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Category: Algorithm Updates

Discuss algorithm updates and impacts.

  • waynekolenchuk


    My client is a manufacturers representative for highly technical controls. The manufacturers do not sell their products directly, relying on manufacturers reps to sell and service them. Most but not all of them publish their specs on their sites, usually in PDF only. As a service to our customers and with permission of the manufacturers we publish the manufacturers specs on our site for our customers in HTML with images and downloadable PDF's — this constitutes our catalogue. The pages are lengthy and technical, and are pretty much the opposite of thin content. The URLS for these (technical) queries rank well,  so Google doesn't seem to mind. Does this constitute duplicate content and can we be penalized for it?

    | waynekolenchuk
    0
  • mutant2008


    ON 14th November following a DNS error (which seems to have been a google error as local servers were not effected and it happened to many people everywhere) my traffic started dropping. Within 5 days it was down 50%. In a panic to resolve the situation I thought it was because i was on a shared host and moved to VPS which was a disaster. Ive had server errors since. After desperately looking everywhere for news on the DNS error and whether there as algorithm change etc I decided i should have a look at my site @ www.mutantspace.com and see if there were any internal issues. In Google Webmaster forum a helpful moderator suggested that I do 2 things: 1. Deal with the fact that I had keyword stuffed my <alt tags="">. Basically i run an arts blog so have 8 - 10 images per post and was putting the same text in each one i.e [artists name][artform][name of artwork]. I stupidly didnt realise what i had been doing and have since been deleting my alt tags for every image except one per post. However i have 17,000 images so its going to take a while. </alt> 2. She also linked me to https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/http%253A%252F%252Fwww.mutantspace.com%252F and wondered why i had such volatile inbound links. I dont know why. And cant figure it out As far as everything else goes I dont know what I could be doing wrong to deserve penalty - if it is a penalty. I dont back link so all my links are natural (from artists, galleries, art blogs, tumblrs, etc) I dont sell advertising (yet anyway) Having said that ive been told i have too many links on each page (i run a wordpress site and so have categories, etc) so im wondering if i should nofollow my categories? In short im wondering what advice anyone has on doing a systematic shake up of my site. Im currently doing the following: 1. deleting most of the <alt tags="">on my posts. Ive got back as far as 2012 and will keep going til theyre all done.</alt> 2. Redirecting all crawl errors 3. No Following more outbound links and links to social networks 4. Checking all inbound links to see if there is an suspicious domains 5. Sorting out the fact that ive had numerous server errors for the last 2 weeks (would that affect SERPS?) Is there anything else i can do? Should do? much appreciated

    | mutant2008
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  • mutant2008


    HI there. On 14th November GWT reported a DNS error on my site I checked with my hosts but they said there was nothing wrong. I then went searching for answers and found it happened to lot of people on that specific day see http://moz.com/blog/was-there-a-november-14th-google-update. After that time my website traffic dropped by 50% over the period of a week and is still sitting on 50% of what it was. I then moved the site to VPS, had a few DNS errors  - that were the cause of my hosts  - so i moved back to shared hosting last weekend and now DNS issues are solved. However the original DNS issue is still unknown I dont know what went wrong and want to rectify issue. I dont sell ads and write original content 4 times a day. I have a miniscule bounce rate, my site speed is okay and i dont  stuff keywords in my content although i was careless with my <alt tags="">so they could be considered keyword stuffing (and i have up to 10 images on one post). But i have been removing all the keywords in my images theres over 3000 posts so its taking time).  My impressions have dropped from 10,000 a day to 2,500 and I have no idea why.</alt> My website has been building traffic consistently for the last 2 years. Only now has it crashed a bit. Have you any advice on what I can do to solve this problem or rather find the cause of the issue. Im not a pro seo person and do this blog in my free time so am not an expert on data analyzing etc.... thanks alot

