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I would recommend **not**disavowing links that have a spam score of more than 3 in Webmaster Tools.
In this video - http://moz.com/blog/understanding-and-applying-mozs-spam-score-metric-whiteboard-friday - Rand specifically says 'don't disavow links just because they have a spam score of 7 or 8'. He mentions a link disavowal issue that Cyrus Sheppard had that really hurt his site for a long time. Doing the disavowal for all links with a 3 could cause serious damage.
I'm doing some competitive link analysis for a new client in the food industry right now and I've come across one of their competitors using this tactic quite extensively, and it seems to be working very well. They crush their competitors as far as domain authority. Most of the anchor text is branded (company name) but you can quickly tell that there are one or two keyword phrases that they have targeted. I can only assume that they were getting some of the bloggers to include the custom anchor text. It's definitely not overdone, so the overall link profile still looks natural.
The bloggers that they're targeted all seem to have relatively authoritative sites which I can only assume means their brand is getting a lot of quality exposure on these sites as well as referral traffic. I'd hazard a guess that the direct referral traffic and overall exposure is worth as much or more than the increase in organic rankings that they would see because of these links. None of these links were nofollow or affiliate links.
The general rule of thumb I've always espoused (with a few exceptions) is that anything that you are doing for SEO purposes should have an equal or greater benefit to you for _non-SEO _reasons. I guess that's sort of my test to see if something can be considered a legitimate white hat technique. But there's obviously still some grey area with this.
Just building on Jasmine's comment, the Google Analytics URL builder is a handy tool to created tagged URLs easily. It particularly makes it easy if you want to name a campaign something like 'Campaign #1'. You can't write '?utm_campaign=Campaign #1 in the URL. If you just fill out the fields in the URL builder, it automatically builds the proper URL for you, i.e., utm_campaign=Campaign%20%231
%20 = 'space'
%23 = #
In short, don't stress about why that particular URL is constructed the way that it is. It doesn't follow best practices. There's better ways of building/tagging URLs.
I experienced a similar issue recently with a client. A few 904 errors seemed to coincide with a notice in the client's 3d cart CMS that they were short on bandwidth. We also saw a VERY significant drop in rankings across the board. We upgraded the hosting plan and the 904 errors went away temporarily, and a very modest improvement in rankings followed, but not a return to normal. It's now about 2-3 months after we first saw the 904 errors and I've just noticed another one that has come up.
I hear ya. I don't know if you're from the western NY area or not, but not living too far away from there, I know that 'Seneca' means more to people than just the tiny city in NY. The first thing that comes to mind to someone in Buffalo when they hear 'Seneca' is _not _the city.
This is turning into more of a discussion about marketing in general than a discussion about duplicate content.
This particular situation is unique. It's not a franchise. It's not a company expanding into a neighbouring city. In order to _not _change the name while expanding into this secondary market, an awful lot of money would have to be invested into branding, which just isn't worth it.
I agree with all of that, but I feel this situation is very different. If you have a company called 'Albany Plumbers', it seems kind of weird to market 'Albany Plumbers' in Buffalo. That's basically what I'm dealing with. Client has the city name in their business name. Users are not going to think the site is relevant in this secondary market they're looking to target.
I have a client that operates a local service-based business. They are thinking of expanding that business to another geographic area (a drive several hours away in an affluent summer vacation area). The name of the existing business contains the name of the city, so it would not be well-suited to market 'City X' business in 'City Y'. My initial thought was to (for the most part) 'duplicate' the existing site onto a new site (brand new root domain). Much of the content would be the exact same. We could re-word some things so there aren't entire lengthy paragraphs of identical info, but it seems pointless to completely reinvent the wheel. We'll get as creative as possible, but certain things just wouldn't change. This seems like the most pragmatic thing to do given their goals, but I'm worried about duplicate content. It doesn't feel as though this is spammy though, so I'm not sure if there's cause for concern.
Most studies/reports that you'll see point to a slightly negative _correlation. _But correlation does not equal _causation. _One that I recently remember reading pointed to a negative correlation when Google authorship markup was present. It's obviously very hard to argue that adding Google authorship markup to your site _decreases _your organic search rankings.
