Latest posts made by RealSelf
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Is this thumbtack.com pop-up modal allowed by Google?
When you click on a Thumbtack organic result, there's a pop-up modal on the landing page. Is this allowed by Google?
E.g. Go to these SERPS and click on the first Thumbtack result. The landing page has this modal appear. Is this likely to hurt their rankings?
posted in White Hat / Black Hat SEO
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How to get an Updated Logo in Search Results?
I'm having trouble getting a new logo in search results. My company, RealSelf, updated our logo over a year ago and both Google and Bing continue to show our old logo in image results. Worst of all, this means that when people look for our logo, they find the wrong one and include that in new, external content.
Here's a list of what we've tried:
- We've modified all the logos on our site with the new one (not including a few PDF whitepapers from before the redesign
- Added schema.org logo and organization markup
- Featured a high resolution image on our "Logos" page (top result for "RealSelf logo")
- Verified wikipedia has the proper image
- Modified all social profile logos: Twitter, Facebook, G+, etc..
- Begun outreach efforts to have high ranking image results update our logo
I'm wondering if there are other ideas besides getting more creative/successful with our outreach tactics?
posted in Branding
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Why should I reach out to webmasters before disavowing links?
Almost all the blogs, and Google themselves, tell us to reach out to webmasters and request the offending links be removed before using Google's Disavow tool. None of the blogs, nor Google, suggest why you "must" do this, it's time consuming and many webmasters don't care and don't act. Why is this a "required" thing to do?
posted in White Hat / Black Hat SEO
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RE: Using AJAX to get a meta description to show up
1. Yes
2. Using google analytics
3. Google organic search.
4. It's not site wide but it's prevalent on pages that we did not do the AJAX change to
Thanks!
posted in On-Page Optimization
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Using AJAX to get a meta description to show up
We're unhappy with the meta descriptions google is picking up for our links in SERPs so have started using AJAX to stream in the content google was previously picking up for meta descriptions.
This worked and it doesn't seem to have impacted traffic coming to our site, however since the day of that change our bounce rates have gone up significantly, even for pages that we did not push this change to.
Is it possible that doing this caused Google to treat our site differently site wide? Is there anything we should be cautious of when doing this?
I know the bounce rates could be impacted by users being better prepared by the google meta descriptions, however it doesn't explain what's happening to parts of our site that we didn't do anything to.
-Billy
posted in On-Page Optimization
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RE: Did Google's Farmer Update Positively/Negatively Affect Your Search Traffic?
Thanks for thinking about it, Stefan. We did try the NOODP meta tag for 2 months (Jan 4th through last week) and Google seemed to ignore it because they weren't pulling a description from the Open Directory project -- they were pulling users quotes from the page. We're not listed in the Open Directory...
The approach we've been using since last week where the snippets only show up on rollover has forced Google to accept the meta description but has increased bounce. So we're going to tweak that further by inserting 1 line of text for each review in the onload event.
We've seen similar meta description problems for our doctor Q&A where Google pulls the doctor's name because it's in a div with class = "author". We're going to rename that div to discourage Google from picking it up.
posted in Industry News
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RE: Google Quality Algorithm Update
We've seen a significant decrease in google.com traffic for stem query terms like [botox] and [invisalign]. We have an active community with tens of thousands of cosmetic treatment reviews, photos and Q&A, so we're not a shallow scraper site.
I don't think we've been specifically punished. Instead, it looks like Google simply reset the difficulty of competing for commercial stem query terms back to what it was in 2008. I looked at google traffic by keyword between the end of February 2009 and the last few days, and it seemed clear that our overall traffic has increased significantly but most of that traffic has been for long tail searches. Traffic for stem query terms are generally flat or down.
In January and early February, we were ranking on page 1 for many of those commercial stem query terms for the first time, but it looks like those days are over.
posted in Technical SEO
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RE: Did Google's Farmer Update Positively/Negatively Affect Your Search Traffic?
Can someone who didn't see a drop confirm or deny if the "Requesting reconsideration of your site" link is in the yellow Help box on the left side of your Webmaster Tools? That link just appeared for us, and I wonder if that's because Google has set some site-wide penalty on our site? It seems more likely that Google added it for all users after the update, but it would be significant if someone doesn't have that link in Webmaster Tools_._ We don't want to further anger the Google Gods so we're going to wait for the updated algorithim instead of requesting reconsideration at this time.
reconsideration.png
posted in Industry News
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RE: Did Google's Farmer Update Positively/Negatively Affect Your Search Traffic?
Good ideas, Dave. Your housecleaning ideas prompted us to delete 2,500 old skin care product pages that we had converted to static pages after switching off Drupal. It constituted 1% of our pages and visitors, but the poor metrics from those pages could have acted as a bad signal (2,500 pages is a lot for a human to create) and tarnished our overall site. 1% rotten is still too much.
Good idea about bringing back more content onto the Category/Subject pages. We're going to do the same for our main landing pages. The data I've seen indicates site speed seems is only used to break ties between pages with a similar ranking.
posted in Industry News
Best posts made by RealSelf
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RE: Google Quality Algorithm Update
We've seen a significant decrease in google.com traffic for stem query terms like [botox] and [invisalign]. We have an active community with tens of thousands of cosmetic treatment reviews, photos and Q&A, so we're not a shallow scraper site.
I don't think we've been specifically punished. Instead, it looks like Google simply reset the difficulty of competing for commercial stem query terms back to what it was in 2008. I looked at google traffic by keyword between the end of February 2009 and the last few days, and it seemed clear that our overall traffic has increased significantly but most of that traffic has been for long tail searches. Traffic for stem query terms are generally flat or down.
In January and early February, we were ranking on page 1 for many of those commercial stem query terms for the first time, but it looks like those days are over.
posted in Technical SEO
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Is this thumbtack.com pop-up modal allowed by Google?
When you click on a Thumbtack organic result, there's a pop-up modal on the landing page. Is this allowed by Google?
E.g. Go to these SERPS and click on the first Thumbtack result. The landing page has this modal appear. Is this likely to hurt their rankings?
posted in White Hat / Black Hat SEO
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RE: Did Google's Farmer Update Positively/Negatively Affect Your Search Traffic?
Good ideas, Dave. Your housecleaning ideas prompted us to delete 2,500 old skin care product pages that we had converted to static pages after switching off Drupal. It constituted 1% of our pages and visitors, but the poor metrics from those pages could have acted as a bad signal (2,500 pages is a lot for a human to create) and tarnished our overall site. 1% rotten is still too much.
Good idea about bringing back more content onto the Category/Subject pages. We're going to do the same for our main landing pages. The data I've seen indicates site speed seems is only used to break ties between pages with a similar ranking.
posted in Industry News
I studied physics, worked in finance doing portfolio construction, then moved over to analytics and SEO for RealSelf.