    | mutant2008
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  • Etna


    Hey Moz, This has been happening to me with a couple of clients recently and I wanted to kick it out to the community and see if anyone else has experienced it and might be able to shed some light on why. (Disclaimer: Both clients are in the elective healthcare space)
    Scenario: Client's site is optimized for a fairly competitive "procedural keyword + location" phrase. Historically, the site had been ranking on the first page for a while until it suddenly dropped off for that query. At the same time, the page now ranks on the first page for just the procedural term, without the location modifier (obviously much more competitive than with the location modifier). Searches on Google were set to the city in which the client was located. Not that I'm complaining, but this seems a little weird to me. Anyone have a similar situation? If so, any theories about what might have caused it? TL;DR - Site ranked on 1st page for "keyword + location modifier" historically, now ranking on 1st page for "keyword" only and not found with "keyword + location modifier" TRQd9Hu

    | Etna
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  • BrickPicker


    I got notified that my domain went from a google pagerank of 3 to 4.   When this happens, does google raise me in the searches which can then hopefully get me more traffic, or is it a worthless number.  Maybe only google knows 🙂

    | BrickPicker
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  • dimicos


    I am curious, if i can add both "video" and "article" schema.org markup for my video pages. Currently i have video markup up and running, but it only shows up in SERPs when users browse videos (not web content). Can i add "article" markup as well, so the markup will show on Web search? Thanks, Dime

    | dimicos
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  • Manseo


    I have done a good bit of research but am not sure which word to focus on.  I feel that the trend is moving towards no hyphen but I do not have any data to justify that other than google trends.  Here is the research I found: Google Trends says ecommerce is more popular
    http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=e-commerce%2C%20ecommerce&cmpt=q Ngram says e-commerce
    https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=ecommerce%2Ce-commerce&year_start=1990&year_end=2013&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cecommerce%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ce%20-%20commerce%3B%2Cc0 Google Adwords Keyword tool says e-commerce:
    e-commerce has 33,100 monthly search volume
    ecommerce has 14,800 monthly search volume What do you think,  will ecommerce overtake e-commerce in the future monthly search volumes? Ecommerce or E-commerce?

    | Manseo
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  • designquotes


    Here is the page: http://www.designquotes.com.au/business-blog/top-10-australian-business-directories-in-2012/ It's fairly old, but when it was first written it hit #1 for "business directories". After a while it dropped but was receieving lots of traffic for long tail variations of "business directories Australia" As of the 4th of October (Penguin 2.1) it lost traffic and rankings entirely. I checked it's link profile and there isn't anything fishy: From Google Webmaster https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtwbT3wshHRsdEc1OWl4SFN0SDdiTkwzSmdGTFpZOFE&usp=sharing In fact, two links are entirely natural http://blog.businesszoom.com.au/2013/09/use-customer-reviews-to-improve-your-website-ranking/ http://dianajones.com.au/google-plus-local-equals-more-business-blog/ Yet when I search for a close match in title in Google AU, the article doesn't appear within even the first 4 pages. https://www.google.com.au/#q=top+10+Australian+Business+Directories&start=10 Is this simple because it's an old article? Should I re-write it, update the analysis and use a rel=canonical on the old article to the new?

    | designquotes
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  • BobGW


    Hello, For an Ecommerce site, how does fresh content affect rankings? Meaning, fresh vs old content on the home page, category pages, product pages, articles. Thanks.

    | BobGW
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  • rajatsharma


    Last week (exactly 8 days ago to be precise) my developer created a staging/test site to test some new features. The staging site duplicated the entire existing site on the same server. To explain this better -My site address is - www.mysite.com The path of the new staging site was www.mysite/staging I realized this only today and have immediately restricted robot text and put a no index no follow on the entire duplicate server folder but I am sure that Google would have indexed the duplicate content by now? So far I do not see any significant drop in traffic but should I be worried? and what if anything can I do at this stage?

