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Looks like a pretty spammy site. Sometimes a spam site can rank for a time using black hat tactics, but is eventually discovered and taken down. Rankings also can fluctuate naturally for many reasons-- SEOs usually see a "honeymoon period" for new pages, where they rank really highly when they are first published, before dropping in rankings after Google sees how the page performs in the SERPs.
It likely means the page that the link was discovered on is now redirecting to another page. For example, a few of the links in your screenshot are from Google+, which no longer exists (all pages now redirect to a shutdown notice).
Don't see how it would impact rankings one way or the other... the amount of traffic a website gets isn't a ranking factor.
It does sound like a shady service though. People use services like these to increase the views on their ads (CPM) to defraud their advertisers or increase the view count of YouTube videos which can impact YouTube SEO.
Unless you're seeing a high volume of spammy links, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Every site is going to accumulate spammy links over time. It's just when there is a lot of them that they can lead to your site being negatively impacted. Unless you believe you're being penalized, I would leave it alone for now.
Lots of people speculate that website usability impacts search rank, but this hasn't been conclusively been proven. Improving your website experience is great for conversions and something you should definitely work to improve, but if you want to improve search ranking it's still important to focus on content & links.
In my experience, links take precedence over content. Mediocre content on a high domain authority site is going to outrank excellent content on a site with no links or poor links.
This is a completely separate issue than Penguin, which is an algorithm that mainly penalizes sites that are actively trying to manipulate rankings with poor links.
The definition of cloaking according to Google is "the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines." For that reason, there is some risk in showing Google a different page than what is being shown to your users in the test. Displaying different content based on user-agent is a red-flag to Google.
That being said, cloaking penalties are "manual actions", meaning they are manually applied by human reviewers on Google's team, so unless you are purposely trying to be deceptive, the risk of being penalized is low. Additionally, you can request reviews of manual actions via Google Search Console to appeal any penalties.
Another approach could be to use server-side redirects for the test, using 302 redirects and redirecting users bucketed into the test to a separate URL. The 302 redirect indicates to Google that this is a temporary change, and that they should retain the original page in their index. You can further reinforce this by adding a canonical tag to the test page and pointing it to the original version of the page.
Finally, for high priority SEO pages you may also consider using a client-side A/B test. Client-side A/B testing uses Javascript to dynamically change the content on the page, and is typically not indexed by Google.
Very cool analysis! In the past I've found it interesting to see how people have gotten to the top of the leaderboard, whether it's blog posts, thumb ups, or answers in the Q&A section.
I tend to focus my time & effort more on the links that we can obtain, rather than trying to analyze the value of a link a competitor has. It's impossible to tell whether hidden links or other black hat tactics are propping up a competitor's ranking, but historically speaking, sites like that eventually get penalized (even if it takes Google a few months or years to wise up).
I look at competitor backlinks sometimes to see if there are any tactics they are using that might be useful for my own sites, or other link opportunities, but aside from the occasional competitor analysis, it's a better use of my time to develop new link building campaigns for our site.
Thanks Malika! Our site does have high domain authority, and in general we tend to outrank our competitor and show up in the answer box, but for one specific query our competitor's site stubbornly continues to show up in the answer box above us.
I've updated the content quite a bit, but so far haven't seen any results. You mentioned backlinks-- do you have any instances where a page wasn't showing up in the answer box, and you were able to get it to show up solely through backlinking?
Thanks! Do you have any examples where you were able to show up in the box just by building more backlinks?
You shouldn't use the nofollow tag property for internal links. Doing so used to preserve your PageRank, but it was changed a few years ago so that links with nofollow just result in link juice evaporation.
But to answer your original question, the nofollow tags should have no impact on your blog. But do yourself a favor and remove the nofollow tags.
Anyone have any luck in optimizing your site to show up in the Google Answer Boxes that popup for informational queries? (for example: "what is seo?")
I've read many of the articles that have been written on the subject, and have been able to show up for many queries by a) ranking high organically, b) placing the question at the top of the page, and then answering it succinctly.
However, for one term a competitor continues to show up in the answer box instead of us, despite their site ranking lower organically in the search results.
Anyone have any experience/advice for replacing a competitor in the Answer Box? Thanks!
I would go with example.com/ca/. example.com/en-ca/ is longer and more difficult to type. A subdomain ca.example.com would not inherit the domain authority of your current site.
I would keep the original example.com. Moving urls results in a small loss of link equity, even with a 301 redirect, so I would avoid moving urls if at all possible.
If you have the resources, creating unique content around those product keywords can help you win. Re-sellers of products often just use the default manufacturer description, so if you can create unique content for your site you can stand out from the site. Adding additional content like product reviews, FAQs, instructions, etc. can also help with your rankings as well.
