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Hi everyone,
I'm working with a client that has a strange situation. He's ranking for his target keyword on a national level but when searching locally, he's in the 100s (see attached).
Any idea what could be going on here? He did have an old domain that got hacked that is redirecting to his current domain.
Thanks,
Tim
Hi Reda,
Not exactly. Google doesn't determine rankings just by looking at how well optimized a site is for individual words. They look at many other factors both on and off the site, so it's really hard to say why you're ranking slightly higher for one.
To be honest, I wouldn't stress over individual keyword rankings too much. You'll end up driving yourself insane. With so much personalization in search results today, what you see in search results isn't necessarily what someone else will see. I think its better to look at overall trends and just make sure you're moving in the right direction.
Tim
Hi Mark,
A PA of 1 usually just means that Moz hasn't crawled the page yet. This usually happens when pages are brand new, the site has very few links or the site has a poor internal linking structure.
However, it doesn't mean that Google hasn't crawled the site. Moz crawls far fewer pages than Google does. I would recommend looking through your Webmaster Tools account to see if Google is having any issues indexing the page. Within WMT, you can fetch a page as Google Bot to see if Google is able to access the page.
Without more information, it's hard to say why your pages aren't ranking, but I think Webmaster Tools is a good place to start your investigation.
Tim
Hi Paul,
You're not able to get any keyword information out of "not provided" keywords not matter whether they are branded or not.
One work around that can give you a rough idea of branded vs. non-branded keyword traffic is to look at what page your "not provided" traffic landed on. If they landed on your homepage, they probably search for a branded term. If they landed on a product page, they probably searched for a term based on the product name.
It's not perfect, but it can help give you understand what's going on. You can find instruction on how to look this info up here - http://www.prontomarketing.com/2013/09/unlock-your-not-provided-keyword-data/
Let me know if you have any other questions!
Tim
Hi Gary,
You can find a really good answer to this here - http://moz.com/community/q/can-geographic-location-of-web-server-affect-in-seo#reply_66282
In short, it is best to have your server in the location that you're targeting, but it won't have a huge impact. I would imagine that as the years have gone by, server location has become an even smaller factor. Tons of websites use CDNs and host internationally and Google is smart enough to figure out the location that they're targeting. You can (and should) set your target location in Google Webmaster Tools as well.
Hope this helps.
Tim
Hi Jeroen,
I'd be very careful about placing sitewide links on all your client sites that point back to you site. This could easily end up hurting you. Here's an example where WPMU.org was hit because they were doing something similar - http://moz.com/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update.
I think the best thing for you to do is add a "nofollow" tag to all the links from your clients' sites that point to your site. This should help protect you and then moving your site over to Server A won't be a problem either.
Hope this helps.
Tim
Hi Reda,
Not necessarily. In most cases, switching the word order like that will return similar, but not exactly the same, results. Take a look at these searches:
The Top 10 basically contains the same pages for both searches but they appear in a slightly different order. So if you're ranking well for one keyword, chances are you'll be ranking well for the re-ordered phrase but you might not be in the exact same position.
Hope this helps
Tim
Hi Varun,
Open Site Explorer doesn't list every single link pointing your site. Moz crawls a ton of pages, but it's only a fraction of what Google is capable of. So even if OSE doesn't show it, I'm sure Google knows about it.
OSE typically doesn't show social profile links. I would imagine that this is because the Moz development team decided to devote their crawling resources to other areas of the internet. In general, most links to your website from social profiles will have a 'nofollow" tag anyway, so they won't be contributing much to the strength of your site.
Hope this clears things up.
Tim
Hi Hardley,
Yes, you can! In Moz Analytics, go to Search > Keyword Rankings in the sidebar. Once that report loads, go to the Ranking tab (see attached). This will bring up a list of all your keywords. Click on one of your keywords and it will take you a report that shows the historical rankings for that keyword over the last several weeks.
Tim
Hi Hardley,
I'd recommend using the search operators that Moz has built into Fresh Web Explorer (see attached). Adding quotation marks around your brand name will likely narrow down the results.
Hope this helps!
