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Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO

Looking to level up your SEO techniques? Chat through more advanced approaches.

  • blacey


    Hi all, I recently watched this webinar http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/microformats-real-life-use-cases and it was very good, but I'm not entirely certain if this is a worthwhile thing to be doing? I have a couple of websites I'm improving the SEO on, and things are slowly picking up but I'm not sure if I should be spending time working on improving my landing pages (once these have been identified) or working on the code side of improving my SEO position. When improving my landing pages I'm asking myself the following questions: What is this page about? (Is it clear through headings or introduction text / imagery Does the page sell the benefits of the product / service in a clear manor? Does the page explain what the product is all about? Is the information easy to read, well positioned on-screen and is the content optimised for 1, maybe 2 distinct keywords. Is there an easy method of communication to the site owner if the visitor is interested in the product or service and wants either a quote or wants to find out more. Are there a few links to other relevant areas of the site Granted at the moment I'm in the process of teasing the relevant information out of the client but that's like trying to get blood out of a stone, so I'm exploring other avenues, while they get more content. I am considering going down the route of guest blogging, to possibly get a one-way followed backlink, but again this seems like a lot of effort with no clear guarantee if my efforts in doing this will pay off in being able to generate more leads / enquiries from the websites. Would anyone like to share their thoughts on this?

    | blacey
    0
  • Boodreaux


    Was ranking on first page for over 80 terms  with over 25 in the top 3 and my main keyword was ranked #4...now my twitter account has replaced my website for #4 in the rankings for the main keyword.  I now  have ZERO Rankings for all keywords for my website.  I have no idea what happened. **  Is there anyway for me to check with Google to see why I have been wiped off the map in the search rankings? ** Boo

    | Boodreaux
    0
  • mj775


    I recently launched a website and used local directories, web directories and guest blogging as a means of getting links to the site. Within 60 days the site was ranking on the first page for a highly competitive keyword. It was hovering on the first page for about two weeks before it plummeted in ranking to near 200. I am not finding any crawl errors or duplicate content issues on the site. Could my links have caused this massive decrease in rankings?

    | mj775
    0
  • OneClickVentures


    Hi Moz, A few of our sites experienced widespread ranking drops across all keywords this morning.  Both of these are very strong sites with a high DA (56), moz rank and moz trust above 5. We haven't been doing any black hat SEO, creating spammy links, or paying for links. Is anyone else seeing anything similar or have any ideas as to what type of Algorithm update this might be? We currently rank 67th for our name. 

    | OneClickVentures
    0
  • glasgowseoguy


    Hi Guys, One of our clients are a big brand but their brand is a keyword domain. After signing up to seo moz and utilising the recommended changes to the on page seo, something drastic happened. Every page of my clients site appended the site name at the end of the title tag. Example: <title>keyword | keyword 2 | domain name keyword</title> I felt, and also with seomoz reports, that having the main keyword appended to the end of every title tag was far too spammy and as seo moz suggested could possibly have different pages fighting for ranks on that phrase. We decide to remove the domain from the end on all page titles, and since google re cached the site, the rankings have tanked big time. The site is still indexed so thats good but when you consider a single lead is worth over £1000 to my client and with 20-30 leads per month, he isnt too happy. Has anyone experienced this before? My guess is google is re evaluating the rankings to reflect the new title tags, and thus put my clients site out until it's finished updating the rankings etc? Any help? Thanks

    | glasgowseoguy
    0
  • WillWatrous


    Hello, How does a small, local business win at SEO (without abusing directories, articles, and paid links)? It seems that everyone is saying "create unique content", but that just doesn't seem realistic for a small plumber in a big metro area. One might suggest coming up with helpful articles about plumbing tips, etc., but there are thousands of spun articles on article directories already. On page optimization is in place, we are listed in the main directories, we've asked the people we know to link to us, and we are engaged in social media. What would you recommend next? Thanks, Will

    | WillWatrous
    0
  • activitysuper


    Hi, Just been looking into social signals a little deeper. From what I have read a tweet from one page is not the same as a tweet from another page, the authority and influence is also a big part. So a tweet from CNN does a lot more then a tweet from a random. So how do you find these authority and influential pages/users? I have come across Klout.com which gives a score out of 100, which is one way I guess BUT I have also noticed mozbar stats change for different facebook pages. Q: Can you use the mozbar on facebook & twitter pages to workout who will generate the best social signals? Cheers