    | rajatsharma
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  • webeeline


    Hello everyone, we are preparing a global we strategy for our customer, who wants to focus on many local markets. They are present with their products in over 60 countries on all continents and they can cover 7 languages easily. They also own the TLDs in each main country. Our priority is to be not only found in Google, but also in all major local search engines, which are popular in each country. Our main concerns with this strategy are: How do we host the website locally for each country, so local search engines recognize the website as a local website? Also, is it that important? Is cloud hosting the right solution for this? We would have different server locations for each TLD/language. Surrounding countries would at least get a fast connection and download rate, if the server is located nearby. If yes, can you recommend any companies doing cloud hosting? Is it also wise to additionally redirect the user to the local server based on his/her location? Is there a risk of duplicate content or being recognized as a link spamming site (for having links to each other from different domains of the same site, the content will be in different languages, though) just by using this solution? We would, of course, keep the content separated by domain to avoid duplicate content. Any comments and ideas would be highly appreciated. Thanks, Wojtek

    | webeeline
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  • jfmonfette


    Hi everyone, We had pretty good organic traffic growth for the past 3 years. Some people in our organization think that we were probably affected positively by the algorithm changes (Panda, Penguin,...). When I plot the dates on a chart I think Panda had no effect, but we had big gains starting five months after Penguin 1. Do you think the effect could have come that much later ? Thanks

    | jfmonfette
    0
  • MattBarker


    It's pretty clear that "AuthorRank" is going to be a big thing for SEO. Although the main principles seem to be pretty straightforward (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/authorship-google-plus-link-building) what I'm less clear about is how we can start to think about author influence as a measurable metric. Webmaster tools gives us Author Stats as an impact on the site's impressions/CTR, but how do we measure the influence of an individual author? Are those factors even defined? Will we get to a stage where authors can be given a Klout-like score for Google Authorship? If not that, how will it look? This will be a HUGE question to solve for future content development strategies, and is something I'm thinking a lot about right now. Best, Matt.

    | MattBarker
    3
  • Steplead


    Hi, I am new for MOZ, have no idea how to improve my website with the function of MOZ, can anyone share their experience for using MOZ service. the more detail the better! Thanks a lot in advance! John Thanks for helps for everyone, it took me some time to read each answer, and also spend few days to study MOZ. My initial conclusion is the function of MOZ is to promote the idea of SEO, but not provide any specific SEO service for specific website except for some tools and report. So I am missing or misunderstanding MOZ's service, it will be always welcome to help me out by correcting my opinion. Anyway, thanks again for all the time you've given to me, and good to you all! -John.

    | Steplead
    1
  • sbrault74


    I've got some pages that appear somewhere around #25 in Google. Every now and then, it just goes away from the top 100 results for a few days (even up to a week) and then it comes back. I've got other pages that rank around #8 which falls down to about #75 for a while and then it comes back. But while a page may be gone from the top 100 results in the US, it still ranks at about the same place everywhere else in the world (+/- 10 positions). I've seen this happen in the past but never it happened so often. What gives?!?

    | sbrault74
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  • digitalsoda


    Hello!
    Wonder if anyone can help with this one? I have an ecommerce site www.doggydazzles.co.uk which went live on Friday and was submitted to Google via webmaster tools on saturday morning, but I can't find any trace of it in a google search?
    I'm a bit stuck with this as its never happened to any of my other sites.
    Can anyone help please or make suggestions as to what I can do to get ranked quicker? Thanks

    | digitalsoda
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  • crazymikesapps1


    Hello, We are cleaning up our low quality content on our website and we are struggling with the idea of deleting blog posts that have a pagerank of 1 or above, but pull in little to no views on the website. My research seems to indicate that low quality content in terms of pageviews is possibly a negative for our website as a whole. My dilemma, to delete the pages that hold rank or keep them? thank you Mike

    | crazymikesapps1
    0
  • Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants


    So basically, my website is very old... 1995 Old.  Extremely old content still shows up when people search for things that are outdated by 10-15+ years , I decided not to drop redirects on some of the irrelevant pages.  People still hit the pages, but bounce... I have about 400 pages that I don't want to delete or redirect.  Many of them have old backlinks and hold some value but do interfere with my new relevant content. If I dropped these pages into a sitemap, set the priority to zero would that possibly help?  No redirects, content is still valid for people looking for it, but maybe these old pages don't show up above my new content? Currently the old stuff is excluded from all sitemaps.. I don't want to make one and have it make the problem worse. Any advise is appreciated. Thx 😄

    | Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants
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  • Gavo