When working with WP sites I generally use Michael Torbert's All in One SEO Pack. I've encountered a few examples where when the homepage shows up on a Google search results page the title/title tag shows up as {Business Name:} | {Keyword/Description}. In the 'General Settings' of the plugin in the 'Home Title' field, I have it listed as {Keyword/Description} | {Business Name}
I'm not sure why the order is getting switched and where the ':' comes from. I'm not sure if this even has any adverse effect. If anyone has had experience with this, your input would be appreciated.
Note - I'm not seeing this issue reflected on Bing.
Looking at a Google Analytics report for a client - Traffic Sources - Referrals - Landing Pages from one particular referrer. This one referral site is a large trade directory that links onto several deep pages of the site, but also links onto the homepage. Analytics is showing the one landing page as //index.html. That's 2 // - not one. If you click on the link, it's a 404.
I've never seen this in Analytics before. I'm looking at the client's info on this trade directory site and I can't see a link that points to this 404. The majority of incoming traffic from this site is apparently coming to this //index.html page, so you'd think it would be coming from their main profile on the site. But it's not there. Also, if you had all this referral traffic coming to a 404, you'd expect a really high bounce rate, but it's not - it's average. The client also has a sister site also listed in this directory, and I'm not seeing this same issue in their Analytics.
Is this just some weird glitch in Analytics?
I recently posted an (insightful) comment in a LinkedIn group. I can see that someone from this group has taken a look at my profile, so I'm assuming that they read my comment and they were at least a little intrigued as to who exactly I was. I would regard this person as a prospect. Maybe a slightly unlikely prospect as there's a couple thousand miles that separate us geographically.
I'm wondering what sort of etiquette/best practices there are for connecting somehow with this person/company. Initially I thought I'd follow them on Twitter, maybe like them on Facebook, but they have no such presence. I like the idea of connecting with them that way because it's a 'soft' connection - not too aggressive.
Doing something like emailing or calling and saying 'Hey, saw that you looked at my LinkedIn profile', seems creepy & desperate. Even sending an invitation to connect seems a little too forward.
I feel the only thing to do is to continue to involve myself in this group by posting thoughtful & insightful comments in order to get noticed further that way.
I know this is a little late, but I figured I'd comment on this because I just actually stumbled upon your question in a SERPs for something like 'multiple rich snippets in SERPs'.
I just posted in a Google+ community on something that I found where you've got the review markup, a recipe pic and this little mini author pic that all show up together. I had never seen this before... Check it out...
https://plus.google.com/u/0/101946888512778592728/posts/9f2Xh8jnCzA
Hi Matthew,
As you've seen from the rich snippets testing tool, the author pic is showing up for your homepage - it's not just content-oriented blog pages.
It does take time though. Seeing the author pic show up in the testing tool, and having it not show up live is the norm. It can definitely take some time, so be patient. Personally, I believe it took me about 3-4 days from the time everything was properly implemented to the time I started seeing the author pic in search results.
There's been a lot of speculation about why some people implement the markup and see the author pic show up in SERPs in a day, whereas for others it takes a couple weeks. There was a lot of speculation that it had to do with your Google+ activity and the number of people who had circled you, but I've seen enough examples of people with zero G+ activity, and next to no circle activity that have their author pic showing up in SERPs.
A great resource (where all the really smart Authorship people hangout) is Google Authorship & Author Rank G+ community. AJ Kohn (Blind Five Year Old) Bill Slawski & Mark Traphagen are some of the go-to experts on the topic who are very active in that community.
How to deal with the complaint directly is a loaded question.
CMC-SD makes valid points... Social media profiles are an easy thing to start off with if you don't already have them. Profiles on websites of professional organization that you belong to can be helpful as well. You also want to build links to these profiles to increase the chance that they show up higher in the SERPs.
Paid advertising on your own brand name can help in a small way in these sense that it will push the organic search results down (assuming your paid ad shows above the organic results), and this measure can oftentimes result in the ripoff report link being pushed below the scroll. If someone is searching on your brand name, most people won't have a need to scroll down.