    | activitysuper
    0
  • bjalc2011


    I am helping out a small UK company who have had a sudden drop in organic search traffic since March 24th. Investigation highlights some issues with the site,e.g. Potential canonicalization of home page, a few html errors, some inbound links to the /index.html version of the homepage rather than /. But, nothing particualrly major and nothing that is different to pre-March 24th. The indexed pages looks ok in Google (although Bing is ranking the non-www version of the homepage) but this does not appear in Google's index. Searches for the company name on Google.co.uk show it as top result & some keywords are ranking reasonably well (based on homepage). Selecting blocks of text from the homepage and it ranks #1, but its Google rank for the primary keyword has gone from #2 pre-March 24th to not in the top 100 results since. SEOMOZ is grading the page A for the keyword which appears prominently on the page & keyword is the first characters of the title. It is not a particularly competitive keyword. Adding UK to the keyword and the page is Google.co.uk ranked #3. It's almost as if they are being penalised for a single keyword which I've never seen or heard of before. Any ideas? ** The company has never carried out any SEO - white hat or black hat. The site is perfectly normal, nothing dodgy or concerning about it at all.** Thanks in advance for your advice.

    | bjalc2011
    0
  • Profero


    Hi guys, I just wanted confirmation if this is the right way to go about doing this. I need to merge three websites and I've never done three websites in to a brand new site before. Ok so we have Sitex.com
    Sitey.com
    Sitez.com We've created a SiteB.com SiteB.com has SiteB.com/SiteXCat
    SiteB.com/SiteYCat
    SiteB.com/SiteZCat Each X,Y and Z have over 1,000 pages. They only have about 10 pages each with Page Authority above 10 and the domains arn't that strong. What i plan to do is: 301 redirect each site domain (X,Y,,Z) to it's corresponding category. e.g. Sitex.com > SiteB.com/SiteXCat 301 redirect each page off X,Y,Z that has a Page Authority above 10 to their new pages on SiteB.com Then, I'm unsure if i should 410 every other URL... I don't think its worht 301 every single URL if they arn't in search results much - but maybe it is if they have a lot of inbound links even with low page authority? Any ideas and does the above seem the best practise? Thanks.

    | Profero
    0
  • inc.com


    So the Google+ Badge verifies our site for Google direct connect. However, the javascript code for the badge itself causes the page to load 3 to 4 seconds longer, which is a big deal. Any ideas for a work around?

    | inc.com
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, How would you recommend finding and gaining backlinks for nlpca(dot)com other than looking at the top 10 competitors? Also, we could do an infographic but the owners don't have time to produce a lot of additional articles. Thanks!

    | BobGW
    0
  • salvyy


    Hello, I often build sites using WordPress. The other day I read an article in which the author stated that the sites built using the free WordPress template are not SEO-friendly. Could someone please confirm this statement? Does this mean that I need to develop themes myself or buy WordPress templates? Thank you for your help.

    | salvyy
    0
  • SEODinosaur


    Hello, I have a client that has a site with a .html plugin and I have read that its best to not have this. We currently have pages ranking with this .html plug in. However If we take the plug in out will we lose rankings? would we need a 301 or something?

    | SEODinosaur
    0
  • SamCUK


    I've just set up a wordpress site with a hosting company who only allow you to install your wordpress site in http://www.myurl.com/folder as opposed to the root folder. I now have the problem that the robots.txt file only works in http://www.myurl./com/folder/robots.txt Of course google is looking for it at http://www.myurl.com/robots.txt and returning a 404 error. How can I get around this? Is there a way to tell google in webmaster tools to use a different path to locate it? I'm stumped?

    | SamCUK
    0
  • YNWA


    Hi, Just a quick one to see what peoples thoughts are regarding links. I have just gained a free link on a .gov website in the UK. In one of their offers pages, will this provide any link value or domain trust to me and what can the benefits be SEO wise from having a link on a government domain? The link is just the website url with a a few lines of text detailing our address etc... so its not got any anchor text regarding targetting one of our brands. It is equallly, less or more important to target anchor text links to specific brands or to get good high quality links from trusted sites such as the .gov one I have linking to my root domain? The website is a local council website in the UK. And was listed by a member of their staff, who only list in the offer page if your offering discount to council members etc..., so its not a spammed page or anything like that. What are peoples views on anchor text links vs domain url links? Cheers Will

    | YNWA
    0
  • salvyy


    Hi, I've a simple question. Some time ago I built a site and added pages to it. I have found out that the site was penalized by Google and I have neglected it. The problem is that I had written well-optimized pages on that site, which I would like to use on another website. Thus, my question is: if I delete a page I had written on site 1, can use it on page 2 without being penalized by Google due to duplicate content? Please note: site one would still be online. I will simply delete some pages and use them on site 2. Thank you.

