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I've noticed this past week that when you search for the links pointing to a given site, by using the "link:" operator, that Google not showing as many links as they use to.
I noticed this also with Open Site Explorer, it is not showing the detail link information as much as it did before.
Is Google trying to mask what we can view now on competitors backlinks?
If so, how can we see the backlink building that our competitors are doing?
Two things you can do:
1. Submit a site map with all those pages. They suggest breaking the sitemaps into 50,000 page groups.
2. Use the "Fetch as Google" feature in GWT and fetch your root domain then click the box to submit the root domain along with all the linked pages. This will submit the request to Google to be indexed.
Thanks Jeepster, that video answered my question. It just seems like Google was showing a lot more links on the link: search than they currently are.
I haven't used the Google operator link: for a while, and I noticed that there is a big disparity between the operator "link:" and the GWT's links to your site.
I compared these results on a number of websites, my own and competitors, and the difference seem to be the same across the board.
Has Google made a recent change with how they display link results via the operator?
Could this be an indication that they are clean out backlinks?
So your algorithm for the On Page Report is the same, or hasn't changed. Is your advice on the report card up to date? I don't have anything that I'm questioning. I just want to make sure that the advice on each one of the checks is best practices to the best of your knowledge. I am sharing this information with clients and co-workers as best SEO practices for on-page optimization.
Thanks for your reply!
This question is for one of the SEOMoz staff.
With the ongoing changes and improvement in algorithms, does the SEOMoz team keep the "On-page Report Card" up to date with best practices?
It's kind of a cat and mouse game with Google. They are trying to be more transparent, but at the same time keeping a lot of information close to the vest. They don't want us to figure out their secret sauce.
Yes, I reviewed the thread over on Google product forums. Not much of a discussion on it yet. If the "not selected" metrics were accurate, it did give us some additional information. I'm all for more information from Google, not less. Taking this away may be another step for keeping us guessing.
Video are good, and have always been good for the SERPS. It is always good to have keyword relevant content around your video embed, especially as the H1 title of your video.
Google doesn't hit you for adverts above the fold unless it is a lot. Look at it from a user perspective. When you open your page are you blasted with adverts. A few nicely placed are okay, just don't have all adverts and very little content above the fold.
Just noticed today that the "not selected" has been removed from the Index status, Advanced section of Google Webmaster Tools. Anyone know why.
I've used this metric to determine how or why Google was not selecting pages, particularly to gauge canonical's, 301's and duplicate content.
It will be missed if gone for good.
Those are called sitelinks. Here is Google's explanation:
We only show sitelinks for results when we think they'll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn't allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don't think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user's query, we won't show them.
At the moment, sitelinks are automated. We're always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future. There are best practices you can follow, however, to improve the quality of your sitelinks. For example, for your site's internal links, make sure you use anchor text and alt text that's informative, compact, and avoids repetition.
If you think that a sitelink URL is inappropriate or incorrect, you can demote it. Demoting a URL for a sitelink tells Google that you don't consider this URL a good sitelink candidate for a specific page on your site. Google doesn't guarantee that demoted URLs will never appear as a sitelink, but we do consider a demotion a strong hint that we'll try to honor when generating sitelinks.
Once you've demoted or undemoted a sitelink, it can take some time for search results to reflect your changes.
You can demote up to 100 URLs, and demotions are effective for 90 days from your most recent visit to the Sitelinks page in Webmaster Tools.
Are there no opinions on this topic?
Update:
After unblocking Google, almost all of our rankings are back up, and in some cases a little improved. I was surprised how quickly Google recrawled and ranked the pages that dropped.
I did do a Fetch and submit on all my websites and pages. I'm not sure how Fetches are attended to by Google, but it appears they are.
I have an IT guy who doesn't feel a Fetch makes any difference. He says Google will crawl when they want to and probably does not pay attention to the Fetch request.
What's important with your meta descriptions is to make them appealing enough to get your user to click on your listing. Meta descriptions no longer add any ranking value, but they do add marketing value. Put your meta description keywords in your first sentence, as they will be bolded if they are part of the search query. Put your action or power words, (Words that would motivate your searcher to click your listing) also towards the top of your meta description. Towards the end of the description they will get cut off.