If it's a really popular ripoff report, there may be links to that individual report that are allowing it to rank higher which will just fuel the fire. You might not be able to get any type of satisfaction from Ripoff Report of the author of the report, but if you use OSE to check out where the links are coming from, there may be an opportunity to contact a webmaster site/owner and convince them to remove the link to the report.
I'm assuming you're referring to ranking when someone searches on Yelp as opposed to getting your Yelp profile to rank in the SERPs.
There's not a whole lot of literature/research out their on this topic, but just from experiencing working with clients to claim/complete their Yelp listings, I feel I can speak to it to a certain extent...
One of the more obvious things is having a listing that has content on it. It's not in Yelp's best interest for people to do a search for restaurants only to find a list of restaurants with their names, addresses & phone numbers. So first thing would be claiming your profile and completing the full profile. I don't want to suggest that if you don't have a 'completely full' profile, that's going to hurt your chances, but it can't hurt. Obviously with Yelp, reviews are huge. So you want to encourage real people/real customers to write reviews for you online. However, you've gotta be mindful of the fact that Yelp does a very good job of filtering reviews. So if you tell a customer to write a review on Yelp, and they go sign up for an account, write a review right away, and then never come back to Yelp - that review's gonna disappear.
If Yelp sees a steady flow of reviews, particularly coming from active members of their community, that's most definitely going to help.
The reviews for Yelp are much more crucial than they are for Google. Yelp will sooner show the user businesses with reviews that aren't geographically relevant, than they will show geographically relevant businesses with no reviews & no info on their profiles.
One specific tool that can be useful in terms of driving users to your Yelp profile to write reviews is the Bright Local Review Biz badge.
That is quite bizarre, but this is generally the type of thing that is easily resolved by contacting AdWords/Analytics help.
I use Bluehost quite a bit.
Here's a list of Wordpress-recommended hosts. Bluehost is one of them.
Contact AdWords support. They are very helpful with these kinds of issues.
I'll elaborate on what Nakul has said (all great points)...
If you have something that is truly newsworthy, it will get picked up and generate quality in-bound links, and also generate some qualified traffic. (The idea of traffic is all-too-often lost when we talk about link building). Those links will build up your domain authority. Then, you let your on-page SEO do the work for you. You can have perfect, by-the-book on-page SEO, but if you don't have any links/domain authority, search engines aren't going to give you a sniff. In your case, you're dealing with a relatively competitive vertical, and I would think, the businesses in that vertical are all vying for some choice 'trophy' keywords, and thus, the on-page SEO from some of the top businesses who have invested some money in their site/internet marketing is going to be similar. What's going to separate one from the other in the eyes' of the search engines is the quantity and quality of in-bound links that you have. And press releases are definitely one way of earning (I stress that word) good links.
I recently had an old client that called me in a bit of a panic over a significant loss of rankings due to penguin. The internet marketing company she had hired, is actually a very large player in the industry, but because I'm not out to slander anyone, I won't name names.
They engaged in some "link building" that resulted in the vast majority of the website's anchor text being keyword-rich, exact match anchor text from such gems as www.link-add.net. They also placed a couple dozen incredibly keyword-rich articles on the site that were clearly not meant for human consumption, and were only accessible through a footer link that's only located on the homepage.
The client forwarded me a response from them saying, (quoting verbatim). "We have never engaged in any black hat SEO techniques, nor will we ever engage in any black hat SEO techniques. Just that notion is ridiculous"
So clearly, the strategy I outlined above, in the mind of this company, is not black-hat SEO. So getting to my point: **if that's not black hat, then what is? **
I'm posing this question largely because I'm appalled that a large internet marketing company seems to be suggesting that the aforementioned techniques represent good, sound SEO, and I'd like to get an idea as to what people in our industry actually feel are good, acceptable practices. Where is the line? Can we not set higher standards for ourselves?
