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I would not recommend doing this.

This is a great response. Thanks for this!

Does your website have a canonical tag in place?

I'm only posting a comment so that I can follow this thread. I'm really curious to see what people have to say. Good question!

Thanks for the update!

This is seriously a great list.

And very well-written to boot!

Good afternoon, Moz.

My team and I are a bit stumped. We are getting ready to send out reporting and discovered that we are getting hits on a few very odd landing pages. We build our websites and we never made this URL: https://eaglehearing.com/Home/gclid/ EAIaIQobChMIo_K0t8T_3QIVg81kCh1NQAKIEAEYASAAEgJajfD_BwE

There are around 7-10 variations on these weird URLs pulling up in our reports for two different clients now. Do you think we got hacked?

If you can, please provide any and all talking points that I can use in this argument. It seems that no matter what I show him, including Matt Cutts' video debunking Keyword Density back in 2011, it doesn't seem to stick. He is fully, 100% convinced that keyword density is hugely important and we need to focus our time and energy on it.

Any sources you might have to help me show him that this is a myth would be hugely appreciated.

Thank you.

The client is called Orthopaedic Associates, based out of Boise, Idaho.

You can view their site here: https://orthoa.com/

This is an actual client who almost disappeared from Google.

I don't see how they could have gotten hit with a penalty, to be honest. We have been working with them for a while and haven't done anything different. Maybe a few tweaks to meta descriptions / title tags as we update their site.

Hey everyone!

I wanted to ask the Moz community on what I should be on the lookout for in this situation; I have a local SEO client, an orthopedic clinic, who out of nowhere completely dropped off the map. Their Search Visibility is now at .001%.

I really have no idea what would have caused this... I have dozens of other local SEO clients and have never seen this before.

Hey there.

I'm trying to export a .pdf to send to my client. When I click "export pdf", the page sits for a second then goes to a 404 page?

I've never seen this before. Is anyone else getting this problem?

Does anybody know why this might happen? When we made the new site, we just changed the skins. The source code was the same, the content was the same.

Even when I search their brand name and their city, their URL won't show up.

When I search their URL into Google, it won't even pull up their homepage: it only pulls up /contact-us and some other subpages.

Any tips on what I should be looking out for?

Hey everyone!

I wanted to get the other Mozzers opinions on this.

With Google announcing a new Speed Update that will affect mobile rankings, I wanted to ask: How will AMP pages play into this?

Let me know what you think! 
Thanks!

I would imagine that the date of which a link was acquired does, in fact, impact the links value.

More importantly, though, I would say it is much more important that you keep getting new links - For instance, if you got a few backlinks on really great sites a few years back and then just let those sit without acquiring new links, Google might think your company has dropped in relevance and that people no longer care about you.

Old, credible backlinks are good - consistently getting new backlinks is better.

Mozzers, what are your thoughts on documenting SEO results from an incognito window? Does anyone have any articles they can recommend that talk about this subject?

Is it better to document results from the normal window or from an incognito window?

Cool, thanks for this article! This is really good to know. Do you know, then, why this might be happening; within an hour of searching that same search string, one of the results gave me 3 different Meta Description tags, while the actual source code meta-tag did not change once.

Screenshots for proof: https://imgur.com/a/hXLWz

I also just noticed that the 275-character-length descriptions are not actual meta-tags in the source code. Google is disregarding those tags and simply grabbing a section of the content and making it their new meta description. This is wild.

In case anyone else wants to try it out for themselves, this is after I searched for "fulfillment center" on Google.

Just saw this: https://imgur.com/a/KQ0Hf

This is the first time I have ever seen a meta description that long. Ever. I haven't seen any other sites covering this.

That's a 275-character-length description that is not being truncated.

Thoughts? I'm freakin' out.

This happened at the last company I worked for (one of their clients who was paying for social media management) and unfortunately there was nothing that could be done. I'm interested to see if this has worked out for anyone else, though.

Excellent advice all around in the above comments.

I'd like to add that the word "Canyoning" is pretty lengthy (as far as Title Tags are concerned), so I would suggest only using it once. This would save a lot of characters. For instance: Canyoning - São Jorge - Azores | Brand Name

I just want to add to what Roman has said; I might be reading into this incorrectly, but it appears that you might be under the impression that sites that link back and forth to one another are as valuable as Affiliate Linking Programs. I thought I should interject and just say that doing Link Exchanges has been proven to be detrimental to sites. I mean, just Google "Link Exchanges Bad" and you'll find an endless supply of articles on this...

I'm not sure what dictates a "published study," but I have read countless articles on how important maintaining consistent NAP-info on business listings. But I'm interested in seeing what other people have to say, so I'll comment to follow this thread.

Just thought I'd throw this question out to the Moz community.

Anyone have leads for good, credible directories where I could get a smaller, local hospital listed on? (besides the obvious ones like HealthGrades, etc.,)

Thanks!

Another huge proponent of the amount of time it would take to get ranked is the niche that you are in, and if it is national-rankings or local-rankings.

If you are a local business trying to get ranked for local rankings, it will be much quicker. I've seen rankings have massive changes in local SEO in a very short amount of time.

Hope this helps!

