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Hi there! We are in the process of transitioning to a faster platform, and we recently moved a subset of URLs over. The subset that moved over saw a drop. We didn't change the URL pattern, or the content. The only thing that is different is the new platform. Here's a link to one of the URLs that is currently served from the new platform: http://bit.ly/1YjXD7H And, here is an example of a URL currently served from the older platform: http://bit.ly/1Jtx7Di Any ideas why the newer platform is seeing a decline in organic traffic?

Hi there, We have access to a third party site that has high domain authority and we want to know if anyone has a case study demonstrating what happens when you 301-redirect a high DA site to another high DA site. In particular, we are wondering what kind of lift the site saw from the additional link equity?

Looking for a comparison of major affiliate marketing programs (Amazon Associates vs Commission Junction). Can someone point me in the right direction?

A third party canonicalizes to our content, and we've recently needed to re-direct that content to a new URL. The third party is going to take some time updating their canonicals, and I am wondering if search engines will still recognize the canonical even though there is a re-direct in place?

What is the most efficient way to import search volume information into excel? We have 130K keywords that we need search volume information for.

To make 'jump to' navigation work, does the href or anchor need to contain descriptive text? For example, I know this is best: Install with Wubi But, would the below work just as well? Install with Wubi

We're adding schema markup for all of our videos, but some videos exist only in a playlist (all integrated into one URL, and loaded after a javascript call). Per Google: "Make sure that your video and schema.org markup are visible without executing any JavaScript or Flash." https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2413309?hl=en So we know the current implementation won't work for schema markup... What's the best practice for adding schema markup for video playlists? Should we host all of these videos on individual URLs (but then they appear twice) or is there some other workaround?

We want to move our author byline to the bottom of the page, but we are wondering if this will affect how authorship displays on a page?

"Noindex" is a suggested pagination technique here: http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284, and everyone seems to agree that you shouldn't canonicalize all pages in a series to the first page, but I'd love if someone can explain why "noindex" is better than a canonical?

When I post this URL (http://goo.gl/iDMsJq) to my Facebook page, the image is small, and it isn't pulling the correct description. I checked FB object debugger, and it looks fine - so why isn't it working properly when I post to Facebook? https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.healthline.com%2Fhealth-slideshow%2Fquit-smoking-timeline

According to https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details, we should include a canonicalicalize back to our desktop version of the URL, but what if that desktop URL is noindexed? Should the m. version be noindexed as well? Or is it fine to leave it as a canonical?

We built a better version of a search results page and re-directed from the old search results page to the landing page, and are seeing a huge uptick in traffic. Wondering if we remove the re-direct and 404 the original search results page if we'll see a drop in traffic. I ran the search results page through open site explorer and Google Webmaster tools, and there aren't many links, but the search results page used to see quite a bit of of traffic over the past couple of years.

If you go to http://bit.ly/173gdWK, you'll see that m. results are showing as blocked by robots.txt, but we don't have anything in our robots.txt file that specifies to block m. results. Any ideas why these URLs show as blocked?

if we search site:domain.com vs www.domain.com, We see: 130,000 vs 15,000 results. When reviewing the site:domain.com results, we're finding that the majority of the URLs showing are blocked by robots.txt. They are subdomains that we use as production environments (and contain similar content as the rest of our site). And, we also find the message "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 541 already displayed." SEER Interactive mentions that this is one way to gauge a Panda penalty: http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/100-panda-recovery-what-we-learned-to-identify-issues-get-your-traffic-back We were hit by Panda some time back--is this an issue we should address? Should we unblock the subdomains and add noindex, follow?

What are your feelings about indexing search results? I know big brands can get away with it (yelp, ebay, etc). Apart from UGC, it seems like one of the best ways to capture long tail traffic at scale. If the search results offer valuable / engaging content, would you give it a go?

I'm interested to know if Phantom was just a "pre-Penguin" 2.0 or if it was a completely different update. Thoughts?

An example URL can be found here: http://symptom.healthline.com/symptomsearch?addterm=Neck%20pain&addterm=Face&addterm=Fatigue&addterm=Shortness%20Of%20Breath A couple of questions: Why is Google reporting an issue with these URLs if they are marked as noindex? What is the best way to fix the issue? Thanks in advance.

