Hi,
Cheers for your input, Brady. I guess I may have overreacted a tad! It just seemed a bit weird that the Bing and Yahoo rankings have dropped like stones overnight.
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Hi,
Cheers for your input, Brady. I guess I may have overreacted a tad! It just seemed a bit weird that the Bing and Yahoo rankings have dropped like stones overnight.
Morning,
Has anyone else in the UK seen a massive ranking shift on Bing and Yahoo over the last week? One of our eccommerce client's main keywords was ranking #3 and #11 on Bing and Yahoo respectively last week, but today they've dropped to #32 and #35.
It seems rather strange as pretty much all of the main keywords have increased on Google. In fact, pretty much all of the Google rankings are the highest they've been since the SEO campaign commenced in October/November!
Cheers,
Lewis
I read a really good article by Neil Patel the other day on the very subject - it's from September, but all still relevant advice.
Thanks for your swift replies, Alick and Chris. Much appreciated!
The Page Authority will be 1 as it'll be a brand new page. You don't create a page with an instantly high PA, it has to be earned. Take the BBC, for example; if they create a news story today the page will have a PA of 1 but a DA of 100, but most SEOs would love a link from the BBC!
News websites are constantly adding new pages as new stories break. It's unlikely these types of pages will get huge PAs as, let's face it, yesterday's news won't continue to attract many backlinks after day one or two of the story breaking.
Keep up the good work! You should certainly see some positive results if you keep building links like that!
Cheers,
Lewis
If you don't want Google to index certain pages, you're best off adding them to your robot.txt file. The sitemap is just a guide, and leaving out certain pages does not necessarily mean Google won't index them.
Good morning,
We've recently launched Pea Soup Digital, a new UK-based digital agency. However, when you search 'pea soup digital' in Google, the business info doesn't appear on the right-hand-side of the SERP. But when you search 'peasoup digital' it appears? Our Google+ and business account have the name registered as separate words - Pea Soup Digital - so why is Google doing this?
It's not the end of the world, but slightly annoying. Is there anything we can do?
There's also an issue of our privacy policy page ranking above the home page. I know it's early days (1 week), so Google might be sorting itself out, but I guess we could add this page to the robots.txt file?
Cheers,
Lewis
Well, get ahead of your competition!
Also, you probably need to ask the sites hosting the dodgy links to remove them. Failing this, collate and them all to the disavow file on WMT.
Who knows? There's been no official word from big G, so it's purely guesswork really. But if you have the budget, get a responsive site sorted as soon as possible. It can't hurt!
Check your Analytics to see what percentage of visitors are accessing the site on mobile or tablet, the result will probably shock you. Mobile/tablet made up nearly 70% of my client's January traffic. So, in the eyes of Google, we can't really complain for being punished when we're not catering for the majority of our visitors!
Hello,
There are rumours going around that Google has launched a mobile algorithm that ‘punishes’ sites for not being mobile-friendly by ranking them lower in the SERPs.
After 3 months of increased organic traffic, revenue and rankings from my white hat SEO techniques, SERP positions for a website I've been working on have dropped over the last couple of weeks. After much deliberation, I have deduced the drop may be due to the fact the site isn't optimised for mobile/tablet users. So, in an attempt to remedy this, we’re designing and building a responsive site as I speak.
If you've exhausted all the usual avenues and are still stumped, build a mobile-friendly site and see if that helps. My guess is that it probably will. Google has been chattering about improving the experience for its mobile users for quite a while now.
I hope this helps!
Lewis
Thanks all for the great responses... as usual!
Hola!
I've been optimising a site since October and our hard work has yielded a sizeable increase in organic traffic, revenue, quality, relevant links and Search Metrics scoring since commencing the campaign.
After yesterday's Moz update, the DA has dropped slightly and a number of pages' PAs have dropped significantly (i.e. from 27 to 17). So here are my questions:
Cheers,
Lewis
The site's pretty new, so it may take some time. According to Moz, you have no backlinks to your site and a DA/PA of 1. Just keep up with what you're doing, build some decent links and you'll soon see the fruits of your labour.
Lewis
Yeah, true. I guess social activity may not be part of the algo, but certainly improves your organic presence, albeit indirectly!
Cutts says that social signals aren't part of the algorithm, but, after his research, a certain Mr Patel would argue the case!
However, the article you have posted has obliviously stuck a chord with so many people, so I can't see any issues. Moreover, at the end of the day, Google is all about rewarding useful content - so keep up the good work!
Morning!
The main competitor of an eCommerce site I'm working on has a total of 31 sites for 31 different countries. Each one of these sites has a different domain extension (.com, .co.uk, .fr, .it etc.), and every single one of these sites' pages links to all the other homepages through a dropdown menu on the navigation bar.
When I pop the .co.uk URL (our main competitor) into Open Site Explorer, I'm advised they have a 45,079 links from 475 domains. If I look at 'just discovered' links, most are from their own sites - I guess MOZ picks these up every time a new page is created.
Now, these guys are huge in the UK. They rank in the top 10 for pretty much every single search term and, to put it into some kind of perspective, their Search Metrics score is 33,000 compared to our measly 160!
Don't get me wrong, they do get some decent links from authoritative sites, but it seem most of their links are from their own sites. How does Google view these? Does my competitor have these thousands of 'internal' backlinks to thank for their current position?
I've just checked their .kr URL and this has 12.5 million(!) links from just 450 domains. Do every single one of these links pass equity? Or does Google just look at one from each domain?
Thanks,
Lewis
I tried to implement this for our non-customer facing e-commerce site and failed. Google contacted me and advised that, as we didn't have a 'bricks and mortar' store where customers could purchase goods, we were not permitted to have that info on the right-hand side.