    If I have a website that been affected by the panda/penguin update, do bad links affect the entire site or just the page the bad link(s) are linked to? If it is the latter and penguin/panda actually affect webpages, not websites (as is the common reference/conception), then wouldn't simply creating a new URL, targeting this new URL, shifting meta-tags and restarting link-building efforts again (this time using the right quality strategies) be a really common-sense approach instead of the tediousness of the disavow approach that so many go down?

    | Gavo
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  • SorinaDascalu


    I am consulting someone for a problem related to copied content. Both sites in question are WordPress (self hosted) sites. The "good" site publishes a post. The "bad" site copies the post (without even removing all internal links to the "good" site) a few days after. On both websites it is obvious the publishing date of the posts, and it is clear that the "bad" site publishes the posts days later. The content thief doesn't even bother to fake the publishing date. The owner of the "good" site wants to have all the proofs needed before acting against the content thief. So I suggested him to also check in Google the dates the various pages were indexed using Search Tools -> Custom Range in order to have the indexing date displayed next to the search results. For all of the copied pages the indexing dates also prove the "bad" site published the content days after the "good" site, but there are 2 exceptions for the very 2 first posts copied. First post:
    On the "good" website it was published on 30 January 2013
    On the "bad" website it was published on 26 February 2013
    In Google search both show up indexed on 30 January 2013! Second post:
    On the "good" website it was published on 20 March 2013
    On the "bad" website it was published on 10 May 2013
    In Google search both show up indexed on 20 March 2013! Is it possible to be an error in the date shown in Google search results? I also asked for help on Google Webmaster forums but there the discussion shifted to "who copied the content" and "file a DMCA complain". So I want to be sure my question is better understood here.
    It is not about who published the content first or how to take down the copied content, I am just asking if anybody else noticed this strange thing with Google indexing dates. How is it possible for Google search results to display an indexing date previous to the date the article copy was published and exactly the same date that the original article was published and indexed?

    | SorinaDascalu
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  • the-coopersmith


    I am setting up local pages on our main site for each of our dealers. Some of them cover multiple cities. For example, one dealer in Santa Rosa, CA, but also covers San Francisco (50 mile drive). While I know that with Google+ Local I can add coverage radius or zip code/cities covered, what about on that dealer's local page on our site? Should I create local pages for each city covered or cram local optimization into one? Keep in mind I only have one address to work with for each dealer (P.O. Boxes or Virtual Mail Boxes are NOT a good solutions). Looking for any white hat tips before I implement for all 100+ dealers.

    | the-coopersmith
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  • TomNYC


    Hi all, So, I've read a lot of posts about guest posting being dead, but what about if you have a regular column on a well-regarded site? Stop? Nofollow links? We have a regular column on the Huffington Post and each piece has historically had at least one link (or more) back to our site. Yes, early on (like last year) we did use optimized anchor text in our links, and then calmed down on that a bit. But regardless, the links have always been relevant to the topic covered, and the topic is always in our niche (namely: budget travel in Europe). I saw Matt Cutts' recent video in which he recommends using the "nofollow" tag on guest posts when linking to one's own site, and specifically mentions HuffPo. Thus, I'm prepared to go back to my old posts and "nofollow" those links, but I just wanted a sanity check from the fine folks at SEOMoz. Would you go back and nofollow them? Many thanks!

    | TomNYC
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  • bjs2010


    Hi all, I'm experiencing some strange behaviour with Google Webmaster Tools. I noticed that some of our pages from our ecom site were missing start keywords - I created a template for meta titles that uses Manufacturer - Ref Number - Product Name - Online Shop;  all trimmed under 65 chars just in case. To give you an idea, an example meta title looks like:
    Weber 522053 - Electric Barbecue Q 140 Grey - Online Shop The strange behaviour is if I do a "Fetch as Google" in GWT, no problem - I can see it pulls the variables and it's ok. So I click submit to index. Then I do a google site:URL search, to see what it has indexed, and I see the meta description has changed (so I know it's working), but the meta title has been cut so it looks like this:
    Electric Barbecue Q 140 Grey - Online Shop So I am confused - why would Google cut off some words at start of meta title? Even after the Fetch as Googlebot looks perfectly ok? I should point out that this method works perfect on our other pages, which are many hundreds - but it's not working on some pages for some weird reason.... Any ideas?

