Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks!

Whats going on with Dmoz? Last time I looked the site was still live but I remember submitting some clients around 4 years ago and still haven't got a response!

Thanks! I'll take a look at those. Exactly what I needed. If you remember any others let me know

Hey Mozzers,

I am doing some research and wonder if you can help me out?

Before Moz, Hubspot, Majestic, Screaming Frog and all the other awesome SEO tools we use today what were the SEO tools / software / websites that were used for aiding SEO?

I guess we can add the recently closed Yahoo! Directory for starters!

Thanks!

Thanks Donna, that is a great help

Thanks Donna, any experiences you can share using these tools? Especially the last 4?

As the title suggests, what are the best paid tools available for content promotion?

Thanks for your input. So far it looks like people are in agreement that outreaching from the client is the 'best' way.

Thanks Andy, that is great. I'll leave my thoughts until the end so I don't bias the following answers but appreciate you taking the time to give me your opinion.

Hey guys,

I hope you can all help settle an office debate?

When doing outreach for a client who do you send it from and why? I don't want to bias the answers so not going to go into much detail at this stage but I guess there are 3 possibilities (happy to hear others though):

1. From an individual with an agency email address
2. From an individual with a client email address
3. From a persona (fictional third party)

It would be great to hear your thoughts on where you send outreach emails from and why.

Thanks!!

Thanks Keri. Is there actually a way to do this by using Moz tools which I am missing?

In terms of getting worthwhile links video is actually a pretty solid way to start. You can get a lot of relevant / industry links utilising them, just make sure they link back to your page and not the video hosting one (which YouTube is notable for).

What's the best tool for measuring reach and engagement on all social media platforms (or at least Twitter, Google+, Facebook) ?

Hi Antonio,

Sorry to hear you have had the same problem, due to our clients nature this error by the developer cost them a load of lost revenue.

In answer to your questions:

1. It took 19 days in total to recover

2. We took everyone's advice and implemented them but I am unsure what actually helped. I think working work GWMT is the best thing for it. Make sure you submit for a re-crawl as soon as possible and see what is still blocked

I know how scary the situation is but things will go back to normal. Its just a matter of playing the waiting game really, sorry I couldn't be of more help.

Rikki

Thanks Keri! Ill just bookmark it for now

Amazing thanks.

Any reason why the tool isn't just in the tools section which can be found in the main menu bar? (Just curious)

Hello,

I don't know if I am being a bit daft but I don't seem to be able to find the area where I can request a one off crawl report anymore (rather than setting up a campaign).

Can someone let me know where this is now?

Thanks!

I was expecting to see a page which is very well optimised and with lots of content but it only seems to use that phrase once on the page and doesn't have it in either the H1, Bold tag or an image alt. The page content seems very average too.

I guess its not a massively competitive phrase but the other sites on that page (and a few on the pages below) do have decent DA and PA. What is the one link they have? Is it a strong one with exact anchor text for that phrase?

Hi Tom,

Do you have any mark up data in place on the UK site?

It just seems curious that it is pulling the product data for the UK site and not IE. It could be the case the the mark up data is not in place on the IE site or if it is that Google has yet to implement this data in the search results.

Rikki

Morning,

It would seem your site is already dealing with the issue as it has a canonical tag for the URL you posted pointing back to http://www.trespass.co.uk/camping/festivals-friendly/clothing

After the actual URL (http://www.trespass.co.uk/camping/festivals-friendly/clothing?Product_sort=PriceDesc - which is a price sort version of the canonical page above) the &utm_campaign=banner&utm_medium=blog&utm_source=Roslyn section is simply tracking data for Google analytics and shouldn't have any effect on your SEO.

Rikki

Hi Andrew,

Just to clarify your question - do you mean if you you optimise a page, e.g. a category page, will your internal subsequent pages, e.g. sub categories pages, do stronger as a result?

Rikki

Hi John,

If you click on my name, then press "Private Message This User", then in the top right corner press "Inbox".

Rikki

Click on the person who you would like to message. On the left hand side there is a button which says "Private Message This User".

Once you have clicked that it will open a new message form or from the top right corner of that screen you can even see your inbox etc.

Hi John,

A PM is a private message, you can send them through the SEOMoz system.

Rikki

Tom is right, the SEOMoz recommendations list is a good place to start. There are also some really good consultants and agencies who are active in the Q&A who will be able to help you too.

Hi guys,

Thanks very much for the responses. I guess my gut feeling was right that everything would come back to normal but just needed some reassurance.

I have made real progress with this client going from an online brought in revenue of £15k per month at the start of the year to £105k last month but it is all phone based so at the moment his call centre is like a ghost town - its a shame that can happen when a developer is trying to block his own dev sub domain and ends up blocking the whole thing. Just hope it doesn't take too long.

We will certainly try the social media route to see if that speeds things along.

Hello,

A client of mine is going through a bit of a crisis. A developer (at their end) added Disallow: / to the robots.txt file. Luckily the SEOMoz crawl ran a couple of days after this happened and alerted me to the error. The robots.txt file was quickly updated but the client has found the vast majority of their rankings have gone.

It took a further 5 days for GWMT to file that the robots.txt file had been updated and since then we have "Fetched as Google" and "Submitted URL and linked pages" in GWMT.

