Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Hi All
I have have been kind of out of the seo scene for a while, does &pws=0 still work? I only ask as the search console says our brand name has droped to an average postion 3 ( instead of 1), but every time I check I we are 1st ( and I can see anything behind it that could possiabley get in front of it.
Thanks
Edit: Actually I also tried testing incognito, via a proxy and &pws=0, we are always 1st
are you sure you are deindex? have you tested with a proxy? i just checked google.com.au googled "mycustomcar" and you are indexed fine (granted I don't have an aussie proxy to test from)
I have seen this before, it looks like <a class="attribute-value">http://www.osce.gob.pe</a> has been hacked, but you have said that you have tried contacting them to tell them they have been hacked. Looks like they are only showing google your scrapped content but redirecting everyone else ( its a broken redirect for me), i'm guessing the hacked site has a higher authority than your site and that is why its out ranking you. This seems to be a common trick for these guys to make a quick buck for a few weeks before google catches on whats going on an corrects the serps.
Maybe try reporting it on googles forums, maybe a mod will escalate it for you.
Keep us updated
I think you posted this message before seeing my last response, but you'l notice that they use "results" (like us) and google it picking up on that, but your site has nothing after the number
Just to follow up, on our site we have on categories that have more than one page it says "Showing 1 to 24 of 32 results ", and in the serps it says "Results 1 - 24 of 32"
For categories with one page , its say eg "Showing 15 Item(s)" and the serps says 15 "Item"
But for a category that has only 3 products "Showing 3 Item(s)" the serps does not show anything, so there is no guarantees that it will work.
(on a side note, I must change the way we display the number of products, "results" and "items" are not really the right terms )
So yeah this has nothing to do with rich snippets, goojle is just figuring the product count. So if you look at the example size, they have the text showing "Showing 53 products" so google has worked out that there are 53 products, but on your site it says "showing 1 - 52 of 156", note it does not say "products" so google not picking up the meaning of "showing 1 - 52 of 156", I would guess just by adding "products" to the end of that text, google will pick that up.
Have you tested on google testing tool?
https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/
I have seen google show the number of products on pages that don't have rich snippets too, so it can be just what google bot decides what to show or not.
I notice rankscanner.com in my referral data, and I assumed that it was referral spam at first, but there website says "Start monitoring your keywords now... it's free"
I have never heard of them and googling them does not bring up too much. Anybody heard of them/ used them?
Hard to match up with analytics since the landing page is the home page. Over all there has been an drop in organic traffic, but it looks like most of it is long tail and some smaller drops on some keywords, but that keyword was the standout loss.
Yes I track on Moz, it show no major drops at any stage ( just from 2-4, but that should not have effected impressions I would have thought)
attached is an update of WMTs, which is started to show impressions and clicks starting to come back, not to what it was, but its something 
I thinking John might have been on to something and that maybe that a local results or something like that had been pushing the result down
I understand why you might come to that conclusion, but its very generic keyword for our industry, and the number of searches have constant for years. For example its like saying users are not searching for "cars" anymore.
yes the graph is from the https version, but I have attached a picture of the last 90 days for the http version
search analytics beta, but I also checked with the old version as its showing the same thing
Hi John
My main point is that the WMTs is reporting the same position but the impression have dropped off which does not make any sense to me.
"but I am starting to get concerning on backlink issue" what do you mean, I have done 1000s of redirects linking the correct old pages to the new pages. Also I have been keeping an eye on the crawl errors, and most errors are for pages that have been removed off the site years ago (wmts doesn't ever give a link to where the source of the links are from)
But even if there was an issue with back links it does not explain why wmts is reporting no drop in position, but a drop in impressions
There are other oddities like this with other keywords, but nothing as extreme as this
yeah, unfortunately, its the home page, which gets a traffic from a few keywords. But it has had a drop in traffic. Other metrics, bounce rate sightly higher, less page views, longer sessions, but no huge spikes/drops
Ah ok, get you. But yeah yeah about the same data, High impressions for the first week of so , then a drop, but yeah more impressions I got I was in position 2-4
Are you talking about "Search Engine Optimisation"? its that not use pulled from WMTs?