You're also going to want to make sure that the full address in your Google Places/Google+ Local listing is the same as the address used in your online citations. I.e, you don't want to have Floor/Unit number in the Google Places profile, and then just the plain old address in the rest of your online citations.
Thanks. That's not the one I had in mind, but I'll check it out.
I recently discovered a cool SEO tool. I didn't write it down, save it, bookmark, etc... And now I can't remember the name of the tool for the life of me, but I'd really like to use it again.
I was hoping I could list of the features that I remember, and one of you Mozzers know what I'm talking about.
It was a backlink analysis tool. It had a free version, and after you performed so many searches/searched so many backlinks, you had to pay. From what I remember it was a fairly nominal fee with the most popular package in around $25.
The reason that I liked it so much was you could take an OSE csv file, dump it in there, and it would sort all of the links by link type, i.e, footer, comment, directory, etc... Then it would put it all into a nice pie chart for you and show you the % of the total links that each link type made up. It would also analyze the anchor text and would show you every anchor text used, and the % of the total each one made up.
I just stumbled upon an SEO company's website that says they are a 'Google Preferred Agency'. This isn't just a line of copy on the site, it's featured prominently on the site, and they use the Google logo as well.
I've never heard of a 'Google Preferred Agency'. One would think that even if there was such a thing, that it would involve a link back to a profile page on Google like they do with AdWords/Analytics partners...
Am I missing something, or is this company doing something a little shady?
I don't want to toss the name of the company out there because I don't want to publicly bash them.
Hi Karine,
One of the things that's most glaring after just spending a few minutes taking a look at the site is that the first piece of the title tag on the home page is 'organic pharmacy'. Quickly looking at the Google Keyword Tool, as a phrase match, 'organic pharmacy' receives approximately 2400 searches in the US monthly. I'd suggest that's fairly low given the types of keywords that would be relevant to you. Low search volume doesn't necessarily mean low competition, but in this case it does.
What's more surprising, is that 'organic pharmacy' appears to be a competitor. If that's a conscious move, I'm not sure if I would agree with that. Buy PPC ads on their name instead if you want to be showing up when someone does a search for their name. The CPC you will pay for that word will be much less than what you would pay for your head terms.
I'm a big proponent of PPC for a variety of reasons, so I'd recommend it, especially for a new website. Beyond driving qualified traffic to your site, it will give you a much better idea as to the real search volume taking place for your target keywords. You'll also be able to get an idea as to the conversion rate of the website on the whole, and for specific target keywords. Armed with the knowledge of your conversion rates, keyword search volume, and the percentage of clicks you can expect based on a given position based on the CTR curve (image attached), it can give you an idea as to the value of optimizing your site for specific keywords.
I'll chime in on the '**what is a good domain number authority'. **
I hope this is an obvious point... There's no magic number. I would suggest that it depends on your vertical, and the keywords for which you are trying to rank. Quick tip - use the SEOmoz SERP overlay tool . When you're doing searches for your target keywords, you can get a quick/rough idea of the type of domain authority/number of linking root domains that will be necessary to be in the conversation for page 1 rankings.
Matt Cutts has gone on record as saying they don't use the meta keywords tag. Check out the video.
I've definitely noticed this. I haven't thorough investigated it, but I'm guessing that they're just showing those one or two categories, but they're still recognizing the other categories on the back end.
We generally look at bounces as an inherently negative action for the user to take, but that's not necessarily the case.
The one positive action a user can take is _calling! _If someone comes to the site and calls right away, _it's a bounce! _You'e got a strong call-to-action in the top right corner of the site, so that's definitely going to lead to a good number of visitors 'bouncing'.
Although all the comments are suggestions already listed are very well made, I don't think it addresses the issue as to why the site has an 90% bounce rate. The site isn't that bad. It's definitely not so bad that 90% of visitors that go the site and are leaving because they either don't feel the website has an answer to their question, or because they're completely turned off by the look & feel of the site.
The one thing to me that seems a little off is your title tag. 'Compensation Claim - No Win No Fee | A Compensation Claim'??? That may give a little bit of credence to the idea that you're attracting the wrong type of traffic and the user really is finding what they're looking for on your site. Why aren't you including phrases like 'personal injury lawyers/attorneys' or the firm's name in the title tag?
