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Category: Algorithm Updates

Discuss algorithm updates and impacts.


  • I have two domains www.hairremoval.com and a sub domain www.us.hairromoval.com both sites have virtual the same content apart from around 8 pages and  the sub domain is more focused to US customers so the spelling are different, it is also hosted in the states. Would this be classed as duplicate content ? (The url’s are made up for the question but the format is correct)

    | Nettitude
    0

  • Let's say I have an ecommerce site and it has a separate theme via device detection. So I may even have different content on the pages. So for example, on desktop, on mysite.com/flowers I have a video about flowers. But on mobile, I have 10 000 words of text. Will this page rank better for people searching via mobile? Will google give different search rankings, based on desktop vs. mobile? Or how is Google calculating this? Are there any good mobile SEO tips or a knowhow base?

    | JaanMSonberg
    0

  • My company has previously added on extensions to a url like the example below http://www.test.com/product-name/extra-keywords My question is since there is no difference between the pages http://www.test.com/product-name and http://www.test.com/product-name/extra-keywords and you don't leave the product page to reach the extra-keyword page is this really necessary?  I feel like this is probably not a best practice.  Thanks for any suggestions.

    | Sika22
    0

  • In the upcoming months, or even now, do you think responsive websites will rank higher?

    | CFSSEO
    0

  • Hi All... Just wondering if it is a new feature on Google's side (knowledge Graph)? Thanks

    | BeytzNet
    0

  • Hello all I have uploaded sitemap to bing webmaster on January 21st, 2014. However, the site has not been indexed yet. I see few pages crawled and some crawl page error but it does not show what pages have an error. Can anyone help me please on how to get this done right so i can can our website indexed in Bing and Yahoo quickly. By the way our website address is : http://www.eduniche.com

    | Eva2014
    0

  • Hi all, last Thursday (1/31) our organic traffic and conversions fell off the map, going from 15% of our traffic to just over 5%. We've started creeping back up, we were nearly 7% yesterday, but I'm wondering if anyone else experienced an extreme drop in traffic or any advice on what we should be doing next. We are currently building links from University and government organizations and are always creating fresh content on our blog and website pages. One thing that we thought of is this timeline corresponds with when we created a Google + local listing for our company. Is there any possibility we stopped appearing in as many national search results since we have a local listing? Our domain is www.dishcostsless.com. Any advice would be very helpful. Thank!

    | PlanetDISH
    0

  • What's up SEO's, I'm new the SEO world and had a quick question. I just installed the MOZBAR and did a google search: "What is Google Voice" I attached an image of the results I received. Can someone explain how MacWorld's article outranked Google's when both Google's Page Authority and Domain Authority are so much stronger than MacWorlds. This is in addition to google having many more links. This is basic, but any insight will be very helpful. Thanks guys! [Screen%20Shot%202014-02-18%20at%206.08.15%20PM.png](file:///Users/jackfarrell/Desktop/Screen%20Shot%202014-02-18%20at%206.08.15%20PM.png)

    | Petbrosia
    1

  • We are the presenting sponsor for this big event in our area (Chasco Fiesta). As part of being their sponsor, their website has linked to us in five different places on their site. But it's all to our homepage. Would there be any benefit to having them link to other pages on our site instead of just our homepage (assuming the other pages are a reasonable expectation for the user, of course)? Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0

  • I've put off asking this question for a long time because I know what the short answer is, but I've been working the SEO on http://www.photojennette.com for almost a year now pretty constantly and all of the measurements are positives except for authority.  Traffic has more than doubled, links sending visits has doubled, external followed links is 500% up, keywords sending is way up, pages within the site have way more links and are more diverse in their own SEO, but no matter what I can't get PA and DA to budge. In fact at one point DA dropped a point or two. (although OSE and Moz Analytics shown that competitors lost a point or two at the same time so I didn't think much of it.)  I feel like I had a good grasp on what helps DA but I'm starting to question that.  Anyone have any ideas?

