happening (i.e. report 1 returns a greater value than report 2).

Does anyone have a greater understanding of what these mean and relate to? Does anyone have any views on which metric is more useful?

Thanks

Neil

Hi

This is obviously a well worn question (I've read the great blog by Sam Crocker last year - see below), but I'm looking for an updated set of opinions on sources of competitor data. The competitor data I'm interested in is traffic volumes either aggregated or disaggregated by referral source (i.e. organic search, PPC, email, social etc.).

The types of data I've checked so far are Google Trends for websites (no disaggregation), Alexa (some good sources of free data) and Experian's Hitwise (too expensive for my current needs). In addition I'm aware that Compete will be providing an interface for such data in the UK in January at reasonable rates for what I'm after.

I'm interested in views on these and other sources in relation to experience of their relative accuracy, costs, pros, con etc. Ideally I'm looking for something that is free, comprehensive, and is not being used by the competition - is that too much to ask!!!

Any inputs would be greatly appeciated.

Thanks in advance!

Neil

Sam's great blog:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/monitor-competitor-traffic

I'm a Brit and know very little of Thanksgiving, or dentists, or sunshine during the summer etc etc etc...

Thanks for the reply.

Hi

I'm trying to establish a methodology to best show the gap between potential and realised organic keyword traffic.

To obtain potential keyword traffic I'm using the Google Adwords keyword tool to derive local monthly search volumes for exact keyword matches. To get the realised data I'm using Google Analytics.

However, to get the I'm confused as to which is the best way of getting a comparable metric from Google Analytics (GA).

I was using custom reports and the 'organic searches' metric. However, this provides different values to a standard report selecting non-paid search in the default advanced segments. What is the best report/metric in GA to use for both organic and paid search volumes that would be comparable to the Google Adwords keyword tool.

Thanks

Neil

Hi

I'm trying to establish a methodology to best show the gap between potential and realised organic keyword traffic.

To obtain potential keyword traffic I'm using the Google Adwords keyword tool to derive local monthly search volumes for exact keyword matches.

However, I'm confused as to which is the best way of getting a comparable metric from Google Analytics (GA). I was using custom reports and the 'organic searches' metric. However, this provides different values to a standard report selecting non-paid search in the default advanced segments. What is the best report/metric in GA to use for both organic and paid search volumes that would be comparable to the Google Adwords keyword tool.

Also, I'm having problems getting my kids to eat their greens, any advice!

Thanks

Neil

Thanks

My lotto needs another number, so if I'm having to add to your suggestion your cut goes down to 30%!

Cheers dude.

Great, thanks. Is there any way of undertaking competitor analysis?

And, where are those lottery numbers!!!

The SEOmoz PRO tool shows how keywords rank in the organic part of the SERPs. Does anyone know if there is another tool out there that shows the same thing for ranking in the ads section of the SERPs?

Also, does anyone know the winning lottery numbers (any lottery will do, I'm not fussy!).

Thanks

Neil

Awesome

Cheers dude!

Wendy (or anyone else who wants to assist)

a) Within the standard reporting part of Google Analytics I have selected Organic Search from the Traffic Sources section. This provides me with the number of non-paid search visits for the period in question.

b) In the custom reporting section I have selected Organic Searches in the metrics tab, and then Sources (for example) in the dimensions tab. This (I believe) should give me tha same data as in a), but it is lower in volume. The difference is only 3%, but it makes me think I have done something wrong which I obviously want to correct.

Again, any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Regards

Neil

Thanks Wendy for the prompt response - just have to dash for a meal with the inlaws (!), will confirm latter what I've done to check.

Thanks again.

Hello

In Google analytics you can obtain the number of visits as a result of non-paid search. You can also set up custom reports to find the number of organic searches. The numbers are different, so what is the obvious difference between these two metrics that I'm missing.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Neil

Thanks for the prompt response.