    | salvyy
    0
  • HD_Leona


    Hi! I have pages within my forum where visitors can upload photos.  When they upload photos they provide a simple statement about the photo but no real information about the image,definitely not enough for the page to be deemed worthy of being indexed.  The industry however is one that really leans on images and having the images in Google Image search is important to us. The url structure is like such:  domain.com/community/photos/~username~/picture111111.aspx I wish to block the whole folder from Googlebot to prevent these low quality pages from being added to Google's main SERP results.  This would be something like this: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /community/photos/ Can  I disallow Googlebot specifically rather than just using User-agent:  * which would then allow googlebot-image to pick up the photos?  I plan on configuring a way to add meaningful alt attributes and image names to assist in visibility, but the actual act of blocking the pages and getting the images picked up... Is this possible? Thanks! Leona

    | HD_Leona
    0
  • StreetwiseReports


    I just spent thousands of $$ redesigning my site. Have a Wordpress site now with Yoast SEO. However, my organic traffic has dropped of a cliff. Can any of you help me figure out why? www.UltimateBasicTraining.com

    | StreetwiseReports
    1
  • TSpike1


    I'm working on a website that has multiple member pages. They are generated generically by the cms. Think of this website as a convention visitors bureau. Is it possible or is there a way that I can make the individual member pages more seo friendly. Other than the url structure, do anyway have any advice.

    | TSpike1
    0
  • dpdeleon1


    I'd like to rename about 20 web pages on one of my websites. If I do a 301 redirect for each of the pages will I get dinged by google for all of the renames?

    | dpdeleon1
    0
  • axelk


    We have an existing large site with strong, relevant traffic, including excellent SEO traffic. The company wants to launch a new business offering, specifically targeted at the "small business" segment. Because the "small business" customer is substantially different from the traditional "large corporation" customer, the company has decided to create a completely independent microsite for the "small business" market. Purely from a Marketing and Communications standpoint, this makes sense. From an SEO perspective, we have 2 options: Create the new "small business" microsite on a subdomain of the existing site, and benefit from the strong domain authority and trust of the existing site. Build the microsite on a separate domain with exact primary keyword match in the domain name. My sense is that option #1 is by far the better option in the short and long run. Am I correct? Thanks in advance!

    | axelk
    0
  • Voonie


    Hey guys, I've got a question for you all that I've been pondering for a few days now. I'm currently doing an SEO Technical Audit for a large scale directory. One major issue that they are having is that their internal search system (Directory Search) will create a new URL everytime a search query is entered by the user. This creates huge amounts of duplication on the website. I'm wondering if it would be best to block search engines from crawling these URLs entirely with Robots.txt? What do you guys think? Bearing in mind there are probably thousands of these pages already in the Google index? Thanks Kim

    | Voonie
    0
  • GDB


    Hi, I have a search page that generates some querystrings (with the term, current page, number of pages etc). This long url is something bad for Google indexing? Thanks.

    | GDB
    0
  • smallbox


    One of my e-commerce clients has a script enabled on their category pages that allows more products to automatically be displayed as you scroll down. They use this instead of page 1, 2, and a view all. I'm trying to decide if I want to insist that they change back to the traditional method of multiple pages with a view all button, and then implement rel="next", rel="prev", etc. I think the current auto method is disorienting for the user, but I can't figure out if it's the same for the spiders. Does anyone have any experience with this, or thoughts? Thanks!

    | smallbox
    0
  • SEODinosaur


    If I am building a Nav bar should I use my keywords or make it easier for the user to find what they are looking for. IMO one should ALWAYS make a site based on user experience. If it Google and other SEs do count Nav links, would it be best to place more important keys first?

    | SEODinosaur
    0
  • jeremydavid


    I'm looking into buying an exact match tld, but it is .net. Do .net domains get the same exact match bonus .coms do?

    | jeremydavid
    0
  • SEODinosaur


    Im moving a page over from www.domain.com/page to www.domain/category/page currently www.domain.com/page is ranking in google. Would a 301 do the job? is there anything else needed to help keep SE positions?

    | SEODinosaur
    0
  • seointern


    http://screencast.com/t/KLPVGTzM I just logged into our Webmaster Central account to find that it shows 100k links that are not found? After searching through all of them they all appear to be from our search bar, with no results? Are we doing something wrong here?