    | jonnyholt
    0

  • My rank for a keyword went from ranking #1 to #22.  The page grade for this keyword is A, there was no site structure changes.  The only thing I can see is that tumblr and reddit and other sources are now listed for this keyword and it's difficulty went from the mid-low teens to 28%.  However, even given that, I do not a see a reason for this keyword alone to fall so far.  It was giving us a ton of traffic, in fact, most of our organic search results came from this term for nearly two months.  And 2 weeks ago for no reason, we were pushed to page 3.  Has anyone else had similar experiences how do you counter it, and what can we do?

    | mozmemberanon
    0

  • We need to update one of our older posts (a new federal ruling came down that now applies) but do I just update it or should I republish it? I know that just republishing something that hasn't been changed, can get you  flagged, but if it's an update, I would think that would be appropriate to republish. I'd just like some guidance before I proceed. Thanks and Happy Friday! Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0

  • Hello, I manage a news site that gets new items posted daily. We had had a pretty even keel with Google search and ranking for some time now only on the 9th Jan we took a massive drop and have no recovered except for one big spike on the 29th January. The only think we had done differently was not post as much over Christmas for about a week as people were on holiday but if this was the reason for it the posting is back to normal now and has been since the 6th Jan and nothing has recovered. The site is wjlondon.com - any ideas greatly appreciated. Thank you

    | luwhosjack
    0

  • Hello, My URL is: www.BannerBuzz.com and it has been penalized by google algorithm and my all ranking are getting down so i have found some links and disavowed them in google webmaster tool and now I want to submit a reconsideration request with google but I am not able to do the same. When I Click on "Request reconsideration of your site." it takes me to Check any manual action against my website. After Checking the manual action it says "No manual web spam actions found." and After that No Option to Submit My Request! Can we submit a request while not having any manual action against the site? Thanks

    | CommercePundit
    0

  • We've seen consistent traffic from yahoo of about 4000-5000 visitors a month from Yahoo traffic and then all of a sudden when pulling reporting for January 2013, we saw a very significant 40-50% drop from them. We're not seeing any ranking changes in our terms on Yahoo and are curious if anyone else is seeing the drops which may indicate some incorrectly tagged bots, or something wrong from a Yahoo side. While we (like most businesses) primarily focus on Google traffic, Yahoo still provides sizable traffic and a drop like this makes it noticeable. Anyone else seeing drops in Yahoo traffic for January?

    | GeorgiaSEOServices
    0

  • Having a discussion with my boss over whether the following page is over-saturated (stuffed) with keywords in the element: http://www.godreamvacations.com/BarceloHotels -- We implemented the description and keyword tag text back in 2010 when the boss gave me the text. Anyone have any good responses to the bosses' response (below)? "These are the ones (pages) that are actually working wonderfully well on Bing. At the time, I researched the optimal number of characters and tried to really follow all that was suggested by SEO experts. As far as the keywords, I would say you could remove the ones without the “s”, for example, take out “Barcelo Hotel” and leave “Barcelo Hotels” I think this is all relevant to what is found on the page. I don’t know what they would expect us to do differently than this. Do you? What is your MOZ currently saying is the optimal number of characters for a Title?" Any responses would be appreciated. Am I wrong in saying it's "stuffed" and looks spammy? What would you tell your boss?

    | godreamvacations
    0

  • I have seen previous answers in the Forum about this subject but Google has seemed to have again changed the playing surface. Within the past 30 days, we have seen a huge spike in organic search returns seeming to favor .org as domain authorities. Has anyone else noticed this shift and is it just coincidence or worth factoring in? If it is a shift, will Google punish those that have .org but have used.com previously for switching the redirects to serve .org first? Thanks, Jim

    | jimmyzig
    0

  • Hi Moz, I'm working on an ecommerce site with categories, filter options, and sort options – teacherexpress.scholastic.com. Should I have canonical tags from all filter and sort options point to the category page like gap.com and llbean.com? or have all sort options point to the filtered page URL like kohls.com? I was under the impression that to use a canonical tag, the pages have to have the same content, meaning that Gap and L.L. Bean would be using canonical tags incorrectly. Using a filter changes the content, whereas using a sort option just changes the order. What would be the best way to deal with duplicate content for this site? Thanks for reading!