In GWMT it is still showing that that vast majority of pages are blocked in the "Blocked URLs" section, although the robots.txt file below it is now ok.

I guess what I want to ask is:

• What else is there that we can do to recover these rankings quickly?
• What time scales can we expect for recovery?
• More importantly has anyone had any experience with this sort of situation and is full recovery normal?

Thanks in advance!

Thanks Gianluca.

Yeah we implemented cross site hreflang tags on the US site also.

I thought the site strength / DA would be the issue as the US site has been established much longer. It has a 42 DA compared to the EU 30.

Getting the EU DA to 'overtake' the US in order to outrank it in the UK (and other EU countries) seems like a longer process though. It is a shame there is nothing else we can do to resolve this quicker really.

Thanks Gianluca, I have done that too with the EU domain to all the specific countries.

One quick question though. There is a separate US domain (the original domain of the country) which outranks the EU domain in the UK on nearly all occasions.

Apart from the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag what can we do with the US domain to ensure the EU domain ranks in EU countries?

Thanks, this is what I thought but it is always good to get an outside opinion encase there is something I am missing!

Hi Chris,

Things link your robots.txt file, on page optimisation etc aren't screaming out any major issues like you are reporting so I don't think you are going to find a specific, easy to see, reason for your drop and have an overnight answer unfortunately.

There was also a Panda update in March. Given your two drops were around dates with Panda updates that would signal a bit of a warning.

As Matt suggested I would do a full analysis of your link profile and look to lessen the keyword rich nature if that is the case.

Rikki

Hi Rob,

This is a tricky subject and I have a client with a similar issue.

We added the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag in the head section as suggested here http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 but the results are not conclusive as yet.

I would be keen to hear other peoples thought on this subject too.

Rikki

Never seen that tool before Matt, do you rate is highly?

Hi Chris,

There were in fact a couple of Panda updates in November 2012, it may be worth looking into these to see if either could have effected you. More details at: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change#2012

Hello Chris,

Before I have a quick look when did you website stop ranking? Was it sudden or have you lost your rankings slowly over time?

Hello,

I have a client who's home page redirects to /default.aspx - what are the possible SEO impacts of this?

As the home page redirects to /default.aspx and does not load under both there does not seem to be a duplicate content issue.

Also the redirect should carry over most of the link juice from the home page to /default.aspx therefore are there any negative SEO "side effects" of this set-up?

Thanks in advance!

Hi Neil,

Glad my response gave you some encouragement!

Whenever something changes in SEO there is always a massive over exaggeration that something is dead or no longer works but the truth normally is we have to tweak the way we work rather than revolutionise.

Don't fully write off your 'traditional' methods yet, yes invest more time into content marketing but find a balance between the two.

The directory, social, article, commenting all still 'work' but you just need to be a bit more strict with the websites you chose to do this with (make sure they are 'good' quality sites) and if you are commenting or submitting a piece to them make sure it is of good value to their audience, isn't nonsensical and non duplicated.

That's my opinion anyway and no-one yet has convinced me that doing the 'traditional' methods of link building don't have any benefit any more or will penalise you if you take a professional and common sense approach.

If you have the resources to implement it I would personally go with #2 - it gives you the opportunity to get some long tail traffic in from the colour variables. Obviously don't make the products 'sound different' from each other, just explain the product another way.

If the products are separate for a reason which is beneficial to the customer (as you suggest) and you can write good enough content for each then this would certainly be the way to go.

Thanks for the response!

Hello,

In the past we have ran many contests with aims such as increase facebook likes, twitter followers, newsletter subscriptions etc but I was wondering if anyone has had any success in gaining links through a content and if so how did you set it up?

Hi Adam,

Your right, you had have a very solid DA and PA and there are certainly competitors in the top 10 results with similar kinds of authority. Also the design of your site looks very nice.

One problem I can see by using http://www.opensiteexplorer.org is that all your anchor text is brand related. Anchor text is one of the key ranking signals which indicates what your website is about and none of your refer to 'electric bikes'.

Of course your 'raw' number of links (by total and root domains) is lower than those in the top 10 results too, which is also another ranking factor which you could improve.

Hope this helps,

Rikki

Thanks, I'll check them out!

Hello everyone,

I recently read Danny Doves book, Search engine optimisation secrets, and loved it. I was wondering if anyone had read a similar book on the PPC side which they could recommend that touches on similar topics such as advanced techniques but also the practical side such as billing and dealing with customers etc...

I completely agree. For that budget I would expect a select amount quality links rather than a large quantity of spammy ones, but who knows... maybe the company is working on relationships to get some really good quality links and is just doing the run of the mill directories in the mean time (playing devils advocate here a little because I don't believe that is the case).

I think the on page SEO is just as vital too. If the website in question is the one in the OP profile then I would question that a little too.

The homepage seems to be targeting 3 key phrases plus the brand name which isn’t ideal, especially not with very competitive key terms.

I could go onto the categories too - you have the category which is targeting the key phrase for men, women and children when there are separate sections for each which could target the male, female and child’s keywords while the main category page targets the general term.

I think in 6 weeks it can be difficult to judge the link building strategy but taking the on page SEO into account I would say you might be better changing...