Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Syed,

At this point it is all automated, there is no webmaster input (other than removing the sitelinks that you do not want to show up under Google WMT) or schema to help with this.

Also note, that sitelinks are search query specific. Example the same homepage for a site can display different results based on the query, in this case with sitemaps or not, at times schema might be displayed instead of sitemaps; meaning other schema that is set up can at times take away from the sitemaps that you are trying to display.

Some say that it is authority based and the more authority your site has, the sooner the sitelinks show up. However with a great structured site, for example a Wordpress site with easy to follow permalink structure, sitemaps, no duplicate content. I have seen even non authoritative and new domains showing up with sitemaps quickly.

More info from Google:

"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."

Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/47334?hl=en 

Hope it helps!

A great resource here: https://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/

Also a common misconception is that if you havent created listings in local directories they are not there, sometimes services generate listings for you, and at times with incorrect, or partially correct information. All your listings should have identical NAP (Name, Adderess, Phone, Email, and Website) for most benefit. and this service https://getlisted.org/ actually locates any current listings in directores etc. that you may have so that you can claim, fix, and update your listings.

Hope this helps

Hi Dario,

Authority is a superior metric for the following reasons:

1. Twitter followers could just be spam accounts and not genuine followers

2. Authority is usually based on things such as retweets, mentions, and responses meaning that you are engaging your community and your tribe or a following actually is responding to your shares.

Therefore 100 followers that retweet and engage your shares, will be more meaningful than 1000 followers with no shares, retweets, etc.

Hope this helps!

Well first see if the promo works if it does and numbers make sense, you can apply the unconditional free shipping for a while if the behavioral economics of peoples choices are similar in a sense that they treat the promo and actual shipping change the same way, you can leave unconditional. shipping as is, if not revert back to the initial pricing.

3 Stage:

1. Promo test

2. Change shipping rate on the website, and try unconditional for a while

3. Keep or revert back

Hope this helps

If you are going for content and landing pages. Its hard to beat Wordpress (.org not .com). The search engines seem to love how Wordpress platform is set up for content publishing, and the community to support this platform is huge and one of the nicest around. Its proven to scale well with larger news sites as well.

Hope this helps

Hi Jonathan,

Domain vs Page authority: http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority (includes a bit on how to influence/grow domain authority, and page authority would be focusing your SEO efforts on one page as opposed to the whole website)

Also Karl has a great response here: http://moz.com/community/q/what-s-more-important-page-authority-vs-domain-authority

As for www or not. Choose and stick with one, its important in terms of SEO link building to have consistency when you are building links to your pages. So either http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com is fine but choose one.

Also do a 301 permanent redirect to the preferred choice. Without this you might run in to these issues.

Hope this helps

Hi Tyler,

This should do it. If you don't do this facebook will scan all the pics and give a user an option to choose out of the scanned images. If the above is used once it will give one default image to be selected. You can use multiple og:image tags to allow the user to chose multiple default images that you have selected.

Hope this helps!

Hi Miriam,

Thanks for all your consistent help, and just to provide my input:

1. It does not look very natural to those extremes, similar to having a backlink profile from one source, it could potentially look like a local directory, and if the site is not of that nature, Google should not rank them for that.

2) I want to look at the current Google structure of local results and organic results.

For local business with NAPs, Google places is the solution, granted it still doesnt work for all local searches + keywords, and might not give you meta description, it will easily tell you its a local physical business or a franchise of big national company but that still has a local presence.  I think Google is improving very much in this.

Now after the Google Places results you still have organic results, this area in my eyes is a fair game to all, to rank for keyword plus local, and leave the spam filtering up to Google. What I mean by this, its Google's job to rank quality content vs for example Post-Gazette spam, In same terms I think Google should rank high quality pages in the organic even if they are for every city, granted it would be really tough to produce unique great content with every city, that is not thin, duplicate, and in the future social + social share proof. Where domain authority monopolies would not fly as the do now, but Page authority of great content would dominate the organic SERPS.

3. Would I recommend this to a national company, probably not at that scale for the reason of unnatural scale of this type of content. I would recommend for top or key cities and if budget permits go for longer tail unique search keywords with that city. As a diversification of content vs looking like yelp directory.

