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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!

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 really think the main issue is with the robots.txt. If you think about it, all of your blog posts that are not featured on the home page would be inaccessible to Google (since the pagination at the bottom and the main navigation URLs to browse posts all contain "/search"). So once the posts leave the homepage, you're telling Google they shouldn't see them anymore.

I only brought up the issue with "cloaked" text because the second link I saw was to a credit company and a red flag went up in my head screaming SPAM! But it looks to be legitimate.

I would advise you update the robots.txt and create an XML sitemap for all your posts/pages and submit that to Google Webmaster Tools. Should clear things up!

Also, your robots.txt is disallowing "/search" which appears in the URL for all paginated pages on the homepage as well as in your "browse posts" category URLs. I would advise that you remove that line from your robots.txt. If you want to prevent search queries from being indexed, replace that with the following line:

Disallow: /*q=

That should prevent search queries from getting crawled or indexed.

I've only begun looking into your issue however I noticed something odd when looking at the source code of your home page. I did a search for a couple of snippets of code (noindex, meta data, etc..) but when I searched for nofollow, I found a few links that seem to have a fair amount of text associated with them. However I do not see the text on the actual site.

The first instance is in line 1406 of your source code, there is a link to smnt.co.uk and some text about private vehicle registrations yet that link and text is not visible on the home page.

You may want to look in to that, while there may not have been a manual action against you, it's possible that your pages are being caught in Google's algorithm.

Hope that helps

Dave,

I think you're on the right track with the KPI you have listed. We have been making a shift towards removing all keyword data provided by Google Analytics (thanks (not provided)!) and focusing more on landing pages. We still monitor keyword rankings but we try to tie our efforts into the landing pages reports when discussing progress with our clients. As in: "We are targeting X Keyword on Y Landing Page. X keyword's ranking has improved while organic visits to Y landing page have increased". Now it is difficult to get that granular for every keyword/landing page combination, however providing a couple of examples will help show the impact of your efforts and hopefully calm down a client who's seeking #1 rankings for every keyword as soon as they sign a contract!

Hope this helps and good luck!

Hi Jennita,

I thought you assigned my issue (not being able to access analytics) to a customer service manager?  If so, I have heard nothing.

Generally, Moz seems a little more on top of customer service.

Hi Jen,

Thanks for your response.  I have a really simple suggestion that might make this whole process easier (and it came after looking at the link you sent above /help/contact, which I never knew existed).

Instead of placing the "Contact Help" in the navigation menu on the moz.com/help page, why not put a Prominent call to action button next to the phrase "Have a Question? We can help find an answer?"

Having the "Contact Help" in menu may seem like a good spot, but in reality may be kind of hidden.  Just a thought.

Eric

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

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.

I have a site in Bing Webmaster Tools that I no longer work on.  I can't seem to find where to delete this website from my webmaster tools account.  Anyone know how (there doesn't seem to be anything obvious under Bing Help or on a Google Search).

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.

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.

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.

this is cool.  I like it better than ChartIntelligence.  It provide more data.

thanks!

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

Eric

I have a client who's Google Organic visits dropped significantly on June 26th.  I used a chart overlay called ChartIntelligence.  It says that there was an SEOF update on 6/26/2013.  Does anyone know what this update (or any other updates) would be?  Also, where might I find additional info on this update.

I did notice that Moz's algo change tracker listed a multi-week update on June 27, but I'm not sure where to find info on what types of things were impacted by this update.  Any info would be helpful.

Thanks Martijn

Hello,

Within the Moz report from the crawl of my site, it shows that I had 89 Rel Canonical notices. I noticed that all the pages on my site have a rel canonical tag back to the same page the tag is on. Specific example from my site is as follows: http://www.automation-intl.com/resistance-welding-equipment has a Rel Canonical tag  <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.automation-intl.com/resistance-welding-equipment" />. Is this self reference harmless and if so why does it create a notice in the crawl?

Thanks in advance.

Greetings Patricia,

I've also seen this trend.  Many of the sites that I and my team members work on have experienced upticks on direct traffic while organic traffic has dropped. This has been unfortunate, but it hasn't been a significant amount,  perhaps 1%.  I did some research this week on several clients (and removed any info about the clients); I'd be happy to share it with you.  Feel free to reach out directly to me evallee@topfloortech.com.

