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My recommendation would be to remove the tag altogether if possible OR leave the tag blank if that is not possible.
The other "problem" a keyword tag can pose if you are utilizing it correctly is that competitors can EASILY see what keywords/phrases you are targeting.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Maybe give this Bing Index Explorer tool a whirl?
"The Index Explorer tool in the Reports & Data section provides you with a unique view of how Bing sees your site. It reflects all the URLs we have seen on the web, including redirects, broken links, or those blocked by robots.txt, organized in an file explorer-like fashion. This view can help you get some really detailed insights into how your site was seen by the search engine during recent crawls. It can help discover both issues on your site as well as opportunities."
Hope this helps.
Mike
It does not matter from an SEO standpoint whether you link to https or http from your homepage to a secondary page.
What does matter is that you only have one version. You do not want to have http://domain.com/second-page and https://domain.com/second-page on your website.
Hope this helps.
Mike
The full subdomain of your website in this case would be www.mysite.com. The www is considered a subdomain.
I just responded to your other question and was guessing that you had a campaign setup for your non-www version and that is why you are getting the 301 redirect notice.
As Joram suggests, you can remove the non-www version from your campaigns.
Mike
If this is an internal link on your website, you would want to change the actual path to point to the newer secure-document-storage page.
If this is an external link from another website, you'd create a redirect that will take the incoming request for the old document-security page and push the visitor to the new secure-document-storage page.
Make sense?
Mike
Hi Rasmus,
I think the SEO best practice or normal practice is to target one keyword per page. I think the reasoning behind it is you can tailor the title, url, content, backlinks, etc. to that particular keyword instead of splitting it up between multiple.
That being said, I think it all comes down to the competitiveness of your keywords. If they are very competitive, you are better off doing multiple pages; however, if they are not completive or more "long-tail" types of keywords, you could definitely attempt to have them on a single page.
If this does not help in answering your question, I would simply recommend trying it. See if you can get the results you want using one page... but if you can't attain those results, switch it up and try the two page approach.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Keri's example of Moz's "top secret project" is a good one.
If you Google "top secret project" they are appearing at the bottom of the second page SERP.
Hi Gina,
You should try to fix any errors. Errors can impact your users' experience, as well as interfere with web crawlers and even impact your rankings.
404 errors:
Warnings are more or less a "if you have time and can, you could fix these". They really do not impact your rankings, but if you are trying to be perfect, you could fix them.
Notices are just a "heads-up". They do not impact rankings, UNLESS you are blocking robots ; )
Long story short, fix Errors, work on Warnings when you have time, verify you already knew about the Notices.
Hope this helps.
Mike
The only thing that can happen is if Google indexes an http and https version of the same page. It isn't a HUGE deal... just depends on how obsessed you are about the site structure.
You could potentially have visitors start linking to the https version vs the http version, in which case that would be a problem.
Depending on the complexity of your site and code, this rule may be able to help you... where it says, pattern="download" that means that if someone visits the downloads section of your website, it will allow for https. You can continue to add additional folders by just repeating that code and replacing "download" with whatever the folder names are that you want to allow to use HTTPS. I did a Google search of site:lucid8.com inurl:https and noticed that your download section was indexed as using HTTPS, that is why I used it in this example.
If you are just using simple folder structures, this rule is not too bad to implement. I previously just implemented it with pattern matching and that was not fun.
Any way, if it helps great, if not, just try to keep your internal linking as consistent as possible. Sometimes the best way to do this is use absolute paths vs relative.
Mike
<rule name="AllHTTPexceptSIGNIN" stopprocessing="true"><conditions><add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="<a href=" http:="" (www.)(.)$"="">http://(www.)(.)$" negate="true" />
<add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="on"><add input="{URL}" pattern="download" negate="true"></add></add></add></conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="<a href=" http:="" {http_host}="" {r:0"="">http://{HTTP_HOST}/{R:0}" redirectType="Permanent"/>
</action></rule>
Hi Gina,
If you use Google Webmaster Tools you can see how many pages you submitted on your sitemap and how many Google has indexed under Optimization > Sitemaps.
It will also list if you have an issues with your xml sitemap.
Hope this helps.
Mike
I am pretty sure the SEOmoz toolbar uses the same metrics as Open Site Explorer, which is only updated a few times per month. In any case, creating a new page means you are starting off with little or no authority PA:1; however, once you include 301 redirects to that page, internal linking structure, and links from external websites, that authority will grow.
