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DA and PA are Moz metrics not google ones.  That's the first thing to note.  Moz recently made some changes to their way of calculating the metrics that made them a more accurate predictor of the ranking capability of a page.

So basically they are an integer that's arrived at by a calculation involving the number of links pointing to a page and the power and authority of those links. DA is global, so one domain in the pond of the whole internet and PA is a local to your individual site.  So each page you own in the pond of your whole site.

So how do you use these metrics?

1. find out whether google is ranking links and a pages 'power' or the content therein.  Sometimes the first three results all have very high DA of 60-70 and 80+.  This means that to compete you'll probably need to get a ton of links to your page to be in that top three.

Other times the top three can have little or no domain power and just be great articles.  This is more common now.

2. You can look at the PA or your individual pages and rank them according to PA. Then see where each ranks and whether there are any statistical outliers.  Sometimes a page with low PA will be doing well.  That's great.  Other times a page will bomb and if you find that it has a low PA then you might want to insert some internal links to it to bump it up a bit.

By way of additional research look here:

https://moz.com/blog/the-new-link-explorer-is-here - rand on DA updates

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/ - matt cutts on pagerank

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/pagerank-patent/250603/ - roget montti on pagerank patent and lots of _science, yo. _

Go get em!

Thanks all - and everyone listen to Miriam, she is another local search power hitter.  While I'm here I forgot to mention local citations.  I outsourced my citations to a guy actually on this forum.  I won't mention the business because I don't want to come across like I'm spamming the forum but you might be able to figure out who it is.  He is a lovely Russian guy who has a large citations business and their audit really helped me save a bunch of time and they got all our citations out and perfect in a week or so.  That's one less thing to do and something that for a few hundred you can safely outsource if you're short on time.

I am a firm believer that life's too short for citations. And I'm bad at making typos so it's a dangerous game for me to be in!

Also found a smidge over 1000 in SEM Rush.  That figures though because you have about 50 x 5 in your navigation alone.  Then the best sellers and then all the gifts and sliders and footer etc.  THere's an awful lot on the page.  Every basic advertising book warns about the common mistake people make when advertising - they write everything they do on one ad (or page).

Perhaps you need to organise things a little more.  Read up on data architecture.  It's a big word but not a particularly difficult subject.  They are big on DA at google so the inference is that they use it to rank sites.  I've also found in my own SEO experience that finding the defined edges of topics and sorting into those topics really works.  There is no right answer as usual, it's a game of trial and error.  You need to test everything and add / subtract subtopics from pages and swop them around to find the optimum position.  No tool will do this for you - pen and paper is best.

I would say about 100-200 is the maximum amount you want to dilute the links coming from a page.  I think 200 is ok if it's ecommerce.   People say it doesn't work anymore but pagerank sculpting works for me.  I don't do it intentionally but there is a strong correlation between number of links x 'link from' page's authority and target pages authority.  When I link over about 250 links this stops working - presumably because the links are spread too thinly.

So get to grips with information architecture and then look at sensible topics for a page.   Or just go to another page like yours that's ranking well and steal their IA, topics and internal linking strategy.  Learning new stuff is great but plagiarism is quicker. 

This is a great challenge you have here because it's 100% achievable. These are some things to consider- it's not exhaustive by any means.

1. Set up your google my business profile and get it all optimised with the right categories & seed the Q&A part and offers with a good introductory offer and some frequently asked questions

2. Watch this: https://moz.com/blog/local-businesses-need-websites

3. Seriously consider changing the name of your company to London Removals - as this will really really help things.

4. Start collecting google reviews (not from the same office as they won't show up)

5. Add Schema markup (local business) in the datahighlighter

6. Set up all your keywords and content inside Moz or your favourite SEO tool and start watching the rankings

7. Optimise your homepage with London removals in the name of business, permalink, first paragraph, one of the H1's, meta description and image Alt.

8. Start writing content based on the main local keyword topics.  Don't focus on keywords but on one topic for each article.  Think about creating the best article you can that exhaustively covers that topic and make it 10X better than the current one on google.

9. Speak to your customers and find out what information they want to know and write about it

10. Set aside two hours a day learning from Youtube and Moz about SEO strategies and possibly speak to or follow Joy Hawkins, she's the queen of local search (sorry other queens and princesses of local) I learned local SEO in about 8 months this way and was able to rank locally for everything in Liverpool.  London is different.  Perhaps you should focus on a London Borough to make it easier.  So call the business Removals North West London or Removals South London.  There are enough people in one Borough to give you plenty of customers and make the job of SEO a little easier.  Remember that the most important signal is LOCATION!.  So you'll do much better being mega removals Westminster or Mega removals Southwark etc.  I'd say the volumes are easy enough (about 500/month for removals north London) Then once the business grows you can buy another unit in another postcode and rinse and repeat.

That should give you plenty to be going on with. Good luck!

Haha lol.  My business does 40k Net Profit a month and Starbucks is still too expensive!

But seriously, I have had loads of fake reviews, mainly from our competitors but have noticed some random ones creeping in.  Not patients at the practice but instead very generic.  It reminds me of the webform spam which started off as porn / viagra and then became more insidious so as to get past my gatekeepers or get a click or response from the newer receptionists at the practice.  They have started saying nice things like "great article, I loved reading this, can I have an appointment please for whitening".  The girls on front of house always respond to them because that's how they are trained and they are too busy usually to spot the email address that's from a bangladeshi pharmacy (very common one) or some sort of mens health company.

I try to stop them but al my actual enquiries end up in the trash.  It's a nightmare.  But spammers are adapting.  They are not ever going away. The more tech we use to screen them the smarter they get.

I have had lots of success getting google to remove reviews though.  It's not as hard as everyone says if you have the data and stats and evidence for Google.

Best thread ever.

Can we talk about Rand's book here? Just delete me mods if it's not appropriate or interesting to anyone.

But I thought it was great - no they're not paying me - it put me in the mind of my absolute fave book of all time 'Trust Me I'm Lying' by Ryan Holiday.  I mean rand is nothing like Ryan Holiday but the style of complete and utter openness and fearless criticism of what is bad in the world really gave me a lot to think about.

