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Category: Search Behavior

Learn more about search behavior and search trends.

  • TomCritchlow


    I have a hypothesis that the % of users that type URLs is decreasing. Instead I think users will be arriving at sites by clicking on links in emails, search and social. Where can I find data / research to back me up?

    | TomCritchlow
    0
  • 4pm


    My impression drop drastically in the past two days. What could be the cause for it. My website is http://4pmdesign.com Thank you in advance.

    | 4pm
    0
  • StreetwiseReports


    What is the difference if a friend on Google +, +1's  your blog entry as opposed to your blog (as a whole)? Will it be displayed differently to their network or better yet, have a difference in their search engine results the next time they search for a relatable keyword?

    | StreetwiseReports
    0
  • Lantec


    Hello, I have a catalogue website and I am implementing the rel="next" and rel="prev" to the website. My question is that we do have a view all page also, which apparently Google likes over a 'page1'.. Should I add the canonical to this page? I already have it set to WEBSITEURL/sonos (which is going well) I don’t want to have to change this to [URL]sonos/view-all (which is my view all link) as the first page is getting ranked well I am then telling Google no, the view all page is the parent. Any advice would be very much appreciated. Thanks Rick

    | Lantec
    0
  • marksierra


    I am having a problem where I'm getting an enormous amount of unique visitors that bounce from a small area in Oregon even though we never market there. It appears to be some type of ping. It messes up our tracking and inflates the bounce rate. Is there a way to block this? I'm OK with any type of block because our reach is statewide in Florida. ANy feedback?

    | marksierra
    0
  • Mike-i


    How sensitive do you think the Google Places NAP algorithm is? If I have different Google Places pages for one client with multiple locations, but the same phone number for all locations with different addresses, will this hurt my Google Places ranking or organic webpage result?

    | Mike-i
    0
  • therealmarkhall


    Ok odd one. 2 sites hosted on go daddy, neither sites has any cause for concern. But both sites have had there home pages deindexed or - 10000 penalty for no reason. We do the SEO for 1 site and not for the other. The server is shared with go daddy no idea on how many other 3rd party sites are on it. I've filed a reinclusion request for both sites. Any help is more than welcome.

    | therealmarkhall
    0
  • Grumpy_Carl


    Been playing with the historical linking data (nice feature, by the way) and I see a graph which shows the increase in my, and my competitors', domain authority in the previous month. My competitors have averaged a growth of about 1.6 and I have gone up by 2 in this period which is good, however is 2 really that good for a month? What would other members' consider to be a decent growth? To add context, the domain I have in this report went from 26 to 28. Obviously going from 90 to 92 will be difficult but I have a feeling I should be doing more to grow faster at the lower levels.

    | Grumpy_Carl
    0
  • ksracer


    I have a blog that's gone from not indexed, to indexed and ranked around 85 on 3 target key phrases. With a bit of SEO the blog jumped to around 11th on those 3 key phases in a week or so. Now, the following week, it has bombed back to 76th. Why the dramatic fluctuations?

    | ksracer
    0
  • Bush_JSM


    Hi Mozzers, Can anyone help me please. I have a client that is ranking in position 2 for his major keyword in G.co.uk. He's been moving up but over the last 7 - 10 days he's moved down, then back up and around and around the front page which we all know can happen. The thing is - this is changing through the day 4 or 5 times in some cases. I've checked when the first page of the SERPs have been indexed via the cached button and normally Google hasn't crawled the competition or my guys site on the given day the changes happen, yet he's been 2, 5 and 7 and back to 2 in about 3 hours. Are these social signals do you think? whats going on - any ideas? Cheers Bush

    | Bush_JSM
    0
  • PureStorageMarketing


    Why does my keyword report show for my keywords by keyword report zeros, while the summary shows 400+ for all keywords?

    | PureStorageMarketing
    0
  • qubesys


    Someone just reported that our website was showing malware attack page on their browsers. We checked and saw a bad php code on the above of our index.php file. We removed it and made it clean. Still all the visitors are getting malware attack page. How to fix this ? Site is already clean.

