Cool - glad to hear you're having a positive experience. I think waiting until you hear from Google is a wise decision, too.
Posts made by randfish
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RE: Should I Wait Until the "Dust Settles" on the Algorithm Update or Get Busy Now?
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RE: Should I Wait Until the "Dust Settles" on the Algorithm Update or Get Busy Now?
Richard - this is just my personal opinion, and it's not based on a ton of recent experience (I haven't had sites banned/penalized by Google in a very long time now). However, my feeling is that if you've been hit by this update, it's a great catalyst for immediate change. I'd be thinking about all of the following:
- Is now the time to start a new site that's exclusively white hat?
- Can I salvage this site and what's involved in that?
- How do I get rid of the bad links?
- How do I explain all the things I've done to Google (through reconsideration) and are they likely to let me back in?
Obviously, it depends on your long/short term goals, why you're doing web marketing in the first place, what you want to accomplish in the next few years, etc. If you're in the short-term, make money on the web fast with as little effort as possible and don't want to build a brand, then it's a question of whether 301'ing the domain to a new one and trying some tactics Google's not-yet-devalued is better than trying reconsideration and removal of bad links.
If you're thinking long term and brand building and want to put in sweat equity now that might take years to pay off, I'd be thinking around the new domain vs. trying to salvage this one (or two).
Wish you luck whatever you choose!
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RE: Squarespace Errors
Hi Jeremy - I've worked with the SquareSpace crew a bit personally (don't know the system inside and out, but have a reasonable grasp on it). Could you share the URLs that are being reported with the duplicate issues? It's likely a URL parameter that's relatively easy to fix with rel=canonical or the like.
As far as 404s - you might want to download the XLS for those and see which pages are being reported as pointing to the error pages. If you think they should be active, repair them, and if there's a structural problem, you may need to report to SquareSpace's customer service.
Sorry for my long delay!
Rand
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RE: Rand's presentation from the AMA webinar on March 27th, 2012
Hi Miranda - I'm not sure whether the AMA made a recording of the webinar available. I checked out their site and couldn't find it, so it's possible they may not be making it public (or didn't record). You could try emailing the folks over there - alibb@ama.org was my contact.
Best of luck!
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RE: Press Release Sites
Hey Rod - thanks a ton for jumping in. I totally agree with you that diversity is required and that press releases are most valuable when they reach their target and achieve broader press and distribution than merely the PR sites themselves.
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RE: Subdomains vs Subfolders
I just mean the uniquely named portion of the subdomain, e.g. the "xyz" in xyz.domainname.com
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RE: Subdomains vs Subfolders
All the testing, research and examples I've seen in the past few years (and even the past few months) strongly suggest that the same principles still hold true.
Subdomains SOMETIMES inherit and pass link/trust/quality/ranking metrics between one another
Subfolders ALWAYS inherit and pass link/trust/quality/ranking metrics across the same subdomain
Thus, having a single subdomain (even just domainname.tld with no subdomain extension) with all of your content is absolutely ideal from an SEO perspective. It's also more usable and brandable, too IMO.
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RE: Do you think Seomoz is worth the monthly fee if you're not a professional SEO ?
Wow - that's very impressive work; congratulations! I think getting more technical depth is a great goal, but I wouldn't let it overwhelm the equally important practice of creativity in content, branding, UX, design, etc. The "softer" practices and metrics that touch on inbound marketing / SEO are a huge part of how you win authority, links, brand reputation, trust, etc. and those all lead to both better rankings and more customers.
Glad you're sticking around here, too
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RE: Do you think Seomoz is worth the monthly fee if you're not a professional SEO ?
Personally, I think the community as a whole is even smarter than those folks individually But glad you like that feature so much Sha!
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RE: Do you think Seomoz is worth the monthly fee if you're not a professional SEO ?
I hear you. I love the Keyword Difficulty tool for the analysis of this, but actually providing recommendations would be, IMO, dangerous. It's too simplistic to say that any machine-programmed logic could apply to each unique situation effectively, hence we focus on the analytics and diagnosis through software and leave the recommendations (at least in the complex areas) to professional marketers who can properly consider all the paths.
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RE: Do you think Seomoz is worth the monthly fee if you're not a professional SEO ?