I can highly recommend it.  And to be honest (not transparent - those are different) to be honest don't be tempted to give up in the first few chapters thinking it's a rags to riches personal story.  Because it develops into a real goldmine of technical advice and the sort of advice that you can't get anywhere - emotional advice.  Being a founder is hard and I'd say it's well worth a read (or listen in my case)

You'll be surprised if you've only ever seen him on Whiteboard Friday.  It's like a different rand altogether.

What did you all think?  I remember some [person] trolling him once for some talk he gave at an SEO conference saying 'stick to whiteboard Friday - nobody wants to know about your life'  But you really do.  Because you need to know that your business is different from everyone else's.  I'm an optimist and think that in marketing the next decade is going to be the decade of authenticity.  And this is a great place to start.

_Moderator's Note: This question has been edited to comply with Moz's TAGFEE Code and Community Etiquette Guidelines. _

She certainly fits the genius bill for sure.  That's funny because my PPC guy was saying there's loads of CRO opportunities.  You're right - I'm becoming obsessed.  All this gamification of apps is making me crazy.  Seeing just a 5% drop in traffic will ruin my day and we could have converted £25,000 of new patients lol.  I'm not even kidding either. I'm getting bummed out by stupid stuff.

Who was it who said you cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.  I think it's time to bin the dashboards for a week and come up with some new thinking.

Thanks for your advice. I'm also gonna hit Joy up at Sterling.  Even her lowliest agency tea-boy could probably move the needle for our site.

Yeah you nailed it as usual.

Schema stars just don't show up on homepages.  You're probably right.  A homepage is a homepage and it's going to kill my local rankings to try to mess around with a 'dentist Liverpool page'  Should I take all the schema review attempts (that failed) off the homepage?  Is it damaging things?

I went through a big phase of consolidating content and it worked really well and now I'm number one for lots of stuff (or sometimes one and two!) I'm experimenting with more specific 'topics' now trying to write more content - also trying not to fall foul of maccabbees or beinng so specific that I just don't get enough traffic/keywords on each page to get them ranking.

It's all testing and I really feel now like I'm in a maze just randomly testing routes and trying to stick to best practice but doing it blindly.  I audit my competition every time I do a search.  Sometimes I just don't know.  The auditing tools all come up with different ideas and they are less and less reliable as google is taking these giant leaps.  But that's the point.  If we were able to work it out then the whole thing would fall apart.

One thing that has had a HUGE effect is all the DCMA's i've been putting in and disavowing dodgy domains.  I really don't think google is as good at ignoring them as they say they are.

I've experimented with Ad Words (appearing first on all the mobile searches as a sort of branding exercise) but i'm not sure that's helped with CTR like the research suggests.

Sometimes I want to pay some pure genius to look at it for me and run a really comprehensive report but I know I'm just going to pay for a crappy SEM Rush branded PDF report or a something straight from an SEO SAAS product.  I need someone with a brain to look at it for me.  I feel like i'm at the limit of what I'm actually mentally capable of and it's frustrating me.

I also think that it's sometimes not me moving the needle but the whims of google.  Search console is showing some really strange results with demand like some days there'll be 3x the impressions but I don't see any featured snippets or reasons.

Im sorry - i'm ranting at you.

Yeah pricing customised things is difficult.  I tell my patients getting a smile makeover is like buying a car.  And they say 'what sort of car' and I say - 'well you've just answered the price question - it's up to you not me'

Remember manuals and technical content will be duplicated from the manufacturers sites so will harm not help. Also can you get links from the manufacturers like in their 'find a supplier' pages.

Also find everyone in the office with a degree and get them to join their university alumni and write a piece about your company and how they've done well in their careers.  Universities will publish these in their blogs and blast your DA into outer space.

Another thought - you've got a bunch of engineers.  So you have all the knowledge you need here.  You need to start getting them to write about the products on your blog.  Why they're good. Or great even.  I can make dental implantology sound exciting.  We're drilling holes 1/14 inches from people's cerebellum and they are literally queuing out the door for it.  Become authors.  You are not just a catalogue of pumps.  that's what this website it.  It's a catalogue like the argos catalogue.  You need to be more than that.  Reviews, technology behind the systems, development, challenges etc.  These will get people reading.   And then buying. Because they'll know you're interested in your products and interested in doing a good job and not just buying something for £900 and selling it for £1,500 - which is what anyone can do.

Hey you're from Derby!

We have probably raved together at the mighty Progress back in the day.

OK so this is some complicated stuff.  But do not despair.  You need to think about who is going to be buying your complicated stuff.  Is it procurement people on instruction from engineers? Or Engineers?  People who just need a pump for something?  That's your first job.  I know it sounds bone-headed and I hate doing it but put together some of those dumb 'buyer profiles' that they use in retail - with your whole team and a whiteboard.  Model your best clients. Ask them why they use you.

Don't be afraid to use complex words for complex people and if it's lay people reading then you're gonna have to dumb it down.  There are lots of big images of (quite frankly terrifying-looking) pieces of equipment on there and that might be great or not depending on who's reading and possibly buying.  Have you thought of vectors to simplify or possibly videos to just show what they do?  Close-ups of shiny things are great and can be shot on a phone.

Although it's B2B you still need to focus on the desired end result and get a little emotional.  B2B people are obsessed with features but in reality if I'm buying a pump I still want something - could be the best one, most reliable (so I don't have to keep calling out engineers or being embarrassed by my colleagues) or whatever.  Do these people want the cheapest or the most reliable?  What does your customer want?  Service?  you need to find out.  But the website looks ok if not a little complex.  But it's a complex thing you do.  I still think you can better order things though.  Think about structuring it in an elegant way and google will reward you for that.

But this site seems (with the greatest respect) a little all over the place. Look at the JCB website (believe they're down the road from you) it's more simple and modern looking and the technology and quality of what they're doing is better reflected in their site.