Yes this is a totally normal procedure. But as in everything you do with wordpress or otherwise please BACK-UP FIRST. But the procedure is standard and is done often.  Both are quality plugins with Yoast definitely being the most popular choice. So a switch between the two is natural.

Here is the step by step guide:

http://yoast.com/all-in-one-seo-pack-migration/

Hope this helps

Hi,

1. Yes you can contact the owner to ask for removal. It might or might not be worth your time.

2. You can do that too. Or actually the best way to do this proactively in the future, if you are using wordpress, is using RSS footer option or manually set this up that will display the original full link of the article, this way it is automatically there as the scrape your RSS feed. This would be my top pro-active suggestion.

3. You can do this manually with Google Webmaster Tools and/or Copyscape, or also you can set up Google Alerts for each most that you have done that will notify you when the content is scraped.

For detailed info how to do some of this see this article also make sure to read the comments they are informative as well: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/content-scrapers/

As far as actively fighting this, many say, it is not worth it, as long as you take precautionary steps to make sure that you always outrank the scrapers, with methods such as the RSS footers for each article you publish.

Hope this helps!

Notices are exactly what they are. They confused me a bit off the bat too since they are on the same page as warnings and errors. But they are just what they are notices.

For example if you had no idea that your site was rebuilt, you would appreciate the notices for rel can, to let you know whats going on. But again these are not errors or warnings

Hope this helps!

Hi Samantha,

It was posted on a Google forum Feb 2nd of some users experiencing this

Picked up by SERoundtable on the 6th, and then by others.

However, I haven't seen anything but this instance of it. It might be rolled out to other areas possibly.

Hope this helps

Hi Instabill,

You can also create another landing page, with home being your initial landing page, create the second one at hompage.com/offshore-merchants-accounts and see how it fares

It depends. Here is how I prefer my snippets:

If its an article or blog post I prefer authorship.

If its a business page, service page, review, testimonials page, product page, etc. I prefer star rating.

Hope this helps

Great idea.  Not necessary needed for every page.  Just a robots.txt file in the root directory with:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This should be sufficient for all the pages until you launch. Just remember set a Google reminder or some other reminder to turn it off When the site is live.

Also remember if you have a robot.txt file in any other directory other than the root, it should be updated accordingly as well.

Hope this helps

Also want to comment on 800 number vs local number. Generally for a local small business, a local phone number is preferred. And yes, we use it in the meta description, because it works!

There is a way to display a lot of content (assuming its great relevant content) but not all at once:

http://jqueryui.com/accordion/ accordion and similar hide-until-clicked-to-reveal features will allow for clean design and allowing you to add great content.

Btw jquery is by no means the only way of making this happen there are different code snippets or even frameworks and shortcodes if you are using a content management system to make this happen

Let me know if this helps

Not all that important, as in your case saving Face

UPDATE - Identical name across is nice for creating alerts for things such as reputation management or for others to quickly find multiple social networks profiles with your brand name. But as long as you link these social profiles such as G+ google will honor that connection and see the link between your brand and profile

"Great Steak! Great fun! A.1.!"

Semi-creative way of saying you are #1, and that you want to be listed first on an alphabetical order directory

Yea this makes sense as others have said that Cloudflare is trying to say that TTFB is not the most important metric, and so they published this study, as it aids their business model.

I would do just that listen to Google dev vs Cloudflare. Also the way I think about it even if their studies are true, where for the overall benefit TTFB would have to increase if you are using some compression, you still need to work and decrease your TTFB either way, that is just intuition. I apologize if I made it seem that TTFB is to be ignored, because Cloudflare state's that quite boldly,

Again some things that affect TTFB:

1. Move your website to a faster/better server (If an option)
2. Use a CDN or something similar to reduce the load on the server (repeated requests to a server will increase the TTFB)
3. Reduce the time the server spends processing the request for information (sent above) and more here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10938682/how-to-reduce-server-wait-time

Hi Ruben,

With citations, you always start with matching the address with your local post office, like USPS uses. This is important for things such as the difference between using Ste or Suite for names, St vs Street, etc. Google tends to honor the decisions of your local post office.