Hi Alan - first off, welcome to the community at Moz! Great to have you.
We actually think a lot about this question in a broad way at the company. Right now, our focus is primarily on producing software that's ideal for professional marketers in consulting, agency, in-house or self-directed roles. Those who don't spend much/most of their time thinking about and working on content marketing, SEO, social media, analytics, etc. probably won't find SEOmoz to be an ideal fit.
In terms of justifying the fee - it really comes down to ROI. If you find yourself applying the data, tracking, tips and recommendations from both the software/tools and the community/content in a way that produces far more than $99/month in revenue, that's awesome. But if not, please don't feel bad at all about cancelling. We make it very easy to do so (right on your profile page) because we want folks to have a phenomenal, positive experience with SEOmoz, even if our product isn't right for you. And who knows, perhaps in months or years to come, you'll find that as your businesses grow, there's a greater need and come back.
I wish you luck whatever you choose - and please do let us know (through our feature request forum) if there are particular items you'd like to see.
Cheers,
Rand
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RE: Are moz analytics now redundant ?
Some reciprocal links are fine - those that are given without the intent to manipulate Google. However, when SEOs talk about reciprocals, we usually mean a link that is only in existence because both parties are trying to manipulate Google's rankings. Those won't generally fly.
Guest posting is almost always 100% white hat, unless the quality of the sites is extremely low, the links are terribly obvious spam or you're engaging in "article spinning" and not true guest authoring on real, quality sites with editorial standards.
There are literally thousands of awesome ways to get great editorial links, and I disagree that most sites must buy/spam to acquire. If you need to get started on some ideas, I'd check out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4
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RE: Are moz analytics now redundant ?
Couple thoughts:
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Google's always done this, they've just been more aggressive recently. Moz metrics should still be useful to help separate the wheat from the chaff, but any non-editorially-acquired links will always be risky.
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We are working on a MozSpam score. Starting some data collection for a training model next week actually. I'd expect 4-6 months before it rolls out, but hopefully will be useful for exactly this kind of thing.
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RE: Open Site Explorer Not Working on 99% of Sites
Yeah - it should be just temporary (think it was just a few hours this AM when our API servers through Amazon's cloud went wacky). We're working on ways to make them stable, even if/when Amazon's having issues.
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RE: SEOMoz rocks, but is it breaking Google's webmaster guidelines when it comes to check rankings?
Hi Vinod - looked through the other thread. I'd say the advice you got there was really solid. The content of that site is not very unique or valuable, the linking tactics you used were partially spammy, partially just low quality (directories, article links in syndicated directories, etc), and the effort put into the site overall feels subpar.
SEO in fields like pharmaceutical can be incredibly spammy and manipulative, thus looking at the top ranking folks (who usually only last a few days to a few weeks) is actually a terrible idea. Unlike in other spaces, overwhelming quantities of spam links and other manipulative tactics reign and Google appears uninterested in regulating this like they do in other markets. If it were me, I'd try to be one of the few legitimate, non-black-hat sites there, but I recognize that the spammers are likely to keep ranking with the churn-and-burn strategy, so it's up to you.
I do like your idea of starting over with a different type of site - perhaps a topic you're very passionate about that's less spammy?
Cheers,
Rand
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RE: SEOMoz rocks, but is it breaking Google's webmaster guidelines when it comes to check rankings?
Hi Vinod - we use APIs for some things (e.g. AdWords data, social shares, some rankings stuff, etc), and direct crawling for others (e.g. Linkscape itself obviously, fetching weekly site crawls, etc). I believe Google's violations primarily apply to software one installs on one's own machine that runs automated queries. We don't do that (as there's nothing to download and install with Moz). I believe this is what got WebPosition called-out on Google's site.
We're in relatively good touch with folks at lots of the major services we use - Google, Twitter, Facebook, Bing, etc. Googlers have asked us to make some changes and we've obliged (e.g. removing PageRank scores from our Mozbar/PRO app).
Hope that helps!