I used to build rockets and loved really techy sites where I could browse all the parts and o-rings and nozzles and telemetry units and recovery systems and engine grains but I look at those sites now and cringe.  And they don't rank anymore either.   You need to communicate a desired end result to the consumer whether you're B2B or B2C.

Look how the JCB site is similar to a B2C luxury car site - I believe that's the way things are going.  Also update the imagery.  Some of the pumps are exactly the same pictures. That's just lazy.  Take beautiful close up images of their parts and make videos of them doing what they do. I'll bet some of the stuff you have is really, really cool.  So show it off.

That would excite me.  And pumps can be exciting - anything can. I'm a freakin' dentist - so I feel your pain - no pun intended.

Good luck - this is pretty non-specific observations but ask away and let's all get it fixed.

Hi DAGU,

This is an interesting question and one that requires research.  Google rank brain will identify words intent that are essentially the same.  You can see this with keywords by typing them into the search engine.  If you type in 'How much is a haircut' in bold you'll see in the entries to the SERP 'haircut prices' 'average costs' haircut cost 'hairdresser cost' etc.  So you know google considers these to be the same things.

So if you mention 'price', 'cost', 'average price' loads of times you're going to get slammed for keywords stuffing because these are variants on the same words.

Now with products it's a little more difficult but the same principle applies.  You need to find out what people (and google) considers to be in the same topic and where the edges of that topic are.  This takes testing and time and research.

But the best place to start is with googling.  On the highest ranking pages do they group the products together or have them on separate pages?  Also use your brain (I don't mean that in a derogatory way) but shut your laptop and think critically about what your customers want to see on each page and what type of customer might be looking for what product and why.

Even better go ask them!  But looking at successful pages will give you a good start.  Make sure you have your Mozbar on and discount the pages with very high DA or PA because they may be ranking because of factors not related to on page or smart information architecture but because they are just established players.  You want model the small players who are newer and doing it right.

There is basically a balance to be struck between the serp entry (very important for people looking for something specific) and the page content which needs to have the depth and comprehensiveness to rank.  And there's no tool out there except your own brain and your customers/staff that's gonna give you those answers.

Also don't be afraid to test.  I treat 'gummy smiles' with Botox so had that as part of my botox page.  I just took it out this morning and made a page dedicated to gummy smiles that includes laser gum contouring, crown lengthening and all sorts of other stuff.  Let's just see what happens.  You can always change it back if it doesn't work.

But be aware of volume.  If you've got one page for the "Nobel Biocare Straumann Titanium Implant" it's just not gonna pick up enough search and google's not going to get enough data from chrome to rank it. So I have it as a tab on my Dental Implants page and if someone does a search it it's marked up & H3 so it comes up as a hyperlink in blue.

Good luck.  But this is a critical thinking job and a research job so get googling and see what google considers the delimitations of your topics.  Spending two days just googling products and making notes will not be time wasted because you'll get a feel for it.  And once you start to get a feel for these things then you can start using your intuition and taking shortcuts.

Most of the stuff I do now I just wing it and do a few tests and pick a winner.  Because i've done so much painstaking research I feel I have a pretty good idea of what google's got in mind for my categories and topics.

All I know about this is that Google HATES spam and they have a new(ish) system - read about it here - whereby the distance between authority websites is measured in a sort of distributed way using lots of servers and loads of stuff too hard for my brain to fathom.  It's worth a read though because he puts it into simple language too.

The upshot is that your site can now be better ranked if it is 'closer' to an authority site using this system. Now I would bet you a million pounds that this works positively (so I get a link from a small but authoritative site and will get a bump in my rankings) but it also works negatively - to reduce webspam.

So - and I'm totally hypothesising here - I'd say getting yourself links from high spam sites will get you labelled as a spam site too.  And this is not a crazy jump of the imagination when you look at the work google has done getting rid of PBN's and groups of sites circle-jerking (sorry can't think of a better word here) themselves to the top of the rankings.

So I'd stay as far away from spam as you can.  Even if the other stats are good stats.   GOOGLE HATES SPAM and they are going to rid the entire web of it one day.  So you're possibly polishing the brass on the Titanic with these links.

But test it.  I would worry that I might get labelled permanently in that spammy place though.  It's not like you can disavow and just have everything return to normal the next day.  I think it's a very dangerous game.

Why don't you go after nice less spammy high authority and good sites for links?  That's just as hard or easy as getting the nasty ones on side surely?

But I'm not an expert here so if some good spam-experienced people could chime in that would be good.

Out of interest what's the site.  You can email it or DM it to me if it's private. I'll run it through Ahrefs, Rush, and a few more I have and see what they say.

YES! WP custom area.  That's the one I want.  Thanks roman.

Thanks Miriam - I'd not heard of that one - looks awesome.  Yes outsourcing is not good but if you've got the tools to identify when the agencies have gotten you bad links you can always ask them to get you some good ones to replace the bad ones.

I've done that with a few agencies and they are not bad people - they are trying to do a good job and develop their own good relationships and I think they get let down by bloggers and make mistakes just like the rest of us.  So when they do and you've paid them you must ask them to make it right for you.

But if someone put a gun to my head and said get me a DA70 link by tomorrow I'd collar one of my dentists or therapists or nurses and make them write an article about how great their university experience was and send it to the student newspaper or uni blog.

That's a truly marvellous way of getting exposure. Incidentally Oleg emailed me and our conversation was about product suppliers also.  He works with dealerships for example and there will be lists of dealerships on the main car websites.  Every product I use from the sunglasses patients wear to stop the lights getting in their eyes to the bubblegum-flavoured mouthrinse.  I've written to them all about how much we love their products and they'll 7/10 times bang it straight up on the blog or put a link in my signoff at the end of the review.

I'm actually starting to like linkbuilding.  It's like spreading love around and making people fee nice about their products in return for links. I'd do that all day.

Thanks for the endorsement Miriam. blushes  I love it here.

Hi Roman,

Thanks for this - some great options here for my page. But what about when people want to upload their own photos rather than reviews. So it's hosted on our site and could potentially one day form a sort of Q&A and brochure of our lovely patients.  I also need one for our recruitment page where people can upload CV's and cover letters but think I can fix that with one of my forms plugins.

