Instead of immediately assuming Penguin there are things like Relevancy, localization, personalization, link authority, language tags, and so on that have affected results for some time. It could just be that the content, while in English and just as readily available to US users, has better bounce rate, better traffic, more authoritative links and so forth for Canadians and Australian search results. It could be that sites which are highly targeted toward US users have better/more relevant content that is pushing your sites down in the US but don't have the same reach in Canada & Australia. It could be that the terms you're losing traction on in the US serps are more volatile or have a different breadth of competition than in Canada or Australia.
Posts made by MikeRoberts
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RE: Why would a site lose rankings in U.S while maintaining rankings in other English locations (Canada & Australia)
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RE: Headers question (H1,H2..)
You have all of three H tags on that page... I wouldn't worry about dilution. Personally though I would alter the H2 slightly instead of duplicating the H1 but I highly doubt you'd hurt yourself if you didn't change it.
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RE: Our main domain has thousands of subdomains with same content (expired hosting), how should we handle it?
If its essentially a duplicate, thin content Login Screen... NoIndex, No Follow the page.
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RE: Big rise in "Keyword not defined"
I hope Bing steps up their game and offers everyone a free analytics suite more on par with GA in response to the loss of keywords. I've never been enamored with Bing but they have been looking for a means to steal away people from Google. They can even market it as Microsoft saving the little guy/small business while Google hoards information.
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RE: Using competitor brand names. How far is too far?
A similar question was asked last month that might give you some insight as well. http://moz.com/community/q/should-i-use-my-competitor-s-name-in-my-content-to-help-my-rankings
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RE: 418 error
My favorite error of them all. Had one of our coders hide one on our main site for anyone enterprising enough to search it out and get to it. Not a likely thing to happen but I consider it hilarious.
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RE: I already have a campaign registered in moz, but it does not appear when I open Moz Analytics, as I proceed?
It may not be in Moz Analytics yet but it will be. When I first switched, only 4 of my 5 campaigns appeared. So i kept having to switch back to Pro to access the fifth one. Eventually it too got updated in Moz Analytics.
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RE: Why are my keyword rankings dramatically changing week to week?
Have you double-checked your rankings either through another tool or through unpersonalized searches to see if the Moz data is correct? I have a few search terms on two of my campaigns that regularly swing from 1st one week to "Not in top 50" the next according to Moz when in reality they barely shift ever.
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RE: 3 months of backlinks building is enough ?
Google makes 500+ changes a year which means a minimum 1.4 changes every day. And the SERPs shuffle practically every day to reflect the changes individual sites & pages have made and the changes & new pages/sites crawled & indexed by the spiders. Then there are the big algorithm changes that happen throughout the year at unknown intervals and page rank updates every few months.
So don't wait for an update because they're happening all the time. Keep working at it, tweaking things, building your profile, building your presence, creating new content, sharing that content, interacting with your customers/fans/patrons/users, and so on.
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RE: Canonical tags and Syndicated Content
She essentially said that canonicals for moving a site was one of the intended uses. In her talk she gave the example of having an Exercise Blog and taking over Matt Cutts' Exercise blog... and how in that instance canonicals are a good way to notify the search engines that you would like your main site to start ranking for the instances where the secondary site would come up. (Plus the bits about good for the user experience) Then you would canonical all relevant pages as necessary, move any content that you would like to appear on the main site, and throw up a message on the secondary site with a link stating you're moving to the new URL. Then after a while you would 301 everything over.
I have actually given that advice to people regularly and (so far) no one has come back screaming at me that I ruined their site.
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RE: Canonical tags and Syndicated Content
I have done these and I agree completely.
Also, the bit about Canonicals to move a site and then 301 later was actually talked about at SMX by Maile Ohye of Google as a legitimate and good use for situations such as buying or taking over someone else's site as a means to pass link equity while also giving users a better experience by letting them know you are transitioning... giving them time to change their bookmarks instead of potentially causing them to bounce by sending them somewhere they didn't intend to go.
(though don't quote me on her saying anything about "link juice" or "link equity" specifically... it was about a year ago and its been ages since I've listened to my personal recordings of the session [and actually, i'm not sure I was even actually allowed to record while Google and Bing reps were speaking... but oh well])
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RE: What now? Do we believe Moz or Matt Cutts?
Maybe everyone is right... Correlation does not equal causation.
Moz sees that there is a correlation between higher ranked sites and +1s but that does not mean +1s cause higher rankings. It could be that higher ranked sites are more likely to get +1'd.
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RE: What is the better of 2 evils? Duplicate Product Descriptions or Thin Content?