No. Footer links will not impact your SEO. You're going to want to focus on your internal linking structure as a whole.

Before I provide any other information, I have to ask first - Did your rankings (generally speaking) drop as well? Or was it just the number of your DA?

There's a discussion going on in our office about sitemaps. I thought it'd be a good idea to get the thoughts of the Moz community in on it, too.

What are your thoughts? is the User Sitemap still an effective tool to utilize?

Good afternoon, Mozzers!

My boss and I noticed a weird thing happening in the rankings for one of our clients. Just in case the niche has anything to do with it, the client is an HVAC company.

When my boss is in an incognito window and he googles "commercial HVAC Portland" - The client showed up at #8.

BUT ---- When I googled the same keyword-string in an incognito window, the client showed up at #14.

We are both on the same IP. And we did these searches within minutes of one another.

Does anyone know why / how this might be happening? We'd love to hear your thoughts!

Hmm.... This is wacky.

It looks like although it says "Sweetwater" in the Title Tag, the pdf file is still being hosted on your URL (as well as the actual rebate form having American Music listed as the return address).

Maybe perhaps whoever added this rebate form to your website "borrowed" it from Sweetwater? And by that I mean, copied over the pdf file, changed the address, and copied everything else (Title Tag included), but forgot to take off the Sweetwater brand name?

Either way, it's on your own URL and it's a rebate form that includes your own address. Just get into your site editor and change the title tag and you should be fine.

Bump.

I am trying to understand your question, but I think it's a little lost in translation. Could you try explaining a little more thoroughly?

Commenting only so I can follow this thread. Very interested in hearing what people have to say.

I'm going to comment on here again to bump this post. This is a little aggravating: I ran a report on one of our clients using OSE and it says they have 3 backlinks. I then immediately ran a report on RavenTools and their report says we have 61 backlinks.

Why would I want to use OSE if it is only going to provide me >5% of my client's backlink profiles? I simply don't understand.

After a quick Google search, I found this: http://resources.spyfu.com/find-sites-ranked-past-ranking-history/

Hope this helps!

Honestly, I think either idea would work. But, personally, I would build off of the already established website.

Reason being this; if you were to make a new site - and it was optimized correctly, had amazing user-friendly content, and was all around a great website - It wouldn't matter what the DA is, it would get ranked. I've seen it happen plenty of times where a new site comes onto the scene and ends up taking over well-established sites in the rankings, and it boils down to having a better, more user-friendly website.

But, like I said earlier, I would attach these new pages to your old domain. If you build these pages to be just as amazing and user-friendly and useful as you would a new website, those pages will still rank. And not only will that help getting ranked for those specific search terms, it will build the credibility of your root domain and could boost your DA.

Hope this helps!

Thanks for this update, Pete!

H1 tags are hugely important, yes. It is a giant arrow to Google pointing to that keyword and essentially saying "Hey! This is what this page is about!"

I personally believe that that is far too many clients for one person (or two people with the person training under you). If they are paying you for SEO services and you haven't touched some of them in 5 months, that's a problem. These companies want to see results, and if no work is being done and there's no difference in their rankings, traffic, etc., then they will most likely leave your company. Retention is very important and it looks like the way things are structured there that you will certainly start to have clients leave...

Kris beat me to it! I was coming here to say basically the same thing.

Hey everyone!

I just wanted to start a discussion on Moz's Forecast. If you haven't noticed, it has been over 100 degrees for an entire month now, which I have personally never seen before...

Why do you think this might be happening? Any ideas or theories? I'd love to hear them!

I'm gonna comment again to "bump" this thread back up. Is anyone else having these issues? Moz's crawler seems to be kinda freakin' out. It'll tell us that we have duplicate content / title tags / meta description when it's simply not true. It will also say it's unable to crawl a site due to something on our end (even though it was crawling just fine the day prior) and then it will fix itself with no work on our part.

Thanks for the well articulated response, Chris! It's much appreciated.

I'm gonna contest your last statement though, and I'd like to see what you have to say. If I use Moz to check my backlinks, and it gives me (4 root domains, 15 total links) VS. using someone else and getting (150 root domains, X amount of links) ---- How is this a good way to be equipped to act on my backlink portfolio, in regards to using Moz? I wouldn't be able to know if I have spammy backlinks, or a good amount of high quality links?

Hey everyone!

Can somebody explain to me why this keeps happening: Whenever I'm trying to backlink my competitors, I typically use RavenTools. Every time, without fail, if I put that same URL into Moz's Open Site Explorer - It gives me about 1/20th of what RavenTools shows me. Sometimes it literally comes up with 2 or 3 links total.

Unfortunately, RavenTools has a cap on how many backlink checks you can perform in a month - so once I've used those up, I have to start using OSE... But, it just doesn't work.

Does anyone else have this issue?

Thanks!

This is a great response! Thank you!

Yes, we are having the same issues.

Bump.

Hey everyone!

Had a quick question for ya'. Does anyone know if there are currently SEO tactics that are in place to help a company's Facebook page rank in their search bar? For example: When I search "Idaho Auctions" into the facebook search bar, there's a multitude of results - ranging from groups, to events, to businesses.

How do these get ranked above each other?

Any information at all would be a huge help, thanks!