Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi,

Short answer is that Social signals are not used for rankings at all. (if you think about it it make sense since you can fake those like there is no tomorrow).

Read more on this at: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-facebook-twitter-pages-are-treated-like-any-other-web-page-on-the-internet-182370

On the other hand, if you do have a large exposure / visibility on social networks, a real one - not faked - with real users and real interaction chances are high that people will share, quote and link to you and that will impact your SEO efforts. I would not focus on social just to get SEO advantages though as it will prove to be a negative ROI.

Related with your last statement - it's true that once you +1 or share on Google plus or twiter for example an URL chances are high that you will get indexed faster - note that there is a distinction between getting indexed and getting ranked. Google bot will find your domain / url faster, it will crawl and index it but that doesn't mean you will rank, rank well or get any boosts in rankings - you are just in the index.

Hope it helps.

Cheers.

Edit*

I'm looking at starting a few Adwords campaigns (for search only) and targeting a niche where there is very little competition. Lets assume I get a very good CTR on my ads. How much could I expect to pay per click? Does Adwords have any minimums CPCs? Or is it actually possible to get penny clicks in Adwords?

Hi Folks!

I'm in the process of trying to buy a domain off someone who isn't really using it for much other than a single anding page for his defunct company.

The current ower is putting a massively high price on the domain (five figures) which is WAY more than what any regular buyer would value it at. He claims he paid that price several years ago when he bought it.  I don't believe him, and I feel he's just using that as an excuse to value his domain very highly.

Does anyone know of any tools I could use to help me see how many times the domain has changed owners? I have a sneaking suspicion that he is the original owner, but I have no way to tell.

It currently has privacy on it so I can't tell much by looking at whois.sc or using my subscription to whorush.com. Any one have any other ideas for me?

In an effort to do some housekeeping on our site we are wanting to change the URL format for a couple thousand links on our site. Those links will all been 301 redirected to corresponding links in the new URL format. For example, old URL format: /tag/flowers as well as search/flowerswill be 301-ed to, new URL format: /content/flowers**Question:**Since the old links also exist in our sitemap, should we add the new links to our sitemap in addition to the old links, or replace the old links with new ones in our sitemap? Just want to make sure we don’t lose the ranking we currently have for the old links.Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Hi Folks,

We have a blog post on one of our sites that ranked very highly for lucrative term for about a period of two months. It had over 2000 Facebook likes, about 20 tweets and the same amount of Google +1's.

The post ended up receiving several high quality natural links, and we also pointed a few authoritative links to it from our network of sites.

After we saw the ranking starting to slip we did a bit of link building (which we shouldn't have done) and ended up making a big mistake. The link building company was only supposed to do 30 links and they ended up doing 600.

Once we figured it out, we immediately submitted a disavow request and told Google about our mistake.

I also thought maybe we then had a manual spam penalty applied so I also submitted a reconsideration request (and also told them about our mistake) but got back a canned reply saying "no manual penalties" were found.

After we did all that, we saw the rankings fall out of the top 50 with the next 10 days.

I'm confident we can throw up a new similar blog post and see close the same rankings we experienced with the original post. But before I do that, I have two questions:

1. Should we 301 the old post to the new post? Could that some how "pass" the bad rankings along to the new post?
2. What should we do about the natural links we received? Should we try and reach out to the sites and get them to change their links to the new post?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

I've been going through and doing some spring cleaning on some spammy links to my site. I used Google's Disavow links tool, but after I submit my text file, nothing happens. Should I be getting some sort of confirmation page?

After I upload my file, I don't get any notifications telling me Google has received my file or anything like that. It just takes me back to this page:

http://cl.ly/image/0S320q46321R/Image 2013-04-26 at 11.15.25 AM.png

Am I doing something wrong or is this what everyone else is seeing too?

I have filed several DMCA reports against scraper sites that are scraping my original content (mainly original images that my community is creating and submitting) and those scraper sites are still getting a TON of traffic... Alexa rank less than 2000) and nothing has happened. Any suggestions as to what else I could do?

Hello,

I have a 'Free download' type site for free graphics for designers. To prevent hot linking we authenticate the downloads and use a 301 redirect. So for example:

The download URL looks like this if someone is clicking on the download button:

http://www.website.com**/resources/243-name-of-the-file/download/dc37**

and then we 301 that URL back to:

http://www.website.com**/category-name/243-name-of-the-file**

Is a 301 the correct way to do that?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Read this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/postpanda-your-original-content-is-being-outranked-by-scrapers-amp-partners

From my research it appears like no one really knows what to do yet.

In my specific case, the site is a scraper site that is scraping my original images and content and outranking me for it. I'm working on compiling a massive list of infringements and then submitting a DMCA Take Down request for each infringement.