Pertaining to the zip code, 5 digit zip code is still the king for consistency. Main reason being is that most places still allow only 5 digits for zip code vs 9 digits.  One camp may say well 5 + 4 is still consistent but gives extra location info, but I haven't seen any local benefit for "+4" other than the fact that it helps with identification for the local post office. But in terms of local SEO NAP consistency trumps in my opinion, and I totally agree with William on both accounts.

If you can opt out of leaving +4 I would do so. When it comes to adding your zip code on Google it gives you an example of 5 digits, even though it gives you a link to the USPS site which will give you 9 digits. And I would match Googles NAP. You should not be penalized for this on Bing end, if you choose to leave this out. Can you be penalized if you leave the +4 in? Maybe (due to inconsistency) but most likely not.

Hope this helps!

Hi Igal,

Do you work for incapsula, you are mentioned as a Mod on the blog?

I have heard great things about incapsula from others, but in terms of TTFB is it better than cloudflare? If so, how so?

Also any other ways that it excels Cloudflare? any ways its inferior to Cloudflare in your opinion?

Thanks I am really looking for more info, as I had great results with Cloudflares features and offering, wondering if I should give Incapsula a run

Thanks

1. Not critical but helps and gets a message across much better visually.

2. Speaking of visually and what to tag, this infographic gives you a general start of what to tag: http://moz.com/blog/a-visual-guide-to-rich-snippets

3. Rel=author is one type out of many ways to add rich snippets described in schema.org.  Used to show in SERPs the author of the article.

Hope this helps

They’re going to switch to white-hat only for a few months<<<<<

Looks like we have a bigger problem here, that needs to be dealt with first!

The best post/information I came across was what Geoff has written here: http://moz.com/blog/site-speed-are-you-fast-does-it-matter

Under How important is Site Speed? In two words summary of Google and Matt Cutts reply is that its a factor, but a very small factor of the many factors involved in rankings.

I am also interested in this question as much as you are, but in my efforts I haven't seen a noticeable change in rankings just solely related to speed, this includes TTFB and other speed improvements.

Having said that. TTFB and overall speed optimization is important in conversions on your site and ultimately in providing better user experience, which is always really important.

This leads to another question that you can ask, did improving TTFB improve conversions, or lower bounce rate, etc? This also is a great question, that I am curious in as well.  From my end I did not have a client that was that worried, or had a horrable TTFB that I could measure and notice a difference, but very interested if someone had this effect

Hope this helps

Or push the limits a bit and go for moz.gov.  Online marketing education for the central intelligence, and so forth...

Its edu, and .gov links that we are after ;D

They exist for Google maps local and so it might be connected now: http://maps.google.com/help/maps/richsnippetslocal/

People have seen it as early as May/June of this year: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-local-important/6642-more-google-local-changes-location-links-rich.html

Yoast Premium was primarily created for higher end support purposes. The free version should do most of the functionality of the premium the redirect portion can be supplemented with other great alternative plugins currently out there. If support is key its worth it for that.

Hope it helps!

http://www.wpkube.com/wordpress-seo-plugin/ this article just came out as a one of the many guides to Yoast's Wordpress SEO.  I am surprised it mentioned:

• Use meta keywords tag: Google reportedly doesn’t use the keywords that your enter for your posts but as Google isn’t the only show in town, you might want to check this box.Recommendation: check

1. I stopped using meta keywords tag because Google doesn't use it any more, plus if you are in a competitive field by using keywords you are giving free keyword research to your competitors? Does any one still use meta keywords here? If so why?

2. Google doesn't use keyword tags, has anyone experienced a dis-benefit to meta-keywords tag from Google ie. dropped rankings etc.?

Maybe not in ranking per se. But if you are signed in as you search, and your google plus profile happened to somehow interacted or be connected-with the person (especially if he is really a well known and well connected ie a lot of people have circled him/her on G+); for those signed in users the article might have showed up on the first page (lets say) and with no authorship or someone else might not even show up.

With this in mind I would keep the author that has the most influences or people that have circled him, or that has the most activity on his/her Google+ network.

Again Google is saying one thing, but with the move of making the search more social this is not unlikely. This also in Google's eyes may not be a pure "ranking" process but more related to "displaying relevant info" from your friends on the G+ network.

Just some thoughts

The easiest and yet very professional looking way of making a video would be animoto.com

If you have pictures, you select the music and and titles, and you can tell a great story. If you take good pictures, that is. You can also do the same with videos instead of pictures, on animoto.