When evaluating competition, I would step outside of SEMRush and actually take a look at the pages that are outranking you. Do they have higher domain authority than you? Do they have more backlinks? Do they have more content? If you think you can do better on those metrics, then you have a shot.
Correct except for the nofollows. You almost never want to use nofollow links pointing to your own site. And try to put as much of the content you have on your product pages onto the category page.
The Open Site Explorer index is only updated once every few weeks, so newer links won't appear in it for a while. In terms of backlink analysis, honestly MajesticSEO and AHREFs provide a lot more data than OSE.
How are you implementing the password protection? What website is it for? It's hard to say anything without knowing the specifics.
If this is an existing site, I would not change the URL structure just to include some keywords in there. The benefits of having a few keywords in the URL are outweighed by the risks. Even for a new site, shorter is typically better, like you said.
If you have a really large site with distinct categories, then having subdirectories makes sense. I would use dashes instead of underscores:
Otherwise, just include the keywords in the page itself rather than creating a subdirectory just so your can have keywords in there:
Are you asking about crawls or indexation?
I can't think of any reason why you would want to decrease crawls, but you could probably do so by getting backlinks removed, blocking sections of your site from being crawled through robots.txt or nofollow links, and decreasing the change frequency in your xml sitemaps.
As long as the transition goes smoothly (no downtime, robots.txt & htaccess files configured properly, no changes to the site) then it should have no impact on your search results. Make sure that everything is configured exactly the same as on your current host, and you should have no problems.
Interesting. Do you know if Google Analytics is installed properly? Is the code in your header? Are there any javascript errors on your page? Do you have multiple analytics scripts installed?
May be some kind of tracking issue there.
I would go with the canonicals. If there are any links going to these duplicate pages, that will prevent any "link juice evaporation" from links which Google can see but can't crawl due to robots.txt. Best to let Google just crawl the page and see the canonical so that it understands that it is a duplicate page.
Having canonicals on all your pages is good practice anyway, as it can prevent inadvertent duplicate content from things like query parameters.
Crawl budget can be of some concern if you're talking about a massive number of pages, but start by first taking a look at Google Webmaster Tools and seeing how many of your pages are being crawled vs the total number of pages on your site. As long as this ration isn't small, you should be good. You can also get more crawl budget by building up your domain authority by building links.
Not really. Google only shows referrers as (direct) when there is no referral data present, and that's an issue with the referrer, not your tracking system. Referral data can be lost for many reasons:
You may be able to get around this to a certain extent by using URL parameters (utm_source, utm_campaign), but those would only be for links that you have some control over.
That's the new way Google is displaying info on profiles and pages. Before they displayed "+1s", which was a metric which included your total number of followers + all the +1s your content had obtained. Now they've broken that out into total number of followers and total number of views.
Who knows how long the new format will last, but we can assume that Google found those numbers to be more useful than the previous format.
I just went through this process. You just leave the day out, like in the example in the documentation:
https://moz.com/local/help/documentation#Hours
So if the business is not open Sat or Sun, you would just put:
2:9:00:AM:5:00:PM,3:9:00:AM:5:00:PM,4:9:00:AM:5:00:PM,5:9:00:AM:5:00:PM,6:9:00:AM:5:00:PM
Ok. Well, to answer your original question I don't think the semantic markup will negatively impact your rankings, but it's not the ideal implementation (the rich snippets will say "votes").
As long as you aren't being deceptive about it, it should still work.
Just put your code into the rich snippet testing tool and see if the semantic markup is implemented properly.
How long did you test the aggregate ratings for? It can take a while for Google to catch up. I don't see why votes would work but ratings wouldn't.
Why would you want to use votes? If the reviews are on a separate tab, why not just include the aggregate rating on the page itself, in order to get the rich snippets showing? You may also be able to implement the tabs in such a way that you still get review snippets.
Definitely don't use nofollow. Using nofollow won't solve the problem of having too many links, and will just end up hurting your site. It is almost never a good idea to use nofollow on internal links.
What you should consider instead is to have navigation that changes in response to what section of the site the user is in. For example, if the user is in the automotive category, it makes sense to have links to tires and oil, but it's not necessary to link to a subcategory for perfume. Having contextual navigation is great from an SEO perspective, and also provides for a better user experience of not overwhelming the user with a hundred choices.
That being said, limiting a site to having 100 links per page is a very old Google recommendation and is not a hard and fast rule. Having a lot of links on a page makes it more difficult for Google to crawl and dilutes the link juice on a page, but is sometimes necessary. Amazon.com, for example, has 300+ per page. How many links Google is willing to crawl is a factor of your site's Pagerank.
