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Does anyone have a tutorial on how to dynamically capture the referring source to be populated in UTM parameters for Google Analytics?

We want to syndicate content and be able to see all of the websites that provided referral traffic for this specific objective. We want to set a specific utm_medium and utm_campaign but have the utm_source be dynamic and capture the referring website.

If we set a permanent utm_source, it would appear the same for all incoming traffic.

Thanks in advance!

Hi Moz Community,

Thanks in advance for the help! We have a law firm client interested in fully switching their SEO marketing from Criminal Defense to Personal Injury. Our client no longer wants any business for Criminal Defense cases.

Background Info: The website for the last 10 years has focused on Criminal Defense (and ranks well). Over the last couple of years we have introduced Personal Injury content on the website and achieved some decent rankings as well.

In order to make the website less relevant for Criminal Defense, it had crossed our minds to de-index these specific Criminal Defense pages but still leave them present on the website.

Question:  Would you recommend de-indexing all of the pages at once or done in a gradual manner?

Our concern it that doing it all at once could affect the overall domain's authority more sharply and harm rankings for any other keywords not involving Criminal Defense.

Does anyone have a solution where you can use a listing of page names with tiers in a Google spreadsheet and have it dynamically appear in a visual sitemap architecture format within in a Google document?

Thanks in advance Moz community!

Agree, it is most likely the filter Possum update.  They are absent on More Results, but appear on filter or zoom. Thanks!

Lawyer shares a small office building with 40 other businesses.  Two other businesses on same floor are also criminal defense firms.  This is not a Regis style office suite, rather a regular office building with many tenants.  Each has its own office number.

Firm only has one Google My Business.

Can't share right now.  Just trying to see if anyone else has experiences a similar filter where the listing won't appear at all on maps, but on ratings/hours filter it will appear in a high slot. At first glance, it appears some penalty is in place.  Maybe if we can't get anywhere we will share the domain.

Hello Moz.

We have a law firm client who practices criminal defense law.  Historically, he has been ranked for _years _in the map pack and first page of search for a variety of phrases.  This is a law firm with twice the number of reviews of the next competitor, solid back links, and open 24 hours a day.

Over the past 30 days, he now appears inconsistently in the map packs. Sometimes he is in the C slot and sometimes he does not appear at all.  Most of the time he is not listed for specific legal phrases for DUI, DWI and criminal defense.

When he is not listed in the A, B, or C slot, then he is actually gone completely.  You click on More Places and his listing for the map is just completely gone.  You can scroll down from listing 1 through 20+ and not find his firm in the Map listings.  You would think he would just be further down on the list at 5 - 10.  But it is just missing.

However, when you change the filters for either rating or reviews, he suddenly will appear.  In fact, he will be near the top of the list, but only on filtering. You can even clear the filter and he stays listed in typically the C slot too. However, if you refresh the page, he is gone again.

My question is simple:  Do you think there is some type of data issue or penalty in place?  Or is this just how the filters work - suddenly showing a list that should appear in the main area.

PS:  If I am not clear on the above, I can send video evidence of this oddity.

No problem at all! These new URLs do not actually exist on the website. Since we cleaned up the malicious code all of these URLs redirect to our 404 page.

Hi 94501,

Thanks for taking the time to respond. Just to be clear, we are not submitting multiple removals for the same URL and I don't think Google WMT even allows you to do that. Completely new URLs are appearing each day after removing the older ones.

My main concern is having spammy URLs indexed and associated with my website and the negative effects it can have from an SEO perspective.

A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred.

My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically?

Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.

Thanks Carlos for the in-depth response!

In the past, when we've setup a filter to exclude a single IP address, we just entered the IP address normally. For example, 64.68.82.164. However, I was researching how to exclude a range of IP addresses and found out that I might be using the wrong format to filter a single IP address.

• Is it supposed to be 64.68.82.164 or 64.68.82.164?
• Will it still work if it was entered without the escape characters?

Thanks in advance Moz community for your assistance!

Thanks again for replying.

No, the old domain name is not branded. Just curious why you ask?

Alright so since we are not migrating the site, flipping the switch on the new and shutting down the old will be fine to do?

Thank you for taking the time to address my question.

I apologize if I didn't explain the original scenario clearly. Even though we were able to have the manual action penalty lifted for the old website, we were never able to see rankings for our main keywords appear again. The website never fully recovered from the penalty. We had waited months after the penalty had been revoked but no progress in the rankings were made.

Although a drastic measure to kill the site, we decided that the old website was forever tarnished (and the client didn't want to keep pumping money into trying to revive the website) so we wanted to start fresh.