The key here is to use images and videos that are done in well lit environments. And audio needs to be as clear and noise free as possible. This can be solved by using background music and telling your products story visually.  At the end of the day, Lighting and Audio make a great video... well and great product/story

Hope this helps! Again this is if you are starting out and want to do it your self and not waste too much time, and still get a great result.

Outsourcing, if you record your own footage its very easy to find a person to edit and compile that for you. As for recording you need an actual person nearby.  Contacting Film departments at your near by university or college might be a great place to start looking for cheaper price, as this can get expensive.  But the students should be familiar with HDSLR technology that is rocking the film industry with great images coming out from cheaper cameras and combined with great lighting and audio you can get great videos.

Hi Chris,

You are correct that keyword stuffing is no longer a legit SEO practice, and it is not ideal for user readability. Can you still get away with it sure. However, it is not a long term strategy as at any moment Google can pull its plug on you and de rank or penalize these efforts.

A better approach is to rank one keyword per page, you can rank for all the terms and potentially even higher then trying to rank one page for 3 terms. This is a better approach for users and Google alike.

To step into the shoes of the competitors. There was a time when the competition was low and ranking for multiple keywords per page was doable and so you had limited pages, and many words to rank for, so that is what you went after. Back in the day keyword stuffing was the way to go. As a result, companies such as Morton Buildings could easily rank for them. Currently they have built up the authority and the traffic for these terms, and so they are easily ranking top position for short tail (two word) competitive keywords. So in their eyes, they may even have in-house SEOs that understand that keyword stuffing is a no-no; however, they are currently ranking for these terms, and they may not want to touch and change what is not broken in their eyes. As soon as Google or other search engines take action on this, they will have to take appropriate measures to change and fix things up.

Again, for someone starting out in small business, at this point, going for multiple keywords per page is not a realistic approach. You have much better shot going after one keyword per page. Even a long tail keyword such as "small wooden horse barns" vs competitive "horse barns" to try to rank competitively.

Hope this helps!

Hi Gina,

A great way to think about this is: when you +1, like, share, or retweet content, it is counted in its one social network. So if you click (for example) Facebook share this article via your share plugin, your plugin does not count the share, but Facebook does, or Twitter, or Google+.  So you are free to switch between social share plugins until you find one that suits you best.

One word of caution for plugins such as Discus or CommentLuv, they have their own counters and likes, because they are proprietary to their own platform and so if you have been using one commenting system and you switch to another those may or may not transfer. But for things like Social Sharing Buttons type plugins. They just pull the data from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Linked in etc.

You can test this with a tool like this: http://www.sharedcount.com/ for a URL

Hope this helps

I have noticed the same thing it takes a while for your profile to display the points even when you hover over the image and more points are displaying. But rest assured within a day or so the system propagates and adjusts on all the areas to match. If you have no activity and the points after few days doesnt show up let us know

Hi Joni,

This guide should help you setup up bit.ly or any other shortening service to be tracked in Google Analytics:

Guide

Hope this is what you were looking for

Sign in to Moz. Top Right Click on the Person Icon next to the question mark and search icon

Then: Billing and Subscription -> Billing Information (Second Tab) -> Bottom half (Invoice History)

Click VIEW on the relevant date in question

Hope this helps

No it does not, and here is one glimpse as to why:

"Google does indeed sometimes launch algorithms just for the English language but when possible, Google does try to launch them globally."

More info: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-we-fight-search-spam-in-40-localized-countries-internationalize-our-spam-algorithms-168785

Hope this helps

Wordpress is SEO wizard's dream.  It is at its core a content publishing system and all great SEO is highly focused on content and great platform to create, setup, display, archive, and categorize it.

Like Devanur said, the plugins and more importantly the vast community supporting and running it generally understands SEO well. Various plugins allow vast number of customization's and tweaks to SEO.  To allow a holistic approach to cover most if not all foundational on-page SEO needs.