I'd rather deal with the duplicate content. Personally I'd bounce quicker with Thin or no content than I would with the same content on a different but similar product page. Of course I wouldn't let the duplicate content sit there and hurt me... I'd add canonicals to pages that were similar. Now if it was the exact same content everywhere then that'd drive me nuts. But if I can look at all the products, realize how many are the same with a minor variation and how many truly different product types... then I could write content for fewer pages and consolidate link equity with the canonical without worrying about duplicate content penalizing me. Of course I could always just NoIndex those duplicate pages instead.
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RE: Banned Page
I'm having a hard time following. A bit more info would be helpful if you don't mind. What pages are these? Who were they banned by? By "banned" do you mean they were penalized and/or removed from the index? What 3rd party app are you using?
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RE: Updating old blog posts in Wordpress to appear more recent?
For the most part, trying to re-post your old content with a newer date in order to make it seem fresh when it isn't is really just an attempt to game the system. It may work somewhat in the short-term but its not a good long-term strategy. New, unique and relevant content would always be better.
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RE: New to Moz and wanted a bit of help with my report
Since I don't know the exact nature of your duplicate pages, its a little hard to give a solid answer. Firstly, a canonical is a signal not a directive... so the search engines can choose to disregard it. Second, there are a few ways to consider handling duplicate page content. If your duplicate needs to exist for some reason and is a straight copy of another page or features a duplicate subset of content found on another page, then you could consider a canonical. If the duplicate page serves no real purpose and there is a better version of it elsewhere, then you could go with a 301. If the page needs to exist but could be re-written into something more relevant than its current state, do some tweaking to make it unique.
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RE: Updating old blog posts in Wordpress to appear more recent?
Why not write new content about the same topic but from a more current viewpoint including any changes to the law and/or info on recent, publicly available cases that are related to that law?
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RE: New to Moz and wanted a bit of help with my report
In reports, Canonicals are listed as a Notice not an error or a warning. Notices are just interesting facts about your site. So those aren't wrong. Many people have said that adding the canonical tag on a page pointing to itself is a good precautionary measure for if the page gets scraped.
As for http://www.domain.com/ and http://www.domain.com/index.php ... They may look like the same page to you but they are not to the bots. You should choose 1 and redirect the other to it.
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RE: Google and Product Description Tabs
It may depend on how the tabs are set up. If you can see it in the page source without any problem then usually Google can too. Quick test to check: Grab a chunk of content, copy/paste it into Google search with quotes around it and see if your page comes up. If it did... then yes, Google read it perfectly fine. If not then you need to check how your tabs are hiding the content and fix it.
Two of the ecommerce sites I work on handle content on product pages using tabs to separate specifications, description, accessories and so on. Google can see all of our stuff perfectly fine as one page.
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RE: It's not link buying, but...
Here's the official Google page on Link Schemes: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en
I differ with Sheldon on the "College Bar" one. Since you didn't state whether the chicken wings were free or not, I'm not sure if asking for the link would fall under "exchanging goods or services for links". If you stated "Reviews are optional but appreciated" and didn't ask for a link on their college wiki then I'd say its probably fine.
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RE: Should I noindex, nofollow a lot of child pages?
Having pages that no one goes to won't negatively affect the rankings of the rest of your site.
In your case if you're really concerned about those obscure pages and they're thin or duplicate content, you could choose one really popular product in each category (such as "6x6x4 red foil gift box") and add canonical tags on the other similar products in that category (i.e. all the other red box pages) pointing to the popular one.
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RE: Why has our site had a huge spike in referral traffic?
Cursory inspections shows that:
search.dnsassist.verizon.net is Verizon Wireless.... http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/verizon-substituting-its-own-search-engine-overriding-its-own-users-search-engine-preferences/
wind.search-help.net is search being done over the Windstream Communications broadband.
uslc.search-help.net is caused by a browser hijack.
And, finder.cox.net appears to also possibly be a browser hijack.
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RE: How does google recognize original content?
For our ecommerce sites we always make sure to have original content in our product feeds as well as our pages. That way the things from our feeds don't poach from our sites and we have a broader range of search terms covered as well as avenues to be reached through.
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RE: Should I use my competitor's name in my content to help my rankings?
Legitimate comparative use should be fine. So if you wrote a blog post about how your service compares to two or three others in your industry, or had a page on your site about the common services offered by your competitors and how you stacked up in comparison to show you have more or better priced services, those would likely be considered fair use. Just make sure you're not saying anything blatantly deceptive or slanderous.
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RE: Should I use my competitor's name in my content to help my rankings?
