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From what I can tell, map packs are NOT considered in the new Search Console data.
I have a client who is killing it in Maps, but is still recovering from an organic penalty making the site basically non-existent in organic ranks for anything that isn't brand. None of what the website ranks for in Maps is being counted from what I see, since the Search Console is only showing branded stuff.
Yeah, I figure it's a glitch, but never seen it before, and with their mobile stuff rolling out, I could see them testing title shortening tactics.
Still happening in incog every time, and never when I'm logged in.
Beginning today, when I search in incognito mode, Google is giving me extremely limited titles, and not really going off of the title tag. The results are horrible for users, and make me nervous as an SEO. Image attached below:
Just that one significant change in my client pool, but it's also the only client that had a large discrepancy between Google reviews and Yelp. My other clients have consistent averages, and it seems like there would only be a noticeable spike if there was a discrepancy.
Any word on if Google is using those reviews less in the local ranking algorithm?
I have a client who has an average 4 stars on most sites, but had a much lower score on Yelp. Last night, he spiked in maps for some big keywords, almost like Yelp wasn't being considered anymore.
Associating with Yelp is my first thought too, but it seems unlikely.
If I had to guess, maybe a competitor or disgruntled employee destroyed an existed listing that had strength a ranked well? If that's the case, this listing should drop off soon.
It could settle. Also, there's a "crawl control" feature in Bing webmasters, if you haven't tried that yet.
Are you running paid search ads as well? If so, I usually notice Bing bot being very active at the beginning of a campaign.
Keep in mind, if you want to use this character, a lot of people may not see it in the SERPs, and it could just make your site look glitchy like the attached image.
The focus keyword is just a little tool to help you in the backend. You can focus on more than one keyword if you'd like, just check each keyword individually in the tool if you want to use it.
The Yoast SEO plugin is a good one to go with. Your title tags are changing in the code, so it's not the plugin.
Sometimes (and more often in recent months), Google will rearrange or rewrite a title for their search results. The most common way I see them do it is: "Brand Name: Title Content." You can only attempt to change this with the title tag, but Google still might alter it depending on the query searched to find the site.
Thanks Kate!
I didn't know that about the Facebook relationship. I'm seeing some improvement, and it looks like it's due to changes like the ones you're mentioning. It's like Bing/Yahoo are just a couple years behind and are still using factors Google has moved past or doesn't pay as much attention to.
EMDs do seem to have more significance in Bing, but that doesn't help me optimize his existing site.
Thanks for the input.
Thanks for the input. This is client that cannot be convinced to change his focus from Yahoo! and his ranks are great on Google.
Everything I research, and my other clients' performances, suggest good SEO isn't search engine specific, but it appears to be in his case.
I have a client who is very focused on getting ranks in Yahoo! Convincing him that focusing on Google is much more important isn't going to happen. He uses Yahoo! He ranks very well in Google, and his site is relatively well-made with no glaring on-page issues. His backlink profile is also not an issue.
I'm trying to find ways to rank specifically for Yahoo! since we're ranking well in Google and the client cares a ton about Yahoo! I know Yahoo! uses Bing's algorithm, but results aren't identical in the two engines.
Does anyone know of big, glaring difference in the two algorithms that would result in great Google ranks, but almost non-existent Yahoo! ranks?
I have him in Bing webmasters, his local SEO and citations are good, his backlink profile is good, and his on-page is decent.
Then you'll need to go off the data you have. The keyword planner is still a good tool to use, it just can't be 100% trusted. You can also play with the Google auto-suggest (waterfall) that pops up as you type things in. The suggestions are based on search volume.
There are also keyword research tools out there that can help. SEMRush, SpyFu, etc.
Also look at competitor sites that already sell the product. See what they are targeting in their title tags and H1s.
It's important to look at webmaster and analytics data for this. The keyword planner isn't exactly accurate. I see traffic coming from keywords all the time that don't have a search volume in keyword planner, or have a vastly different number in keyword planner when compared to the data I get other places.
