Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You think it would be worth setting up a new Analytics code?

Just found this in the landing pages...

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Thanks for the response, Matt.

Any idea how I can correct this then?

Hmm. You could be onto something. Direct traffic has definitely increased in the last month. Although, it spiked before May 7.

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Hey guys,

I have a pressing query that's really puzzled me!

I've just been going through Google Analytics and noticed that there has been a complete drop off of all my organic visitors from May 7. All other traffic mediums are unaffected so there is no issue with the Analytics code recording visits.

I haven't received any penalty and my rankings have actually improved in the last month. This is proper bizarre. Any ideas?

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Hey there,

Does anyone know how I can add another Google Places listing to the following account? The company now has two stores so I'd like to get both listed.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/107389046695957843430/+FinsahomeCoUk/posts

I've tried using https://www.google.com/local/manage but that only appears to let you add a minimum of 10 locations?

Hey there,

I was wondering whether you could help me out on the following;

One of our clients has a Google places listing that we created for their business but it appears to be being blocked - or at least conflicting - with an old listing.

As such, Google appears to be showing the old listing with an outdated URL and company name - rather than the new one. Does anyone know how I can go about removing this listing or showing that the newer one is now more relevant?

Unfortunately, I don't have the logins for the old places listing.

Old listing; https://plus.google.com/105224923085379238289

New listing; https://plus.google.com/b/114641937407677713536/114641937407677713536

I always thought they were essentially the same thing myself but appears there may be a difference?

Any one care to help me out?

Cheers!

Hey guys,

I'm working on a relatively new client and have noticed that all the initial rankings that we have point towards a sub page rather than the home page. Only a branded search appears to bring up the home page which seems really strange.

Any ideas?

Home page; www.geraldmiller.com

Sub page (ranking); www.geraldmiller.com/dwi-dui-defense

I'd need to hire a "good PR person" to get a press release out? Seems a bit extreme.

I can write the PR in co-operation with the client. What I'm looking for is somewhere to place/promote it.

Hey guys,

I'm wondering whether you could point me in the right direction of a reputable PR site to use?

I realise that many of these sites have been devalued over recent years but I wanted to produce something for a client after they struck-up a fairly notable connection with another company in their industry.

Or should I just avoid PR sites altogether?

Oh, and I'd prefer them to be free if possible

Doh! I knew it

Thanks Doug!

Hi everyone,

The Tilde operator, normally used in search engines to find synonyms of the following word, does anyone know if it actually still works? Also where on earth (or keyword) can I find it? (note, i copied it from elsewhere in the title).

I'm sure I've read somewhere that Google maybe cancelling it's effect, but it could be just me imagining things again!

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Hey guys,

I was wondering whether you could offer me some help on something.

One of the site's I'm working on has a blog attached to it and we sometimes accept guest posts from authors. A month or so back we published a blog that has been attracting a number of low-quality backlinks.

Having looked into the matter further, it turned out that the client who had created the guest post was doing something called "tiered link building" and was building crappy links to their guest post content on other websites.

I have subsequently deleted the blog post in question - will this devalue/cancel out the inbound links pointing to the original URL? Or do I need to do something extra? Disavow even?

Comments appreciated!

Thanks Chris,

A good Answer.

best,

Thanks Chris,

What do you thin the negatives would be? Literally, the client wants to redirect site a's man navigation menus to site B.

Would google then look at site a as some sort of link farm / cloaking site?

Hi,

I have a client who have a solid, high ranking content based site (site A). They have now created an ecommerce site in addition (site B).

To give site B a boost in terms of search engine visibility upon launch, they now wish to redirect approx 90% of site As pages to site B.

What would be the implications of this? Apart from customers being automatically redirected from the page they thought they where landing on, how would google now view site A?

What are your thoughts to thier idea. I am trying to talk them out of it as I think its a poor one.

Here is what Google says;

"If your site isn't appearing in Google search results, or it's performing more poorly than it once did (and you believe that it does not violate our Webmaster Guidelines), you can ask Google to reconsider your site."

I've bolded the key bit. According to that, I should be able to submit a reconsideration. Trouble is, there is doesn't appear to be anywhere to option to do it! There is nothing under the Manual Actions tab to click.

Hey guys,

One of the sites I'm looking after took a hit with their rankings (particularly for one keyword that went from 6/7 to 50+) post-Penguin in May. Although, after cleaning-up the link profile somewhat we started to see some slow and steady progression in positions.

The keyword that dropped to 50+ was moving upwards in advance of 20. However, a couple of weeks back, the keyword in question took another slide towards 35-40. I therefore wondered whether it would be best to submit a reconsideration request - even though the site did not receive a manual penalty.

The website has a DA of 40 which more than matches a lot of the competitor websites that are ranking on first page for the aforementioned keyword. At this stage, I would have expected the site to have returned to its original ranking - four-and-a-half months after Penguin - but it hasn't. So a reconsideration request seemed logical.