As for your other page being at the same Google position as before, that is good; however, that is not always the case. You are correct in stating that a 301 helps transfer the link juice from one page to another, but it is not a 1:1 transfer... which means that in some cases you could lose traction in your current Google position.
All of that being said, it sounds like you have everything set up correctly with your 301 sending link juice and traffic from your old page to your new page. It will take a couple weeks (typically) for SEOmoz to update Open Site Explorer and the SEOmoz toolbar to reflect these changes. Also, it can take some time for Google to rank your new page accordingly, as it must built some trust and authority with Google.
Hope this helps.
Mike
You don't need to really worry or stress about the missing meta descriptions and long titles.
Meta descriptions do not impact your rankings and Google will automatically create a description for your page if it appears in the SERPs.
Title tags that are too long do not impact your rankings... at least not directly. If your title tag is over by 10 or even 20 characters, it will not impact whether your pages ranks or not. The 70 characters is a suggestion as that was the number of characters that would display in the SERPs; however, now it is based on pixil width. The only other important info you need to know about titles is that you put your most important keywords towards the beginning of the title.
If you are unsure about how or are unable to edit these pages to add or edit the description and title, it isn't going to make our break your site from a ranking standpoint.
Some CMS will automatically generate 301s if you edit a URL's structure. It does this so that any old links pointing to the old URL will be brought to the edited URL. The CMS will not fix broken links that point to the old URL, but on the server side, if someone clicks on an old, broken link, they will be brought to the edited URL page - if that makes sense.
I understand that you want to attack warnings and notices and get things perfect; however, sometimes it just isn't possible. Whether it is a CMS issue or knowing how to fix something complex - what does matter is that you investigate each warning and notice and make sure that it is not negatively impacting your site. From the sounds of it, the handful of warnings and notices you have are just fine.
Hope this helps answer your question.
Mike
If you go to your campaign overview page, you will see a little box below the mini overviews that will say something like, "Last Crawl Completed: Apr. 3rd, 2013 Next Crawl Starts: Apr. 10th, 2013"
I personally use SEOmoz PRO tools in combination with Screaming Frog. I verify many of the problems using Screaming Frog, then fix them, then rescan (which is instant), then wait for my SEOmoz PRO tools to reflect my changes. SEOmoz does a great job of warning you and keeping you in the know... where Screaming Frog gives you a lot of information, but you really have to know what you are looking for and would have to keep on top of it... SEOmoz is more automated... if that makes sense.
Mike
Hi Rachel,
Personally, if this is an SEOmoz or other software error, I would disregard it. The reason I would disregard it is your titles and content are different... even if it is just by 1 character. This approach does make sense for your niche.
Now, IF you were having problems getting both of these pages indexed or if Google sends you a duplicate content message, that would be cause for some concern.
I just Googled clear contractor bags 42 gallon and I see both your 4mil and 3mil thicknesses listed in positions #7 and #8 respectively, as well as #1 and #2 under the Google Shopping area.
If I were you, I would not worry about it.
Mike
Hi Carlos,
I think part of this has to do with the breadcrumb functionality you have built into your site.
So for instance, /Mens_Wetsuits-598/ has a ton of inlinks. Part of this is because your top navigation is linking to /Men_Wetsuits-598/ on every page on your site, then your breadcrumb functionality is linking to /Mens_Wetsuits-598/ on each of your 252 men's wetsuit products.
If you want a further look at internal linking structure, I would recommend Screaming Frog SEO Spider. It will scan your entire site and can show you all internal in-links and out-links for each page on your site.
I hope this gives you some insight as to what is happening. It is not of course a comprehensive explanation, but you can see how something as small as a breadcrumb can easily inflate the number of internal links.
Mike
I think it could be a lot of different things. One of them is that Google's SERPs are always going to be more up-to-date, hence the Next rankings update: XXXX in the bottom right-hand corner of the Rank Tracker tool page.
Here is some more information from SEOMoz about Rank Tracker:
"Why do the rankings returned by Rank Tracker sometimes differ from what I see when I check the search engine? Don’t worry – it’s perfectly normal. Rankings are constantly in flux and rarely universal. Some factors that may affect rankings include:
Luckily, trend data is quite good, so even if the positions you see vary slightly from what Rank Tracker reports, the gains or losses are indicative of relative performance. Don’t expect to see precise correlation, but do keep an eye on ranking trends over time."
