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We've got a client that has a number of real estate agents that operate out of the same location. There are clear guidelines for how to approach this with Google My Business (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en) but I'm having no luck finding resources as it relates to Bing Places and individual practitioners. Does anyone have experience with this within Bing? Essentially the client wants to maintain the office itself as a location, and there are agents that want to create/claim pages that would utilize the same address.

Thanks

From an SEO perspective, duplicate content and how it is handled is important.  There are two ways to handle it.  The first is to determine which page you identify as the "original".  In this case, I'm guessing that would be the testimonials page.  The next step is to add a canonical tag to any page that uses the same content.  (In your case that would be "our work/project" page).  The canonical tag will point to the orignal page.

One thing to keep in mind is that you should only use canonical tags if both pages have the exact same (or almost the exact same content).  If the "our work/project" page has multiple testimonials on it, then that page would actually have content that a search engine would deem unique, even thought it consists of a compilation of content that appears elsewhere.

This moz post provides a pretty good overview of how to use canonicals.  http://moz.com/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not

I am working with a company that is launching a brand new website (for a new business they are creating).  I am wondering what things people have done to try to start building traffic and/or awareness for the site.

Hi Chiaryn,

Thank you; i look forward to what you see.

Please keep in mind that this website has been around for at least a year, so should have been crawled.

You can reach me directly at evallee@topfloortech.com

Eric

Greetings,

I am working on a website, https://www.nasscoinc.com, and ran a Moz Crawl Test on it.  According to the crawl test, only 2 of the website's hundreds of pages are receiving internal links.  When I run a similar test on the site using Screaming Frog, I see that most of the pages have at least one internal link.

I'm wondering if anyone has seen this before with the crawl test; and there is a way to get the crawl test to see the internal links?

Thanks!

Thanks Matthew, while I am aware of duplicate content on this site, I wasn't aware it it specific to some of the pages that aren't being indexed.  I will do more research on this!

I’ve included the scenario and two proposed fixes I’m considering.  I’d appreciate any feedback on which fixes people feel are better and why, and/or any potential issues that could be caused by these fixes.  Thank you!

Scenario of Problem I’m working on an ecommerce website (built on Magneto) that is having a problem getting product pages indexed by Google (and other search engines).  Certain pages, like the ones I’ve included below, aren’t being indexed.  I believe this is because of the way the site is configured in terms of internal linking.  The site structure forces certain pages to be linked very deeply, therefore the only way for Googlebot to get to these pages is through a pagination page (such as www.acme.com/page?p=3).  In addition, the link on the pagination page is really deep; generally there are more than 125 links on the page ahead of this link.

One of the Pages that Google isn’t indexing: http://www.getpaper.com/find-paper/engineering-paper/bond-20-lb/430-20-lb-laser-bond-22-x-650-1-roll.html

This page is linked from http://www.getpaper.com/find-paper/engineering-paper/bond-20-lb?p=5, and it is the 147^th link in the source code.

Potential Fixes Fix One: Add navigation tags to the template so that search engines will spend less time crawling them and will get to the deeper pages, such as the one mentioned above. Note: the navigation tags are for HTML-5; however, the Magento site in which this is built does not use HTML 5.

Fix Two: Revised the Templates and CSS so that the main navigation and the sidebar navigation is on the bottom of the page rather than the top.  This would put the links to the product pages in the source code ahead of the navigation links.

We used a trial of Hubspot several months back and I saw a fair amount of traffic from Mountain View that did not show up in our GA account. Chalked it up to crawlers on the site. Don't know if that helps you at all, but you're not alone!

Depending on the CMS you are using, you may be able to add a dynamic element to the URL when more than one filter is being used, for example noidx=true. Then utilize your robots.txt file to disallow all URLs with noidx=true. This should allow pages with one filter to get indexed and crawled, but when a user (or Googlebot) enables another filter, that page would not be entered into the index.

I want to start by saying I am not a user experience expert! I can tell you that from an SEO perspective, building international sites with subfolders can be advantageous because those international sites will inherit the main domain's authority and you can have one linking strategy that can benefit all areas of the site.

