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Just could use some feed back on these products. I am looking for something to help Identify competitors top performing keywords by traffic amount, as well as possibly suggesting related keywords.
It looks like searchmetrics might do what I want, but not sure. Semrush I know is popular, but don't really know what is best for what I am trying to achieve.
I would appreciate your thoughts.
I must confess that I "learnt" SEO by undertaking in black hat stuff. I used various programs to mass post spun articles to blogs and directories and anywhere else the software let me. I spend hours and hours on crafting generic piles of #### to post everywhere I could.
I became so good at SEO for about 2 months. Things were looking good.. then penguin hit.
Not to let that stop me, I spent even longer crafting the perfect anchor text densities, private blog networks and anything else I could to try and fool Google.... 1 month of semi-greatness.
Ok, starting to learn alot of great things. Learnt about penalties, and more of what Google wanted. Let's try white hat.
With white hat it was all about the content. To my surprise I spent less time working, more time on producing a better site, and to my amazement ranking higher than I ever did before. That is not to say I have never had issues with content quality (short news posts), but I have never looked back since focusing on content and forgetting about links (although some content I have written is especially to attract natural links from other blogs).
Anyway, just make sure you don't mind losing any site you try black hat stuff on, but still recommend white hat stuff all the way.
Hi,
Find your single.php file in your theme folder. THen change:
to
<h1 < span="">class="post-title entry-title"></h1 <>
plus make sure you change the closing tag to
that will be shortly after where you find that.
If you have a child theme (recommended) then you will need to find this file in the main theme, and copy it across to your child theme before changing.
NB: Make sure you back up before changing stuff!
Great find. Just looking at it now.
Just curious, but does Google take into account readability like this?
Thanks
I think you are right here... and yes, I think a change of strategy is required in light of the way Google is heading with this latest update and how other similar sites are suffering.
I am starting to formulate a plan, and your response kind of reinforced it.
Nope, they had a quick spike but if you see my link, they plummeted shortly after. Basically they spoke too soon.
Yeh, I follow seroundtable, but they also got hammered by this update... probably much more so then I did.:
http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research/domains/organic?acc=154293&url=seroundtable.com&cc=US
My website reports on news relating to certain web hosting providers, and being hit by the latest phantom update a little I am looking back a little more harshly on some of my content with especially the older articles needing alot of work (I know some areas on the site need work), and there are some articles I am just not sure about.
I have listed a few OLD articles below
https://www.besthostnews.com/the-power-of-shared-web-hosting-by-bluehost/
https://www.besthostnews.com/siteground-sponsors-wordcamp-london/
https://www.besthostnews.com/free-ebook-guide-to-starting-a-website-on-a-budget-a-small-orange/
These are 3 old articles that I have previously updated several months ago, but are they good enough. Due to the nature of the site sometimes I will report on certain news \ features that a web host releases, and sometimes there is very little to write about. These are probably a good example where I feel there is a struggle to write enough or the quality is perhaps lower than something that has more information to report on.
I would appreciate some harsh critical view points \ and perhaps suggestions on how to improve my writing style for these kind of generic style posts.
I had this problem.
Are you using W3 Total Cache... if so you should activate the Yoast SEO extension (presumably you use Yoast, and their sitemaps). You will find it at Performance -> Extensions in the W3 Total Cache admin area.
In addition, with the robots file in Maxcdn you should have something like:
User-agent: *
Disallow:/
Allow: /wp-content/
Allow: /wp-includes/
You will find this under the SEO settings of your Pull zone in MaxCDN. Make sure you have robots & canonical header ticked as well.
The W3 Total cache extension will sort all the sitemap problems with pointing to the right URL and canonical. There is no need to do anything manually as some of the articles suggest.
That's awesome. Thanks. Will take a look at all those things this week.
That crawl path report is pretty cool, and it led me to the redirect chain report, which I have a few issues to resolve with that with a few multiple redirects on some old links. Fantastic stuff.
So, I have just purchased screaming frog because I have some specific tasks that need completing. However, looking at Screaming Frog generally, there is so much information I was wondering for those who use it, what are the top key tasks you use it for. I mean what are your "go to" things you like to check, that perhaps are not covered by the Moz Crawl reports.
Just looking for things I perhaps hadn't thought about, that this might be useful for.
I agree, Google is constantly evolving and becoming stricter on what it considers acceptable content. You should be looking to constantly improve your website in line with the evolving best practices and Google Algorithm updates.
Yeh, I checked that and it said no issues 
hence why I asked here.
Your link updates back to this post, presumably in error. Would appreciate if you can repost the link you are referring to.