After a quick look:
It's fine for me on Chrome. Chrome also has a whole load of useful marketing and SEO add-ons that can make your job easier!
Hi there,
The copy is exactly the same - bar the product name - on both pages. Although it's a pain, it's better to have completely unique copy on each product page.
Hope this helps,
Lewis
Just a side thought - I'm not sure what the page speed was prior to the decline, but it's pretty slow at the moment. So that won't be doing you any favours
According to John Meuller, any content that is only visible to a user after they have clicked a tab, button or link may not be indexed.
Do you have an example of a URL that is allegedly missing a description?
Cheers
As already said, it's unlikely these comments are negatively affecting the page. Moreover, Google's John Meuller intimated that hidden content within 'click to expand' style boxes is not indexed. With this in mind, only the most recent review will be looked at by Google.
I guess it's a very delicate situation, especially if your CEO doesn't have a clue about SEO. You asking him for more money/manpower could come across to him as "I can't handle the workload". But, in reality, that workload is pretty much impossible. At best, you'll just end up treading water without making any meaningful improvements.
What I'd do is create some kind of document detailing everything SEO-related that needs to be done for each site. This would include things like blog writing, on-page content, proof reading, technical SEO (this could cover a multitude of tasks), link building, reporting, keyword research, etc. Then jot down how much time you would need to spend on each of these tasks for each site, times this by 50 and that should give your CEO a good idea of the workload involved. If he's not prepared to meet your demands, your position will be pretty much rendered untenable, in my opinion.
Sounds like you have your work cut out for you. I don't see the point in having Moz if you can't use it for all of your sites. 50 websites seems an absurd amount of SEO for one person to deal with. I'd be sitting down with the CEO and advising it's simply not possible to do a decent job with just one person.
If you want to use Moz, you're going to have to upgrade to a premium package. Get some more staff in. I'd be tempted to ask for an SEO for every two or three sites.
I think a 302 should be OK in this instance, but you may want to wait for a response from a more technically minded Mozzer. However, if there are thousands of 302s, I imagine there are quite a few others that will need looking at.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but if you want to redirect a visitor permanently you should be using a 301.
A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect and should only be used if you want to redirect your site visitors to another page for a short period time. Ultimately, you will remove the 302 once it has served its purpose. As this is only a temporary redirect, it will not pass its 'link juice' to the target page as Google thinks you'll be removing it after so long.
If you plan on removing these 302s in the near future, then it should be fine. However, if you're wanting customers to be redirected permanently then you should change these to 301 redirects.
Also, if you have tons of redirects it could affect your site's speed/performance.
Thousands of 302 redirects doesn't sound quite right, though, so I'd pull all of the 302s, review them and see which ones need removing or changing to 301s.
Good topic.
A few of things I've noticed after a quick look:
I'll be interested to see how this pans out.
Cheers,
Lewis
Hello,
You're correct. www.ourdomain.co.uk/products/category/subcategory/theproduct1 shouldn't have a rel=canonical pointing to /products. You can either remove the tag altogether or change the tag to point to itself:
You currently have a tag pointing towards /products, which means it's likely Google will disregard the page you want to rank. Sometimes, if Google thinks you've made an error, they'll ignore the rel=canonical. But it's better to be safe than sorry, so remove/amend it.
Cheers,
Lewis
Hi,
No more links than a standard e-commerce site should have...
I'm chasing the sitemap as we speak.
Cheers,
Morning,
So I checked our site's index status on WMT, and I'm being told that Google is indexing 3,511 pages and the robots are blocking 3,331. This seems slightly odd as we're only disallowing 24 pages on the robots.txt file. In light of this, I have the following queries:
Thanks in advance!
Lewis
I'd guess that WMT will simply pull duplicate titles from your site and not take rel-canonical tags into consideration.
Hello,
Thanks for your reply!
So, as these links clearly look spammy and they keep on coming, I need to report the site to Google? How do I do this?
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreportform
I found the above WMT page, should I just submit it via that?
Thanks,
Lewis
Good morning,
Webmaster Tools is reporting an increase in server errors on our site due to some very suspect links from Yeusaigon.net. After taking a quick look, it appears they are some form of search engine attempting to link to our images by using incomplete URLs. For example:
http://yeusaigon.net/search/images.php?q=htc%20one%20max%20phone%20cases&page=1044
Is linking to:
http://www.mobilemadhouse.co.uk/caseflex-htc-one-max-real-leather-flip...
As this URL is incomplete, it's throwing up a server error. There are currently 139 instances of there errors from the same domain, and is increasing by around 5-10 per day. The domain, however, is linking to some of our pages/images correctly, but I fear Google may look at these as spammy links - they certainly look that way!
So, what can we do? I can't find any contact details on Yeusaigon website so I have disavowed the entire domain. Is this the right thing to do? How do I stop the ever-increasing number of sever errors due to incorrect URLs?
Cheers,
Lewis
Thanks for your time. I think you're right, I'm getting a little too hung up on the grader when, as you say, it's simply a guide.
Cheers!
Greetings!
I started a new position last week and the extremely supportive director promised to give me anything I required to make my job easier. Of course, my first port of call was MOZ Pro.
Having never used MOZ Pro before, I've just been getting to grips with it, fixing any pressing issues and giving the whole site a general SEO health check. A few fairly major issues have been flagged, which I'm in the process of fixing, and I'm currently putting our main landing pages through the MOZ Page Grader. After a little bit of tinkering, our iPhone 6 cases page has been graded B for the term 'iPhone 6 cases', but I have a few queries/concerns regarding some of the suggested fixes:
I think that's about it for now! Thanks in advance and keep up the good work!
Cheers,
Lewis (Andrew is the name of the director)
UPDATE Now I've sorted the rel=canonical issue, the pages are being graded A but still with the first two suggestions above.