I've tried applying a couple times through their form over the last six months with no response. Has anyone here been accepted as a news source, and if so, what did you do? To clarify, I mean accepted into the Yahoo News index (submission form here: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/news_global/submitsource.html?from_url=http%3A%2F%2Fhelp.yahoo.com%2Fkb%2Findex%3B_ylt%3DAm2jThOClBnKBsnrNsRjE6a5OSV4%3Fpage%3Dproduct%26amp%3By%3DPROD_NEWS%26amp%3Blocale%3Den_US&last_url=http%3A%2F%2Fhelp.yahoo.com%2Fkb%2Findex%3B_ylt%3DAm2jThOClBnKBsnrNsRjE6a5OSV4%3Fpage%3Dproduct%26amp%3By%3DPROD_NEWS%26amp%3Blocale%3Den_US) We've already been accepted into Google News and Bing News, but not Yahoo News

I know there isn't any official documentation from Google about exact number of seconds a user should spend on a site, but does anyone have any case studies that looks at what might be a good "dwell time" to shoot for? We're looking on integrating an exact time on site into or Google Analytics metrics to count as a 'non-bounce'--so, for example, if a user spends 45 seconds on an article, then, we wouldn't count it as a bounce, since the reader likely read through all the content.

We have about 20 testing environments blocked by robots.txt, and these environments contain duplicates of our indexed content. These environments are all blocked by robots.txt, and appearing in google's index as blocked by robots.txt--can they still count against us or hurt us? I know the best practice to permanently remove these would be to use the noindex tag, but I'm wondering if we leave them they way they are if they can still hurt us.

We have several subdomains we use for testing applications. Even if we block with robots.txt, these subdomains still appear to get indexed (though they show as blocked by robots.txt. I've claimed these subdomains and requested permanent removal, but it appears that after a certain time period (6 months)? Google will re-index (and mark them as blocked by robots.txt). What is the best way to permanently remove these from the index? We can't use login to block because our clients want to be able to view these applications without needing to login. What is the next best solution?

Analyzing our traffic, looks like we were hit site wide, with some article pages that don't have great engagement seeing more damage than others. We've been talking to other sites, and sites that have never seen any penalties and do everything right have also seen about 15-20% drop in traffic. The sites we know that weren't affected are brands (sites you would recognize by name). The only conclusion I can draw from everything (looking at mozcast metrics 'big 10' is that branded websites saw a boost. Does anyone else have any theories about what this most recent update was about?

If you perform this search, you'll see all m. results are blocked by robots.txt: http://goo.gl/PRrlI, but when I reviewed the robots.txt file: http://goo.gl/Hly28, I didn't see anything specifying to block crawlers from these pages. Any ideas why these are showing as blocked?

Does anyone have any insight into how Google determines 'top references' from medical websites?
For example, if you search 'skin disorders,' you'll see 'Sources include <cite>nih.gov</cite>, <cite>medicinenet.com</cite> and <cite>dmoz.org</cite>'--how is that determined?

I know domain age plays a role in SEO--but, I am wondering if a domain is set up to 301 re-direct to another domain if it builds the same amount of authority over time as the static domain--just looking at age as a ranking factor, not links accumulated over time.

Our really old blog content still sees traffic, but engagement metrics aren't the best (little time on site), and as a result, traffic has gradually started to decrease. Should we de-index it?

We have a news sitemap, and follow all best practices as outlined by Google for news. We are covering breaking stories at the same time as other publications, but have only made it to the front page of Google News once in the last few weeks. Does anyone have any tips, recommended reading, etc for how to get to the front page of Google News? Thanks!

I understand the benefits of implementing Open Graph as a local business, but am unclear of the benefits for a website, for example, a health website. Does Bing use OG in their search algorithm?

We are translating our site into 17 different languages, including local variants of the same language (i.e. Mexican Spanish and Spain Spanish, Canadian English and British English, etc). Should we add all of these local variants to our site? We don't have the marketing / link building budget (or business need) to put these all on separate ccTLDs, so we are using country-specific subfolders instead (example.com/es/). The translations will be of exceptional quality. Our main goal is to pull in some additional traffic from these translations. If we add these local variants, do you think we can expect to see traffic from these different countries (additional traffic from Canada, England, etc)? Any advice / input would be appreciated.

Working on developing a news product and wondering if there are tools available to gauge search interest in a particular topic. For those that work in news, what are your favorite SEO tools?

Going through Bing's SEO Analyzer and found that Bing thinks having multiple H1's on a page is an issue. It's going to be quite a bit of work to remove the H1 tags from various pages. Do you think this is a major issue or not? Does anyone know of any case studies / interviews to show that fixing this will lead to improvement?

If there aren't any crawling / indexing issues with your site, how important do thing sitemap errors are? Do you work to always fix all errors? I know here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/bings-duane-forrester-on-webmaster-tools-metrics-and-sitemap-quality-thresholds Duane Forrester mentions that sites with many 302's 301's will be punished--does any one know Googe's take on this?

In its webmaster guidelines, Google says not to index search results " that don't add much value for users coming from search engines." I've noticed several big brands index search results, and am wondering if it is generally OK to index search results with high engagement metrics (high PVPV, time on site, etc). We have an database of content, and it seems one of the best ways to get this content in search engines would be to allow indexing of search results (to capture the long tail) rather than build thousands of static URLs. Have any smaller brands had success with allowing indexing of search results? Any best practices or recommendations?