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RE: No follow - dofollow
Hi Nikos - my experience has been that over the long run, those who break those rules find it comes back to bite them both directly and indirectly. I certainly don't want to lecture you or tell you how to do your marketing - that's your business. But I would feel awfully guilty if you came away from an experience interacting on the Moz community thinking that we might endorse or support link buying. It's always dangerous and, in my opinion, always a worse use of money and time than white hat, long-term tactics.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/white-hat-seo-it-fing-works-12421 has more on my opinions, and http://www.seomoz.org/blog/unnatural-link-warnings-blog-networks-advice is an excellent, recent piece on how Google cracks down on this sort of thing.
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RE: Private Blogging Network
Most definitely! Google wants editorial links - that is, links that are freely given by a party that receives nothing in return. Blog networks, whether paid or unpaid, are intentional attempts to manipulate the rankings through a form of "reciprocal" linking, i.e. all parties are benefiting from links that don't exist for editorial reasons, but rather because they are part of an exchange scheme.
The webspam team certainly tries to shut these down, and while they're harder to find than the larger ones or paid networks (sometimes), there's still substantial risk and, recently, plenty of examples of them catching and penalizing those who engage.
Besides - white hat SEO is SO much more fun, valuable in the long term, and adds to lots of forms of inbound marketing, not just search rankings.
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RE: Private Blogging Network
Hey Jen - I'd be very, very wary of doing this, given how much Google's been cracking down on blog networks, e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=private+blog+network&tbs=qdr:w
I've also seen Google's responses to re-consideration requests include statements to the effect that the penalties may be lifted faster if the abuser includes details on what SEO services, blog networks, and links they used/acquired. Thus, Google's creating a strong incentive for anyone penalized to share their acquisition techniques privately. My guess is this will mean lots more penalties and devaluation coming soon.
If possible, I'd urge you to consider spending the time, resources and energy you'd give to this project on something else.
I'd also probably say that SEOmoz public Q+A might not be the most ideal place to conspire to build black hat link networks (for obvious reasons)
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RE: When will Rand put out "Art of SEO 2nd Edition"? (ANSWER: IN ABOUT 2 WEEKS)
Yep! That's actually the only major contribution I made to the book. Stephan, Jessie and Eric are the folks behind this one more so than me (though I did do some review and work on the social stuff).
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RE: Strange titles showing in WMT?
This can't help a ton, but my blog was hacked a while back and I got a good recommendation to move hosting to WPEngine. It's a bit pricey, but the sites I've set up there have never had a problem; their spam fighting software and assistance from team members is exceptionally good.
Also heard good things about http://www.websitedefender.com/ from some WP folks.
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RE: Multiple H1 tags are OK according to developer. I have my doubts. Please advise...
Hi AWC - this is tangential to the topic, but important for Q+A and Moz community participation in general.
Please, in the future, work to be as generous and empathetic in replies as possible. This community is meant to be a haven from many of the nastier corners of the web and while your comment was not excessively insulting, it wasn't kind either. Contributions both big and small are welcome here, as are opinions.
If we're going to maintain the amazing community here, we have to be mindful about the impacts of negativity. Thanks for understanding.
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RE: Is Google stupid?
We've seen a pattern with this stuff - it works temporarily, then gets cut in value. TLA is the one I tested last year - rankings went way up, but as soon as we dropped the links they fell (indicating that TLA stock did work). However, when we observed and talked to folks who'd turned it on and kept it on, they reported that rankings, then dropped (within ~90 days with TLA).
Recently, we've seen Google start banning many private blog networks (warning, links below contain a LOT of black hat stuff and some none-too-friendly posters as well, unfortunately):
http://www.internetmarketingtoolsupdate.com/internet-marketing-tips/seo-link-monster-warning/
Those are all in just the past week.
Google's not stupid, but I do think their webspam team has been swamped. Recently though, it feels like they're making a bit more progress, and I wouldn't be surprised if they continue kicking some tail in the link spam/black hat world.
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RE: Seek help correcting large number of 404 errors generated, 95% traffic halt
I wouldn't feel too confident that the numbers and dates Google's showing you are precise or accurate. In fact, we've seen times when GWMT is considerably off. I'd watch how Google crawls your site and look at search traffic to your pages - those are likely leading indicators that things are/will be fixed.