As for the user journey, I can provide some ideas for what we've done in the past with our clients. The first would be to have a window display on the main domain.com page that will allow a user to choose their country, and that will then forward them to the appropriate area of the site.

Another tactic we used was to purchase domain names that are unique for each country/language that would then redirect to the appropriate area of the site. We would typically only use these domains in offline marketing material (brochures, business cards etc..) and that way you can tell your prospective customers to visit you at domainuk.com instead of domain.com/en-gb/.

I hope this helps!

I’ve been using Moz (and SEOMoz) for almost 3 years.  During that time, I’ve found them to be very engaged; however, during the last several months, I’ve found a shift in this philosophy—which is a bit disheartening:

• SEOMoz used to have a very simple contact-us page that listed an email to the help desk as well as the office.  Now, they have the locations of the two Moz offices, with no phone numbers or emails.
• Moz’s help hub, used to have a form that could be completed when you were having issues.  Now, there is only a list of community-managed resources to access.

The only way you can find the way to contact their help desk is if something breaks & the website gives you an email help@moz.com.  However, this email account seems to get overloaded quite often and you will get a “Delivery Response Failed” message because their inbox is full.

Does anyone know how to get a hold of Moz directly?  I'm having some issues accessing Moz Analytics and really need help from their support team.

Michael,

Great question.  I always look at Google's Keyword planner to see how it treats it.  Couple things I noticed.  1) Google doesn't see a difference between lower-case and uppercase "E" in e-file.  2) Google lists 30 exact match searches for 1099 e-file software and none for 1099 efile software.

I would probably go with "e-file" as the target keyword, and perhaps use "efile" in the text and alt-image text, just as a backup.

Eric

I think the best course of action depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you are trying to avoid search engines from indexing the paginated pages (since they do not contain the unique content) then a rel canonical should do the trick. If you are trying to associate all the content that is provided on all pages as one, like in your example of the 3 part article, then the rel next/prev is your best bet.

Does your site have a "view all" option?

I was reading this article http://adwords.blogspot.de/2013/05/introducing-keyword-planner-combining.html that says that Google is going to be sunsetting it's popular keyword tool.  As an SEO specialist, I use this tool daily, so I'm concerned about it's impact on my keyword research efforts.

I reviewed the keyword planner (albeit quite quickly) and it doesn't seem to work as efficiently for SEO keyword research.  I'm curious to get others thoughts on the following:

• The new keyword planner tool
• Will the new keyword planner tool be effective for SEO keyword research
• Are there other tools that you've used that have provided good keyword research data (and are they free or paid)

I think it's pretty clear Google is more interested in doing whatever they can do convince marketers that PPC should be the most important tool in your digital arsenal.

Hopefully, bing will overtake Google in the next five years.

While I haven't used the new tool much, what I have used has shown me that it won't be very effective for down-and-dirty type searches. (i.e., quickly doing keyword research for a specific page).  This is because you no longer have the ability to click a checkbox and download options.

I believe that the best options will be to use the Keyword Planner when doing comprehensive research.  For those who can afford it, using a paid service may be a good option.

I think that this is more proof that Google wants to steer more people towards paid advertising.  And while they won't admit it, Google doesn't see the value of offering a free tool that is focused on improving organic rankings.

Thank you Michael.  I skimmed that post when it came out, but need to look it over more thoroughly.

Eric

My client, www.warehouse-lighting.com, has all the links to its category pages on a left-side navigation structure.  Their competitor, www.prolighting.com has all of its category-page links listed under the drop-down menu of the top-level navigation.  I’m wondering if one way is better than the other for SEO and why?

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the update; just to clarify, Moz states on the link labled "here" that you included that they take email; however, it is spotty at best.

Eric

Bing Webmaster Tools offers a similar tool.  While it isn't as good as Google's previous keyword tool because there aren't as many people searching on Bing; it works very much like the old Google Keyword Tool.  The chief differences IMO are that you can't easily select certain keywords to download (however, you can download quickly), and Bing Uses "Strict" search rather than Exact/Broad/Phrase match.

I think Duane Forrester and the people at Bing appreciate what SEO'ers do and want to help them create a better search environment.