Cheers,

Ed.

I've had some great people from <a>Upwork</a>.  This could be a job for them.  Super easy to use and you can vet them with questions and interview.

I did an HTTPS migration - went off without a hitch

Some linkbuilding that was great too

No you simply can't outsource it.  It's hard graft and the companies you outsource to will use some white some grey and some downright black hat methodologies.

If you have any professional services then I could give you some really useful advice.  What sectors do you operate in?  Being on your own is hard.  I' on my own but I just have one site to worry about.  But we punch above our weight.

Why don't you email me some specifics: ed@sexydentistry.com and I'll be able to tell you about the good the bad and the ugly.  I don't want to get into trouble on here because I don't want to offend or make enemies - and also it's not really a marketplace either.  but I don't charge.  I'm here to help. And I'm sure i'll need a favour in return one day lol.

Ok so you have two avenues here and people focus usually on one and not the other.

I'm a local dentist and struggled with the map pack.  I find it easy to rank number one for terms with a local identifier like 'product+location' which always trigger the maps.

The problems you might encounter are that the maps are great but they take the user to the home page.  This is problematic because I'd actually rather them be taken directly to my product page and not have to navigate around to find what they're looking for.  So maps are great but they do have this annoying limitation in UX and I find from looking at user feedback from recordings (like from Hotjar) that they can get lost and pogo back to the serp - always bad.

The other limitation is NAP-W.  So it can be worth getting your NAP absolutely squared away - which it sounds like you have.  But I got some great results from doing an audit with a company called whitespark who basically do it for you for a few hundred dollars.  Moz also have a great tool but it's not working here in the UK at the moment.  However, my NAP was in a mess so you may well not need these although it's a small investment and got us from 7% to 14% in the maps (out of thousands of positions) so that's a LOT of map 1-3 positions.

So places you must go are:

1. INDUSTRY SPECIFIC (like universities and local clubs and trading links with local businesses and local bloggers)  Bloggers want money and for hardly anythign they will publish nice advertorial that will move the needle.

2. LOCAL - It has to be local.  google 'Hyper local citations' for some examples.

3. BUSINESS - and this is the one people neglect.  You sell a product but you are also a business so get in touch with local business groups, start up organisations and write articles about business.  Then you have two sources of links.  Your product and general business stuff too.  This is how I've had some massive successes.  Local newspapers will write about small businesses and the people and stories behind them.  Use this.

Avoid signing up to rubbish local directories.  They don't work.  I read in Search Engine Roundtable - (which is reputable) that there are still some good directories out there but I ran them through my systems and they are all absolute rubbish.  I respected that company and really lost a lot of respect for them when they were touting these crappy listing companies.  Probably paid. Who knows.

Remember NAP and directories are different.  You need to be listed in relevant citation sources like local newspaper directories for businesses but the old web directories are a waste of your time and money.

If you have professionals working in any of your client organisations get them to write for their university alumni - if they went to uni in their city this will skyrocket your local pack presence.

But if you are new it can just take time.  So be patient and don't try anything shady to try to game the system.  Google is getting smarter and smarter and what worked even 6 months ago will get you penalised after the huge quality and link algo changes that happened in March, April and possibly in May too (of this year)

Also remember link building cannot be done without building relationships with real people.  It's essentially now PR.  Doing real things with real people in the real world.  Gone are the days of basement linkbuilding.  Use your brain not the tools. And don't copy other sites because what they did 9 months ago might now be banned in the eyes of google. Sure model their successes but don't blindly follow their strategies - they might be working with less reputable agencies and you'll do yourself harm.

I have looked at lots of different plugins and wanted a recommendation for an easy way for patients of ours to upload pictures of them out partying and having fun and looking beautiful so future users can see the final results instead of sometimes gory or difficult to understand before and after images.

I'd like to give them the opportunity to write captions (like facebook or insta posts and would offer them incentives to do so.

I don't want it to be too complicated for them or have too many steps or barriers but I do want it to look nice and slick and modern.

Also do you think this would have a positive impact on SEO?

I was also thinking of a Q&A app where dentists could get Q&A emails and respond - i've been doing AMA sessions and they've been really successful and I would like to bring it into out site and make it native.

Thanks in advance

Great advice here, I'm with casey on constant updating and that's a solid article from Herb.

But for me you're asking the wrong question.  Sure updating content is great but you should really be testing it.  So test meta descriptions, H1's and other elements using a tool (there's this great keyword tool I believe it's called MOZ lol - lots of chat about that lately - they've really made some great changes.)

But in the interests of openness I also use SEM Rush and GOOGLE  that's the best keyword tool out there.  Just get googling and see what sorts of articles are overtaking you and model them and make better versions.

Having a young kid (congrats) means you're tired and creativity is really hard when you're tired and stressed - even for very creative people.  So model the articles of others and use the keyword suggestions and volumes as a guide.

But always be testing and tweaking.  Add just a paragraph and revisit and change up some words and phrases and keep it fresh. Use the date in the Meta Description.  CTR in the SERPS is really important and If I see 2018 up there i'm going to click on it.

Don't just add '2018' to everything though because google will catch you out. you actually need to add some contemporary stuff in there and it will revitalise and refresh the content.

Also remember that there have been lots of changes at google lately. So your drop in traffic might be external ranking factors bumping other sites up because google can understand them better and is better able to get good user feedback from Chrome.

Also be granular about it. Ask yourself of each article, "does this answer the question?" Is it up to date and is it correctly optimised using the keywords that are coming up in your research.

The best SEO tool in the world is the 100 billion neurons sitting on your shoulders.  Use that tool first and foremost

So to be clear I've ruled out:

1. Domain and page authority

2. Content and KW density and stuffing

3. comprehensiveness and content topics etc

So all that's left is domain age but I read that doesn't matter anymore so much and how are we outranking them for the non-branded keywords? some of them really super-comeptitve?

It's a mystery.