Hope this helps, also if you have any specifics about this feel free to ask as well, or dive in to Wordpress and never look back

Significant repetition of the word "Kingspan" will not cause a negative mark, excessive or keyword stuffing will. I am not sure exact ratio that moz uses for their keyword stuffing, or bettter yet not many know Google's ratio for keyword stuffing. In your case it looks natural.  You have short descriptions and single word mentions of kingspan. If you had much more text, and say kingspan in every sentence, or better yet if you had two or more word keyword, ex: appliance repair atlanta in that exact order in every sentence that would look un natural..

Also your page is a shop page with various versions of the product aka a list so perfectly normal repetition. Great work you've earned "Grade A"

http://seogadget.com/links-data-excel-seomoz-api/ would using something like this help directly?

Also others have used Netpeak with Parallels for Mac

Hope this helps

Hi Oliver,

"Ratings in Google Product Search consist of an aggregate ratings score with snippets of customer reviews from third party sites and from Google Checkout which are based on your store name and the registered domain."

These ratings from Google come from _"various sources" _including:

Bizrate(Shopzilla), Pricegrabber, Epinions, Yahoo, Review Centre, Viewpoints, Google Checkout Reviews, Reseller Ratings, Trustpilot, RateItAll.com, eKomi, and more.

To read more the above is taken from here

PS Google Checkout is no longer a place where reviews can be acquired as it is being cut.

Hope this Helps!

I will answer your 3 specific options and general thoughts at the bottom:

1. Yes you have the correct game plan here.  Postal code may or may not help unless it is specifically searched for.

2. Unique content is the name of the game, each neighborhood/area will have their own unique elements you can write about in your content and this will engage the user and bring familiarity and will rank better, and this solves duplicate issues.

3. Greater area reach is hard unless you are dominating with reviews or other local listing factors. The goal is having a physical location close to your area of intent.

"product is expensive so this justifies" - does this justify potentially opening another physical location to be closer to the searcher?

Also how is the current showroom main location doing, with search and its response? Is it in the target area, is it reaching customers well?

Removing was probably a safe bet. Why are you considering putting it back?

Does it help your customers? No, then dont put it back. Yes, then maybe, why does it look over-optimized to you?

Can you explain a bit more of what you mean by, "The product name in the product column is the name from the actual website I am tracking. As such, my keyword was appearing sometimes up the 30 times." ? Is it in a product descriptions with significant amount of information that is relevant to the customer? If so, then you can edit the text to make sure your keyword density is below 10% or 5% just to be on the safe side. Unless you mean something else by the product column. Like Peter said adding relevant content to balance the keyword ratio could really help, fundamentally relevant content is great its great for SEO, if that is possible.

Actually 301s are good, and many times the way to go, for more clarification check this out:

http://moz.com/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use

Hi Fabrizo,

This has been addressed before hope this helps: http://moz.com/community/q/seo-moz-poor-rankings-reporting

One great answer is contacting moz aka submit a support ticket

Hope this helps

Hello SamuEU,

1. Just creating folders or pages for the sake of keywords is useless thing to do solely for ranking, unless it helps with categorization for example, shop.com/shoes/nike/

2. en.blog.com vs blog.com/en/ work the same way, If you are moving sites, its a bit easier to move a blog/en/ site you dont have to deal with subdomains.

Another thing to consider generally the closer the page is to the domain tends to rank more.  All else equal:

shop.com/nike/ will tend to rank higher than shop/clothes/shoes/nike/ but its a small factor again if categories are needed and make sense go with categories.

Hope this helps

Right after Moz added me into the their beta. I didn't see any info in the analytics, if I remember correctly. After sometime, I got to see some campaigns with data and one with out data, and one campaign that is showing up in the original crawl/ranking reports but not yet in the new moz analytics.

I was added to the beta about a week ago for the record.

Also have this message up top: You can now set up new campaigns in Moz Analytics! We've already migrated at least one of your existing campaigns over from PRO, and any existing campaigns that have not been migrated over will appear on your dashboard soon.

See if you have any message up top on your moz analytics home page, and/or

Wait a few days if not please contact moz support directly. Thanks and hope this helps Schwaab.

1. Not all keyword terms are localized

2. Even those that are localized organic results follow below.

For both of those geo-specific keywords are needed to rank organically.

Hope this helps

Haven't used it. But there is a Tag Assistant G+ Community where questions like this are asked often, might be worth a shot to ask here as well:

https://plus.google.com/communities/105448214237192581344

Hope this helps