    | seointern
    0
  • robotseo


    I've noticed something like a quote whilst I was doing a search in News section. Does anyone know what is it called? Is it some sort of microdata or something you can manipulate or is it up to Google's algorithm to determine whether or not to display the section and the content of it. The section in question is highlighted in the attached image. Thanks in advance! MqdoW MqdoW.png

    | robotseo
    0
  • wazza1985


    Hi All, Question: How important are domain names when trying to rank for a competitive keyword? Thanks

    | wazza1985
    0
  • MargaritaS


    I noticed something new on Google's SERPs today. Has this been up for a while? Has anyone else seen this. https://www.google.com/search?q=bubba+watson+wife&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a gm8rI.png

    | MargaritaS
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, A friend of mine has a google places account. Her website is http://debidonner.com/ You can see her places account listed under "life coach scottsdale arizona" I've attached a screenshot of her categories. I just added "NLP Coach" and "Personal Coach" today, so results are only for the other categories. We're looking for ways to improve it. We've had 43 clicks for driving directions. 4 map clicks, and 0 website clicks (how good is that, by the way) Thanks! screenshot-google-places.jpg screenshot-google-places2.jpg

    | BobGW
    0
  • MTalhaImtiaz


    Guys I am not technically savvy. I just want to know how to present the website architecture I want to be implemented on my website... how do I present my suggestions to the development team. For example.... Should I say. Page Level 1 - HOME Page (URL) Page Level 2 - About Us Page Page Level 2 - Feedback Page Page Level 2 - Our Services Page Level 2 - Contact Us Page Page Level 2 - Accounting jobs Page Level 3 - Audting jobs Page level 3 - Junior accouting jobs Page Level 2 - Engineering jobs Page level 3 - architecture jobs Page level 3 - Motor engineering jobs Page Level 2 - IT Jobs Page level 3 - Hardware Jobs Page level 4 - Job Post 1 Page level 4 - Job Post 2 Page level 4 - Job Post 3 Please guide me my fellow MOZZERS.... I really need an answer/guidance at the very earliest. Iwill be truly obliged Regards, Talha

    | MTalhaImtiaz
    0
  • ScottBaxterWW


    Hi Guys, I've noticed that Google is starting to de-value site-wide links... Our previous SEO agency sourced us a site wide link on a big website and at the moment within Google Webmaster Tools its showing 749,726 links from this 1 source. Do you think this is too many? Could this be being flagged by Google? Here is the site: http://tinyurl.com/7bttw3b Cheers, Scott

    | ScottBaxterWW
    0
  • andrep


    Here's a bit of background information: I've achieved the targets and is now being offered what is essentially an unlimited budget. I have a nice list of ideas but thought I would the brilliant people here at the SEOMOZ community what they would do. So as to promote as much response as possible, I'm going to keep my list to myself for now. And by "SEO", I mean I can do things like content strategy, blogging, infographics, etc. Shoot away!

    | andrep
    0
  • JohnParker2792


    I have about 10 - 15 URLs that are redirecting to http://www.domainname.comwww.domainname.com/. (which is an invalid URL)The website is on a Joomla platform. Does anyone know how I can fix this? I can't figure out where the problem is coming from.

    | JohnParker2792
    0
  • alhallinan


    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304459804577281842851136290.html

    | alhallinan
    0
  • entourage212


    My site WhiteGloveInternational.com has taken a sharp fall in the rankings. I have specified the Canonical as www inside webmasters tools.  I am using wordpress & a plugin called  "Simple 301" in order to specify the canonical I used the rel meta tag and changed the site location to www inside wordpress general settings, however I have not updated with the  "Simple 301" plugin. Should I? Should I 301 redirect all non www pages to their www counter part or should I wait for the SERPS to do their thing?

    | entourage212
    0
  • altecdesign


    How is this site: http://inhabitat.com/ hoarding all of their pagrank on their homepage?

    | altecdesign
    0
  • NaHoku


    Google is king, but it seems as though there is a significant source of traffic and revenue from Bing.  What is the preferred strategy?  Optimize for Google and hope it filters to Bing?  An obvious concern would be that if we change tactics to please Bing, we could stand to lose our rankings with Google.  Any opinions/thoughts/feedback/suggestions would be appreciated.

    | NaHoku
    0
  • Bristolweb


    Hi when using the meta description tag how is it best used? what should it describe?  should it describe the topic or the services offered i.e should it be a sales message for the services. For example: a page that promotes the benefits of acupuncture whilst pregnant  should it describe the page content or the service provided? i.e. acupuncture for pregnancy in Chester or  acupuncture can benefit pregnancy because.... thanks

    | Bristolweb
    0
  • richcowley


    It's a while ago that (i thought) I read the following information on the Google badge. Here https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/badge/ we have the implementation guide, however I was under the impression the Google badge could be thereafter extracted into SERPs so the user could follow etc... direct from SERPs. I can't find anything confirming this. I think that it might clash with authorship data which does a similar job, but where a site page is not relevant to authorship at all, I would have thought linking back to the G+ page from SERPs was a sensible option. Can anyone confirm the Google badge can appear in SERPs?