    | qubesys
    0
  • DTOSI


    SEO Moz has reported 7 of my keywords declined dramatically overnight. One word even went down 18 positions in Google. I have a few ideas on why, but none of them really make sence. 1.) The night before the decline I deleted around 6 "test pages" from our website. None of them could be reached through our website but they could be found by typing in the url. Most of these pages only said things like "test", but one of them was a draft of a keyword rich page within my website that only included some of the keywords that went down in ranking. Could the fact that I deleted this page be the cause of the ranking decline? 2.) About two weeks ago I purchased a url volusion-store-design.com which is one of my keywords and forward the address to an internal page within my website http://netonesystems.com/E-Commerce-Volusion-Store-Design. Could have this hurt my rankings, like Google is considering it duplicate content or something? If anyone has some ideas please help. Here are the keywords that I lost ranking for: volusion developers ---- down 18 volusion features ----- down 5 volusion store design ----- down 2 volusion templates ------ down 11 volusion designers ------ down 4 free volusion templates ------ down 4 ecommerce volusion features ------ down 3 Here are the pages these keyword were pointing to: http://netonesystems.com/E-Commerce-Volusion-Store-Design http://netonesystems.com/E-Commerce-Volusion-Features http://netonesystems.com/E-Commerce-Volusion-Templates

    | DTOSI
    0
  • ClaytonKendall


    We were contacted by a company that claims they want to build us a local. sub domain that targets only local traffic and operate on a rev share model. I'm very weary of this and can think of many things wrong with it, but I was asked to look into it. I'm about to give them a call to see what they are all about, but I always get great advice from the moz community so I thought I'd reach out to hear your opinions. Thanks!

    | ClaytonKendall
    0
  • ArjunRajkumar


    At the start of a new SEO campaign - I make a list of bloggers and editors who will help my client along the way in his industry. I then start following these people on Twitter from my client's company account. I wanted to know if there are SEO's who follow and interact with these bloggers/editors from their own personal account - and not necessarily form the clients account? If so, how do you manage that? Or do people follow from both accounts? What do you do?

    | ArjunRajkumar
    0
  • creativedepartment


    Guten tag SEOMozians! I'm looking for your opinions and thoughts regarding MozRank. I recently noticed a website of mine going from a modest MozRank of 5 to an out of the park 9 in the span of two weeks. Any thoughts on where I might look to see what may have caused such a spike? Cheers, Jonathan

    | creativedepartment
    0
  • activitysuper


    Hi, Might be a silly question but wanted to ask it anyway. Lets say I run a gifts website and this year I decide I want to try for a more competitive keyword 'Christmas Gifts'. Now each year I see a lot of search on for example 'Christmas Gifts 2011' and because of the search volume the EMD for this is gone (an affiliate has brought it or something). So the affiliate works hard on ranking it builds up say PR2-PR3 but when it comes around to renewing the domain they don't bother because 2011 search volume has passed and they move onto 'Christmas Gifts 2012'. My question is this: If I was to buy the 'Christmas Gifts 2011' when it expires and redirect it to my Xmas page would it pass the PR and give my new page a boost?

    | activitysuper
    0
  • SoundinTheory


    We have some clients who have raised concerns over how this new update will affect them. They are an Estate Agents who regularly update their property portfolio, blogs and news section etc. Can you advise how they may or may not be directly affected? Thank you.

    | SoundinTheory
    0
  • TheVolkinator


    I have a staff of 10 full time people and 8 part time people working on my websites generating dynamic and unique content daily. Been doing this since 2003. We have over 5K indexed pages.  There is another site with about 5 indexed pages that ONLY has RSS feeds on our site (one of which are articles from our site). How in the world do they have a higher domain authority than us?

    | TheVolkinator
    0
  • SimonCullum


    Schema tags have been around for a while, am really interested in knowing of any noticeable benefits seen by anyone who has had experience of implementing Schema tags.