Hey,

Thanks for the response.  I've done loads of top ten benchmarking and their sites are older.  I worry that could be the reason too.  We're only a few years old.  The one and two positions are 6 and 10 yrs old.  But we're outranking them for all our services so my question really is can I ignore the homepage and create a 'services page' with 'dentist liverpool' as the focus KW?

Thanks for that. How precisely do i do a redirect from Blogger?  I'm used to working in Wordpress? Is it in the tools somewhere or do I need to do it somewhere else?

When we first started out our website didn't have a blog and we started one on Blogger.  It has loads of great content on it but it was before the days when I understood SEO so it's 4 years old and has maybe 1000 views per blog article.

Now I want to repurpose some of that great content and SEO optimise it and put it onto my new site.  How do I go about this from an SEO perspective.  I am aware of internal competition and will only be using the old blogs that are new topics to start off with so it doesn't negatively impact my rankings.

Should I just delete the old blog and re-write it all on the new one or redirect the old blog articles to the new pages and rewrite them?  The blogger articles have no links to them and it's just content that I'd like to use.

The old blog has almost no SEO value at all but I want to use a best practice approach to not cause any damage to my new blog or have google thinking I'm stealing someone else's content.

https://imgur.com/RQkLJbq

Here's the technique I use.

So I understand that I'm never going to get google review stars appearing on my homepage.  The only term I really want my homepage to rank for is the term 'dentist liverpool'.  This figures.

But what I'm seeing from my google analytics is that I can rank pretty much any keyword really well (with stars and a great serp entry) except my homepage.  Which is languishing at position 3-5.

Now I made some observations from the data and the only people who are landing on my homepage are branded searches.  So people who are searching for us.

Why cannot I just make a page and optimise it for 'dentist Liverpool' and go for the number one spot?  That way all the branded people can end up on the homepage and everyone else looking for a dentist in Liverpool can land on my highly optimised 'dentist Liverpool' page?

I think I might be missing something really obvious here and know i'd need to de-optimise the home page.  But I find it so easy to rank for all sorts of keywords but our homepage (because it has everything on it) is just not getting to position one.  It's not specific enough to that keyword. Also how awesome would it be to have the only serp entry with 250 google reviews and stars and sitelinks and all that cool stuff?

Tons of great advice here.  My responsive design drops the sidebar to below 5% of the average scroll depth so I binned it and nothing bad happened to pages per session or time on site or bouncerate or any of the important user signals.  I do have a site-wide 'BOOK AN EMERGENCY APPOINTMENT' button but people use it and we're killing it for emergencies.  It's one of our best catagories and is hotly competitive.  It's in red and replaced a trustpilot widget that was taking people off site.

One of the best decisions I ever made and I was tearing my hair out about site wide links messing with SEO but it didn't happen for us.  All the google results were 'no it's SPAMMY' - but they are just a load of content creators jumping on a bandwagon, here in the Moz community, as you can see, things are more nuanced.

So if it's relevant and helpful keep it.  Do you have Hotjar.  Allows you to see what peope are clicking on.

SWL and footer links Is one of those where spammy sites use it so people say - "ooh don't ever use it" - but you must not be that binary.  If it helps the users then keep it.  In my case hardly anyone used them so I dropped them in favour of one important button.

But an additional bump in pageviews and time on site because people are navigating around your site is absolute gold.  So you must encourage that.  but remember Cialdini's jam experiment.  More than three choices is going to induce decisional paralysis especially when you have only a second and the user is almost making unconscious decisions navigating. It's like driving.  You're not thinking what you're doing - it's automatic. So make is fluid and easy and watch the user feedback signals.

How about  "Learn more",  "buy something" or 'back to navigation'

haha yeah it sucks on the mobile!  I like answering questions on my way in to work on the train and they are full of typos and mistakes because it's so tiny!

Hey Tim,

I would have a page for everything you offer.  That's by far the best strategy.  So on your Invisalign page have a picture of Invisalign and don't mark it as dentist schema mark it as product.  I think the dentist schema is rubbish myself.  You're much better off using an image of All on Four on your All on four product page and marking it up that way.

Nobody is interested n your brand and logo if your a small local practice.  They search things like 'Braces New York' and want to see the options for all the braces you offer or your orthodontist.

I use the data highlighter for this because it gets us better results.  On the homepage you can't get review schema to show stars and all you're going to achieve is getting your logo up there when someone types in the name of your dentist so what's the point?

Go for unbranded products and keywords and mark them up with price, availability and an image with an alt tag with your location in it. that works for us.

Sometimes having dentist schema in the site wide footer just overrides our product schema for the services pages so I don't use it.  For your dentists mark them up individually as people with their headshots there and what they do and their postnominals and qualifications.

Also make sure your GMB has orthodontist, endodontist, oral surgeon etc so that you show as an orthodontist in the maps when someone types in braces.  Also having reviews mentioning the products helps.

Google ignores about 70% of our mark-up anyway and I think it's becoming less important as google figures out what things are and what they mean.  But a granular approach works the best. So one page for everything you do with the dentist as author marked up with the products they offer marked up and then it makes the dentist one kind of obsolete.

This is just my experience in our practice but we're ranking number one for pretty much everything now. Interestingly we're not doing so well for just the term 'dentist' but on the other hand we're ranking really well for 'emergency dentist' and I think the two might be competing with one another. Emergencies is much higher volume and makes us more money. being number one for dentist didn't actually get us many good patients.

Being number one for Veneers Cost or Invisalign or Fastbraces or Emergencies does. So perhaps focus more on those.  Dentists make the big mistake of putting everything they do on the homepage and that is a big mistake because you can never compete with my specific page that answers a customers specific dental query.  If I had toothe ache I'd google painful tooth and google returns our emergencies page.  I don't google 'dentist' If I need braces I google braces - not 'dentist'

Thanks for that. This morning it says "the image has been removed for copyright reasons".  They've all gone.  Was that you? Thanks if it was.  I love cleaning up crap on the web. I disavowed them but they were literally gone this morning.

I'm a dentist and I keep getting my images turning up on pages where there are hundreds of images of dental procedures, linking out to dentists all over the world. It's not -ve SEO I don't think. There's just not enough of it to be that.