That said, when I came to go through the process on Webmaster Tools I was unable to find the option! Has it now been removed for sites that don't receive manual penalties?

No offence but that is a proper generic answer.

No, I definitely wouldn't say that. If I wanted a kitchen and I wanted it cheap then I'd say there's a good chance I'd be searching "cheap kitchens".

Just found this...

http://whocallsme.com/Phone-Number.aspx/08712000410/15

After a bit of research I've discovered that all but four of those domains are owned by the same person.

Incredible.

Hey guys,

I've just been doing some searching and couldn't quite contemplate how heavily low-quality and spammy EMDs are still running some Google searches.

Just take "cheap kitchens", for instance.

Here are a list of URLs that appeared;

http://kitchenunitsdoors.co.uk/

http://www.kitchenunits9.co.uk/

http://www.aboutkitchenunits.co.uk/

http://www.cheapkitchenunits1.co.uk/

http://www.cheapkitchensonline.com/

http://www.buycheapkitchens.com/

http://www.cheapkitchenscheapkitchen.co.uk/

http://www.cheapkitchensforsale1.co.uk/

http://cheapkitchensaberdeen.co.uk/

http://www.kitchensderby1.co.uk/

http://www.cheapcheapkitchens.co.uk/

http://kitchen-cheap.co.uk/

http://www.cheapestkitchensinbritain.co.uk/

http://www.cheapkitchenss.co.uk/

http://www.cheaperthanmfi.com/

http://cheapkitchenuk.co.uk/

As you can see, none of them appear to be genuine retailers and are setup purely to influence Google rankings. I'm amazed that Google is still giving so much weight to these types of sites - especially considering how search is meant to be better than it ever was before!

Any insights into why this is?

Thanks Noah.

Any more feedback on this?

Hey guys,

Just wondering, how does Google view reciprocal link building nowadays? I've heard in the past that it's something that Google isn't particularly keen on. However, more recently, I've also read that - as long as the links are decent (and in moderation) - link exchanging is by no means a bad thing.

The reason I ask is that I'm thinking of creating a "resource/recommended links page" for a client of mine. Because of their industry, it's really apparent that attaining links is often only possible if there is the opportunity of a reciprocal link in return. Therefore, I'd need to have a resource/recommend links page of my own.

Is this something I should go ahead with to make it much easier to attain links? Or should I try to avoid reciprocal links and attempt to pinpoint one-way linking opportunities - even if they're thin on the ground?

Any help much as appreciated as always.

Cheers.

We are currently tracking the rankings of a US-based client (we are UK-based) and it appears we are seeing some considerable differences in positions.

To check ranks we often use Fat Rank which can be set to a US-based search and a manual search on Google.com. However, our American client is receiving different results (actually higher positions than we have recorded!) and is claiming to have used both a manual check on Google.com and the following tool.
http://smallseotools.com/keyword-position/

Would anybody be able to tell me how accurate this tool is regarding US-based positions?
We’ve since made use of the tool too and it adheres to the rankings that the US-based client is claiming – rather than our checks using Fat Rank and Google.com.

Cheers Tom.

Exactly the answer I needed!

Hey guys,

Wondering if you good people could help me out on this one?

A few months back (June 19) I disavowed some links for a client having uploaded a .txt file with the offending domains attached.

However, recently I've noticed some more dodgy-looking domains being indexed to my client's site so went about creating a new "Disavow List".

When I went to upload this new list I was informed that I would be replacing the existing file.

So, my question is, what do I do here?

Make a new list with both old and new domains that I plan on disavowing and replace the existing one?

Or; Just replace the existing .txt file with the new file because Google has recognised I've already disavowed those older links?

Thanks for your input guys.

In addition to this, say a keyword has a national search volume of 1,000 exact match searches per month, as my client has. The client ranks, nationally, at position number one. However, the traffic the website receives no-where near matches the available search volume, we are talking less than 50 visits from a keyword that Google says has a search volume of 1,000.

So, is this a direct result of localized results? IE a user types in the search query and contributes to the 1,000 monthly search volume Google says it has, but is then served a local result so the clients site doesn't appear. This would mean that any given website, would never achieve the expected volume of traffic from Google's estimated monthly search volumes?

As the questions says.

I've had some conversations with colleagues of mine and they definitely feel that search query volumes are being heavily affected by localised results - and even more so recently.

So, for instance, you may have a Google UK rank of 3 for a keyword yet be hardly visible in other parts of the UK because of the localised-based results.

Thoughts?

Thanks guys. Yeah, I think no-following is very much the answer here to be on the safe side.

Hey guys,

A little help required.

We are potentially taking on a new client who has over 5,000 image backlinks (4,000 of those from one site) from around 7,000 total backlinks.

Would this be a problem?