Had a competitor try to do this once but he wasn't a fan of listening to our request to have the mentions removed. I literally scoured their entire site, created a massive excel sheet of all instances of our company name/website used without our permission, and then we had to mention "legal action" before they complied. So... don't use a competitor's name without their permission. If its the case of using their brand name on a product you offer that is actually their brand product, well that's fair use and fine.
E.G. if you have Taylor Made products on your site and your pages & copy say Taylor Made then that's fair use. If your site offerings have nothing to do with them and you just mention them hoping to leech traffic and/or rankings, then that's deceptive.
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RE: Should my client stop their large-scale spammy link building immediately or taper off slowly?
They should stop right away. Every spammy link they add now is yet another that you'll have to try to get removed or disavowed on top of all the prior ones you'll have to fix.
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RE: Site Crawler Tool by the Company Formerly Known As SEOMoz
There is no easy way to get there currently. Right after the Moz redesign, someone had asked how to find it and I saved the URL from the answer just in case.
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RE: Site Crawler Tool by the Company Formerly Known As SEOMoz
Are you referencing this crawl tool? http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test
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RE: Canonicalized Website
Ah, WordPress. Yes, all of your duplicate title tag and duplicate content warnings are probably caused by the way that WordPress handles archives out of the box. WordPress has all of your tag archive pages, category pages, author archives, etc. set to Index. So this means one post is duplicated in a potentially infinite amount of places (depending on the number of tags on it) and every page2/page3/page4 winds up duplicating the title tag.
What works well for many is picking up a plugin like Yoast; changing the post preview setting to the snippet instead of full (That way you don't have the full post appearing on every page, only a blurb until you click through to the page where the post actually sits); set Tag Archives, Author Archives, and potentially Category Archives to NoIndex,Follow; and look into cleaning up any useless One-Off tags.
As for what Canonicalization is... in simple terms its like a redirect except for bots only. The tag lets the search engines know that you feel a page is a duplicate or a subset of another page and would like them original canon page to rank in its place and they redirect equity towards that place while leaving the page intact, visible and accessible to the general populace.
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RE: Incorrect cached page indexing in Google while correct page indexes intermittently
It would seem that http://www.miway.co.za/midrivestyle is actually doing a 302 (Temporary) redirect... which means its not passing any link equity. This could be the reason it is still showing in the index instead of your intended page. You would need to implement a 301 (Permanent) redirect to completely remove the old page in favor of the new one.
Edit: I double-checked it with a few more user-agents in SEOBook's HTTP Status Codes Checker and actually seem to be getting 301s sometimes and 302s other times. Not sure why it would be doing that but I would still double check that you have your redirects implemented correctly as that could be the culprit.
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RE: How do I get rid of these nofollow backlinks from 1 comment I made?
When in Open Site Explorer, click the first dropdown and select "only follow". That way you won't see any of the NoFollowed links pointing to your URL.
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RE: SEO for an independent fashion brand - the right tool for the job?
Assuming they're trendy, I agree on the Social Media front. Trendy fashion items should have a good likelihood to be shared via facebook, twitter, instagram, pinterest and tumblr.
As for the generic terms to attempt ranking for, I'd say use them in a blog campaign to at least create some content devoted to those terms. Get enough people following and liking via social could lead them to linking your blog content in various places which could eventually boost rankings from having a strong, natural backlink profile. And who knows, something could go viral.
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RE: Keep www in the domain or not?
There is no definitive benefit of having WWW vs. not having WWW... best to choose one and stick to it. If you're switching from one to the other, make sure that all of the necessary redirects are correct and change your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools. My personal opinion would be to stick with the way they had it originally when it was first set up.
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RE: Weekly traffic from Google: How do you explain this?
Its not that Google has decided to give you less traffic on Sunday vs Monday... its that the natural trend of visitors for your site is that you get more on Monday than you do on Sunday. Practically every site winds up having this Sine Wave of traffic in analytics. It's not exactly the same for every site but there is always a distinctive pattern like that.
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RE: 404 Crawl Diagnostics Report MOZ
Try using Open Site Explorer. It should list all the links that Moz knows of that are pointing to your 404'd pages.
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RE: Duplicate Content - Category Pages 2+
That's a tough one without more information. So I'll go into part of my standard WordPress spiel...
Other than categories, what are you doing about Tag Archives and Author Archives duplicating your content? Are you using tags properly or do you have tons of one-off tags everywhere? Do you have your homepage & archives set to show the full article or only a preview? Because if everything is set to full article, you're tagging like crazy, and your archives are all being indexed... every new post is being duplicated a minimum [4 + (# of Tags)] times on your site.