Yes, if the old pages are completely outdated, then it makes sense to redirect them to an up-to-date page. If the old pages still have some value, then you may also consider just adding a prominent note at the top of the page linking to the new location.
That's very frustrating! I've never had a problem with HMA specifically, but that script usually works.
You may want to try searching for things like "break out of frame proxy" or "break out of frame php" to see if anyone out there has come up with a better solution.
It's possible, but I haven't seen any studies that are conclusive. However, having additional unique content on your site can help with rankings though, especially if it includes long tail variations of keywords that you didn't include in your article, which you can also rank for.
Interesting. Google is usually smart about not indexing proxies, but here it looks like it's doing exactly that.
You can try using Javascript to break your site out of any frames when a visiting your site. This will break the user out of the frame if they come via the proxy, and may also help prevent Google from indexing the proxy frame:
What query are you searching for? The website comes up fine for me.
Google Images doesn't send much traffic anymore since it was updated, and the quality of traffic was never that good to begin with. However, if you have a lot of high quality images, using an Image Sitemap can help them get indexed:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636?hl=en
Also, in addition to the alt tag, make sure to give your images a descriptive file name, so "panda-eating-shoots.jpg" vs "IMG0001.jpg".
It can potentially affect your rankings for some keywords, especially long tail keywords. User comments generally the highest quality content, but they are content nonetheless and indexed by Google.
One solution might be to switch to a comment system such as Disqus. Disqus will still allow users to login with Facebook (as well as Twitter & Google+) and can be configured so that the comments are indexable.
Make sure you have the canonical tag in the header of all your pages. It helps Google tell what is the original source of a page:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en
Also, check in webmaster tools to see if your site has a manual penalty, being penalized can cause other sites to show up higher than you in the SERPs for your content.
The forum is butchering my formatting, but I hope you get the idea.
Try changing the first line of your index file to:
<sitemapindex xmlns="http: www.sitemaps.org="" schemas="" sitemap="" 0.9"=""></sitemapindex xmlns="http:>
That should get rid of the second warning. For the first warning, you are not using enough <sitemap>tags, you need to encapsulate each of the <loc>tags in one, so your sitemap should look like:</loc></sitemap>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http: www.sitemaps.org="" schemas="" sitemap="" 0.9"=""></sitemapindex xmlns="http:><sitemap></sitemap>http://www.westmarine.com/sitemap/wm-products01.xml.gz<sitemap></sitemap>http://www.westmarine.com/sitemap/wm-products02.xml.gz<sitemap></sitemap>http://www.westmarine.com/sitemap/wm-brands01.xml.gz<sitemap></sitemap>http://www.westmarine.com/sitemap/wm-categories01.xml.gz<sitemap></sitemap>http://www.westmarine.com/sitemap/wm-content-pages01.xml.gz<sitemap></sitemap>http://www.westmarine.com/sitemap/wm-commerce-pages01.xml.gz
Google Webmaster Tools doesn't distinguish between dofollow and nofollow links, so just because they show up there doesn't mean it's doing anything for your SEO. If you're seeing an increase, it could mean the page authority of your Pinterest page has increased, leading it to get crawled more.
Pinterest switched to nofollow links in March of 2012, then switched back to dofollow links for pins and profiles in July 2013, before switching back to all nofollow links in November 2013.
Hey Daniel,
I doubt that sending radio traffic to the old URL would have any impact on which page is ranking in Google.
Another thing you should do is add canonical tags to all of your pages. That will also help Google tell which version of the page is the correct version to show, and also helps prevent a lot of common duplicate content issues.
When did you implement the 301 redirect? It can take a while for Google to catch on to the redirects, especially if you have a large site.
If you want to see the transition sooner, use the Change of Address tool in Google Webmaster Tools:
Rankings for which specific keywords? Unless a someone is actively tracking a keyword using a tool like Moz, the historical ranking data for that keyword isn't going to exist.
Some of the larger search services like Searchmetrics, BrightEdge, and Linkdex may have ranking data for some of the more popular websites for their top keywords.
What are your traffic demands like? I use Bluehost for most of my non-essential hosting, and MediaTemple for the sites with higher bandwidth requirements. Have been using both for years and they provide great service.
No backlink checker is perfect, unfortunately. Nobody has the resource of Google to crawl the entire web (even Google only crawls a section of it). In my experience Majestic & AHREFs have the largest backlink counts, and Moz can show some of your newer links through their "Recently Discovered" tab. If you can afford them all, it's best to combine data from all sources and de-dupe them.
Bing Webmaster Tools can provide some additional backlink data as well.
Just add the following code to the footer.php file:
A little bit of templatized text shouldn't hurt, as long as you have sufficient unique content that distinguishes the page. If you have different categories of content, you could also create several different templates for each category to mix things up.