I think it takes a bit more digging than that, and you also need to consider the long-tail effect from the keywords you're optimizing for.
Asking some of the clients of the business how they search or look for your products can be very helpful.
With that being said, keywords with high volume in the keyword planner do usually offer much more traffic, but also much more competition.
To Google, there is not. The R=301 at the end of the rewrite rule defines it as a 301 redirect, so it's practically the same thing. For a one-off redirect I wouldn't use the rewrite format. This is usually for when you need to grab big chunks of URLs and redirect them all at once. Still, if it works this way, there's really nothing wrong with it from the redirecting standpoint. If there was, when people used it for large quantities of redirects, it wouldn't work.
When you say "Tab" I take it you mean the anchor text of the homepage link in the navigation. If that's the case, I think keeping it as "Home" is just fine. The additional keyword specific anchor text juice you get from that change doesn't outweigh user experience. People know and expect there to be a "Home" type button. Changing it may confuse people when they don't need to be.
Yelp and Google My Business are musts for just about any industry, but after that, the priority changes depending on the industry. Industry-specific directories can play a significant part.
Here is a great guide where priority is broken down by industry: http://moz.com/learn/local/citations-by-category
Make sure the 301s you put in place are functioning properly. Did you 301 all pages from the old site to the new one? Did you redirect them at a page-level or just grab all the old URLs and redirect them all to the new root domain?
Also, look at analytics and GMT for the old and the new domain. Do the increases on the new domain correspond with the drops from the old domain? Maybe there some spots on the old domain that are still there and need to be redirected? The data in these spots should help you determine if something is out of whack.
How long ago was the domain change? This kind of drop can be expected for a couple weeks, but too much longer than that, and something else may be wrong.
ColeLusby is right. Prices vary greatly depending on a lot of factors on your side and on the client's side.
For you: your talent level, experience, and what you think your time is worth all come into play
For the client: his/her industry, project scope, kind of website, and what they can contribute to the campaign should be considered.
Only you can know the answer to this.
When Google sees more than one canonical reference on a page, they will more than likely ignore all canonical hints that page has. Keep that in mind when you make your decision. If the canonical tags are working on most pages, but not on that one specific page with ?m=0, you might want to keep them implemented. If the issue is larger than that and you're seeing it effect your site in a negative way, remove them and see how Google responds.
Here's a link to canonical information I refer to: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html
Google doesn't care where the email comes from to request a link removal. I've never seen a disavow report where the email of the requester is even mentioned. All Google wants to see in a disavow report is which links you want to disavow, and how much of an effort your made to get them removed manually.
The reason your SEO is requesting an email address at your domain is likely because he's using software to request link removals, and that software requires the email. Services like Rmoov are great for streamlining the disavow process, but in order to use Rmoov, you have to prove you're part of company, which requires the email address.
So the website itself is being redirected? This has the potential is get it removed from the index. A 301 redirect tells search engines that the site has moved permanently, which means you're recommending they not index it, since it's not there anymore.
Also make sure to submit a sitemap to Google Webmasters to see if there are any errors there.
How old is the website? It's possible it hasn't been indexed yet. If the site is more than a couple months old, then that isn't the issue. For some reason Google isn't indexing your website.
When you say "exact" URL when you search, are you including the ".com" in there? Your URL without the ".com" will pull up other website that rank better than yours. IF that's not the case, there are several other potential causes, including robots tags on the pages, duplicate or thin content, a robots.txt file, etc. If you haven't yet, add your site to Google Webmasters and see if you can gain any insights there.
Webmasters doesn't yet support change of address for HTTPS. They're working on it. Yes, it's insane that this wasn't handled before the HTTPS ranking factor announcement.