The images are linking back to me with follow links (but worthless) and the pages are indexed with low to moderate 10-30 DA (that's old DA)  and the new link explorer is showing them as worthless - so well done new link explorer!

I'm not worried they are harming my site because I'm sure they're being ignored by google.  But is there some evil black-hat scam going on that i'm not aware of?  Should I disavow? I don't care that they're using our images. They are watermarked and they are linking back to us.

I just don't understand the point of such a site either?  Is it a precursor to something more malevolent or spammy?

**So my question is - is this harmful or should I just let the crazy internet be crazy and not interfere?  **

I'm always wary of disavowing.

Also you need one of these on your site if you don't already have it.  People want information about the season and coming to NZ.

The sheer amount of people all over the world googling ski field opening dates is quite staggering.  Put together a really great page (like this one) and you'll get a ton of traffic. Then use that page to do native advertising for your home boot, binding and board services.

You might even get the featured snippet if you use a nice table in wordpress or something that is really simple, fits on and looks good.  Get some schema plugins failing that or just write out the code using a code generator (like this epic free one)  You'll have to find out whether it's a service or an 'event' I haven't had much luck with events TBH but give it a go.  Always be testing.

You're in a great position though because looking briefly at your numbers there's **nothing stopping you from overtaking all your competitors and becoming number one. **It's all about getting it right and there's no right answer, you just have to experiment.

Another thing is just because you do something a bit different (come to people's houses) doesn't mean you're not competing with those who don't do that or just have shops in town.  I advertise for loads of things that we (as dentists) don't even offer. All types of old or obsolete braces and veneers and loads of stuff.  We have pages associated with those products and tell the customer all about them, why we DON'T offer them (usually because they're rubbish or not made anymore) and then what the customer should be looking for.  Like educating them.

So long as you're not misleading your customers and are remaining truly authentic you'll get lots of great success with this tactic.  We even have people asking for the products that we've slammed in our unbiased reviews or said you literally can't get anymore because they haven't read the articles to the end and just see that we do x, y and z and then call up wanting it.  These people always book in for something different.

I think the OP is not saying Schema is mandatory but that "Just recently they made 'image' a requirement for the Dentist category." having an 'Image' in the dentist schema is now an option.  Again - it's not mandatory.  Test it.  I am a dentist and find that sometimes images get shown for products and most of the time they don't.

It has nothing to do with the JSON that I create for the dentist category.  I have better success just marking all your products and services up as products with the price etc and making your pages have good structure, H1 etc.  Make all the FAQ's H3 and they'll get blue hyperlinks in the serp when people ask that question or a part of it.

PM me. Schema hasn't really helped us a huge amount. Sometimes I completely forget to mark up a new page and it ranks and has all the bells and whistles of schema because google has detected them.  I do use wordpress though and they are good at telling Google what's on the page.

Hey Justin,

This is a very cool product and you're killing it for ski hire queenstown delivery but I'm sure the real money is in the broader ski hire queenstown. or ski here wanaka.  You're constantly in the map pack which is great so there's nothing seemingly wrong with local (from a very short assessment and some googling) but for ski hire and snowboard hire your coming in at 3-5 position which is not great.  you need to be 1-3.

Have you tested splitting things out? When I type ski hire queenstown in the meta comes:

"Looking forski hireor snowboard hire in Queenstown?"

This tells me that google considers ski and snowboard hire to be different things.  So maybe a seperate page covering each and not trying to cram everything into your H1.

Ski Hire Queenstown & Wanaka | Rental Delivery | Snowboard Hire

Also have you tried splitting our QT and W as locations?  You'll need a physical location or depot or address in each town but that might help with location specific signals and you can save space by using a headline with something more in it.  Like:

Dependable, hassle free ski fitting and hire delivered to you in Wanaka (might just fit on) and then the same for Queenstown. This will make the H1 and SERP entry more attractive and get you to number one with the Click Through rate.

As for Meta descriptions, they take from the first paragraph usually.  So get your terms into there in bold or google will just pick them naturally up from the first sentence (or most relevant sentence) you write. They will often be much longer so write a sort of 'featured snippet' as your first paragraph on each page.

But i'd say you need to get more granular with the pages. Without falling foul of maccabees update.  So test it and see what happens.  If you look above you NZSki and Snowrental are just Queenstown. That could be the key.

Also do some keyword density and top ten benchmarking with these pages and see if there are other problems that you can fix.

God I wish I was there now. Has the season started yet?

You're playing a really dangerous game here.  The google algorithm maps the blogs to find correlations between who's posting on them and an unnatural link profile.  PBNs are in direct breach of the rules so you may get a great result but you also might get a penalty and be wiped out.

So it's up to you.  Sometimes this sort of thing works but you're playing Russian roulette with your revenue stream.  How much revenue are you making from google? Is it your only channel?  Can you afford to lost the entire channel for - say for example - two months while you try to undo the manual action for webspam?

I've seen the sophistication of the PBN products google uses first hand and it's not something I would want to mess with.  but if you are wanting to make a quick buck and aren't worried about the long term viability of Google as a channel then go for it.  But be aware that over-optimising anchor text is the sort of thing that will get google looking more closely at your site and then with the fact that the PBN has signals that show it's a PBN and then you'll wish you'd not ever tried to cheat.

This is effectively cheating. It's black hat. So proceed at your own risk.  Maybe you need to go over and ask the folks on some other forums where they are more into this type of stuff.  They will know how to get the best short term gains from things like PBNs.

Hey there Yael,

Take a look at Rands insights about Searcher Task Accomplishment to discount this as a possible cause.  It's rare to hear people questioning good positions not bemoaning bad ones - but I also have done lots of thinking about implicit user feedback and trying to correlate time on site, scroll depth and bounce rate with rankings.

The upshot of my research is that Rand really has something in his video.  I implemented Adjusted Bounce Rate  in GA and found that people were spending time scrolling and reading my articles that were ranking with a high traditional bounce rate (90%+) but a low adjusted one (17%)

I suggest you take a look at getting more accurate bounce stats by using GTM to set up goals for scroll depth and time on page. It will send an event when a user does something that google measures but GA doesn't in it's bounce rate calculation.