    | SimonCullum
    0
  • Red_Spot_Interactive


    Please follow the link for a visual. Any help would be appreciated. The query I used was "phoenix plastic surgeons". I have never seen a large national site like PlasticSurgery.org Rank in local for a specific Dr.    Thoughts? Thanks! 7O1oK

    | Red_Spot_Interactive
    0
  • SharpKiwi


    Any tips on identifying the target audience?

    | SharpKiwi
    0
  • 3Amigos


    Hello Everybody, Thanks for taking the time to read this post. Without further ado, I'll jump straight to it: http://www.dataclinic.co.uk is the web site of a UK based data recovery company. Historically the site has always ranked well for popular data recovery keywords in the UK, with page 1 rankings for most things data recovery related. However, lately things seem to have changed for our most important phrase "data recovery". We noticed several months ago that Google had started to favour the page  http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery.htm instead of http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/ when a search for "data recovery" (and similar) was performed. This didn't concern us that much as our rankings remained good. However now, neither of these pages seems to be ranking well when a search for "data recovery" is performed (I gave up at Page 5 - who looks past there when searching?). I would appreciate your input on this please - especially about the following points: 1. Why have these two pages now seemingly disappeared from SERPS when a search for "data recovery" is performed ? 2. Why has Google chosen http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery.htm rather than http://www.dataclinic.co.uk  ? 3. Is this just something to do with UK results ? 4. Other sites I would expect NOT to see in the top results have started appearing - despite their link profiles etc remaining poor - perhaps Google is doing a bit of reorganisation with SERPS related to data recovery at the moment ? 5. And perhaps, most importantly - do you think we need to do anything about our current lack of visibility ?? As I mentioned, we've always ranked well, so these results are puzzling... Should search results revert "back to normal" in a day or so, or am I missing something and need to take action ?? Thanks for any input on this - we would be very grateful indeed for you help ! Kind Regards, Sue

    | 3Amigos
    0
  • neooptic


    Hi there. I've got a client that runs a photography studio and is seeing a massive drop in traffic. I was wondering if it could be seasonal - it's her first year trading so she has nothing to compare it against - or whether it could be some other issue. Thanks!

    | neooptic
    0
  • Lael


    I have numerous print ads running and I would like to see which ads are sending traffic to my site.  What is the best way of doing this?  Redirects? Is this a recommended practice?  Thanks!

    | Lael
    0
  • MichaelWeisbaum


    Google is randomly displaying the alt image tag as the page title for my homepage.  It happens when you search for the brand name, but the page title appears as "BrandName Logo" (obviously not "BrandName").  Has anybody seen this happen before?

    | MichaelWeisbaum
    0
  • 3Amigos


    Hi, I'm a newbie at all this - I hope someone can help me. We're thinking of running time-specific offers to try and convert as many of our customer site visits as possible e.g. 15% discount if you call between, say, 2 and 5pm. It would be really helpful to me to find out what times of day people are visiting our site. I can't seem to find a way to do this on Google Analytics. Can anyone help? Thanks so much Sue

    | 3Amigos
    0
  • James77


    Hi, I was wondering on your thoughts, or if any tests had been done on the best format of "near" perfect keyword domain matches. Suppose I am not really interested in branding, and I am principally after the bonus given to exact keyword matching, but all the exact match high level extensions have gone - whats the next best solution? Suppose I am after the term "car hire", and on my website I want to target many different location keywords such as - "Car Hire London" My main extensions are gone, but I have the options to go for:: Additional Word at the FRONT:
    Number - eg 4:
    4carhire.co.uk  -> gives me -> 4carhire.co.uk/london/
    Geo association - eg uk:
    ukcarhire.co.uk  -> gives me -> ukcarhire.co.uk/london/
    Info term - eg compare:
    comparecarhire.co.uk -> gives me -> comparecarhire.co.uk/london/ Additional Word at the END: Number - eg 4:
    carhire4.co.uk  -> gives me -> carhire4.co.uk/london/
    Geo association - eg uk:
    carhireuk.co.uk  -> gives me -> carhireuk.co.uk/london/
    Info term - eg compare:
    carhirecompare.co.uk -> gives me -> carhirecompare.co.uk/london/ Which of the domains would be best to benifit when a term like "Car Hire London" is typed in ?? If you were to choose a domain which would you go for and why?