    | DA2013
    0

  • My understanding of Moz DA is that it is predominantly based on external links. Since Penguin I am noticing more and more websites ranking high in Google with a "low" number of links and certainly a low DA but quality and relevancy of content and also of offering. I understand that there was always more to ranking than DA but is it anymore even relevant to how a site will rank in Google?

    | halloranc
    0

  • A while back I posted about a youtube video campaign that dominated the attorney rankings throughout Florida. Today, I noticed a new hangout video that does not have the reach of the before mentioned video, but it has just popped up as number three for the term "Tampa Car Accident Attorney." It wasn't even listed anywhere in the first few pages Monday. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=barTgGYQTIM Has anyone else noticed Google Hangout Videos having this kind of success or is this a "flash in the pan" incident? Also, is there any significance to this even being a Google Hangout video as opposed to just a youtube video? Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0

  • I'm looking to add some foreign language pages to a website and have a lot of international SEO questions. I think the overall question is can you do SEO yourself if you are a native English speaker for a language you don't speak (like Chinese)? 1. How do you go about doing keyword research for a foreign language? What tools are available? 2. How do you know what search engines you should optimize for in a different country? And where can you find the technical SEO requirements for each? I'm wondering things like title tag length for Baidu. Or is the Title length different for Yahoo Japan vs. US? Do you write titles and meta tags in Chinese/Japanese for respective countries? Etc.

    | IrvCo_Interactive
    0

  • Hi all, What is best for SEO. We sell products online. Is it good to mention the brand in the product detail page URL key if (part of) the brand is also in the home url? So our URL is: www.brandXstore.com Is it best to do: www.brandXstore.com/brandX-productA.html of just do: www.brandXstore.com/ProductA.html Thanks for quick answering 😉

    | RetailClicks
    1

  • We have noticed that several of our clients have been falling fairly significantly in the rankings in both Yahoo and Bing in recent weeks.  Do you know if they have made any algorithm changes lately, and if so, do you have any indication of what changes may have been made?

    | GregWalt
    0

  • 1. When I do a sitemap through a generator, it lists some of my URLs twice, with and without the last slash. Ex: <url><loc>http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-hollywood</loc><lastmod>2013-11-25T16:12:50+00:00</lastmod><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>0.9</priority></url> <url><loc>http://www.howlatthemoon.com/locations/location-hollywood/</loc><lastmod>2013-11-25T16:14:27+00:00</lastmod><changefreq>daily</changefreq><priority>0.69</priority></url> Should I remove one of these or leave it? 2. What is the importance of lastmod? I've read that if you have a lastmod listed, Google won't recrawl until a new time/date is up? 3. This goes along with lastmod, but is changefreq important? Can it hurt me at all?

    | howlusa
    0

  • Hello, Our website is a private equity firm database, privateequityfirms.com. We rank well for a number of private equity definitions and terms and have been increasing rank in those terms but unfortunately we have been losing ranking in our main keyword and url "private equity firms" .We have ranked as high as 3rd under wikipedia in recent months. The only real changes we have made are too the sitemap that is auto generated every time some thing is changed in the database. Does anyone have any ideas what is going on? im i being hit by hummingbird. Thank you! MozAnalyticsPDF115_zpsddec64fa.png

    | Nicktaylor1
    0

  • Hello, Our website is a private equity firm database, privateequityfirms.com. We rank well for a number of private equity definitions and terms and have been increasing rank in those terms but unfortunately we have been losing ranking in our main keyword and url "private equity firms" .We have ranked as high as 3rd under wikipedia. The only real changes we have made are too the sitemap that is auto generated every time some thing is changed in the database. Does anyone have any ideas what is going on? I have included a Image to help show the problem. Thank you! MozAnalyticsPDF115_zpsddec64fa.png