Tim
Hi John,
Federico is right, rel="dofollow" doesn't exist. To expand upon that a bit, every link is assumed to be "dofollow" by default unless you add rel="nofollow". So if you want link juice passed through your links, you don't need to do anything special - just build the link as you normally would. If you don't want link juice passed, you would need to add the rel="nofollow" tag.
Tim
Hey there,
You're right that there isn't a lot of very good information about Schema implementation out there. My understanding is that Schema for addresses should be used for every instance the address appears on the site.
Using Schema in multiple places on your site won't hurt you. All it does it help make that information easier for search engines to digest.
Tim
Hi Adam,
I would suggest you read through David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors. It's almost a year old now, but there is still a lot of insight that can be gained from it.
As with organic search results, local rankings are influenced by a huge number of factors. There are some basic steps like selecting the right categories and claiming your listing that play a very important role, but things like the authority of your homepage, the number of matching listings on other directories (like Yelp, CitySearch, etc.) and the number and quality of reviews on your Places page can all have an impact on results as well.
Tim
Dr. Pete just posted an article that might help explain what's going on here - http://moz.com/blog/comparing-ranktracking-methods-browser-vs-crawler-vs-webmaster-tools
Moz uses a crawler to track the rankings you see in your reports. Because of personalization and a variety of other factors, the results in the report might be slightly different than what you see when manually searching in your browser.
Hi Thomas,
WordPress.com is blocked in China, but websites built with WordPress aren't automatically blocked. Here's a couple helpful tools that can check if your domain is blocked in China.
Tim
Hi Ricky,
Congrats on the mention in Examiner! I looked through a bunch of their other articles and it seems that no-following external links is a standard practice for them. For example, here's an article that links to HootSuite, LinkedIn and the iTunes App Store - all of them are no-followed.
You could try to find the contact info for an editor and request that they remove the no-follow tag, but if this is a site-wide policy, I'm not sure that they would do it for you.
Tim
The problem is that search engines view these URLs as two separate pages, so both pages get indexed and you run into duplication issues.
Yes, using rel=canonical is a good way to handle this. I would suggest using the lowercase version as your canonical page, so you would place this bit of HTML on both pages:
The other option is to create a 301 redirect from the caps version to the lowercase version. This would ensure that anyone arriving at the page (including search engine bots) would end up being directed to the lowercase version.
One thing to consider is that just because Open Site Explorer found the link and assigned it a high PA/DA and the PageRank toolbar shows a high PR score doesn't mean that Google is actually passing link strength through those links. I wouldn't look at site's PageRank as a definitive answer to Google's thoughts on the site's quality.
Page Authority and PageRank are essentially just equations that consider the quantity and strength of links pointing to a page, but they don't say anything about the spamminess of a page's content. It's possible that Google has already noticed the hundreds of followed links coming out of this site, marked the page as spam and devalued all those links. All of that could be done behind the scenes without any changes to the site's PageRank and without any public notice in regards to the site's spamminess.
With that said, it's also possible that Google hasn't caught on to the spam tactics of this site and those links do still have value. The internet is a huge place and as we all know, Google is definitely capable of letting spammy sites slip through the cracks. Unfortunately, Google will probably never pull back the curtain for us, so we won't know how they treat cases like this.
As for whether you should get the link for your client. I would lean towards no, but wouldn't completely rule it out. There is some risk involved, but if your client already has a decent link profile, one link from a spammy site probably won't hurt them and if Google hasn't devalued those links, it could potentially help them.
If you do choose to go after the link, I would first have an open discussion with your client about the potential risks and rewards. If they want to be really aggressive, they might want you to go for it. If they'd rather play it safe, probably better to pass.
Tim
Hi Adam,
It's based on the preference of the webmaster of those domains. They have simply chosen whether or not to include www in their domain. It doesn't have an effect on SEO because the addition or exclusion of www doesn't give search engines any clue as to the quality of the site.
The important thing to remember here is that http://www.example.com and http://example.com are technically different domains, so if you're not careful, it's easy to run into duplicate content issues. If you're working on this for your own website, you should pick one version and make sure the other redirects to it.
Hope this helps!
Tim
Excel FTW! A pivot table could handle this for you as Basil said. Or if you wanted to do a one-off formula, it would look something like this:
=(B1-A1)/B1
Where B1 is your number from the more recent time period and A1 is the number from the previous time period.
Hope this helps!
Tim