What are you using to try to handle your duplicate issues? Practically everyone suggests using Yoast.
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RE: Competitor's 'hidden' links harming my site?
DO NOT just blindly Disavow Links. The tool is really only intended for use when you have received an Unnatural Links warning or you have a massively spammy link profile that you're preemptively taking care of. Disavowing Links improperly can wind up hurting you.
If another site is linking to pages on your site that don't exist then the correct course of action is the 404. You could always try contacting them to tell them about the broken links pointing to your site and ask if they can be fixed or removed them as needed. Ultimately the 404s on your site are not harming you and they are also not benefiting you via any link equity because your page does not exist so there is nothing to pass the equity on to.
If you actually receive a decent level of traffic via those links or if a large number of valuable links are pointing to the 404'd pages, THEN you may want to consider redirecting somewhere else. If the other site is a spammy mess or you have 1000s of crap links pointing to you, then I'd say you might need to do a Disavow. But currently it would seem to me that you could let the pages 404 and get on with your day.
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RE: Optimizing pages for keywords
Choose what works best for the product and fits naturally into the content. You need to remember that the search engines will decide what they think you're most relevant for and rank you accordingly.... which means that just because you optimize for "Cowboy Chinks" doesn't mean you won't also rank in the SERPs for "chinks" and "western chinks". Google recognizes synonyms in content. Write for people, not for the bots... unique, informative content that will best serve your customers is better than attempting to force in every keyword imaginable in the hopes of ranking for everything with a single page. And once you start writing it you just might realize you could fit all or most of those naturally into your content.
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RE: Moz client structure.
My first thought would be how many sites & who's paying? For $199 a month you get the Pro Plus subscription with 12 campaigns. So it would be more cost effective to have your one account with 12 campaigns (even if you're only using 6) than to have 6 accounts (costing $594 a month total) with one site on each... Unless your clients want more control over their information and would prefer their own individual accounts that they pay for and give you access to in order to do your work. Have you spoken to your clients to see how they feel about it and what they would prefer?
(Though technically it is against the Terms of Service to to authorize others to use their account, profile, or messages.)
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RE: 301 or 410 a Pop Up Window with a New URL
Are the pop-ups receiving any decent organic traffic or do they have good, viable links pointing at them?
If not, then remove any internal links pointing to the pop-up and 404 them.
If they do then I would say 301s are the preferred method.
A possible alternative might be placing canonical tags on those pages and giving visitors a link to the correct page.
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RE: How does Google sort multiple websites in one GWT account?
All 14 sites listed in my Google Webmaster Tools accounts always appear sorted alphabetically even though it is set to "By Site Health" and the only time one drops to the bottom is when there are messages, access issues, etc.
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RE: Moz has a problem connecting to my GA account. But it hasn't changed..?
When things changed over from SEOMoz to Moz, I had this problem with one of my campaigns. So I just disconnect and reconnect Google Analytics from my campaign as well and it appeared to have fixed things for me.
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RE: Title tag length
Your full title, Security systems | wireless | battery powered | Police Approved | CSS, winds up truncated because its 69 characters with spaces and features a few wide letters (like those W's) that make it too long pixel-wise (as William pointed out).
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RE: Google showing wrong title
It will really depend on how often Google crawls and indexes your site or a regular basis.
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RE: Lol - 3 pages of videos on SERPs
Just... wow. That's different. Even page 2 is youtube videos until you hit the very bottom. I've never seen anything like that.
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RE: 301 a purchased domain
Alternately you could place canonicals across the newly bought site to the most relevant pages on your site and put up a message stating that Website X is now Website Y (with a link to your site) so everyone should change their bookmarks and start going to the other site. After a couple months, switch the canonicals to 301 to those pages. That way you don't wind up with bounces from people who wanted Website X but were confused/annoyed/perplexed/etc. from immediately going to a site they didn't want (even if its the site they need).
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RE: If I install google Analytics, that can affect my SEO.?
You'd receive a notification in WMT if it was a manual penalty or an unnatural links warning.
You would not receive a notification if the algorithm changed and lead to a drop in rankings and/or a penalty.
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RE: Cutting off the bad link juice
Personally I would go with Oleg's original suggestion: "If your rankings are being hurt by these links, I would move them to a new URL and 404 the old page. I would then go through the link profile for the old URLs. Find all the high quality links and contact the webmasters asking to change it to the new URLs."
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RE: Cutting off the bad link juice
NoIndex won't cut the links. It will just remove the page from the SERPs. So you'll still be hit with the bad links to your site and organic traffic will be cut off.