Thanks
For some reason my Campaign hasn't run this week. It was supposed to run on Sunday, and it is now Tuesday.
Just wondering if someone from support can take a look.
Thanks.
Now, I know that there is no set figure to be used here, whichever metric you are using and it will depend on the article and what is natural.
However, lets suppose for a minute that we are taking a keyword in isolation, and I have a 2000 word article using the keyword 17 times and rank no. 3 in Google SERPS. The no. 1 slot uses the keyword 8 times but only has a 800 word article and only a B grade on the onpage ranker.
Of course, there are off page factors as well, but just wondering what your thoughts are on whether you look at density or total keyword usage.
It is easy to just write without think about keyword density or usage, but occasionally you end up using the keyword about 50 times, and it is then I have to actually think about it. Other articles I barely use the keyword because the article just writes itself and it works out fine, but these are generally shorter. With longer articles on my best converting pages, I can't help but think about it more and it ends up a little hit and miss.
OK, but using Canonical for say:
Black Friday sales Roundup 2013 to Black Friday Sales Roundup 2014
is ok? Or should I leave both indexed. Both are quality pages, but targeting virtually the same keywords., apart from a date.
That is interesting thanks. I do actually have links to further information in exactly the way you say.
Including some basic information about the product could work... I will give it some thought, as I will need to make sure it is of sufficient quality.
Well, for definite it looks like I am using "canonical" incorrectly
Work to do...
Just a quick question really.
Say I have a Promotions page where I list all current promotions for a product, and update it regularly to reflect the latest offer codes etc.
On top of that I have Offer announcement posts for specific promotions for that product, highlighting very briefly the promotion, but also linking back to the main product promotion page which has a the promotion duplicated. So main page is 1000+ words with half a dozen promotions, the small post might be 200 words, and quickly become irrelevant as it is a limited time news article.
Now, I don't want the promotion page indexed (unless it has a larger news story attached to the promotion, but for this purpose presume it is doesn't). Initially the core essence of the post will be duplicated in the main Promotion page, but later as the offer expires it wouldn't be. Therefore would you Rel Canonical or just simply No-index?
I have added an update here: http://moz.com/community/q/reviewing-category-tag-policy-update
I recently (http://moz.com/community/q/less-tags-better-for-seo) started reviewing my category and tag policy, and things have been going very well. I thought I would share what I have done:
To add the category description on the first category page only in Wordpress, you need to go to the category.php or archive.php and change:
to
The overall aim was to have a hierarchal resource contained in the category page description. Whilst this is still a work in progress, you can see an example of what I am trying to achieve here:
https://www.besthostnews.com/web-hosting-tutorials/cpanel/
https://www.besthostnews.com/web-hosting-tutorials/cpanel/mail/
If you have any further tips and advice as I continue to implement this (with good results so far), please feel free.
Also, you can use the Visual Term Description Editor plugin to allow the wysiwyg editor for the category descriptions.
I would highly recommend this guide if you are looking to speed up your site (I note it is wordpress):
https://www.besthostnews.com/guide-to-w3-total-cache-settings-with-cloudflare/
Ok, so I understand Google doesn't use stopwords (like "a" or "the").
Therefore if I am optimize for a keyword phrase, and say find an opportunity for say:
"how to create stuff something"
But it actually reads better as (although doesn't sound completely out of place as above)
"how to create stuff in something"
Which is better for SEO? (ignore usability \ readability in your replies please and assume it reads reasonably either way as that was just an example)
I am a big fan of SiteGround, but that is a load of rubbish.
If all links are no follow, you have no issue.
I agree with Alick300. From how you have phrased your question it sounds like you are doing it purely for link building which Google doesn't like... at all.
Thomas is correct. You cannot redirect from an URL with a hashtag in it (although it is possible to redirect to an URL with a hastag using escape fragments). Unfortunately, in your case it is the former, and therefore not possible.
I have implemented SSL about 5 months ago, and have not seen much of a benefit. Also you have to consider that sites running SSL are invariably slower as well, although Cloudflare can help with that.
The only thing I currently like about SSL are the EV SSL certificates (the green bar with your company name) as I believe these allow some sense of authority to be seen by users.
Actually, many of the larger hosts using cPanel now do not require a dedicated IP as they use SNI technology that allows an SSL certificate to be installed on a shared IP. However, there can be other benefits to having a dedicated IP such as being less likely to get caught on an Email blacklist etc.
Thanks, that was my impression of it as well. Just wanted to check I wasn't overlooking something.
Is there any reason to use relative Urls from an SEO perspective?
I presume your site is waspkilluk.co.uk. When I went to your site, the content doesn't load immediately, but rather only when you scroll. Can you just double check what Google actually sees when the page loads - in webmaster tools try fetching and rendering the homepage.