You want to look at this from what you think your user will be search for. There is a lot of traffic you can obtain through image searches. So if your title and alt tab reflect the search queries, then your images will show high on an image search.
Also, consider pinning your images in Pinterest. I have gotten a lot of traffic through Pinterest for our images, as well as some SEO link value from Google.
I know this subject has been discussed many, many times before. But it is now 2013, and Google continues to tweak and change their algo to build upon the best delivered results for users.
So the questions are:
Does Google still treat subdomains as a completely separate and unique domain from the root?
If so, is it a good SEO strategy to split up, when it fits, a website into subdomains with links pointing back to the root or main domain?
As a company we have several subdomains with some of our categories. For example our main site is www.iboats.com. This site has all our boat products. But we set up subdomains several years ago for the following:
And we have our fourms as a subdomain: forums.iboats.com
Splitting them out were originally done for SEO reasons, but now is more for better managing our main categories.
It appears that Google is treating our subdomains as part of our main root domain anyway, so I don't see the SEO value anymore. If we were to move the subdomains into subfolders of the root, I'm wondering if we might see a boost in SEO value having more pages within the main website?
I'd be interested in everyone's thoughts on this subject.
I agree with williammarlow. Matt Cutts has been drilling this home for a long time. That you need to have original content on your pages. Anything that is similar or even close, the serps will rank one over the other. Doing a rewrite of one of them is the best approach. Also, Google likes to see fresh content on a regular basis. So I would encourage to post frequently.
I did a similar process a couple of years ago. I had a blog on Google's blogspot, and I set up a new, self-hosted wordpress blog and transferred all my blog posts over. Both sites were getting crawled, but the new site got no rankings until I blocked Google from crawling my old blogspot site. Google saw it as duplicate content and was only giving the old site ranking value.
I wanted to get back to report the cause of our problem with a lot of our rankings dropping. We originally thought it was due to a database crash. And that still could be affecting some things.
We moved our servers to a new location. A couple of weeks ago, we switched over to some new IP addresses. When we did so, a program started blocking Google's IP addresses because they were hitting our servers with a lot of hits, and put those IP addresses on a blocked list. So our pages on some of the websites stopped getting crawled, and thus rankings dropped. We discovered the problem when exploring our Webmaster Tools Crawl Stats and noticed that the "kilobytes downloaded per day" had flat-lined. Doing a fetch on selected pages we could see that it was not fetching the page. So after unblocking those IP addresses, the pages got crawled, our crawl stats went back up, and our rankings started going back to where they were. We still have some rankings that have not bounced back, but assume they will as new crawls re-index those pages.
A lesson learned for me was to pay attention to the crawl stats. Any drastic variations could be a sign of a problem.
Brad
iboats.com
Investigating it further, we have some permanent redirects that are still hanging. I've got my IT guys working on it as we speaking.
I've got to run, but I would like to revisit this soon. Once we have determined the problem, I will post it here.
Thanks for your opinions. They have helped.
Good point on the 301's. I'll look into that.
Thanks, for your input!
Spammy keywords might be something to look at. Although you they are not high for "marriage records" it is used twice in your title tag, and the word marriage is used 49 times. I recently did some clean up on some of my pages that were kind of spammy with some keywords and saw an improvement.
So something to consider.
Here is one for you. We had a database crash, and was down for an hour and 15 minutes, on Dec 18th. During this time our system automatically sent out a 301 redirect to our product home page. (iboats.com/boat-parts-accessories/dm/)
On Dec 24th I noticed a huge ranking drop on a lot of our keywords, and some keywords that were serving up the redirect page from our database crash, in place of its normally ranked page.
So my assumption is that Google was crawling our site during the database crash and caching the redirect pages in place of our regularly ranked pages. So when a search query is made that would normally display our ranked page, it is now displaying the redirect page from the crawled cache.
And on other keywords where we normally would rank for, Google no longer has that page cached, so it drops it from ranking.
My question: Does this assumption sound accurate? If so, I'm assuming over time that our past ranked pages will show up once again after Google recrawls those pages and saves them in their cache.
I have several sites that were affected with this:
Thanks in advance for your input
I have tried to put my keyword phrase in "All in One SEO" title tag at the beginning of my tag line, following with something relevant. For example, if the headline of my page content is "How to Get the Most out of the Trinidad Carnival?" In the All in One SEO section for the title I would put "Trinidad Carnival - Getting the Most Out of It."