Hope this helps.
Mike
That is the problem... that they are the same site.
That means that Google can index both versions and visitors and other sites can create backlinks to both versions - which is not good, because it splits your backlinks up between two sites instead of one.
You need to set up a 301 redirect from one of the versions to the other, as well as set a preferred version in Google Webmaster Tools.
Hope this helps.
Mike
It sounds like you are maybe trying to target multiple keywords on a single page?
This can be extremely difficult as the purpose of the page is not clearly defined.
As Jesse suggests, create a new page and follow the guidelines here for creating a perfectly optimized page.
Hope this helps.
Mike
After diving deeper, it looks like it is a matter of breadcrumbs and other types of navigation.
Here is an example of how different pages are linking to /Mens_Bags-600/:
/Electric_Goggles_and_Electric_Sunglasses~65
/Surfdome_Mens_Bags-600/132
/Bags-372/
As you can see, depending on the page, the linking structure can vary greatly on your site. I didn't dive extremely deep into your site, so there definitely could be other instances of other types of linking structures on different page layouts. This would definitely explain why some of your pages have MANY in links, while others don't.
I hope this helps; otherwise, like I said, Screaming Frog can pinpoint exactly where your in links are coming from, which can help you figure out the entire linking structure of your site.
Hope this helps.
Mike
"... the main thing is conversion and getting them into someplace valueable for them and you."
Well played Brian. That is the perfect way to think about it.
Thanks for your help.
Mike
UPDATE: By "getting rid of" I just mean we are not going to link to them internally and that the videos themselves will no longer exist. We plan to either redirect those URLs to either product pages or to pages requesting a demonstration.
Yes.
You should/could use the canonical tag to specify your preferred version of pages with identical content. This can be the homepage or any other pages within your site.
Mike
Hi Alex,
From a functional standpoint, absolute and relative paths should lead users and spiders to the same page.
There are some pros to using one over the other though:
Relative
-faster to code
-if you switch domains, you won't have to deal with redoing internal links
-your page should be faster, because you have less code for browsers and Google to sift through
Absolute
-leaves little confusion for browsers and spiders, because it is using the EXACT path
-if your site gets scrapped, the links would still point back to your site
-Google Webmaster Tools recommends absolute paths, "Where possible, use absolute rather than relative links. (For instance, when linking to another page in your site, link to www.example.com/mypage.html rather than simply mypage.html)."
Hope this helps.
Mike
Hi Mirco,
Have you checked out: http://www.seomoz.org/help ?
They have a TON of information on all of the tools and videos on how to set things up.
They also include PRO tips for research, optimization, and fixing issues.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Hi B,
If I am understanding your question correctly, there is no SEO benefit in what you are suggesting.
For instance if you are suggesting changing www.domain.com/topic.html to www.domain.com/topic that will not make any SEO difference.
The main reason for people removing the extension is that it looks cleaner/friendlier. Also, if you were to switch your platform/CMS, you would be able to continue to use the same URL if you do not use an extension.
Does that make sense?
Mike
Hi Nick,
My personal suggestion would be to give the illusion that your site is "light" on content through the use of whitespace. Take a look at SquareSpace.com and Desk.com - both of these sites, in my opinion, give the illusion that there isn't a lot of content, because of the whitespace and large images; however, both of these pages have OVER 1000 WORDS on their homepage... which is a decent amount. My guess is this is the idea your designers had in mind when they said "light" on content - but I could be wrong.
I am not aware of any studies on the subject off hand; however, I am sure there are some out there. As a side note, I do know that Google Analytics cannot track PDF CTRs out of the box, but supposedly you can add some code to the PDF's link that will allow you to track it. I suppose you could do some A/B testing on the subject.
If you want your PDF to rank well, promoting it anywhere would be great.
Personally, I think you should try to convince your designers to let you put the PDF content in an HTML page. It doesn't have to be at a navigational level, but within a page called Case Studies or whatever. My reasoning behind it is that I would assume for most keywords, people would rather view a webpage vs a PDF. Some people may think that if they click on a PDF that is all of the information your website would have on the particular topic, whereas if you click on a website, your assumption might be the entire website would be about a topic.