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RE: Seek help correcting large number of 404 errors generated, 95% traffic halt
Hi Mark - wow, sounds really rough. I've got a few suggestions:
- First off, you need to make 100% sure that you've actually fixed the issue and that the internal links are pointing to the right places AND any old URLs that may have had internal/external links are either rel=canonicaling or 301 redirecting to the correct, updated locations.
- You might try using a few tools to verify this, including the SEOmoz Crawl Test http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test and Screaming Frog: http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
- When you are ready, submit new XML Sitemaps to Google with the proper URLs. Make sure you've deleted/removed your old ones.
- You can also send the reconsideration request again, indicating that while you're aware this isn't a penalty, you have realized some technical/navigation issues on the site and believe you've now fixed these.
Hope this helps and wish you the best of luck!
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RE: Do you trust SEOMoz with your Google Analytics data?
Totally fair question - I'll add a few thoughts from our end:
- Right now, the only GA data we pull for accounts is what you see in the product. We're not taking out or using anything else behind the scenes, nor storing anything other than what you see. Being totally TAGFEE, I will say that in the future, we probably should start using some anonymous aggregations of data to help improve the product, run some testing and possibly long term, offer the ability to share your data anonymously in exchange for some sort of benchmarking/comparison (we'd obviously talk about this a lot more and you'd need to opt-in - we'd never do it without permission).
- Once an account is deleted, we remove its data within 6 months (sometimes sooner - only reason we keep it is in case of account re-activation, where folks don't want to lose stuff).
- We have network admins on call 24/7, so if anything unusual should happen, we can quickly address the problem.
- To date, we've had no intrusion attempts other than to the main WWW site (for injections of URLs - ugh to link spammers making the name "SEO" look bad).
- We have never sold ANY customer data ever to anyone for any reason, nor have we ever attempted or offered to do so. We do, obviously, make our link graph available via OSE, but that's public on the web (just hard to access in a scalable format).
I will ask one of our engineering folks to jump on this thread and provide some information about our security and encryption (probably not details, as that would be counter-productive, but at least a broad explanation).
My final note would be that traffic data via GA, while certainly important and private, hasn't typically been a target of hackers/malware/phishing schemes/etc. The value to outsiders is pretty minimal, even direct competitors (with a few rare exceptions).
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RE: Duplicate content and http and https
Thanks dude! If I make it to Vermont, I might look you up
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RE: Why can't I add my facebook page to SEOMOZ? Also having other facebook issues.
That's super weird... Never heard of Facebook doing that before. So sorry to hear it! Maybe the FB team can un-restrict your page if you send a request?
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RE: Why does site explorer keep crashing?
Hmm... I haven't seen a lot of errors/reports coming in, but I will check with the team. It should be pretty stable- I know we had some Amazon issues with EC2 for a bit, but that shouldn't be strongly affecting.
Thanks for the heads up Robert!
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RE: Why can't I add my facebook page to SEOMOZ? Also having other facebook issues.
That's weird - mine is working OK, so it appears not to be system-wide. Can you drop an email to help@seomoz.org with your account info and the two pages you tried to connect? They'll get it looked at ASAP.
In terms of showing up in Facebook search - I suspect that's either A) Something in the page's/account's privacy settings or B) related to the number of fans you have. Facebook has some minimums (25 to have a business page, 1,000 to get a vanity URL, etc) and it could be that your current level of 61 is what's preventing you from showing in searches (though that would be odd, and I'm struggling to find specific mention of it).
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RE: Can penalties be passed via 301 redirect?
I've seen a bunch of these and weirdly, the 301s do seem to (often) remove the penalty in cases where it's a true penalty. However, what you're describing sounds like it could just be a negation of the value of many external links (which is much more common than the actual "penalty" that downgrades you).
If that's the case, 301'ing likely won't do much positive or negative - it will pass on the "juice" that Google's still counting and thinks is legit, but probably not the devalued juice (though, to be honest, I've seen a few times when it has and black hats sometimes do use this strategy - constantly re-pointing stuff as it gets hit). This certainly isn't recommended, as eventually, you will have that "burnt-to-the-ground" effect. If you're looking to go clean and white hat on a different domain, and want to take some of the content and link efforts you have in the penalized site, that's certainly a way to go.