Here's an article for more information: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-change-address-https-issue-18971.html
It depends on a lot of factors, but in general, I don't like to put category subdirectories in unless they are necessary. For example, if a category page is useful to your audience, then it might be a good idea, but in this case it doesn't sound like one would be.
Also, consider how your audience will react to the URL: domain.com/attorneys looks a lot better to people, I think, than domain.com/industries/attorneys, which implies you're marketing to a bunch of different industries and may lead them to believe this is solely a marketing play and you don't actually understand their needs. A page right off the root seems more exclusive and like you care more about their industry.
These are just my opinions. From a strictly SEO perspective, you're fine either way, but I'd still go right off the root.
This is probably due to a couple reasons:
One reason might be your lack of links pointing to your site. There's aren't a lot of websites linking to you, and the ones that are, aren't of high authority.
Another reason might be that the blog network you're apart of appears to be selling links. I'm not sure if Moz's DA takes that into consideration, but I know Google does. You can see what I'm talking about under the "SEO" heading here: http://www.etailpr.com/bloggernetwork/advertisers
That's pretty strange. There isn't another web person there who might have cleaned things up without telling you? Or maybe your server company?
I don't see how these URLs could be indexed if they never existed, so at some point, someone created those pages and they were around long enough to get indexed. Are there any weird spikes in crawl rates or search queries since the launch of the subdomain?
I've seen this kind of hack before. The hacker just drops some folders full of HTML files into the roots. That's why all those links have a two characters sub directory. That was the folder the HTML files were in before someone likely just saw those folders in the root and deleted them. Maybe they didn't realize what they were doing and thought they were just doing the house cleaning?
Doing a "site:mshowells.com/ci/" or "site:mshowells.com/sp/" can show you what I'm talking about.
Looks like a hack. A hacker somehow got in at some point, dropped a bunch of Ugg Boot affiliate marketing pages and left. Not sure why they are 404ing unless someone already discovered these when they happened and cleaned them up. That could've happened months and months ago.
The 404s shouldn't effect your SEO, but the hack has potential to if it hasn't been cleaned up properly. Do you see a spike in search queries if you look back over the last year or two? That may indicate when the hack occurred and was cleaned up. It's important to know how the hack was cleaned up, so you can ensure that the vulnerabilities have been resolved. If they haven't been, your site is still open to additional attacks, and spam like that can hurt your SEO.
For Wordpress, it's important to keep not only Wordpress itself up to date, but also your plugins (and only use well established plugins, and do a little research on them to make sure people aren't screaming about hacking issues). Hackers search for vulnerabilities in all sorts of places.
The additional asterisk shouldn't do you any harm, although standard practice seems to be just putting the "/".
Does it seem like Google is still crawling this subdomain when you look at webmasters crawl stats? While the disallow function in robots.txt will usually stop bots from crawling, it doesn't prevent them from indexing or keeping pages indexed that were before the disallow was put in place. If you want these pages removed from the index, you can request it through webmasters and also use meta robots noindex as opposed to the robots.txt file. Moz has a good article about it here: http://moz.com/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts
If you're just worried about bots crawling the subdomain, it's possible they've already stopped crawling it, but continue to index it due to history or additional indicators suggesting they should index it.
Telling someone there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty is misleading. While it may not officially be called a "duplicate content penalty," you can get penalized for duplicate content, and not protecting yourself from it opens you up.
So when someone suggests to clean up duplicate content, it's bad form to butt in and imply that there's no need, since no such penalty exists. That's all I was trying to say. Won't spam this thread anymore discussing it.
Except, according to the page I linked, duplicate content is now one of four common factors when determining a thin content manual action. There isn't a big difference anymore, it's now the same category, at least as far manual actions.
Care to explain?
Tough to say there's no such thing, when there absolutely is. Here it is straight from the horse's mouth: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604719?hl=en
Step #1 in removing a thin content manual action penalty according to Google: "Check for content on your site that duplicates content found elsewhere."