    | James77
    0
  • activitysuper


    Hi, My website is coming up in omitted results for search term. Now I have heard before if this is the case then its mainly due to a duplicate content penalty. But the content I used is unique and produced by a copywriter so its good. Its a new site and was in the results for about 2 weeks, I changed the non www to www in webmaster tools 1 day ago and now its sitting in omitted results. In webmaster tools I had to add the domain twice one non www and one www. Both accounts I hooked up a sitemap. Is it just because the site is new and its just working out where to rank me? Just so you know the non www was indexed for the 2 weeks changed it in webmaster tools so I wanted the www one indexed and now gone into omitted results. Cheers

    | activitysuper
    0
  • activitysuper


    Hi, If a E-commerce website based in the UK (and selling products only to the UK) have a .com domain will this stop UK visitors? I kind of getting the feeling some potential visitors might not visit because they feel the website is not UK based because they see the .com. Anyone else had any experience with this?

    | activitysuper
    1
  • JerDoggMckoy


    Hey, I was just noticing that we achieve #2 ranking on Google for one of our customers for one of their primary keyword phrases. But then I noticed the traffic analytics were not matching what we should expect from that keyword phrase. Then I noticed, in using "Chrome's Incognito Window", that our location was automatically selected for our main geographical city area. I then went and changed that location from Denver, to San Diego & Also Chicago, just to see what would happen, and I noticed we instantly dropped from #2 to #7 when changing our location. I don't know what my question is, but I guess I feel like that is preventing us from achieving the results we need to sell ecommerce products. Is there any info on this or suggestions anyone has on how to tackle this issue? It feels like Google is pulling the rug out from underneath our feet and trying to spread rankings more to localized areas, rather than offering someone the opportunity to capitalize on good rankings for a national audience. I understand why they would do it, and I don't say I disagree. But it just seems to affect our work as SEO's doesn't it? Since we can't be as effective for customers that have a global audience instead of strictly a localized one. I'm curious to see what people have to say about this issue. Thanks!

    | JerDoggMckoy
    0
  • augustos


    Hello Folks, First of all, I want to start by:  this is a "discussion" topic, which theres no right or wrong answer. I would love to hear from everyone your toughts about the GOOGLE +1 BUTTON , for the SEO point-of-view indeed. I assume that I did not add it to my websites yet, theres some reasons why. You guys added it? How is your audience behaviors against the button, they often click on it? It changed anything in your ranks, after they clicked on it? Thanks in advance.

    | augustos
    0
  • als007


    One of my clients wanted to know whether it's possible for him to rank as one of the related pages on Google for a brand name of a competitor. I honestly don't know whether it's possible so any ideas whether it's possible and if so, ideas on what can be done is greatly welcome. Thank you in advance. 🙂

    | als007
    0
  • Gyi


    I have been playing with the 30-day trial of Kissmetrics: https://www.kissmetrics.com/ Anyone using this? I like their "person-focused" approach. Wanted to get mozzers' opinions. Thanks