    | Nicktaylor1
    0

  • We have a client who is experiencing much in the way off duplicated content and broken, spammed inbound links. While we are removing and correcting everything using google webmaster, I'm hearing stories of websites not being able to recover from algorithms/penalties applied because of this. My client had around 250 inbound links to their website and over the space of 3 weeks mounted over 8,000 unethical links. Any information surrounding this issue would be much apprecited. Thanks Gary

    | GaryVictory
    0

  • I've found a lot of times it does not take much activity to get a keyword from ranking on page 3 of Google or further down to page 2 but there seems to be a hurdle from page 2 to page 1.  It is very frustrating to be between 11 and 15 but not being able to make that push to 9 or 10. Has anyone got or seen any data to justifiy this?

    | S_Curtis
    0

  • Without mentioning names, we're noticing a shift in many of our clients ranking pages. Previously many of them held page 1 positions with their home page. We've been building brand only anchor text to these pages for some time now and there's a noticeable change in visibility to the domain as a whole displayed in GWT and there's an uplift in organic traffic too. It just happens that some of our clients already had pages in the root directory that were very optimised for the clients' head terms, but all of a sudden, these sub pages with very few inbound links have started ranking in the place of the home pages. I've attached a screenshot of the landing page organic traffic. The pages in question have been there for at least 8-10 months. These inner pages would not normally have been able to hold their ground in this position and I'm concerned that this is a temporary change. I can see this going one of two ways; (i) home page beings to out rank sub page as before, (i) sub page loses ranking ability and home page rank does not come back. My questions to the community are therefore; **Has anyone else noticed this shift in ranking behaviour? ** What are everyone's thoughts on this? - Will it remain this way? From this query I can easily ask another wider question; Good advice across the internet says we should be building strong brand links and citations to our clients' domains. Typically brand links go to the homepage, which should provide the homepage and (to a lesser extent the domain) with a ranking/traffic/visibility uplift. However, as I'm noticing other pages now picking up ranking boosts as a result of this; **Should we still be trying to gain links to these more commercial landing pages? ** How are others building high quality links to pages full of commercial copy? I hope this can spark a little bit of a debate. I look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts. Thanks yPOEjVA.png

    | tomcraig86
    0

  • We are trying to figure out why last year we had a huge (80%) and sudden (within two days) drop in our google searches.  The only "outlier" in our site that we can find is a huge number of pages reported in MOZ as scanned by search engines.  Is this a problem?  How did we get so many pages reported?  What can we do to bring the number of searched pages back to a "normal" level? BT

    | achituv
    0

  • I heard that if you link to another site, when Google indexes your site, they crawl that page that is referenced. By whatever metrics they use, if that site has your name or a link to your site, Google would rank it higher. I am not sure how true that is, but what value does another site mentioned our site have on our SEO?

    | JonathonOhayon
    1

  • I've noticed a massive increase in the number of external followed links to my root domain (from 271 to 9961) - has anyone else experienced this?

    | HeatherBakerTopLine
    0

  • If google shows a search trend doubling in a time frame, does that mean the amount of searches doubled? As in: 2006 was ranked at a 50 on trends and the 100 is 2013 and in 2013 10,000 searches were made, does that mean around 5,000 searches were made in 2006?

    | JoshBowers2012
    0

  • I have a client who targets a particular city, and up until now has had his physical location in the suburbs of that city. This April 1, his office will have the city address he has been targeting. I have spent a lot of time over the past year claiming ownership of all local directory listings and consolidating addresses as he has moved several times in the past 5 years. Looking at this as an opportunity to get the official USPS address he will be using and use the exact same address for everything. So many different variations out there right now for him. Wondering if it would be ok to start promoting the new address before the April 1 move and also when to start with the directory listings. Also, have held off on purchasing the yahoo directory link because of the suburban address but reconsidering this as of April 1 as well.