    | bjs2010
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  • bjs2010


    Hi, We have an extensive online shop in Magento - to ensure that some of the pages with query strings are not indexed, we implemented a conditional NOINDEX,FOLLOW so that it will stop indexing any pages that have querystrings on it - We do need to use Canonical also - for other reasons - so my question is: If you have a page that is NOINDEX,FOLLOW and it has a rel canonical pointing to original, would it transfer that NOINDEX,FOLLOW to the main original page causing it problems? Thanks!

    | bjs2010
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  • A_Q


    Hi Guys, Has anybody noticed canonical URLs being ignored where they were previously obeyed? I have a site that is doing this at the moment and just wondered if this was being seen elsewhere and if anyone knows what the solution is? Thanks, Elias

    | A_Q
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  • DirectiveSEO


    Hi everyone, Does anyone know if Bing has rolled out an algorithm update recently? I have noticed a decent change in Bing/Yahoo results recently. Searching online only produces results for Google's updates. Thanks in advance for your help.

    | DirectiveSEO
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  • inhouseseo


    I have had a niche store since 2008. It has a higher conversion rate than my main site, and does fairly well. The site template is an exact copy of my main site, and all the product URLs are the same. The only difference is, it only has items from a certain category. My questions is, are niche store still a good idea? Will I be better of doing a page to page 301 to my main site, and just focus on a single site? Am I better of as far as SEO with one main site? If anyone has experience with this, I would like to hear about your experience. Any thoughts are appreciated.

    | inhouseseo
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  • ChazSztroin


    I began reviewing the rankings this week and noticed that many of our #1,#2, etc rankings had been bummed down as a whole.  After reviewing many of the search terms it seems Google has begun to rank a group named Scholarly Articles in the #1 position.  Has anyone else noticed this change? Secondly, many of the rankings we have lost are due to some competitors stuffing their descriptions with keywords. #1 Rank Description Failure Analysis; Scanning Electron Microscopy & EDS Analysis. Paint Chip Analysis and Evaluation; Paint Tests Physical Testing of Paints. #1 Rank Description NACE certified coatings inspector, paint inspector, coating inspector, coatings inspector, lining, failure analysis, survey, corrosion, rust, evaluation, testing, expert Is this a possible glitch occurring with the new humming bird release and has anyone else noticed an issue like this? It dropped our #1 ranks from 37 to 23 overnight. Thanks

    | ChazSztroin
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  • iraweissman


    I have the opportunity now to acquire a very desirable generic domain name with either the .org or .pro TLD.  Obviously, the .pro version I can get for a far better price.  The .org will probably end up being about 10x the price of the .pro. I feel like the .org would give me instant clout while the .pro might raise eyebrows.  Also, I'm concerned that Google might also discount these new gTLDs. What do you guys think?  Is the perceived authority of the old-time TLDs something worth investing in? Or will this fizzle away over time as the new gTLDs flood the market? THanks! Ira

    | iraweissman
    0
  • tempowebdesign


    We have looked at around 2000 sites since Penguin 2.1 launched a few weeks back.  These include our customers and their own competitors site.  We are going through all the data which is obviously going to take some time.  Hopefully we will publish a report on our findings as we are happy to share. What I currently see in my early analysis is Roughly 70% of sites tested have 0% exact match Anchor Text for their money keywords. The other 30% have less than 5% exact match Anchor Text. The quality of the links is often still poor to the sites ranking on page 1. The content surrounding the links is only about 10-15% of the time related to the money keywords. The loading time of the sites ranking seems to not matter, we encountered a lot of slow sites. Design and usability of the site was not important. We are not seeing much impact via Social media, a lot of these sites are small business Less than 10% of sites on page 1 had a Google+ account More than 40% of page 1 sites had Facebook profiles. More than 80% of the sites ranking on page 1 had less than 100 links to the landing page that ranked What are your opinions of helping to recover if hit by the above??? Q) If you have too high an anchor text percentage and have been hit or may get hit in the future would you. a) create some more high quality links with more varied anchor text, ie Click here, brand name etc b) not create any more links just remove the links you have to dilute the anchor text c) change the anchor text on links you are able to These figures are a work in progress so data will change just wanting to share our early findings and try to get a good conversation going. What are you guys seeing?