Also a personal side note - one of our PDFs ranks on page one for a keyword. We have not optimized this PDF or attempted to get it to page one... it just happened because so many people linked to it. The problem is that we didn't do a good job of optimizing the PDF, so that is where our traffic stops... people can open the PDF, but they do not have any links to lead them back to our website (which is our fault for not doing something about this). Point being - you may not get the traffic you want coming back to your site if they just open the PDF from a Google SERP.
Long story short - it depends on the purpose of your PDF. Is it strictly for users to read and be done with it? Is it something you want to rank well for and drive traffic to your website? If it is the latter, make sure you optimize the PDF so that users can get back to your website.
Personally I would rather have people linking to my website than a PDF on my website.
I hope this helps and I hope I was able to answer your question.
Mike
As far as when to submit sitemaps, you do not "need" to even submit one. After your initial sitemap is submitted, as long as you have a strong interlinking structure in place, your new pages should be crawled. Submitting a sitemap when you add new pages is more or less a "heads-up" to Google saying, "I added new pages here... you should crawl them when you have time."
Now, if you remove pages from your site, you should also make sure that your sitemap reflects these changes. If you do not, you will start to get 404 errors in Google Webmaster Tools.
I don't think you can overdo it; however, you would probably make less work for yourself if you only resubmitted when you are 100% sure you actually need to.
Does that make sense?
Mike
In many cases, most websites will redirect a trailing slash to the non-trailing slash version, but it all depends on your configuration. Here is some info from Google Webmaster Central on the subject.
I think what you are looking for is breadcrumb rich snippets.
Hope this helps.
Mike
That is a "common" issue unfortunately.
Vanessa (Google's Community Manager) responds with this -
"You may be seeing this message on your listing for a couple reasons.
Hope this helps.
Mike
You are correct in saying your 301 is not working properly. You will want to get your traffic and link juice associated with your preferred domain as soon as possible.
If you use OpenSiteExplorer, you will see that your non-www version has fewer links than the www version. With this set up, you are essentially splitting your authority between two sites instead of one. According to Google, "Once you tell us your preferred domain name, we use that information for all future crawls of your site and indexing refreshes. For instance, if you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com, we follow that link as http://www.example.com instead. In addition, we'll take your preference into account when displaying the URLs. If you don't specify a preferred domain, we may treat the www and non-www versions of the domain as separate references to separate pages."
Once you get your 301s in place and Google recrawls and reindexes your website, I would think that you would see your number of visitors return to its normal volume.
Hope this helps.
Mike
... I had so much written in here, then just clicked back on accident... <sigh>Let me start over...</sigh>
Unique content will help gain followers. The more followers you have, the more FB shares and likes you "should" have. This is where FB pages can impact how your website ranks in Google's SERPs.
The biggest thing with FB pages is that they need to be monitored to interact with followers, responding to their questions and concerns, and updating your content. If you do not do these things, you will not get the followers, shares, and likes you are wanting.
Depending on your company, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google+ might be a better form of social media; however, like FB, they still need to be monitored and followers will demand interaction.
As for increasing your DA... it is wicked tough to do in a short period of time. According to SEOMoz:
"How do I influence this metric?
Unlike other SEO metrics, Domain Authority is difficult to directly influence. This is because it is made up of an aggregate of metrics (mozRank, mozTrust, link profile, etc...) that each have an impact on this score. This was done intentionally because this metric is meant to approximate how competitive a given site is in Google.com. Since, Google.com takes into account a lot of factors, a metric that tries to calculate it must incorporate a lot of factors as well.
This means the best way to influence this metric is to improve your overall SEO. Particularly you should focus on your link profile (which influences mozRank and mozTrust) by getting more links from other well linked to pages."
The short of it is that if your SEO provider is creating multiple FB accounts and they are having issues with maintaining multiple accounts, you are definitely better of with just using one. If they put the amount of time and resources into managing one account over multiple, in theory, you should be able to accumulate more followers, likes, etc., because you will be creating unique content for one source instead of creating thin content, you will be providing great interactions with followers, instead of responding a few days later, etc.
Does that help?
Mike
This has been a much debated topic over the last few weeks.
According to Google Webmaster Tools regarding the disavow tool, "This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."
So as you can see, most sites shouldn't need this tool. If you have thousands of spammy links coming from one source, with keyword heavy anchor text, that could look bad to Google; however, you are more or less averaging 1 link for 200 different domains. As long as that anchor text is unique (even if it doesn't completely make sense) you "should" be fine.
