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Hi all,

Recently a partner of ours discovered that Google is showing a meta description on the serps for his homepage that is not his but ours. On his site, he sells add-ons for our software, so the name of our software appears many times and as well there are many links pointing to our site.

He claims he hasn´t copied this text from us, and I have used some tools to verify this. I don´t understand how Google can get confused and show our text as the meta desctiption on the serps for his homepage.

Any idea on why this happened?

Hi Barney,

if you are talking about the SEOmoz keyword tool, yes, this is possible. If you hover over a keyword, you will see a pie chart next to it (with tooltip "Keyword Ranking History"). If you click this chart, you will see how your keyword has performed over time, since you added it to your campaign.

Try to get good content on your site, that people will like to tweet etc. Also, you can implement share, like and tweet buttons etc. to make it easy for people to share the content of the website. You should also, if you have not done so yet, set up your own facebook page and twitter account.

I don't think it is a great idea to pay someone to tweet to their "50.000 real followers" or to share a message with their "140.00 fans", this is just the same as buying links - blackhat stuff that you should avoid.

Also, by creating good content, you will be able to get not only social shares, but also good backlinks.

Hi,

I was not aware that you were talking about articles for article marketing. However, in this case you should also try to write different content with different headings, in order to avoid duplicate content and to make for a more interesting read. Before you submit them to article directories, I would still pause to think whether it makes more sense to have them on your site and try to build links to the article.

Hi,

you should create unique articles, with unique headings. As you will be targeting different keywords, it would not make sense to use the same headline for different articles. Also, try to make the content of each article really unique, do not just substitute a few words.

If you want to rank for Windows Glass Replacement, I would recommend to use this keyword in the h1, you can then use something like How to know if your windows need replacement as h2. When you build links to this page, you should definitely vary the anchor text, including just anchor text with the URL or "click here" (the latter, if you are going to build a lot of links to this page, if you can only get a few, I would go for good variations of "Windows Glass Replacement", e.g. "replace windows glass", "windows replacement"...

Hi,

if the list makes sense, i.e. if a human being looks at it and finds nothing odd about it, I would not worry about it. I would suppose that this is the case here, as you are not doing it for SEO purposes. While the page in question might not rank highly as it is not optimized, I don't think it will have any negative implications for your site or other pages on it. If you are worried that it actually might look like keyword stuffing, try to come up with some text (without the keyword) and add it to the page - but only if it makes sense and adds value.

Are these keywords that you have started ranking for recently? I have been having this kind of fluctuations with new keywords, too

I have had similar problems (although with fewer pages), and did not notice a negative effect. If you can, I would still try to 301 redirect the URLs these pages point to to real pages. This will also help users which might click on one of the links (but does anyone click on the links from these scraper pages? I have never seen anything in my referrals...)

You can check on the Wayback Machine http://web.archive.org/web/, to give you a general idea at least, but it does not have an archive of all sub pages. But if it is in there, you know how old it is at least. Anyone knows of other tools to check page age (not domain age)?

If the topic of the page is relevant to your website: yes, definitely. Of course, search engines should be able to access the page, and it should not be buried very low in their site structure.

Good question! In my opinion, A/B and multivariate tests are a good way to increase bounce rates. Often, adding a few images, adding bullet points, breaking up your text in smaller paragraphs can help decrease bounce rate.

What you should keep in mind, though, is that different kind of traffic tends to have different bounce rates. So facebook, twitter, digg, stumbleupon ... normally have quite high bounce rates. The same goes for RSS feeds: if people suscribe to your blog, often they will come to your page just to read the one article, without browsing your site. It can therefore help to include links to other parts of your sites, related blog posts, and with a call to action in your blog post.

For reducing bounce rates of Google (or other search engine) organic traffic, you should aim for page titles that relate to the content of the page. When someone clicks on a search result, they will at least have read the title. Now if your h1 is very different from that, chances are, people will leave your site right away, assuming it does not offer what they are looking for.

The same goes for PPC. Make sure your ad copy matches the landing page. In order to achieve this, split your keywords in different ad groups, according to the topic. Then tailor the ads towards the keywords and the landing page. PPC also allows you to run a lot of experiments, so take advantage of this and apply what you learn from it to other areas.

Hi,

I am not familiar with myblogguest.com, but I think that the basics of guest blogging apply here, too:

• the better your content, the better your chance that others will pick it up

• try to offer a new perspective, not just to rephrase what other people have said

I believe that places as myblogguest.com are also a good networking opportunity. Do not just upload your blog articles and wait for them to be found, but browse available blog articles in your niche, too, and if you find a good and interesting article, post it on your blog. You can then ask the author of the guest blog, to feature your article, too.

And if you find you have created a really exceptional piece of content, consider featuring it on your own blog instead of using it for guest blogging. You might be able to attract more quality links coming directly to you this way.

Hi,

I don't think you would get penalized for lack of content, but you will need content in order to get ranked.

I do believe that you can be penalized for the spammy links.

First of all, you seem to have a lot of spammy looking directory links. Is that the kind of linkbuilding you are doing? If so, stop it. This might have given you a penalty.

Are you at least seeing some long tail traffic coming in, or nothing at all?

I would also recommend:

Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any crawling issues with your website.

From a first look at your website, it seems to me that you have very little text in relation to the code. I would try and add some articles related to your topic.