    | richcowley
    0
  • arousta


    We posted the same question in Quora. But hope to get responses or test results from SEOMOzers. This might help Google for identifying: High Link:Content Ratio = Parked Domain 
    Moderate Link:Content Ratio = Directory Site
    Relatively High Link:Content Ratio = Normal Website
    Very High Link:Content Ratio = Article page or Blog Do you think Google is using it, especially during Panda Update? I am trying to find a reasonable cause of many situations like the PR of deep links or category pages in Directory sites has vanished. And if that has something to do with it.

    | arousta
    0
  • diogenes


    I have 2 business sites. www.affordable-uncontested-divorce.com is a homestead template site which is old and clunky but has given me steady traffic despite little maintenance. It was unafected by the various Panda updates. It does load very fast. www.uncontesteddivorce-nyc I put up about 18 months ago it is a Thesis Theme Wordpress site with the usual bells and whistles. I put a lot of work into it and around May its traffic finally surpassed my old site. In June traffic to the new site started tanking, ultimately about 30% off. A friendly SEO thought that there was some duplication between the 2 sites and Google might have seen the older site as the authority site and the newere as the scraper. I tried the usual fixes and the decline finally bottomed out but no recovery. I read someone who said that Wordpress sites are problamatical with Panda because of inherent duplicate content issues unless you don't use them as blogs, just as CMS. So I got rid of all the blog posts save one. Around about 3 months ago my traffic started to go up again and now it once again has surpassed the older site. The strange thing about it is that since the recovery my Analytic numbers like bounce rate number of page views and time on site have gone down and are much worse on the new site than they are on the old site. Does anyone have any idea of what' s up? Thx Paul

    | diogenes
    0
  • terran


    I recently purchased a domain from a domainer who owns and parks many, many exact match domains in my niche. He gets a lot of type in traffic via these domains and is willing to forward them to my domain to help get my site started with traffic. We were planning on forwarding a few dozen domains at the most. I'd like to make sure I'm not raising any red flags with google for forwarding so many domains to a new site. I found this article, which says Panda made some changes with regards to what I'm trying to do here. Not sure if they guy is right though. http://domainate.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/how-google-panda-affected-domain-forwarding-and-what-to-do-about-it/

    | terran
    0
  • sssrpm


    Hi guys, Our website have a very strong landing page (PA 80, more than 1,000 domains linking) but is currently not ranking at all as the targeted terms are dominated by exact match domains. We are thinking of redirecting this particular page to a new partial match domain targeting the same keywords. Is it a good move?

    | sssrpm
    0
  • shawn81


    I've been scratching my head over this one for a while now and I can't seem to figure it out. I own a website that is user-generated content. Users submit images to my sites of graphic resources (for designers) that they have created to share with our community. I've been noticing over the past few months that I'm getting completely dominated in Google Images. I used to get a ton of traffic from Google Images, but now I can't find my images anywhere. After diving into Analytics I found this: http://cl.ly/140L2d14040Q1R0W161e and realized sometime about a year ago my image traffic took a dive. We've gone back through all the change logs and can't find where we made any changes to the site structure that could have caused this. We are stumped. Does anyone know of any historical Google updates that could have caused this last year around the end of April 2010? Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated!

    | shawn81
    0
  • MJMarketing


    Hi, We are planning to launch a dedicated US version of our existing e-commerce website. The US version will sit on a separate domain and will be completely standalone to our existing website. My question is, since a lot of the pages are product pages and will exist on each respective site.  Does the copy have to be completely re-written (or just slightly) on the new US site in order to avoid any SEO duplicate copy issues with the existing site? Any advice would be much appreciated

    | MJMarketing
    0
  • MTalhaImtiaz


    Hello everyone, I am an SEO analyst - a good one - but I am weak in technical aspects. I do not know any programming and only a little HTML. I know this is a major weakness for an SEO so my first request to you all is to guide me how to learn HTML and some basic PHP programming. Secondly... about the topic of this particular question - I know that a website should have a flat architecture... but I do not know how to find out if a website's architecture is flat or not, good or bad. Please help me out on this... I would be obliged. Eagerly awaiting your responses, BEst Regards, Talha

    | MTalhaImtiaz
    0
  • activitysuper


    Hi, I have used a few myself and if I was targeting UK search with a [emd] .co.uk, every time the domain has hit page 1 with little effort. I have done this maybe 4-5 times, my moz stats show 0 but I rank above results on page 1 with moz stats of DA:45+. Can I now say basically any EMD I buy will rocket through the serp's?

    | activitysuper
    0

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