This article from Search Engine Land, 6 Things To Think About Before Disavowing Links, states "If you haven’t actually been penalized and you start disavowing your links, you’re essentially outing yourself to Google that you manipulated the system. Make sure that you equivocally know you were penalized and it’s not just some random fluctuation in rankings, a sitemap or indexing problem, or an accidentally no-indexed page."
You say, "Contacting these sites to have these links removed would be a very long process..." Google actually recommends you contact the site owners first and make an attempt at doing everything in your power to request your links get removed prior to using the disavow tool if you choose to do so.
Long story short. With that few links coming from that many unique domains, AND the fact that you haven't received a warning from Google... I would be tempted to just leave things and evaluate the keywords you were previously ranking for. If you see that it has been a straight up nose dive in rankings, there may be some concern, but fluctuation in rankings (at least for me) is relatively normal. In the course of a week, I can be high on page 2 or on page 5 (I have extremely competitive keywords) - I have come to expect this type of fluctuation, because I always rise to the top eventually.
Hope this helps.
Good luck.
Mike
I am no htaccess expert, but I think you want to change it to:
Redirect 301 / http://whitbypark.co.uk/
Give that a whirl.
Mike
Hi Jesse,
To me, it sounds like a message about manual action. Per SEL...
With a manual action, some human being at Google has reviewed a site and decided to issue a penalty against it (usually manual actions are indeed penalties). The review might be triggered by a spam report from an outsider or just Google’s regular policing.
Removing manual penalties often involve the targeted site filing a reconsideration request along with showing a good faith effort to correct a problem. For example, last year, JC Penney was hit with a 90 day penalty for paid links. It made an effort to clean up those links, submitted a reconsideration request and the penalty was eventually removed, deemed “tough and the appropriate length,” as Cutts said last year.
How do you know if you have a manual action? This should be reported to you through Google Webmaster Central, if you’ve verified your site there."
From your original post, it sounds like you have a handle on which links were purchased/unnatural. And as Marie and I are saying, you need to document your efforts. You will want to send those emails of requests for money to remove your links and your other emails that are not responded to... this will show a good faith effort on your part.
Marie is correct, "It's not about the percentage of links removed. Really, what Google wants to see is that you understand which links are manipulative and that you've worked to get rid of those and that you're not going to continue in this matter." - Google isn't going to require you get webmasters to remove all or a certain percentage of these links. They simply want you to try to get them removed 1) to clean up the web and 2) to make sure you learned your lesson ; )
From your original post, it sounds like you are on the right track. Look over the links I sent you and as Marie suggested, search SEOmoz for additional blogs regarding other peoples' experience with getting an unnatural link penalty removed. Some people it takes a month, others 6... my suggestion is to arm yourself with as much research as you can (KNOWLEDGE IS POWER), provide Google with emails, spreadsheets, whatever - showing you are really trying to get these spammy links removed, and submit a request for reconsideration.
Good luck and let us know how things turn out! Document it all and make a blog post out of it!
Mike
PS Hi Marie! Funny running into you here ; )
I would think it would be difficult to rank locally if you do not have a physical office; however, depending on the competition, you may be able to do so if your page is really optimized and you get some decent backlinks pointing to it. Now... for clarification, I am not talking about a localized SERP where it has local businesses and addresses, but a search where someone is including the location in the query and Google returns a regular 10 item SERP. (if that makes sense)
And cracking those top positions can be difficult. You just have to keep at it. Create a better website, create better content, create a better following than your competitors - you may not get into positions 1 or 2; however, if a prospect clicks through 1 and 2, then gets to your site, it will be a no-brainer for them to choose you if your site and content are better.
Don't fixate on ranking, worry about building your brand 
Good luck.
Mike
I think part of it has to do with the link in your articles section, heading in the article, url, and title tag all matching or being REALLY close.
For instance, if I Google Dynamic Spin Release, I see your website's article; however, if I Google Dynamic Spin Release and the Energy of Your Mind, I do not.
I am guess that is because your title tag and url pull more weight than your listing and heading:
listing: Dynamic Spin Release and the Energy of Your Mind
heading: Article on Dynamic Spin Release and The Energy of Your Mind
title: Dynamic Spin Release
url: Dynamic Spin Release
When you are writing or posting these articles, I would try and match the listing, heading, title, and url to almost match each other if those are the types of queries you are hoping get typed into Google.
I hope this helps.
Mike