It's been noticeable recently that both footer and blogroll links seem to be getting targeted by Google. Would this be the case for images links too? Especially considering the top-heavy nature of the link profile?

Thoughts welcome.

Cheers.

Hey guys,

A client of ours owns an IT company with 20+ locations across the UK. He is looking for a solution to provide each of their 20+ locations with a page or website that they can manage themselves that links directly back to the main site.

His idea is to create 20+ one or two page websites that could all link back to the main central site - aiding the possibility of ranking well for locally-based terms.

At the moment, we have a page for each of the 20+ locations on the main site. However, the client wants to give his franchisees complete control over their web presence.

Would a setup like this work? Would it be logical to have 20+ websites (likely to follow a very similar format) all pointing to one central website? Would we have to "no-follow" links back to main site in order to show we aren't trying to manipulate page rank?

Would creating sub folders on the main site be a better option for each of the 20+ locations?

Any feedback appreciated!

Ahh, good man. That's spot on.

Hey guys,

I'm using Screaming Frog to help locate some broken links on a client's site and I've managed to pick up two. However, I can't seem to find whereabouts they're located on the site in order to fix them!

Is there a way I can do this?

Cheers!

Hi All,

I have a 301 redirect tracking issue.

I have a domain, say www.123.co.uk and I have that domain 301 redirecting to www.abc.co.uk.

Looking in analytics, I do not see any referral traffic sources for the redirect i.e. I do not see www.123.co.uk as a referral (and I know it does sent traffic).

My question is - how can I implement a solution that will show referral traffic from www.123.co.uk  to www.abc.co.uk as a referal in analytics?

Hope that makes sense?

Hi,

Andie, thanks for your input too - again, confirming what I was thinking. Many thanks,

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the reply - i'd rather not give the url out at this point - however I think you have confirmed my thinking on it. It does indeed have the exact same structure, and so yes, its a replication.

Many thanks.

Hi All,

I have a new client site, a static site with navigation across the top, and down the left side.

Two of the menus from the top navigation are replicated in the navigation structure on the left hand side. They have the exact same url structure, they are in fact the same exact page, listed on the site in two areas.

My question is - is this a case of duplicate content, or, as they urls are the exact same, will they be seen as a single page?

A canonical tag on one would be replicated on the other by the CMS - so do I leave it, or try to get them to re-structure removing one of the links? (I doubt they will do this as its a brand new site they just has developed).

Many thanks!

That sounds like an awful lot of links from one site. Is it a footer link? I've previously had this problem with a client of mine. Can you not try to get in touch with this site before you do/don't Disavow?

Hey Lynn,

I've just checked and auto tagging is enabled in AdWords.

So you'd say the PPC clicks have gone under Organic then?

Hey guys,

This month I started running a PPC campaign for a client and have noticed that none of the click data is showing up in Analytics under "Paid".

However, under the "Organic" section, I've noticed that we're gaining a lot more clicks through to the site for some of our targeted keywords than we have been in previous months.

Is this just a coincidence or is the PPC click data being used under the Organic section of Analytics?

I suspect this is the biggest factor in its ranking, you're right. Which shouldn't be the case, of course.

Hey Marcus,

First off, great response. I appreciate the time you've taken out to reply with such detail.

Now, to address the points you've raised;

1. I think we can both agree on that.

2. The keyword is probably more competitive than you think. Like I've just mentioned above, there was a great deal of spam EMD sites infiltrating the search over the past few months and they've only just been removed.

3. It's been there for at least two or three months by my reckoning. The competition was spammy. Now, less so.

4, 5) Interesting. Although, I doubt it's intentional. I know people say the future is "linkless" but this is taking it to the extreme.

Hey Rikki,

The one link they have comes from here;

http://www.globalknives.org.uk/best-quality-kitchen/

Although, I can't see whereabouts it is on the page.

Our client's site is one of those on the second page with decent DA/PA. Only today have I actually noticed the removal of some spam EMD sites from the search that were infiltrating the results. The keyword is probably a lot more competitive than you may think.

Ok, so I'm sure you get the gist of what I'm asking about in my question.

The query is 'diy kitchens' in Google UK and the website is kitchens4diy[dot]com - which is ranking in third from my viewing.

The thing is, the site has just ONE BACKLINK and has done for a good while. Yet, it's ranking really well.

What gives?

Hey guys,

I've noticed that one of our sites have seen some considerable ranking drops for competitive keywords at least a week or so after Penguin was introduced.

I've attached an image to give you a better idea of what I'm talking about. We were ranked around 2nd page for each of the phrases but plummeted to 80+ (although, there has been some movement back towards 50).

I mention Penguin but that really shouldn't have been a factor with this site as it's a relatively new one and all the links have been built naturally.

Any help appreciated!

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Another good answer, Lynn. Thanks a lot. I'll be sure to take on board the advice you've passed on!