    | c2g
    0

  • In the past two weeks, I've seen some movement in ranking for "Tampa Personal Injury Attorney." The problem is that this page: http://www.kempruge.com/personal-injury/ is the one that's ranking and not this page: http://www.kempruge.com/location/tampa/tampa-personal-injury-legal-attorneys/ which is the one I've been working on. Also, the former page has made it to page 4 (not great) but better than 7, which is what the latter page was. In addition, the latter page now doesn't rank at all (or at least not in the first 16 pages). Finally, according to Moz, the latter page (the one that no longer ranks) is my second best page after my homepage. I just don't understand this at all. Is this a fluke? Should I just try to work on the page that's ranking higher over the page I've put the time into? Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0

  • Hello again guys Thank you for your previous help with www.kids-academy.co.uk - we are slowly getting there! I wanted to ask something I cannot seem to find an answer to, can Google penalize you by country? By this I mean; Search term
    Nursery franchise UAE           Page 1
    Nursery franchise UK             Nowhere to be found! The page in question (well a section of the site) has been optimised for UK, however, as they do have a sister site in the UAE, it mentions those areas too. The pages I have been working on are now ranking reasonably well to say there is a long way to go, but for long tailed keywords NOT including anything to do with the UK. There are no naughty backlinks with the anchor text to do with the UK, the server is hosted in the UK, it is a .co.uk URL (no geotagging but I would like to know if this is of any use with this type of URL, everything says no, but it cant harm can it?) - is it possible Google due to bad practices in the past have slapped a penalty on the specific keyword area? Not something I have come across previously but I am scratching my head over here! Time for a brew break 😄 Thanks in advance guys! Leanne

    | LeanneSEO
    1

  • Hi Moz, I'm working on an ecommerce site with categories, filter options, and sort options – teacherexpress.scholastic.com. Should I have canonical tags from all filter and sort options point to the category page like gap.com and llbean.com? or have all sort options point to the filtered page URL like kohls.com? I was under the impression that to use a canonical tag, the pages have to have the same content, meaning that Gap and L.L. Bean would be using canonical tags incorrectly. Using a filter changes the content, whereas using a sort option just changes the order. What would be the best way to deal with duplicate content for this site? Thanks for reading!

    | DA2013
    0

  • Hello! I have a site I've been tracking using Moz since July. The site is mainly stagnant with some on page content updates. Starting the first week of December, Moz crawler diagnostics showed that the number of pages crawled decreased from 300 to 100 in a week. So did the number of errors through. So crawler issues went from 275 to 50 and total pages crawled went from 190 to 125 in a week and this number has stayed the same for the last 5 weeks. Are the drops a red flag? Or is it ok since errors decreased also? Has anyone else experienced this and found an issue? FYI: sitemap exists and is submitted via webmaster tools. GWT shows no crawler errors nor blocked URLs.

    | Symmetri
    0

  • I'm trying to show people the trends of certain keywords/topics over a period of years Keyword Planner gives some actual numbers but only for 12 months. Trends will show "Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart. If at most 10% of searches for the given region and time frame were for "pizza," we'd consider this 100. This doesn't convey absolute search volume." Which I don't really understand, other than if the graph goes up it means more interest but has to do with the amount of people searching, location, etc which can get tricky? I'd like to put together a short report explaining certain topics and how interest in them has increased over the last 5+ years. I'm hoping someone else here has had some experience with this and has some advice or links with more information?

    | JoshBowers2012
    0

  • what are pros and cons of launching a new product site as opposed to placing it under a subdomain of the company site? will the new site be placed in the google sandbox? the main goal is to provide credibility for the product, and by placing it under the company site that has been live for over 10 years. It is not a consumer product - more dealers. So people would be pushed to the site or find it through the brochure.