    | Gyi
    0
  • frostmill


    All, Hope you are having a good day! Recently I had a strange issue with one of my site and I am not sure what might have caused it. I am sure this would be a good place to discuss about it and get some feedback from the elite people in the industry. Here is the problem. Last weekend (On sunday noon) my site which was ranking on Page 1 suddenly dropped its ranking for its main keywords to nowhere, I was  panicked to see what was happening and by the end of the day it was slowly coming back and by next morning everything was back. Again on Wednesday noon, the same thing happened. However, this time it din't come up by the next morning. Making it worse, all of my keyword rankings went down from good spots to no where and there was a point when I could no longer see my site. I was worried something might have happened this time and was not sure what could the reason be. On Friday afternoon all the ranking came up better than the previous (which is a very good news for me). At the moment, my site is doing very well and I am really happy about it. I did realize that Google was updating their Algorithm, but this behavior is the strangest I have seen over years. Can someone enlighten me on this peculiar behavior. Is there something wrong with my site or is it a common thing that I have never noticed?  I have never done anything blackhat for the site. To be honest, all I have done is some low level link building on the site and the site had some advantage of a re-direct from one my previous site which was doing very well in search engines (I changed it to take advantage of the new domain I had). Your opinions/suggestions are a appreciated.

    | frostmill
    0
  • ClaireH-184886


    Hi on my site Weight Loss Hypnotherapy site i have a bonce rate off 55.1 where up to now 60 people have stayed on the site for less than one sec and i would like to know how to combat this and how to keep people on the site for longer. I have tried playing around with the content but i am thinking about adding images to make the page look better but would like the advice from others. many thanks for your help.

    | ClaireH-184886
    0
  • Theo-NL


    After having answered quite a lot of questions here, I figured it was about time to ask one of my own. Can anybody point me to decent (experimental) research articles or blogs that actually show variations in meta descriptions influence the Click Through Rate (CTR) of searchers? On dozens of websites on the internet it is stated that 'meta descriptions affect CTR', but (good scientific) sources for those statements are nowhere to be found. The only research I can find that comes closest to providing any evidence is a translated study by dynamical.biz, which states that searchers LOOK a lot at the meta description, but this study (atleast in the translation) mentions nothing of searchers actually CLICKING it. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

    | Theo-NL
    0
  • dodoflying


    Hi, My website is for stock picking. The keywords in each stock page are stock symbol. Now the stock symbol rank of my website in google is around 30-50. I use On-Page Keyword Optimization tool on seomoz to optimize those page. Now all stock symbol pages are Grade A in on-page report card. Is there other suggestions to increase stock symbol page ranking? Thanks in advance! -Don

    | dodoflying
    0
  • sixspokemedia


    Hello Staff of SEOMoz! I just had a question regarding specialized local listings.  Are there any advantages to having specialized local listings? (An example would be if we were a medical company, having a listing for family practice, one listing for women's health) If there are advantages, what are those advantages compared to having general medical listings? Thanks!

    | sixspokemedia
    0
  • ScottBaxterWW


    Howdy Guys, We are in the process of changing our sites structure dramatically, at the moment this is how an internal page / URL reads: Www.mydomainname.co.uk/ww.sys/pagename We will he changing our site over to wordpress very shortly and will have the correct permalinks in place. We are scared it's going to hurt our rankings as we are in the top 6 for a highly competitive keyword at the moment - the bouns is our domain name is 11yrs old and we have a PR of 4. We have setup all the 301s in web.configuration file just wondering if any of you have made a dramatic change like this and been dropped off the rankings.....

    | ScottBaxterWW
    0
  • gmk1567


    Recently came across an article stating that Paid search may affect traffic through Organic search. Did anyone have similar experience?

    | gmk1567
    0
  • ChristineCadena


    The UK is now requiring that websites, targeting UK visitors and/or hosted in the UK, to provide an "opt-in" option for cookie tracking.   While I don't target UK audiences, I do foresee this potentially being an issue for US business.   Anyone have any suggestions as to how web publishers, in the UK, will easily implement this change will not impacting their targeted advertising revenue?

