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Hi Kristopher,
Could you please mention what the title of the website is?
Most likely, Google believes that it might be too spammy for its search results, so I am assuming it's just returning the company name as the title tag?
This is quite common but can be fixed.
Here are some ideas:
Would suggest looking out there to see what the others are doing as well.
The keyword tool isn't about competition per se (even though it does talk about competition), it's more about how difficult it would be to rank for certain keywords.
In your case the keyword "christian web designers" might only return few search results, but the top 10 could be domains with a strong backlink profile, which would make it difficult to rank for the top 10.
Well if you want to double check it all the meta data is still there, either create a new campaign in SEOMoz with the new URL and see if any tags are missing or use software such as the screaming frog to test.
Hi BobGW,
Kinda funny as I'll mention the exact same article as the person asking a question below you in the Q&A.
Have a look at what Distilled did with their long guide at http://www.distilled.net/linkbait-guide/
Instead of just plain boring text, mix it up with the an occasional image and colored section or quote.
Good luck!
Hi monster99,
Definitely check out http://www.distilled.net/linkbait-guide/ which my favourite content producing article I've found so far.
Ok so now we know it is due to the Penguin update.
The first step to do will be analyzing every single on of your backlink. Use Webmaster Tools and export all the backlinks that are pointing to your website. Next you will have to check out each single backlinks to see the quality of the link. I like to use the Mozbar addon to quickly check what the MozRank and MozTrust of the page is where the backlinks to your site is located.
Once you got the full list of links you want to have gone, you will first have to manually try and remove the links. This could be relatively easy if the link for example is from a directory where you had to make a profile first in order to create a listing. In that case, you can just delete the listing. Otherwise you will have to email the owner of the website if they could remove your backlink.
Now if, let's say 2-3 weeks have passed and you still haven't heard back of some the webmasters (even though you contacted them), you can go ahead and use the link disavow tool. This tool however has to be used with high care.
Have a read of http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-disavow-links-tool-136826 for an understanding of the tool.
If you don't fully understand the tool, please come back to the SEOMoz forums and ask for help, you need to fully understand how it works.
Good luck and feel free to ask any other questions!
By the sound of you might of gotten a penalty of Google.
I believe it might of been the penguin update.
I had a look at your backlink profile, and out of a total of 2.9k links you have 968 links with the anchor text of "vietnam visa of arrival". This is a clear signal to google that you are trying to manipulate to rank for that keyword.
Did the rankings decreased around the period of April the 24th?
Hi Hoang Huy Do,
The following page explains quite nicely where you should keywords in regards to on-page optimisation.
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/on-page-factors
In regards to link building, never go overboard with keyword anchor texts. I believe something around 3-4% can be keywords you are aiming for. Otherwise, it should be your business name or natural text such "click here" etc.
Having duplicate titles will most certainly be effecting your SERP rankings, along with many many others factors of course.
Page titles should be unique on each page, and contain keywords that describe or that are relevant to the page.
Check out: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag
Good day David,
The above information is great. What I could add though is if you add competitors into Open Site Explorer, there is an "Anchor Text" tab you can click, which often shows what keywords they are trying to rank for. It could also be possible that the website might have a meta keywords (even though they were outdated years ago). To access these, go to their website and check their source (ctrl+u), then look for the meta keywords line.
Once you have a general list of keywords that you think they are trying to rank for, instead of manually checking yourself with Google, I use the following software (http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/). Even with their free version, you can enter any URL, followed by a list of keywords you would like to see the rankings of.
Good Luck
Hi tgr0ss,
If you chose for website URL that consists of keywords, it still carries some ranking weight (not much though, and it will decrease over time). Myself, I prefer the company name as the URL, as it good for branding and it doesn't look like you are trying to force your rankings to go higher.
In regards to your titles, each page should have an unique title tag. As you are pro member, you can see in your campaigns that there are "Duplicate Page Title" errors. What I prefer is the following structure:
Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 | Company Name
Keyword 1, Keyword 2 | Location | Company Name
And be sure to keep the length of the title tag under 70 character, so it won't be shortened in the search results.
Best of luck!
The keyword tool isn't about competition per se (even though it does talk about competition), it's more about how difficult it would be to rank for certain keywords.
In your case the keyword "christian web designers" might only return few search results, but the top 10 could be domains with a strong backlink profile, which would make it difficult to rank for the top 10.
Hi Stephen,
Definitely, definitely don't do this. It sucks that your clients don't want to operate with you, but doing this might put them at risk of a penalty. You clearly know that the technique is used by spammers, and even though you might justify you reason, Google will not.
Have you showed your clients some articles or blog posts on the importance of content perhaps?
Hi Diane,
Had a quick look at your website, and since it seems to be regularly updated (latest celebrity news etc.) I think having an RSS feed would be beneficial to have, this way frequent visitors of you site can easy check up what's new at your site.
They are also easy to set-up, so yes, definitely go ahead with it.
Regards
Simply put, the moz crawler bot cannot crawl every single page on the web, whereas the google WMT crawler does a significant job doing so.
If you do have a new site though, give it some time and your links should appear in OSE, every new site takes a while to get found by the moz crawler.
There is one website I could definitely recommend, it is called "My Blog Guest" (http://myblogguest.com/)
It is founded by Ann Smarty, who has been featured here on SEOmoz and she is also a member on here. Basically, the website offers the opportunity to look for blog guest writers as well as offering articles to other blog owners. The site is easy to use and pick up.
If you are willing to pay though you could check out sites such as oDesk (as mentioned by Ben). Do be aware though that you look at their ratings, their native language and the amount of experience they have. We once trialed on there looking for a writer, the content we received however was very very poor (although the person's ratings on oDesk were good). In the end, we settled for an in-house writer.
Best of luck!
Hi Lucy,
Like-wise as Robert, I myself have used hootsuite before for several social media complaints. Besides a huge outage at an important time, I didn't really mind using the service (took a small while getting used to it, that's all).
I suggest you read http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-shortener-owl-li-indexed-in-google (was released today, excellent timing) as well, which actually talks about using one of the URL shorteners provided by Hootsuite.
Best of luck.
Hi btrr69, by looking at your OSE data every single backlink you have (except 1), has the anchor text of "whey protein". There are a total of 76 links containing that anchor text. I am getting the feeling that you might actually be punished by Penguin.
Anchor text should be super diversified, with only about 30% of total links containing either your brand name or chosen keywords.
If I were you, I would change as many anchor texts on those links as quick as possible.
Hi LittleBigMan,
Your best bet finding out where your traffic is coming from is checking your Analytics (which hopefully has been setup?).
On the left you'll be able to go from Traffic Sources -> Search -> Organic. On this page you'll see all the keywords that have brought you in traffic organically.
Also check under the referrals tab to see if BOTW and Yahoo are bringing you any traffic.
Best of luck!