I also noticed with a prices page (from looking at Hotjar recordings of users) that many people scroll to the answer (the price) and then bounce when they've seen the table with the prices on and the price comparisons for my products.  This is really helpful info and is not freely shared by other sites like mine so Google is ranking us number one in the UK for one of the most lucrative search terms in our industry.

The page has no links and the only factor I can identify is that people search for 'Veneers Prices' land on my site, scroll to the answer and then bounce or click back to the main services page. We even had the featured snippet and I de-optimised to lose it because I wanted more commercial and less 'just finding out' traffic.  That worked too. I'm the only person who doesn't want the snippet!

Bounce rate in GA is a misleading metric and Google does not see the same bounce rate that you see.  So your 90% might be 4M time on site or the customer getting the answer they want by scrolling or using on page navigation and then leaving.  Google wants to provide the right answer and this doesn't necessarily mean traditional signals.  Google is getting smarter than that with it's limitless data from chrome.

Hope this gives you something to think about and to go off and test.  Once you have a positive correlation or even a gut feel then start testing to get the solid answer.  Then you can start modelling other pages on your success using the data.

Hope this helps!

Ed.

Thanks EGOL this is precisely what I need.  We're all dentists so have all the things you're talking about.  Apart from me - I'm a lawyer - and I figure it's like court.  You can't just say you're something or someone - they want a certain standard of proof.

I'm busy getting all the professional bodies and associations pointing at the right people and pages and trying to get my people (who've all been to uni a few times) to write for their universities and members associations so we can get links from them too.

This is how they appear in the SERPS - but I'm working on making it like that for everyone.

Dr MJ Rowland-Warmann BSc BDS MSc Aes.Med. MJDF RCS (Eng)

<cite class="iUh30">https://www.smileworksliverpool.co.uk/team/mj-rowland-warmann/</cite> Rating: 4.9 - ‎230 reviewsDr MJ BSc BDS (Manc) MSc Aes.Med. (Lond) MJDF RCS (Eng) is our captain and co-founder She's loved by all and practices with formidable talent.

I will look into google scholar.  I publish all their papers and studies in an 'academic resources' section too - I want to get google scholar to link to that or get them published. It's only university essays though and not peer reviewed stuff so might be a struggle.

I've noticed a bump in search when we use headlines like 'unbiased medical insights into x, y and z' or really play up the qualifications.  'Our orthodontists discuss the best braces treatments' is so much better than just 'buy this and that'

Thanks for your help with this. I'm on the right track but will now double down on your suggestions.  Smart people will inherit the SERPS.  Eventually...

Hi Everyone,

What is the best practice for authorship in 2018 and going forward?

I am moving my entire blog over to a new wordpress theme so it's easier to read and navigate in an attempt to make it look better on the mobile and give better UX / CRO and implicit user feedback signals to google.

On the old blog I would say who the author is in the URL, H1 and in the content.  This includes an image of the author with an image alt with their name, qualifications and blurb.

I've now set up each author as a 'user' for the new blog and their image and name comes up because I've marked those blogs as authored by that particular user in Wordpress.

What should I do as far as the SEO elements are concerned? I have read Eric Enge's blog about authorship being dead here and also that authorship should be marked up in schema correctly - which I've done.  Also I've read around how it provides indirect signals even though it's no longer a direct ranking factor.

Should I tell wordpress to ignore the authorship SEO element by unticking the boxes relating to publishing authorship or let wordpress just do it's thing?  Should I keep the images and alt tags and H1 in there or take them out and let the wordpress system take over the authorship SEO elements? It's going to look funny to have author (in wordpress theme) and then author details again just below?

So what is the best practice for authorship in 2018 and going forward?

Am I making too big a deal of it and can just let wordpress sort it out.  Something it seems to do very well?

Thanks in advance,

Ed.

Good question.  You just have to keep plugging away.  Don't be tempted to spam or troll them yourself by creating fake profiles and complaining with them because google can see it's you and you'll get their backs up.

So be honest and whiter than white and keep going.  If they say, for example, it's not one type of spam then go under another type.  That's ok to do and I've had success this way too. You need to play down the 'business rivalry' part of it too.  I know they've done an act intended to unfairly compete but you need to keep to the point of spam and improving the maps and the GMB listings.

So your problem is that the GMB and map listings are inaccurate and google has promised to keep them accurate by listening to customer feedback. So put the ball in their court, I have found that if you treat it like this, in a rational and reasonable tone and focussing on the issue (not business rivalry but spam) then you'll succeed.

Let me know how you get on. I'd be happy to continue to advise you because I want GMB and the maps spam free in the same way every decent business person does.  That's another good card to play.  Appeal to their better nature by saying that you've been abused by google and its a google product and its inaccurate and harming you and other users with spam.

You can get them taken down by reporting them to google using the functions on their listings.  You need to be logged in and in your Maps or GMB.  The spam and fake people will often have exact match entries like 'New York Plumber' and they will be attached to random addresses that are not taken by other businesses with just a phone number.

You just pick a 'spam type' from the list and then fill in a little form.  The more details the better and you need to keep at it and possibly mark them a few times for different things so that google knows that they are spam and doesn't overlook them.

I've had dozens taken down like this in my city.  Also you can speak directly to google if you can find the right phone number and someone will sort it for you if it's more serious (like someone impersonating you) I have had reviews taken down like this, in one on one conversations with google employees in call centres.

Google are getting better at listening to genuine concerns and I think that all the complaining you hear from people abut how it's 'impossible to get reviews taken down' or 'impossible to get map spam removed' are just lazy or not doing it correctly. Or they have an agenda.  So if it's a genuine thing then you should be ok.

Sometimes they go over night, other times it takes a week but you can keep up to date because they email you whether your suggestions and complaints have been actioned or not.

If you want to outsource, delegate or abdicate link building (don't worry we all secretly want to have nothing to do with it because it's hard) then hire a PR.  That's going to get you MILES further than any of this stuff.  That's what we did and now we've been featured in the news all over the place and on tons of really high quality sites.