We are considering implementing a site-wide contextual linking structure. Does anyone have some good guidelines / blog posts on this topic? Our site is quite (over 1 million pages), so the contextual linking would be automated, but we need to define a set of rules. Basically, if we have a great page on 'healthy recipes,' should we make every instance of the word 'healthy recipes' link back to that page, or should we limit it to a certain number of pages?

We are transitioning to responsive design and some of our pages will not scale properly, so we were thinking of adding the same content twice to the same URL (one would be simple text -- for mobile and the other would include the images, etc for the desktop version), and content would change based on size of the screen. I'm not looking for another technical solution (I know google specifies that you can dynamically serve different content based on user agent)--I am wondering if any one knows if having the same exact content appear twice on the same URL will cause a problem with SEO (any historical tests or experience would be great). Thank you in advance.

Say you were given a list of 10,000 recipes and asked to build an SEO friendly site.  Would you build a recipe search engine and index the search results (of course making sure that IA and user engagement metrics are great)? Or, would you try to build static pages?

We are moving to responsive design--should we 301 re-direct all of the old m.domain URLs to the corresponding domain.com

I've done quite a bit of searching, but can't seem to find a time efficient way to accurately analyze keyword difficulty for large sets of keywords. All of the keyword difficulty tools out there that I've tried are either 1) not accurate 2) slow (like seomoz's kw difficulty tool only allows 5 entries at a time). Can anyone recommend any shortcuts / tools / processes to analyze kw difficulty for large sets of keywords?

So, we have a page, like domain.com/searchhere, but results are being crawled (and shouldn't be), results look like domain.com/searchhere?query1. If I block /searchhere? will it block users from crawling the single page /searchere (because I still want that page to be indexed). What is the recommended best practice for this?

On one site I work on, I noticed that pages in the upper navigation that have less links in the main navigation vs pages that have more links tend to perform better in organic search. Has anyone else noticed this?

Since, November 14th, the impressions on our slideshows on our site are down by 43%. The slideshows are built using # for pagination, and all content lives on one URL (through the user must click 'next' to see more content). Does anyone else have this issue?

Hi All, I'm a bit frustrated with the fact that I can only enter 5 words at a time into SEOmoz's keyword difficulty tool. Does anyone know of a better way (or tool) to analyze keyword difficulty for hundreds of keywords?

Since the penguin update near Oct 6th, both landing page & query  impressions are up 120%, but google traffic is actually down 4.89%. CTR is down 45% but we didn't change any of the meta tags on our site. Any ideas why impressions would be up and traffic down? And / or how CTR could decrease without making any edits to the meta data for our pages?

Question for all the SEO's out there. Do you always include your target keyword in the image alt tag? For example, if you had an article on osteoarthritis, and you included a photo of an old man, would you put "old man on a bench" or "old man suffering from osteoarthritis" -- even though you have no idea if the old man suffers from osteoarthritis?

I'm working with a client that owns a medical site. All content is reviewed by someone from their medical board (doctors or nurses), but the content is written by a variety of authors. I'm wondering if we could create authorship profiles for the doctors and nurses. Would there be any problem with that? (even though they didn't write the content, they just reviewed it for medical accuracy). The name of the reviewer is included on every article. Any thoughts / feedback / similar experiences would be helpful.

Will jump to navigation work when using a hidden div? Basically, we use a navigation system such that when a user clicks on a title, it expands to show the rest of the article, each title has an anchor associated with it, but no where else on the page / site do we link to those anchors. In order to make jump to navigation work, we are considering adding a hidden div with links to the anchors. Does anyone have experience doing this? Did it work?

In this article http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359 google mentions if you syndicate content, you should include a link and, ideally noindex, the content, if possible. I'm wondering why google doesn't mention including a canonical instead the link + noindex? Is one better than the other? Any ideas?

Can anyone provide some guidance on both how to submit your site to Yahoo News as well as some tips for how to get accepted into Yahoo News?

I stumbled across this old SEOmoz whilteboard http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-leveraging-syndicated-content-effectively and was wondering if this is still a valid technique given the Panda & Penguin updates. Is anyone here still doing this (and seeing results)?

One of our clients wants to use about 200 of our articles on their site, and they're hoping to get some SEO benefit from using this content. I know standard best practices is to canonicalize their pages to our pages, but then they wouldn't get any benefit--since a canonical tag will effectively de-index the content from their site. Our thoughts so far: add a paragraph of original content to our content link to our site as the original source (to help mitigate the risk of our site getting hit by any penalties) What are your thoughts on this? Do you think adding a paragraph of original content will matter much? Do you think our site will be free of penalty since we were the first place to publish the content and there will be a link back to our site? They are really pushing for not using a canonical--so this isn't an option. What would you do?