Hi Jean,

there are several tools to check rankings, or you can manually check them. Be aware that you might get different search result when manually checking them due to personalization and your location. However, if a manual check gives you nearly the same result as the SEOmoz tool does for one or two weeks ago, you can be confident that it is a bug and not a drop in your rankings.

You can find lots of different tools discussed here:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-rank-checking-solution-do-people-use

Very good suggestion. With organic CTRs, you never know (at least I am not aware of a tool that would show you...) which snippet Google shows, i.e. if it was your description or some other text from the site, so experimenting with different descriptions would not give you reliable results. But with AdWords, you have full control over the ad copy that is being shown.

Hi Andy,

well, they should know about it: http://www.seomoz.org/q/pro-dashboard-rankings-report-not-accurate-for-the-uk

And though back then I did not have any issues, I am having issues with our German / Austrian / Swiss rankings this week. I would still advise you to open a ticket, so SEOmoz see that many people are affected and it might also help them to sort the issue out, if they get more information.

First of all, how do you know that they have dropped? If it is through a keyword tool, you should manually doublecheck. Several people have reported having issues with the SEOmoz Rank Checking tool lately.

I think the reason people normally do not insert fully capitlized words is that if you scream too much into other people's faces, they are likely to be put off and not click your ad. Take Google Adwords as an example: Google does not allow you to use EXCESSIVE CAPITALIZATION. And Google Adwords is really focussed on getting good CTRs (as they make money based on the clicks they get), and Google does a lot of testing, so I am quite sure that they also have tested this. Also, in general style guides, it is normally advised to refrain from excessive capitalization, as it distracts the reader and makes the text less readable.

I agree with Andre, you should definitely go for unique titles and descriptions. Think about your users too: they will see the title tag and possibly the meta description on the SERPS, and it greatly influences a user's decision whether or not to click your search result. You might still achieve rankings without them, but you will not be able to use the full potential of the site.

Hi,

this seems to be a relatively new format that Google is experimenting with that shows information from large lists as bullet points on the SERP. I suppose it is similar to sitelinks, where Google just decides for which pages and which queries they are shown. Maybe trying out different types of lists with important information (as the property listings in the example) can help you to get the listing.

How do you determine when your page was cached? It is possible Google had already cached it before, or that Google does not show you the correct date. Also, have you manually checked that your rankings have dropped, or with a rank checking tool? If only with a tool, I would doublecheck it manually. But of course it is possible that google has penalized you for the reciprocal linking. When you do reciprocal linking, make sure only to link to sites that are related to yours, and that add value to the reader.

I am getting fairly similar results for Google UK and Google US. I haven't noticed anything strange for Germany, France or Spain either, but I have been using the SEOmoz Rank checker for about two months only.

Go to Rankings, and on the top of the the right hand side you will see "Export to" with options PDF and CSV. Choose CSV and open the file in Excel (using the Text to Columns command).

Hi, I have just read the Seomoz blog article about regular expressions: it contains a very helpful tip for using Advanced Segments:

"You could also use Advanced Segments to create a social media segment - select source and set the condition to matches Regular Expression.  Your value should be something like facebook|twitter|youtube|digg etc."

Just exchange facebook|twitter|youtube|digg for parts of the URL you want to exclude, and that's it.

Here is the URL of the blog: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-seos-guide-to-regex

Are you seeing the drop in traffic across the board, or on a few pages? Is only Google traffic affected, or also direct traffic, referrals...? If you make different changes (as in this case adding links and deleting pages), you should not just assume that one has no effect, but try to get all data possible. Also, did you redirect the URLs of the deleted pages? Have your rankings changed? Could there be any seasonal changes?

Having said that, you might very well be penalized for getting paid links if google knows about these paid directories.

No, if you include (i.e. say "does not contain") " jobs", this will only exclude jobsearch.naukri.com. In this example, you could include "naukri" or "naukri.com". However, this will only work if you do not get traffic from other pages containing naukri, which are not job related.

Hi Atul,

You can do this with advanced segments in GA.

Firstly, if you do not have it already, assemble a list of the job sites that you want to exclude.

The most important thing is to get a list of up to 10 words that together cover all of the URLs to be excluded. Look for similar patterns in their URLs (e.g., some of them might have the word "job" in their URL, others "recruitment"). I believe the limit of different variables for one advanced segment is around 10 (not sure about the number though, but 10 is at least possible), that is why you cannot just add all 40 URLs to the segment. However, the words should be descriptive enough so they are not included in other referrers to your site.

Then go to GA: Create a new advanced segment, from the Dimensions, take source (under Traffic Sources), set it to "Does not contain" and add the first of your words. Then add an Or Statement, and put in the next word. And so on. When you use this Advanced Segment, you will not see the job referrers anymore.

I would definitely go for the contextual link from the most relevant page (I assume that this is a high quality page, and that it is reasonably well linked within the website). I believe not only that google will put more weight on a link like this, but it will also send you targeted visitors which should be easier to convert.

I agree, and if you have the article on your site, your site (rather than blogger) will profit from any links (shares, tweets...) pointing to your article.

I think there is no easy answer as both have advantages and disadvantages. Rand discusses the different options here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

I think this is a good start, and from there you will have to make up your mind. We use fr.mydomain.com, and I am happy with the set-up, as it gives you a better URL structure with less sub folders, making the site more easily indexable.