Linkbuilding is now synonymous with PR.  It's not done from basements and dark rooms at 4am and you can't do it with shady tools. If you want a tool then use an outreach tool to automate your relationship building with the sites you want to feature on.  Or just hire someone to 'do PR' not to 'build links' because the people i've hired to 'build links' have been using as much black and grey as white hat techniques.  Everyone wants to cheat and if you do then you are fighting against Google.  Or here in the UK we say 'biting the hand that feeds you'.

If you can get a good relationship with one of these link-building specialist agencies and have the confidence and insight to know when they've sold you a pup - and ask them to fix it for free - then you can get somewhere.  But its expensive andeasier just to set a strategy, hire someone and execute.

NOT  is the answer.

Directory submissions are the WORST way to spend your time and resources.  They just don't work. And I'm not being 'holier than thou' because I actually tried them out last year (because I test everything and have a fairly small site so thought it might work) but it didn't.  There was no benefit and the directories I used were all paid with links to internal pages.  It took me a couple of days (+ about $500) and after a month I ended up having to disavow most of them and then the others kicked me off after 6 months wanting more money!  It's a total joke.  Run by total jokers.

Even automating it is a very bad waste of time.  **If you're a local business and are actually talking about 'citations' then that's a different thing altogether. ** But directories died years ago.  Many of them aren't even in the index or google has algorithmically discounted them because they have literally too many links spread too thinly so each link carries a tiny proportion of juice.  And the ones that are in the index come back with very high toxic score in SEM Rush and AHrefs with the exception of one called Joe Ant.  That one is showing green lights.  So I didn'd disavow but i've not seen one single referral from them.

I also noticed an ENORMOUS increase in spam following my little test.  I get hundreds of submissions to my forms and site and even people calling.  I've also seen a significant increase in strange black-hat links added to my list.  This is not 'negative seo' but the scrapers and black hat people crawl the directories to find people still dumb enough to pay them (like me!!!) and see them as easy targets for other dreadful SEO products.

Avoid. Avoid. Avoid.

Thanks Christy!

Glad i'm becoming a useful part of the group.  It's tough questions every day. I love that.

There's just too many things it could be and I'd also be scratching my head.  Maybe I'm getting paranoid listening to conspiracy theorists but sometimes things seem to be intentionally obscured so there is always ambiguity about the workings of the system.

It's enough to drive you insane but whenever in doubt just turn to thinking up a great new topic and writing a great new article that people will want to read and engage with and that might earn some decent backlinks.  I swear if I spent as much time doing that as I do trying to reverse-engineer the algorithm then I'd be lots happier and more successful

There was a person last night from a major price comparison site here in the UK with a very good reputation.  She told me that they had been engaging in successful black hat tactics until very recently. Like April 17th 2018 or around the time of 'Fred'

She said she was terrified to move because it felt like a house of cards about to collapse.  I just didn't know what to tell her. It's the same here.  What is your clients view of it?  Do they accept responsibility for the shaky foundations? Have you discussed the position they're in?  I'd get them to agree a strategy and make sure it involves the risk of losing rankings in the name of clearing the decks for future development and nail the financial risks associated with a drop in traffic.

Yikes.

Check this out.  It's a poll on Barry Schwartz' site.  They have some more grey and black hat peeps over there (especially in the comments) and they are saying that huge numbers of dodgy backlinks aren't affecting them at all.  I really believe backlinks are becoming less and less important unless they are really powerful and relevant ones.  It's almost like Google is ignoring this whole swathe of bad sites and the algorithm just doesn't take a blind bit of notice.  But when a real person does a quality survey then this type of thing:

• Automatically generated content
• Participating in link schemes
• Creating pages with little or no original content
• Cloaking
• Sneaky redirects
• Hidden text or links
• Doorway pages
• Scraped content
• Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
• Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
• Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware
• Abusing rich snippets markup
• Sending automated queries to Google

is going to get you a penalty. (I pasted them straight over from google)

Hey EGOL,

thanks so much.  I really enjoy the community.  And answering the questions helps me learn more because there's never a right answer and it encourages me to be creative and think about my own site.  Also I want the T-shirt lol!!

I just came back from the SEM rush conference in London and was doing a Q&A for in-house users of their product.  It's amazing how much has changed really recently.  I'd be genuinely afraid that if I stopped engaging I'd miss something!  We have 32,000 users to our site now.  Pretty much all my learning has been from Whiteboard Fridays and Moz blogs.  I love the way this forum is never about gaming google like some others. It's all whiter than white hat.  That's the future of SEO.  There will be no black hats in a few years. It's going to be impossible to compete.

Thanks for the vote of confidence. I must have read about 100 of your responses on here. You're prolific.  Are you from the UK?  It's Brighton SEO tomorrow?

I've just come back from a forum where we were discussing this exact thing.  It was suggested that older sites can have a multitude of sins and google will overlook them or ignore them until a big event (such as an https switchover) where google take a closer and more comprehensive look at the site and it's pages and backlinks.

A few people said that they were not immediately hit by panda and penguin type issues until they did some big event on the site and it came under scrutiny from google.

This was only anecdotal stuff but I see tons of sites with legacy black hat and grey hat SEO that are still ranking and seem to be doing ok. It was also suggested that links are just less important these days and so long as the page is getting good implicit user feedback signals like time on page, users clicking around and engaging with content then things hold out for longer.

Just like it takes time to get a pages authority and position up it also takes time for it to diminish.  So in the long term you need to correct these issues or you'll gradually (or sometimes quickly) get either a penalty or an algorithmic suppression of your page.

Newer pages will never get ranked with this type of profile and the standards for indexing newer pages are much higher now.  So just because it's not causing problems now doesn't mean you don't need to get it fixed or at least start adding pages that are in line with the latest stricter quality guidelines.

Hope this helps.  I know it's not really an 'answer' because it's a very tricky issue.  I can see how these ideas make sense though. If you were doing things that used to be ok and now are not ok, google is going to be less likely to hammer you like if you tried to launch a brand new site using clearly banned practices.