This is from the Wordpress site - http://wordpress.org/hosting/
Personally I tend to use Bluehost.
To answer your first question - yes, that's kind of one of the big ideas with penguin is that you're going to get penalized if you have a spammy backlink profile.
I've attached a video from Matt Cutts at SMX that talks about this issue...
Matt says that they've tried to build things into penguin that won't allow innocent websites/webmasters to be victims of people trying to attach their websites with negative SEO.
There may be a chance that if you've seen your organic rankings decrease that it's not actually because of negative SEO, but because you do have questionable in-bound links that you have either directly or indirectly acquired.
Well isn't this a nice coincidence... Andrew Shotland just published this article on search engine land that talks about this exact issue...
http://searchengineland.com/the-smb-guide-to-changing-business-names-seo-128939
Mat has made a lot of good points. I'll build on what he said a little bit...
When you're saying that you've started 'getting' some of your competitors links, that suggests to me that it may be various directory sites or industry-related sites that you're easily able to 'submit' your URL to, or you're able to make a simple request to get your site added.
Generally when a link is that easy to acquire, the value of that link is not going to be very significant, and you likely won't see significant (or any) increase in your domain authority.
What I see a lot of people miss when they talk about link building is that content is inextricably connected with the concept of link building. Search engines place value on in-bound links because to them it represents a 'vote' of sorts from site A to site B. Site A 'voted' for Site B by linking to their content, theoretically, because they felt that site B had content that would be useful to the user's of Site A.
So before undertaking a link building project, you first need to focus on your site's content.
Targeting the local search results (Places/Google+ Local) isn't always a viable strategy depending on the the competitiveness of the industry and the number of/geographic distance between the target cities. If you're in a really competitive industry and you're based in one city, and you're looking to target a city that's a 45 minute drive away, Google is likely going to serve up more geographically relevant search results, regardless of the quality of Local SEO work that you've done. In this case, you may be dealing with target keywords that don't always/often produce a local search results section.
Pretty much everything that I've seen small/local businesses do in terms of on-page strategy in order to rank for a number of different localities is very spammy. It generally involves duplicate/thin content, and it sounds like that's what you're describing. However, I've seen these spammy/duplicate content strategies work well both in the past, and today.
I'd be interested to hear some other people's opinions on this, but it seems that for smaller sites panda & penguin haven't targeted them, and if you're an offender on a small scale, you can still get away with things that Google clearly doesn't want going on.
As for 4 city names in a title tag, that's not the most efficient use of a 70 characters.
I agree in this particular case the SEO value of their Twitter activity may not be all that significant, but there's no doubt that search engines are increasingly using social signals in their rankings algorithms.
I like to say that social media has 'democratized' the web in a way. In the past, acquiring an in-bound link was like acquiring a 'vote' of sorts for your site. Today, you don't need to have a website in order to 'vote'. When someone follows/likes/+1s you, it's a vote of sorts. I'm not suggesting that individual follows or likes are the equivalent of a good inbound link.
Search engines want to rank websites that they feel are both relevant to the user's search query, and websites that they feel are authoritative. There has been much discussion about search engines looking at things like your 'retweet ratio' or your 'follower to following' ratio. If those types of ratios are 'favourable' that sends a signal to a search engine that you are 'authoritative'.
Yes. If you've already claimed it, you just need to log into the Google account you used to initially create the account and you can make changes there.
Have you previously claimed a Google Places page for the business?
For me, it's been a good year since I've been able to enter a phone number at that first stage and the system has actually pulled the business that corresponds with that number.
You're talking about losing your existing photos & videos, so that makes it sound like have already set up a Google+ Local page/Google Places page. So why are you going through the process of creating a new one?
I've often wondered the same thing.
I don't know what USPS standards are (maybe because I'm not American).
As far as the legal name. Search engines don't necessarily know what your legal business name is. In Canada at least, as an incorporated business, your legal name can be a number. Google obviously isn't expecting you to list yourself as a number. It's important that the name is consistent.