Eric

Thanks Andie,

I am a pro member, but the keyword difficulty tool has two drawbacks; you can only do 5 keywords at a time; two it doesn't provide recommendations.

Eric

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 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 went to Google Webmaster Tools this morning and found that one of my clients had 11 crawl errors.  However, Webmaster Tools is not showing which URLs are having experiencing the errors, which it used to do.  (I checked several other clients that I manage and they list crawl errors without showing the specific URLs.

Does anyone know how I can find out which URLs are experiencing problems?  (I checked with Bing Webmaster Tools and the number of errors are different).

That makes sense!  Thanks for the clarification!

Alan,

Thanks for the information.  When you say "create your 301s," do you mean to do it in the htaccess file (our client is on an apache server).  If so, wouldn’t the hosting need to be kept live for the 301s to work via the htaccess file?

We are wondering the best way to redirect the traffic from a site that will no longer exist.

The Scenario:
Our client wants to discontinue this website http://www.animalcarepackaging.com/.  We’d like to redirect the traffic from this site to an internal page on our client's other website: http://www.glenroy.com/packaging/.  This internal page is the most appropriate to the content that appears on animalcarepackaging.com (as opposed to just the entire site glenroy.com).

Possible Options We Are Considering:
Option 1: Keep hosting animalcarepackaging.com and add a 301 redirect for all pages to glenroy.com/packaging/.     Our concern with this option is that Google/Bing will see animalcarepackaging.com as a gateway, which could hurt glenroy.com.

Option 2: Keep hosting animalcarepackaging.com and add a 301 redirect so all pages are sent to glenroy.com/packaging/; AND file a change of address with Google and Bing.  We believe this will allow people who have bookmarked animalcarepackaging.com to go to glenroy.com/packaging/; while people searching for animalcarepackaging.com will go to glenroy.com's home page.  We would augment this by posting a message on the homepage of animalcarepackaging.com notifiying users that the site will be discontinued and info will be found at glenroy.com/packaging.

Option 3: Do a change of address with Google/Bing and send all traffic to glenroy.com (rather than an internal page).  Post information on the homepage of animalcarepackaging.com that the site will be discontinued on X-date, and info about animalcarepackaging.com will be able to be found at glenroy.com/packaging.

Looking for feedback on our options and suggestions on how this can be handled.

Hi Chris,
Thanks for your response.  I'm glad you like the look; I agree it can be a cool addition.

However, I was surprised that you stated the sites don't add much code.  If you take a closer look at the code of any of the interior pages of Unique Pad Printing, for example, you will see that the navigation takes up over 200 lines of code.  Original content doesn't appear until you get to line 411 of the code.

Compare this to another site, such as http://www.industrialvacuum.com.  The navigation only takes 30 lines of code, and original content appears in line 124.

Our company has been creating websites where the navigation is developed in such a way as to allow the visitor to get a preview of the image and/or content on that is on the page.   Here are two websites that use this technology:
http://www.uniquepadprinting.com/
http://www.empathia.com/ (On this site, the previews are only available if you click on "Whole", "Productive" or "Safe" at the top of the page.

I'm looking for feedback such as:

• What do you call this type of navigation (We call it look-ahead, but I can't find much info that term on the web)
• Have you experienced any issues with this type of navigation?
• Do you have any recommendations on it?

Some of the things we've seen are:

• It adds the same content to every page of the website
• It creates a lot of internal links
• It can create a lot of code on pages
• It can slow page-load times

Aaron,

Thanks for your response.  I have installed what I believe is the latest version (1.8.21).  I have tried to turn off Google Instant, although this isn’t as easy as I thought.  They removed the ability to turn it off and replaced it with a box where you can check “never show instant results”.  Even when you do this, you still see instant results.

I have the delay between queries set to 12 seconds, so I don’t think that is the issue.  My next steps will be to check the firewall and then delete my current extensions in Firefox to see if any conflict.

Eric

I use SEOBook's RankChecker to do spot checking of keywords for clients or for potential clients.  I like the tool quite a bit, but I've noticed that it recently stopped working at our office (instead of rankings, I just get a series of dashes) but works fine from my home computer.  I'm thinking that it may have to do with our company's firewall.

Anyone have any thoughts?

Thanks for your replay Marko.  I agree that the home page needs a lot of work.

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?

Great info, Michael.  Thanks for the response!