    | ChristineCadena
    0
  • PeterAlexLeigh


    Hi there, We've been having some issues with our site recently where it seems to be jumping very erratically around the google rankings. The site used to be pretty consistent on page 1/2 of google for certain term, but then in late April(ish) it took a dive down the rankings and flicked about between positions 30-70(ish). Late last month, it re-appeared suddenly on page 1 in position 10 and stayed there up until yesterday (6th July) and it now appears to have dived to position 287th or there abouts! At the same time a deep link page has appeared at position 54, which seems a bit strange to me. Any help would be appreciated! Thanks

    | PeterAlexLeigh
    0
  • prima-253509


    With Google recently releasing benchmarking data I am curious as to what you all see across the various types of website niches that you work with (eCommerce, news, blog, services, small business, etc). And how SEO'd websites compare with this "raw" data provided by google. We have one medium size (12,000 products) strictly eCommerce website  that has a bounce rate of 37% and an avg time on site of 5:20 While two other medium size eCommerce/blog sites have a bounce rate of 57% and 59% with average time on site of 2:37 and 2:30 respectively. Finally, I manage a website for a local small business that provides business and home cleaning services. This site has a bounce rate of 45% and 1:40 average time on site. How do your sites perform in these areas? Is it typical to see this great of a disparity between strict eCommerce websites and those sites that are both informational and transactional in nature? What about other kinds of websites? Cheers!

    | prima-253509
    1
  • lsujoe


    Our site is built to show users things to do around their current location.  For this reason we redirect users to a city specific home page based on their location.  To do this we detect users IP address and 302 redirect them to the closest city with events. Our site is below and you should be able to see the 302 redirect. fyifly.com My concern is that I always here not to use 302 redirects as they don't pass link juice through.  I don't think 301 redirect would be good either as it is not a permanent redirect. Any advice on how you think the best way to treat this would be great or if you think the 302 direct is the best solution.

    | lsujoe
    0
  • seoatsea


    I have a content rich site. All of the feedback I get from users is positive in nature and the content matches exactly what people are searching for. It's easy to match search keywords with appropriate content on a "how to" site. Yet, from day one I am seeing 95+ bounce rates with time on site around 20 seconds. There are pages however with hundreds of comments and active discussions, so I have no idea how to address this problem.  I have researched bounce rates and time on site until I am blue in the face with no luck in resolving the problem. Can you suggest somethings that I should change or address? high_bounce_Page_1.jpg

    | seoatsea
    0
  • WebResource


    Looking for a great article on implementing customer based review system with the ability to feed that data to Google with rich snippets.

    | WebResource
    0
  • BG1985


    We have a broad content site - the majority of our traffic overall comes in via deep links.Google analytics consistently shows 17-20% of daily traffic under the "direct" bucket, with the rest of the traffic about equally split between Referring sites and Organic search.However, if we look at the specific content in the "direct" bucket, the URLs that are being hit do tend to mirror rather closely the Search traffic.  The close mapping to our Search traffic doesn't seem to make much sense  - while some of it is probably bookmarks, it seems doubtful that that could be responsible for more than, say, 20% of this direct traffici based on the # of pages and types of pages (many of the pages that do well in search are honestly not ones that someone would be likely to bookmark).  The traffic reported by google as "direct" for a given day tracks a lot closer to Search than Referral URLs (which tend to be he more viral content on our site). Any idea what could be causing this traffic to show as Direct?  Do people tend to bookmark pages while doing searches to come back to them or something? THANKS everyone for the responses.  Still not quite sure what it is, continuing to look into it, particularly technical issues that the link to the Avinash post might prove very helpful for

    | BG1985
    0
  • onlinemediadirect


    To take a site from no where to the top of google in some of the top industries such as Gambling and Finance. I am a never say never type entrepreneur and say yes the logic is there as with all SEO to break into it. How do you feel the internet will shape up in say 10 years time will we see less of the smaller guys take on the world with the larger keywords.

    | onlinemediadirect
    0
  • Yozzer


    Hi, I have a really quick question, which is seeming impossible to find out the answer for. Could only point me in the right direction? I need to find out: How many iPhone 3G, 3GS and 4 users there are in:Europe, North America and Global. The more I can break down the better really. Many Thanks Sean

    | Yozzer
    0

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