I really don't know what else to do at this point. It's very frustrating.

Also, I tweeted to Matt Cutts a while back: "How can we show you instances where recent updates have made results worse?" and he responded "tweet me with examples or do a blog post and tweet me a link to that."

So if we can show Google enough examples of how their updates have made specific SERPs worse, they will hopefully eventually dive in and figure out why and adjust their algo accordingly.

Yes I am seeing it too. Very strange. Overall my traffic on my 3 biggest sites is up, but direct visitis is down by about 30%.

1. Is it necessary or good practice to list "static" site routes in the sitemap? I.e. /about, /faq, etc? Some large sites (e.g. Vimeo) only list the 'dynamic' URLs (in their case the actual videos).
2. If there are urls NOT listed in a sitemap, will these continue to be indexed?
3. What is the good practice for a sitemap index? When submitting a sitemap to e.g. Webmaster tools, can you just submit the index file (which links to secondary sitemaps)? Does it matter which order the individual sitemaps are listed in the index?

I am familiar with both those tools and they do not provide what I am looking for. Specifically I'd love something that spits out a report of the top 100 keywords they rank for in google and shows their positioning in the SERPs.

Does anyone know of any good tools that display what keywords a competitor ranks for?

I have many competitors that I know get a lot of traffic, but I'm not entirely sure where the traffic comes from so it would be nice to plug in their url and get a general overview of what keywords they rank for and what positions.

Just got off the phone with Adwords Support and they confirmed it is definitely still in beta. If you have an account manager you can request it, but I don't spend enough money with them yet to have one

This is all I'm seeing in my Adwords right now: http://cl.ly/2e46010c150T3Z1d0L1S

Are you saying there should be an option called "communication" there if it included for me?

I just googled the term "Mobile Lead Gen" and found this ad:

http://cl.ly/260X3f0t1z1j1R1m212d

Sweet! It has the subscription form signup directly within the Google Ad. Looks like Chrome even pre-populated my email address in the form.

Does anyone know how to set this up within Adwords? I've never seen that option before.

wXOGJ

I'd like to clear all my old keywords out and start from scratch. How do I remove them?

Hello,

Does anyone know if it is possible to track an event on a third party site and have it post back to your Google Analytics account?

For example, I am sending traffic to a partners site and I want to know if that traffic I am sending them will hit a specific point of conversion (a sale) and I'm wondering if it possible to place a tracking pixel on their thankyou.html page that gets recorded in my google analytics?

Well thanks for your feedback, but your answers really have nothing to do with my question. This happened in April 2010 which was well before panda.

Why does SeoMoz tell me I have duplicate content issues and show me these two URLs?

mysite.com

mysite.com/

What does the slash matter and why is that considered duplicate content?

I've been scratching my head over this one for a while now and I can't seem to figure it out.

I own a website that is user-generated content. Users submit images to my sites of graphic resources (for designers) that they have created to share with our community.

I've been noticing over the past few months that I'm getting completely dominated in Google Images. I used to get a ton of traffic from Google Images, but now I can't find my images anywhere.

After diving into Analytics I found this: http://cl.ly/140L2d14040Q1R0W161e and realized sometime about a year ago my image traffic took a dive.

We've gone back through all the change logs and can't find where we made any changes to the site structure that could have caused this. We are stumped.

Does anyone know of any historical Google updates that could have caused this last year around the end of April 2010?

Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated!

When I run a report on my competition I'm seeing their link show up in OSE's report under the "Linking Domains" tab, but when I put my site in there, it doesn't recognize my link from my twitter profile. Any ideas?

Does anyone know of a tool that can be used to input a URL and have it spit out keywords of how Google could possible see what the contents of that page is about?

I found the tool I was looking for thanks to this great post by davidzimm.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-blekkos-seo-data-to-evaluate-web-directories-14678

The easiest way to find this (for me anyways) is using Blekko and then adding a space and /sitepages after the URL.

Specifically I'm looking for a tool where I can just plug in a URL and have it spit out a list of pages on that URL that have the highest pagerank. I don't think I can do that with the SEOmoz toolbar can I?

I have a lot pages on my site and I'm wondering if there is a tool out there that will find all the pages with the highest pagerank for me?

Also, it would be helpful to find that on competitors sites as well. Any ideas?

Thanks guys! This a huge help. I'll get it taken care of.

Hi All,

I've looking at my Crawl Diagnostics Summary and working on getting my site errors down as low as possible.

One thing I'm noticing is that in the "Other URLs" column I'm seeing a lot of 1s. When I click on the number, it is showing me the exact URL with an upper case category title.

For example, it appears like it's telling me that these two URLs are considered duplicate content:

http://mysite.com/Category

http://mysite.com/category

Is that right? Does google care about upper and lower case spelling?