The point of the new website is to be in no way associated with the old. Are there any precautions or steps that we should take when launching the new website and shutting down the old? Should we literally flip the switch on the new site and then close down the old? Our biggest concern is that Google is going to pass on the poor reputation of the old website to the new one.

The old site is actually still the current site and it's not generating much revenue at all. The new site is still in development.

Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic. Although a dramatic action, we have decided to launch a completely new version of the website. Everything will be new including the imagery, branding, content, domain name, hosting company, registrar account, google analytics account, etc.

Our question is when do we pull the plug on the old site and how do we go about doing it? We had heard advice that we should make sure we run both sites at the same time for 3 months, then deindex the old site using a noindex meta robots tag.We are cautious because we don't want the old website to be associated in any way, shape or form with the new website. We will purposely not be 301 redirecting any URLs from the old website to the new.

What would you do if you were in this situation?

Hi Ryan,

Thank you very much for taking the time to respond!

I just want to make sure I understand you correctly. Are you suggesting that the blog posts that WERE NOT written by us and only mentioned our firm should be set to a rel="canonical" instead of a "noindex" since we reposted them on our own site? Is setting the copied article to be "noindex" technically the incorrect thing to do? We thought that since we copied the article verbatim and it wasn't our original work that Google shouldn't index this page on our website.

Part 1
We wrote an article and submitted it to the Daily Business Review. They published the article on their website.

We want to also post the article on our website for our users but we want to make sure we are doing this properly. We don't want to be penalized for duplicating content. Is this the correct way to handle this scenario written below?

• We added a rel="canonical" to the blog post (on our website). The rel="canonical" is set to the Daily Business Review URL where the article was originally published.
• At the end of the blog post we wrote. "This article was originally posted on The Daily Business Review." and we link to the original post on the Daily Business Review.

Should we be setting the blog post (on our website) to be a "noindex" or rel="canonical" ?

Part 2 Our company was mentioned in a number of articles. We DID NOT write those articles, we were only mentioned. We have also posted those same articles on our website (verbatim from the original article). We want to show our users that we have been mentioned in highly credited articles. All of these articles were posted on our website and are set to be a "noindex". Is that the correct thing to do? Should we be using a rel="canonical" instead and pointing to the original article URL?

Thanks in advance MOZ community for your assistance! We tried to do the leg work of our own research for the answers but couldn't find the exact same scenario that we are encountering**.**

Thanks Tom for your input and feedback.

I have a full English website at http://www.example.com and I have a Spanish version of the website at http://spanish.example.com but only about half of the English pages were translated and exist on the Spanish site.

Should I just add a sitemap to both sites with hreflang tags that point to the correct version of the page?

Is this a proper way to set this up? I was going to repeat this same process for all of the applicable URLs that exist on both versions of the website (English and Spanish).

Is it okay to have hreflang="es" or do I need to have a country code attached as well? There are many Spanish speaking countries and I don't know if I need to list them all out. For example hreflang="es-bo" (Bolivia), hreflang="es-cl" (Chile), hreflang="es-co" (Columbia), etc...

Sitemap example for English website URL:
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/</loc></url>

Sitemap example for Spanish website URL:
<url><loc>http://spanish.example.com/</loc></url>

Thanks in advance for your feedback and help!

Scenario:
A website that we manage was hit with a manual action penalty for unnatural incoming links (site-wide). The penalty was revoked in early March and we're still not seeing any of our main keywords rank high in Google (we are found on page 10 and beyond). Our traffic metrics from March 2014 (after the penalty was revoked) - July 2014 compared to November 2013 - March 2014 was very similar.

Question: Since the website was hit with a manual action penalty for unnatural links, is the content affected as well? If we were to take the current website and move it to a new domain name (without 301 redirecting the old pages), would Google see it as a brand new website?

We think it would be best to use brand new content but the financial costs associated are a large factor in the decision. It would be preferred to reuse the old content but has it already been tarnished?

For example, I have a personal injury law firm in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. I only care about potential clients searching within the city limits of Sheboygan (and not within the state of Wisconsin or on a national level).

Do the following elements need to contain an exact match geographically targeted keyword if I only care about ranking locally in Sheboygan, Wisconcsin? (The type of keyword phrase I'm referring to would be Sheboygan Personal Injury Lawyers, Sheboygan Car Accident Lawyers, etc.)

• Title Tag
• Meta Description
• Main Headline
• Body Content

Should I not include an exact match geographically targeted keyword in my content and trust that Google can make the association with where I'm located by other factors on the website?

Website factors:

• Google local business page is setup linking to my website
• Other local listings have been claimed and setup properly
• My contact page contains our full address and phone number
• My footer contains our full address and phone number on every page