I don't think you or they would want to throw away the effort they already put in, assuming it's quality, unique content. 301 the old pages, and move the content over to the new site. That way, if there is any juice, it'll be transferred, but even if there isn't, people may find those posts useful, and this way you don't risk a duplicate content penalty.
Theoretically it might be better from an SEO to have English on the root. If there's already something established on the root, it could be the right choice. Google sees subdomains as brand new domains, so you're starting from scratch.
If you have a lot of other languages that already visit the site, though, you msystem turn off more people than you attract.
I think both options are viable, and it comes down to your demographic split in analytics.
If the majority of your audience in English-speaking, then the best option would be option #2. This eliminated an extra step and gives the majority of your users what they want, faster.
If there's a more even split in the traffic for languages you write for, a landing page to decide on a language may be more useful.
It's also possible to auto-detect the language and automatically direct users to the appropriate page, so you might want to consider that as an option as well.
Webmaster's Tools has been pretty good to me regarding telling me about 404s I may have missed after a migration, but using the tactic I described really limits missed URLs, assuming you have a good grasp on the subdirectories of your site.
Phasing is an option, but say, in the case of a redesign or domain migration, I like to do it all at once. That way Google isn't trying to index the website on two different URL structures or domains. Doing it in one shot makes it clear to Google what has happened, since everything is now moved, instead of just a fraction at a time. I'm sure this is a point of debate, and not necessarily the definitive way to do it.
It sounds like your client needs to be educated on how proper link building works. You can't just say, "I need good backlinks, and I need them NOW!"
In order to build good, relevant, safe backlinks, you need to create assets or other ways to attract people to share your content and build links naturally. This takes time and planning. There are quicker grey/black hat ways to build links, but this puts your client's site at risk, and your client needs to know that.
Moz recently came out with a good beginner's guide to link building. Perhaps you can pull some tidbits from that to help your client understand why his/her request is unreasonable. http://moz.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-link-building
The amount of time you need to wait varies widely depending on a lot of things. Google's John Muller said in a recent hangout that the disavowed links aren't all removed from the site at once. It's staggered based on when the links are recrawled and reindexed by the bots. This means you may not see a big jump after a few weeks or months, but instead gradually see improvement over time. Here is the hangout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxqkqGyCaI4
As to the new bad links you've found, you can continue to update your disavow file with new bad links you find, there's no need to constantly submit reconsideration requests.
Assuming not all of your pages hold incredible value and don't get visited a lot, I don't think you'd need to do it in phases. You can save yourself some time by throwing in some regex to grab large chunks of URLs at a time and redirect them that way.
Your more valuable pages should be one-to-one redirected as to not confuse users and to retain the most juice to the right place, but for less important pages, grab a bunch at a time.
One way to do this is:
redirectmatch 301 ^/sub/directory/(.*)$ http://site.com/newdirectory
This would grab all pages under site.com/new/directory/ANYTHING to site.com/newdirectory/.
Hope that helps.
In Webmaster Tools you can see if there are any manual action penalties. Just because there are none there doesn't mean the site isn't penalized, but if there is something there, then it's time to take action right away.
This little tool can help indicate as well if you don't see a manual action, but without historical data like analytics and ranking reports, it becomes more difficult: http://feinternational.com/website-penalty-indicator/
Some SEOs say not to disavow until you know you're hit with a penalty, but I like being proactive.
These links are definitely spammy. These are the kinds of links that take down websites, and when I get a new client with a lot of this kind of stuff, I'll submit a proactive disavow report.
Recovering from a link spam penalty isn't exactly the easiest or fastest thing in the world, so making sure it never gets to that point is important.
don't put your URL in for line 4, keep it as "localhost" like in the example.
Thanks! Although, yeah, not very easy to play with.
The code above will do the opposite.
domain.com/page.html will become domains.com/page
Did you test for that? Usually this is how people prefer their URLs to be, and if they type in the .html, they'll still get to the page.
