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I was wondering if anyone has noticed changes in how Google returns 'site:' searches over the past few years or months. I remember being able to do a search such as "site:example.com" and Google would return a list of webpages where the order may have shown the higher page rank pages (due to link building, etc) first and/or parent category pages higher up in the list of the first page (if relevant) first (as they could have higher PR naturally, anyways). It seems that these days I can hardly find quality / target pages that have higher page rank on the first page of Google's site: search results. Is this just me... or has Google perhaps purposely scrambled the SERPS somewhat for site: searches to not give away their page ranking secrets?

Hi, I was wondering if search engines, in particular, Google, actually use folder hierarchy to determine how important a particular page on a website might be for ranking purposes, or is on-site page inter-linking only taken into consideration. I know that external and internal links help to support the authority or 'page rank' of a particular webpage on a website. In a typical Wordpress installation, for example, it is easy to create a page and assign child-pages to support it. These sub-pages would naturally link to their parent pages via menu and/or body links, so they would theoretically 'support' the authority of the parent folder/page. My question is... would search engines see the parent folder page as more authoritative than a child-page, even without a lot of on-site interlinking of child and parent pages, just because it is higher up in the folder structure? For example, I have a client who has a Wordpress website, but is using a plugin to make all pages have a .htm ending. The site is fairly 'flat', hierarchally speaking and does not use any /folders/, but the pages are inter-linked. In the following scenario, there are 4 testimonial pages... 1 main one and 3 supporting pages.  The 3 supporting pages are linked to from the parent page and vice versa. /testimonials.htm /testimonials-quality.htm /testimonials-price.htm /testimonials-ease.htm I was wondering if it is worth suggesting to my client that we remove that plugin so that we can more easily employ the natural folder hierarchy functions of Wordpress, such as this scenario: /testimonials/ /testimonials/quality/ /testimonials/price/ /testimonials/ease/ Would the loss of 'link juice' due to redirects and the work that would be involved would be worth the possible ranking increases of potentially structuring the website better... or are we fine just relying on the existing page interlinking to show the search engines what are the important parent pages?

Is location-based rank tracking going to be a feature in SEOmoz any time soon? I've seen in a few other company's tools that I can select a city in which to center the search around, for example... if I track the keyword "pizza" and set it to check rankings for "Seattle", it would give me different results than I've I selected "Milwaukee". The reason for the variation in results is due to maps listings in the results sometimes. So, my question is, will location-based rank tracking be coming to SEOmoz soon? Scott

My question is: Is SEOMoz's SERP Rank Tracking in compliance with Google Adwords API Terms of Service? Background: The reason I ask is because Raven Tools is now removing their SERP Reporting tool because it uses scraped Google position data. So, it looks like SEO's will either have to find a new rank tracking tool or find new ways to traffic the effects that rankings have on a website traffic volumes. For instance, there is a way to get the position a search results was in Google when it was clicked. We could create a secondary profile in Google Analytics for each client and use a custom filter to record the position that the keywords was in when the search result was clicked ( http://www.seomoz.org/blog/show-keyword-position-using-filters-and-advanced-segments ) Or perhaps we'll have to use Google Webmaster Tools' SEO Report to get data somehow ( http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1308626 ) What are your thoughts on this? As you know, ranking data is still a great way to show clients if they are gaining or losing visibility in the search engines. It helps SEO's to report how effective their efforts have been. Because other ranking software companies uses Adwords API data to show the keyword search volume and advertiser competition of a keyword, they can not or eventually will not be able to use scraped ranking data any more. But, if another rank tracking tool out there doesn't need to be in compliance with the Adwords API TOS because they don't use that API to show search volume and advertiser competition, they can still technically provide their ranking data and not be violating any TOS, right? I'm just trying to understand the best way to continue reporting impact of organic keyword rankings on a website. Does the SEOMoz SERP Tracker comply with Adwords API? Is there another rank tracking tool out there that already is using Average Position data from the GWT SEO Report tool? Should we all just stop reporting rankings to clients altogether? Scott

Howdy SEOmoz Fans, Im wondering what happens to an existing YouMoz blog post if it gets promoted to the main SEOmoz blog? Does SEOmoz do a 301 redirect to the new URL? It seems like the old post disappears, but perhaps I'm not digging deep enough. Anyone have experience with this happening on SEOmoz? I'd like to know so I can figure out how to do something similar to that on one of my own sites (promoting UGC to a main blog). Thanks!
~Scott

Has anyone experienced, in the last few months, an issue where a website that once ranked well for 'local' terms in Google stopped ranking well for those terms (but saw a ranking decrease only within the geographic location contained within those keywords)? For example only, some 'root' keywords could be: Chicago dentist Chicago dentists dentist Chicago dentists Chicago What happens is that when a searcher searches from within the geographic area of Chicago, IL, the target website no longer ranks on the 1st page for these types of keyword phrases, but they used to rank in the top 3 perhaps. However, if someone was to search for the same keyword phrases from another city outside of Chicago or set a custom location (such as Illinois or even Milwaukee, WI perhaps) in their Google search, the target website appears to have normal (high) 1st page rankings for these types of terms. My own theory: At first I thought it was a Penguin related issue but the client's rankings overall haven't appeared to have been affected on the date(s) of Penguin updates.  Authority Labs and Raven Tools (which uses Authority Labs data) did not detect any ranking decrease and still reports all the local keyword rankings as high on the 1st page of Google. However, when the client themselves goes to check their own rankings (as they are within that affected geographic area), they are no where to be found on the 1st page. :S After some digging I found that (one of) the company's Google Places listings (the main office listing) became an 'unsupported' status in Google Maps.  So now I am thinking that this phenomenon is due to the fact that other listings are now appearing in search results for the same location. For example, in this case, an individual dentist's Google Places listing (who works within the dental office) is being displayed instead of the actual dental office's listing.  Also, the dentist's name on the Google Places listing is being swapped out by Google with the name of the dental office, but if you click through to the Google Places listing, it shows the name of the individual Dentist. Anyone encounter a similar issue or have any other theories besides the Google Places issue?