But yeah its showing the same type of thing
The chart is from WMTs not analytics
The average impression is now 12, but before the drop it was over 100
not sure what you are asking
yes I used an exhaustive list of redirects ( over 10k of redirect rules
3) Not sure what you mean
Still its not really the drop in traffic I'm questioning, ( could be related to issue with TTFB we has and with has been addressed 2 weeks ago), but more why is wmts saying we are ranking about the same for that keyword, but the impressions (and clicks) have crashed
I used $pws=0 and we are 4th
but when I used a proxy, we are not on the first page . But moz's tracking is showing us in about 4th place too.
But no, there is now note about the certificate
we recently replatformed our main site and switched to https. For the first 2-3 weeks after we moved organic traffic was great, we did not lose any ( increased a little), but then it dropped off significantly. Attached is a screenshot from one of our main keywords that dropped off.
You can see click (blue) and impressions (red) dropped off, and the position became unstable, but in the last week it has stabilised to about the same position it was before, but the clicking and impressions are still very low.
The keyword is generic (for our industry) and there would not be any major seasonal changes in the search volume. I can't make sense of this data, could be be wrong?
just an update, its seems others have had this issue too. We have been able to change the 302 to a 301 (magento defaults to 302 by default, this can be changed under configuration, web, url options). I think the redirect something to do with the "Redirect to CMS-page if Cookies are Disabled", even though its set to "no" its seems its redirecting to the canonical instead.
Ultimately I think the solution is under the "Use Categories Path for Product URLs" which is set to "yes" by default, this make the product urls the same at the canonical (which what google is indexing anyway)
Yes but when you "no follow" link juice that would have been passed to that page is loss (and not diverted to other pages), in turn that means that any pages that is linked to from the login page does not get any juice passed to it. And when you think something like a login page is linked from every page that's a lot of link juice to throw away (collectively).
I understand your point about the crawling, but unless you have lots of new content (or updating content) I would take the boost from the maximising link flow though the site.
I have removed "no follow" from internal link (like login) before and have seen general boost in rankings site wide before ( not scientific proof granted)
I would disagree Dirk, You should never use Nofollow on internal links as its throwing link juice out the window. It better to noindex pages you don't want indexed. nofollow should only be used on external link you don't vouch for or for paid for links
Thanks for that Dirk, there should be no redirect at all, let alone a 302 redirect, but now I have a good idea what's going on thanks
We are having some issues with response codes on our product pages on our new site. It first came to my attention with the mozbot crawl which was picking up 1000s of 302 redirects, but when I checked them manually there was no redirect (and even the moz toobar was giving a 200 status)
I then check with this tool
http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/?page=single&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.equipashop.ie%2Fshop-fittings-retail-equipment%2Fgridwall%2Fgridwall-shelves%2Fflat-gridwall-shelf.html&useragent=2&typeProtocol=11
And its showing that there are 2 responses at 302 and a 200 ( but with the same bot under googlebot setting only shows the 200 status). I'm also getting no warning about it in WMTs
Does anyone know what's happening here and how worried about it should I be as it seems goggle is using only the 200 status
btw the developer thinks it something to do with how the browser is handling the canonicallink, but I'm not convinced
Thanks
Hi
A few months ago I setup daily mentions from Fresh Web Explorer so I get alerts to when my site or my competitors site gets a new back link, and I did get an email in the first few weeks, but I haven't gotten once since. Today I check 1-2 of my competitors fresh links and they have gotten some in the last month, but I got no alerts.
I have it setup like this
rd:competitor.com
But now i'm thinking because technically "www" is a subdomain is that why I'm not getting any alerts, do I need to set it up with www and non www for each domain? ( if so that's going to eat to my limit pretty quickly, which would suck), or is there something else I'm missing?
Thanks
I'll 2nd what Martijn is saying, Alexa can be hugely inaccurate, and the smaller your site is (traffic wise) the more inaccurate it is. If you have Alexa installed on your browser then you are boosting the stats on alexa as you spend more time on your site than anyone else.
I only use Alexa an odd time to get a very rough idea of competitors traffic.
I think that only works for the google news bot but does not work for general crawling and passing pr, But I could be wrong.
But if Martijn is correct, the question is does the uk times allow google bot allow access to that page.
A quick test would be search for a line of text from the article and see if google links to the correct page. If it does not get a hit then either google has not crawled that page yet or can't crawl the page. And if its been a few weeks and it still can't get a hit in google search then it most likely that its not crawlable ( as is a big site you would expect a normal page to have been well crawled in that time frame)
Side note: I think it would be a good test for someone to setup a paywall page which links to a page with no other back links and see if google can pick that page up ( maybe give it anchor text of a load of jibberish and see if that page ranks for that jibberish)
If most of your users come from 1 region is there any point having a CDN? Or is it better (fast) for https?
