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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?
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:
I'm wondering if there are other ideas besides getting more creative/successful with our outreach tactics?
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?
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!
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
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.
Rand said it has been added to Webmaster Tools across the board.
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.
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.
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.
Our Google.com traffic dropped 29% last week, and we get a fair amount of International traffic too (24%), so we'll probably drop further when the change is replicated to .ca, .co.uk, etc.
Looking at our keyword traffic (or our SEOMoz ranking report), it's really clear that our biggest decreases in visits came from stem keyword searches like [botox] or [invisalign] where we were on the first page of results. The ironic thing is that those pages have low bounce (17% and 27%) and no AdSense ads. We removed the AdSense ads from the landing pages a few months ago to simplify the initial visitor's experience.
It looks like Google is treating those pages as a list of blogs instead of a TripAdvisor hotel listing. Many of the sites that were hit in this update were faux blogs targeted to high CPC keywords.
Since last May, we've been frustrated that Google keeps ignoring our meta description in favor of the first review snippet on the page. (Bing doesn't do this.) Even if our rankings are down, we at least want to present an accurate view of the thousands of reviews, photos, and answers that our site has and not be treated as one person's blog.
We've tried a lot of thigns to get Google to pick up a better meta description, but at best it only works on our site search for a few hours and then Google takes user text from a freshly updated review. At this point it looks like our only option is to pass the first words of each review in a JSON array and display it using Javascript, possibly on mouseOver. Its frustrating that we have to do such contortions, but as Fred Wilson says, it "sucks being a Google bitch."