Hello

Is there any definitive information on whether the recent changes to the way Google encrypts search results for people logged into Google affects the traffic present via the Google Adwords Keyword tool?

Plus, how does SEOmoz ensure/minimise the affect of personalisation/localisation etc. on the rankings data provided via the pro tool.

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Kind regards

Neil

Hello

We're going to upload a bulklisting to Google Places for multiple locations. However, there are existing Google places listings for these locations. The bulklisting is being used to undertake a refresh of all the existing data. How do we go about updating the existing data i.e. do we have to delete the existing information prior to submitting the bulkload, or does a new submission over write the existing data.

In addition, how does Google Places verify a bulkload submission i.e. do they make contact with the designated business owner. How long does such a process actually take (roughly!).

I know some of this is touched on in the Goolge Places help section, but it is not clear and I don't want to get this wrong for obvious reasons.

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Rgds

Neil

Hola

Is there any consensus as yet as to whether people plan to use schema.org as the content markup standard rather than RDFa and microformats? There are some arguments flying around about the benefits and disbenefits, but the pragmatic answer to this question IMHO lies in how many people take this up rather than any arguments on what is best.

Thanks to any and all who reply.

Thanks

Neil

Thanks for the response.

I wouldn't have thought the traffic numbers would include these intermediate instant responses either (primarily because it isn't a genuine search, and as Rand's last question suggested it is something that can be 'gamed'). In addition, if the traffic numbers do include intermediate instant searches then as you suggest there is a possibility that search traffic numbers could be double counted for a given keyphrase: once when the intermediate instant result shows for a variant of the possible instant suggestion, and again if you reject the instant search result by hitting return.

However, it is possible for you to click on a result in the intermediate Instant SERP without formally accepting the suggestion (i.e. it remains 'greyed' out). Thereby, you have informally searched for that instant keyphrase suggestion. How would the google traffic estimator deal with this situation? (I feel I should be contacting Google, but I am interested if anyone has any opinions on this).

Finally, just to confirm the brand in question does not have any traffic in the estimator tool for an exact match. I have tried on numerous occasions just to check I'm not going mad. It's going to be an issue as it will cast doubt in the clients mind on the other suggested traffic volumes.

Thanks again.

Neil

Hello

Does the Google traffic estimator include the impact of instant? For example, if I type the phrase "London restaurant", instant may provide a list of search results for the phrase "London restaurant guide" prior to me confirming whether or not I just want to search using the phrase "London restaurant". Is this registered in any way as a search for the phrase "London restaurant guide" (i.e. does Instant impact upon the search volumes presented in the Google traffic estimator)?

In addition, is there any up to date assessment on how reliable the revised traffic estimator is? The tool currently suggests that for a well known brand we are working for does not have any search volume (over a whole year) for the brand keyphrase when used in isolation (there is traffic for various combinations of the brand and a generic term). However, as one would expect, our analytics data is showing that there are in excess of 1 million annual visitors that use the brand keyphrase in isolation to access the website via natural search and nearly 1.5 million via PPC. Is anyone else getting these problems?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Rgds

Neil

We have made modifications to the URL structure for a particular client who publishes news articles in various niche industries. In line with SEO best practice we removed the article ID from the URL - an example is below:

http://www.website.com/news/123/news-article-title
http://www.website.com/news/read/news-article-title

Since this has been done we have noticed a decline in traffic volumes (we have not as yet assessed the impact on number of pages indexed). Google have suggested that we need to include unique numerical IDs in the URL somewhere to aid spidering. Firstly, is this policy for news submissions? Secondly (if the previous answer is yes), is this to overcome the obvious issue with the velocity and trend based nature of news submissions resulting in false duplicate URL/ title tag violations? Thirdly, do you have any advice on the way to go?

Thanks

P.S. One final one (you can count this as two question credits if required), is it possible to check the volume of pages indexed at various points in the past i.e. if you think that the number of pages being indexed may have declined, is there any way of confirming this after the event?

Thanks again!

Neil