Thanks for the suggestion, but I wanted to go with a managed dedicated server that's optimised for Magneto ( So I can concentrate on the website and not worry about the server being uptodate for PCI etc)
If google can't crawl the page the link is on then, then it does not exist to google. End of story.
Of course you have to consider direct traffic benefit you get and with the exposure you might get some additional backlinks from other sites (that have read that story).
Well there is no google.gb !. I'm in N.Ireland so out side GB but in UK, as my search results are full of GB only stuff unless it local results ( very frustrating), so that made me assume google doesn't differentiate between GB and UK in its search results, buy maybe I'm wrong.
I think a Moz staff member is going to have to clear this up for us.
I have never noticed GB before, so I wonder if its a new thing. I assumed "UK" was google.co.uk so I'm not sure what difference GB is ( according to google, not geographically).
Do you notice any difference between UK an GB rank results?
Personally I think its madness to "no follow" any internal links. When you "no follow" you are throwing link juice out the window, the days of sculpting links ( the practice of "no following" some links on a page so more juice flows though other "follow" links) are long gone, yet is still see it being attempted all over the place.
I think the important thing is not to do a knee jerk reaction here, if you don't migrate to https correctly you will be in a world of pain!
Lets remember, right now it is a very weak signal and check your competition, are any of them https? probably not, so right now you're not losing anything.
Its the long term that worries me, it seems google is planning to strengthen this signal over time, the question is at what rate and ultimate how strong will it get ( my gut says it will never be a huge signal, but then every little helps).
In my view moving from http to https is the same as any migration ( to a different url or new platform with different url structure), if done correctly it should be painless but if done wrong can be disastrous. The other factor is if you have absolute links for elements pointing to http: they all need fixed, if you miss any then that page will flagged an insecure to the user.
Something I'm unsure about, I thought https is slower than http (and one of the main reason people don't https their whole site), maybe someone with more knowledge about https/ssl can correct me here.
Any one with experience with a specialist magneto dedicated hosting in UK/Ireland? Just getting a few quotes and looking for recommendations ( and any I should avoid)
Thanks
Thanks for confirming that.
As its a old partial penalty, and from a quick look at their analytics I can't see any main pages that have been penalised , is it best to leave it alone ( in the short term at least)?
This is a repost of this question http://moz.com/community/q/manual-action-found-in-wmts-no-email-no-message-in-wmts
But I'm sure there is someone in the moz fourms that have had/seen manual action
Someone I know said that they were looking though their WMTs and under Manual Actions they found they had a partial penalty. There is no date against it and they never got an email and there are no messages WMTs for it. I haven't personally dealt with a Manual penalty before, but I would have expected there to be a message in WMTs for it ( an email might have been missed because of a spam filter etc). Could it be a very old penalty?
First you need to know what the links were, you might find alot of them were scraped content/spam/junk. If out what links you have lost and evaluate if they are worth getting back, then find out why they were removed. This has to be done on a link by link basis, there is no way to automate this properly.
Its complex as they launched new cctld version of the site and is possible that it might be the cause of the traffic loss. Just very annoying that there is no way to find out when the manual action was issued.
I have to chase a few red herrings before I get to the bottom of this.
Someone I know said that they were looking though there WMTs and under Manual Actions they found they had a partial penalty. There is no date against it and they never got an email and there are no messages WMTs for it. I haven't personally dealt with a Manual penalty before, but I would have expected there to be a message in WMTs for it ( an email might have been missed because of a spam filter etc). Could it be a very old penalty?
by default the inbound links page filter is:
Show all links from all pages to this page and show links ungrouped
Change the filter so that is :
Show all links from only external pages to this page and show links ungroupedShow linking pages across
This will give you all external links to that page, If you want all external links to you website change it to:
Show all links from only external pages to pages on this root domain and show links ungroupedShow linking pages across
Hopefully that will fix it for you
Simply it takes a while
The last update was on the 20 June, and that is based on data crawled from the 4-6 weeks before that date, so there is a high chance you redirects have not been picked up on the current crawl data. The next update is due 24 July, so you should have been picked up in that one.
I'm tracking keywords in .co.uk and .ie so hopefully they will roll out all English language soon
Can't blame you for that. Just have to keep checking out your posts in the forum
Great Answer EGOL. You should write a blog post on moz, your insight would be very helpful to a lot of people (including me).