When manually submitting/correcting client's information on directory sites, I try to keep the address the same in terms of whether or not I'm writing the street name as 'Road' or 'Rd'. (Maybe that's what you're referring to). It seems silly that Google would penalize you if 75% of your citations have 'Road' and the other 25% have 'Rd.'
As far as the phone numbers go, from my experience, you don't necessarily have control over that. You can input the phone number one way, but then the way that it's actually displayed online may show up differently, i.e, dashes vs. no dashes, or including the '1' vs. excluding the '1'. You can't control that, so don't worry about it.
If you refer to David Mihm's Local Ranking Factors both the quantity and quality of citations are more important factors than the consistency of those citations.
Does anyone know how to make meaningful contact with Facebook???
Last month I tried to set up a couple Facebook PPC campaigns for a couple clients only to find out that I can't because another client of mine for whom I set up a Facebook PPC campaign last fall has an outstanding balance of a whopping $30. To be clear, I was only an admin on the client's Facebook page. Their credit card (not mine) was in use, and they didn't pay their bill.
So now, Facebook is holding that against me. I've contacted them through one of the help forms on the site. They clearly don't understand where I'm coming from. I've now sent them 3 emails, and now I'm not receiving a response.
I just recently resorted to sending a direct message through Facebook to Facebook Marketing. No response.
It really does boggle my mind how they're penalizing me, and in turn, my clients, because another former client of mine from nearly a year ago has a $30 balance. I'm not even an admin on the one client's Facebook page anymore?! With AdWords, I regularly have clients who owe Google money but that doesn't affect all of my other clients.
I agree. It's ridiculous how little some of these designers make. It seems that all of them are overseas though. If they make $100 it means a hell of a lot more than $100 means to the average North American.
My uncle owns a pretty prominent graphic design firm that has done work for very large organizations across the globe. For the logo design projects that I've done through 99 designs, he said he'd have to be paid $3k just to consider the project. And I believe I got the logo done for $300. When he looked at the finished product, he had his fair share of critiques, but his observations weren't ones that the average consumer would notice.
I've used 99 designs and I've been quite satisfied with the end product. They do all sorts of types of design work from logos to wordpress themes.
If you don't like what the community of designers provide you, you can get your money back.
There's a few shady people in the community. I had one or two designers on logo design project that just copied something and tweaked it, but within their community, it was caught and that person was disciplined.
Hi Anthony,
In what sense is it a poor-performing account? Just in terms of your ROI? You're talking about using new landing pages, that suggests to me you're not receiving a good ROI.
Your post seems to suggest that you're thinking that having better performing landing pages will result in Google giving your client some priority (i.e, increase in quality score). There's really only the smallest bit of truth to that notion.
According to Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, your landing page only accounts for about 10% of your quality score. The largest factor in quality score is your CTR, which represents about 60% of QS and the notion of 'relevance' is about 30%. You can check out video I've attached.
As far as your client's large budget, I've never seen or read of any evidence suggesting that the total amount of money that Google makes off an advertiser has an impact on Quality Score. Obviously the max CPC bid for individual keywords has an impact on your client's position (Ad Position = Max CPC x QS), so if your client is looking to bid very high amounts for individual keywords, that will certainly help with where their ads will show up.
Oftentimes what I'll do for small business clients of mine (service-based businesses) is have a few different types of contact forms through the site. You obviously want some type of form on the contact page itself. Depending on the type of business you may also have an actual page for a 'Request an Estimate'/'Request a Quote'/'Book an Appointment'. The latter type of form would typically be more detailed (i.e, more fields) than a basic contact form on a contact page, but what I've found effective on a homepage, or sometimes on every page of the site is some sort of 'Quick Contact Form', where you're asking for the bare minimum amount of information from the user in order that your client can proceed to the next step.
There's no silver bullet and what works for one site or one industry doesn't always work across the board. I'm a huge proponent of conversion tracking/goal setting and measuring the each form separately.
Pardon my ignorance when it comes to your particular industry, but do those pages need to be crawlable?