Do some keyword research to determine some of the longer tail keyword phrases that are using your main keywords, and try to incorporate these long tail phrases into your headline and title tags. I have found that if I do this and add a new post or page at least once per week, your page or post will be immediately indexed and ranked within seconds. Just make sure that you have a sitemap plug in that immediately pings the SERPS.
Another point I might add. Make sure that you post regularly on your blog, whether your blog is internally or externally. I recently tested this and found if I post at least once per week on a regular basis, within seconds my post is immediately indexed and searchable. This is, of course, that you have an active sitemap that pings the search engines when a change is made to your site. There are several good wordpress sitemap plugins that do this for you.
For longer tail titles, they are usually on the first page immediately and in the top 3 positions.
If you are referring to outside links to your website, as report in Google Webmaster Tools, I had a similar issue where the links reported in GWT were reduced in the thousands. I closely watched my rankings and metrics, which were not affected, I concluded that Google was doing some clean up work in GWT. Those links that I lost were not valued links, and Google probably wasn't given them any value, so removed them from their report list.
I would suggest to just watch you metrics closely to determine if it affects your ranking positions. If not, then it is probably just a clean up issue on Google's part.
Thanks... Should have read the YouTube description.
Cutt's did not indicate how to download the tool. Did I miss that?
Thanks for the heads up. Just watched the video.
Did he say when the tool is available?
Need more information to give an adequate answer. There are so many factors that can influence it on both sides of the fence. (Google's side and your side) If you have not changed anything on your site and have not done any off-page SEO, then you are seeing the changes with the algorithm that is affecting your ranking. Google is making changes almost every day, and it will affect your rankings, and those of your competitors if those changes are targeting certain attributes on your pages and other's web pages. As you add more content and pages to your website, it tends to settle down on movement.
My traffic and rankings are all normal. So I'm making an assumption that Google is just doing some cleaning up in Webmaster Tools by not showing a lot of of those internal links that are not being given a lot of value anyway. It's been almost two weeks now, and nothing is affected.
Thanks for your reply and input.
If anyone else has seen this with their internal links, I'd be interested in your outcome.
Yes they are on the same server. These are sister sites that have been live and up for about 7 to 8 years. They get decent traffic, which is directed to our main sites. They were not necessarily set up for link juice. But, until last week, the links were showing up in webmaster tools. I'm assuming that Google is just doing some clean up, since they were not giving them link value anyway. Just wanted to make sure that was it and not something else I should be concerned about.
We do outside link building to legitimate sites, and do get good results. Just seeing if anyone is seeing the adjustment from Google from sister sites.
This morning I noticed in Google Webmaster Tools that my internal links to my root domain (Home Page), dropped from 428,000 to 58,000. It appears that this could be my header or footer links back to the home page that Google is not showing any more. My programmers claim they have not made any changes over the last 30 days. My rankings and traffic are normal.
Any cause for concern?
Last week I noticed a substantial drop in "Links to Your Site" in Google Webmaster Tools on several of my websites. Upon further investigation the reduced links were from our sister sites. It appears that Google has reduced the number of links they are counting from links in our headers and footers from these sites to our main websites. It is not affecting our rankings or traffic. Is Google doing some clean up with what they are showing in webmaster tools for links from related, owned sites? Any cause for concern?
I have been working on a keyword term "boat covers" - however a link from the manufacturer site with the anchor text something like "Company Name Boat Covers" would be just a good or better.
Is this correct?
Thanks,
Brook
Thanks Alan. So basically, if I anchor text 3 or 4 times in the body, above the author backlink,and point my hyperlinks to internal pages, I should get positive link love from Google, as well as have original, relevant content on my website pages.
We are trying to build up article content on our website, and are looking at soliciting fresh articles from authors on various subjects, and in turn give them an author link back to their website or blog in exchange for writing the article. Our website has massive traffic so this would be a good thing for the author.
My question is this: If I put a couple of anchor text links into the article, having them pointed at various pages on my site, and then allow the author to link back to his site, will I lose the link love in the anchor text? Or does it depend on the number of anchor links I have? Like 3 to 1 type ratio.