    | bakergraphix_yahoo.com
    0

  • Should your home page be www.yoursite.com/index.htm or home.htm or default.htm on an apache server? Someone asked me this, and I have no idea. On our wordpress site, I have never even seen this come up, but according to my friend, every homepage HAS to be one of those three. So my question is which one is best for an apache server site AND does it actually have to be one of those three? Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
    0

  • I have a physician who is a client and I'm wondering:  is there any advantage to having their schema.org as "LocalBusiness" vs.  Physician? Clearly as Physician is a sublisting, it should be fine.  But I'm just curious.  Other than future-proofing is there any "real-time" advantage? Thanks for any insight!

    | Titan552
    0

  • I am wondering if there are any consequences if you manage multiple websites in the same Webmaster Tool's account and cross link between them? My guess is that this would be a very easy thing for Google to detect and build into their algorithms. Hence affect the link juice from those domains that are owned by the same person. I am looking for verification on this. Thanks, Joe

    | csamsojo
    0

  • Hi I recently updated some page titles, H1 tags & on page content which overall has seen search results slip down following the first site crawl by google I assume. My question is, should I try to get back  the rankings and test and change one thing at a time to see the impact right now or should i wait for a period of time for it to settle down once goggle has crawled the site a few times or will the subsequent crawls have no impact? Thanks Ash

    | AshShep1
    0

  • Our site for years was performing at #1 for but in the last 6 months been pushed down to about the #5 spot.  Some of the domains above us have a handful of links and they aren't from good sources.  We don't have a Google penalty.  We try to only have links from quality domains but have been pushed down the SERP's?  Any suggestions?

    | northerncs
    0

  • I have 14,000 pages on my website, but when I do a site:domain.com search on google, it shows around 55,000. I first thought.."hmm, maybe it is including subdomains". So I tried site:www.domain.com and now it shows 35,000. That still is more than double the pages I have. Any ideas why? When you filter a google search using "site", isn't it meant to pick up just that site's pages? *P.S I tried using the SEOquake add-on to download search results as a CSV file to review,  but the add-on only downloads the first 100 search results 😞

    | Bio-RadAbs
    0

  • We are redeveloping a website for a card company who have far too many products to write unique descriptions for each. Even if they could I don't think it would be beneficial to the user. However they do have unique descriptions for each range which is useful for users viewing an individual card. Which is better practice: a) Ignore the duplicate content issue and supply the user with info about the range b) Provide clear enticing links to find out more about the range which will leave the individual card page a little void of content. Many thanks

    | SoundinTheory
    0

  • We've been having a discussion about the GA Premium service here in our office, trying to weigh up the pro's and con's... For the majority all it seems you gain access to is more support from google. We're trying to find out if that is the case or if you gain extra information, such as and insight into the search terms who must not be named. Of course i'm talking about the (Not Set) data... This section of data is ever increasing, yes i know we can access certain terms through webmasters but it was so much easier (in the good ol' days) when all the data was under one roof! Any thought opinions or even more questions would be greatly appreciated, i look forward to your responses. Anthony

    | Kal-SEO
    0

  • I am working on a clients site and the last two weeks rankings and traffic have gone down hill. I have taken Bing rankings for a grain of salt lately because they seem sporadic in my ranking tools. I did some manual checks and my client's site does not even index or rank on Bing when searching by their domain. Also why is the Bing site index results so off. My client has 29,000 pages under Google but in Bing they have only 40. What am I missing?

    | LeverSEO
    0

  • Hello, During the weekend 4 of our sites automatically changed their search titles and descriptions at the same time.
    They are not picking up the real pages: Title, Description. Our ranks are dropping because of this. can you please tell if it happened to you as well or if you recognize a problem here? sites:
    http://www.robinhoodbingo.com
    http://www.gossipbingo.com
    http://www.moonbingo.com in the attached examples:
    for the kws searched - the results show different titles and descriptions. results for these pages:
    moon bingo - http://www.moonbingo.com
    mobile bingo - http://www.robinhoodbingo.com/skin/mobile.php rhMzURw.png 2tRL5dZ.png

    | lordish
    0

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