Everything may be fine, but there is something niggling me that maybe google doesn't actually see your site properly.
Speak to your host. I believe this is caused by SNI technology at the server level which can cause https versions to revert to another site. SNI is when you can have SSL certificates on a shared IP.
This is best dealt with by your hosting provider.
If the link is from a decent site (i.e. not spammy \ black hat) and you want the link, normally what I do is just accept it knowing Google is sensible enough to know you are the original source from the backlink. However, what I also do is take the opportunity to update my own content seeing as someone else is now competing with your article. Just make your article better \ more unique, and it is a win win from your point of view.
If they have blatently copied just submit a GOogle DMCA request.
If they copy it then submit a DMCA to Google.. I don't even bother asking people to take down content. WHat I was referring to was legitimate referencing when they write their own unique article because they like the idea of my own article. This latter thing is what I would like to achieve. Social sharing helps get your content in front of other bloggers which can help facilitate this.
Basically if you have good content, people will over time give you links naturally.
Every post I write gets shared to about 16 different social media outlets. I do this not only to drive traffic (although some hardly drive any traffic if I am honest) but to also get the content out in front of other people. Who knows... sometimes I get a burst of traffic, other times I hope someone decides to provide a link back because they write their own version or a related article.
My best social networks are Twitter and Google+ and that is where my efforts go. If I had more followers elsewhere I would love to use those as well, it is just I use whatever I find easiest etc. Overall though, I have not found Stumbleupon very useful, although I don't really understand how best to use it or have not really put much effort in.
Thank you. The example page i linked is actually a resource that helps with conversions. . The content at the top will highlight the better posts rather than some of the fluff posts that I rel canonical or no-index (i.e. old offers etc). The problem is that if I do more than 100 words, it would end up fluff. I think it adds value by linking to some external resources and key posts, so I will work towards building that up over time.
But thank you for your indepth reply. You are saying alot of what I was thinking, but not convinced enough to make the drastic changes I probably need to do.
I am tempted to remove tags. I don't think anyone ever visits them.
Update: I have now removed the tags. I can always create one or two new categories if I need to in the future, but for now I think I have made the best decision for my site. 160 pages that were never visited and diluted link juice have just been deleted.
Neither have been indexed due to that very reason... duplicate content, poor quality \ thin content.
As a word of caution to this, Google is updating its doorway page algorithm. I am not sure if this will affect a well implemented example of this strategy, although I would be surprised if it did (i.e. very unique content with text relevant to each location), but I think it will be designed if you use identical pages with just different location names then there is a real risk.
See: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html
Ultimately it won't be fully known until it is implemented, if it hasn't already.
I am currently reviewing my strategy when it comes to categories and tags on my site. Having been no-indexed for some time, and having many tags with just one entry I am thinking that this is not optimal for SEO purposes.
This is what I am planning:
I would appreciate your thoughts \ suggestions on the best practices here.
Not necessarily. He could be using Nginx as reverse proxy.
He already said the http to https is working fine with my suggestion. The problem is the redirect from one URL to another which what I gave him for the .htaccess doesn't address at all.
ie.
https://www.directtraveller.com/holidays/about-direct-traveller/british-travel-awards.asp
to
https://www.directtraveller.com/awards
What did you put to redirect the following:
https://www.directtraveller.com/holidays/about-direct-traveller/british-travel-awards.asp
to
https://www.directtraveller.com/awards
As that is where the problem lies.
I agree, Easter weekend was quiet for us as well. Starting to pick up again now though.
On the 21st April Google is updating its mobile algorithm so that any non-mobile friendly sites will be actively penalised in the mobile serps.
You will want to check the mobile usability section in your webmaster tools, and also here: https://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
I understand that the penalty is either on or off, so either your site is completely mobile friendly or it isn't.
If you have access to the server, or hosts willing to make changes (I assume this is a VPS or Cloud plan) then you may be better off installing something like xCache and configuring W3 Total cache (to use Xcache for database and object cache) with Cloudflare CDN.
This may help: https://www.besthostnews.com/guide-to-w3-total-cache-settings-with-cloudflare/
Try this in your .htaccess file:
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule .* https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.
RewriteRule .* https://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
You need to be really careful doing this. Whilst that used to be pretty much the industry standard, Google recently updated its guidelines to do with Doorway pages. I am not sure that these new algorithm changes have been implemented but it is exactly this method that it will affect.
So, until we know what is up with that you will need to proceed with a bit of caution, and at least ensure that all content on those location pages are completely unique.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html
Personally I wouldn't waste your time. Disavow and move on. I have had no issues with this approach.