    | tempowebdesign
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  • vijayvasu


    For example is you type dr martens in google , the search page shows links and then a snippet of the company on the right. Thank you. https://www.google.com/search?q=dr+martens&oq=dr+martens&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2176j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8

    | vijayvasu
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  • Stew222


    Do search engines consider keywords such as "1099 E-File Software" & "1099 "EFile Software" the same? Many of the keywords for my website will have a dash "-" when properly spelled out but there are many users who would simply omit it when spelling the word.  Another example would be "W-2 Software" as opposed to "W2 Software".

    | Stew222
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  • Stew222


    I have a tax software website for which there a multiple pages that compete using different keywords.  However, all pages but my home page have recently fallen out of the rankings completely and I really just don't know why. For instance, my page - http://www.1099pro.com/prod1099proEnt.asp - has the title keywords "1099 Efile Software | 1099 Software | 1099 Electronic Filing".  When I run a Moz report on the keyword "1099 E-File Software" I get an "A" rating and it finds a total of 8 instances of the keyword.  However, when I run a Moz report on the keyword "1099 Software" it finds a total of 26 instances of the keyword - still with an "A" rating. When I search the actual text/html there are only 6 instances of the keyword "1099 software" which leads me to believe that Moz/Google/Search Engines are ignoring the middle term in words like "1099 printing software" or "1099 e-filing software" and only picking up "1099 software".  Is this supposed to be happening?  Does anyone know why or how many terms can be ignored in that fashion? I used to have multiple landing pages in the top 3 results and now all of my other landing pages have completely fallen from the rankings even though I am not keyword stuffing and am providing unique & relevant content.  If anyone has an idea as to why my rankings have dropped so drastically I would really appreciate it (I take no part in black-hat link building so that isn't the reason).

    | Stew222
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  • balloon.co.uk


    Hi Mozers I have traded from my website balloon.co.uk for over 10 years. For a long while the site ranked first for the word 'balloon' across the UK on google.co.uk (first out of 41 million). Around the time Penguin launched the site began to drop and currently sits on about page 5. What's confusing is that for a search on 'balloons' ('s' on the end of balloon) it ranks 2nd in the location of Birmingham where I'm based. That's 2nd in the real search rather than a map local search. But - if I search 'balloon' from the location of Birmingham my contact page ranks 5th: http://www.balloon.co.uk/contact.htm but the home page ranks nowhere. So - it's gone from ranking 1st nationally to ranking nowhere with my contact page ranking above the home page (which is a generic word domain). Any ideas?

    | balloon.co.uk
    0
  • CSawatzky


    Hi All, I'm wondering what would be the better alternative - schema.org microdata or microformats. I am aware that search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing recognize Schema.org as the standard. Question is, will it have any negative affect? Our web developer here says that schema.org microdata may result in negative html. I don't think that it will affect our SEO, but I guess that's also something to shed some light on. So, what's the consensus here - should we implement schema.org or go with microformats - or, does it really make any difference?

    | CSawatzky
    1
  • Ideas-Money-Art


    Hi Mozzers, I am really surprised what happened here. I conducted a small campaign by adding reviews rich snippet to 10 different microsites(covering different locations). Today I was checking if the snippets were showing up correctly in the SERPs and noticed that most of these locations with review snippet dropped in the rankings? How weird is that? Can anyone explain what happened here? Has anyone experienced this? Thank you!

    | Ideas-Money-Art
    0
  • jesse-landry


    I'm noticing in several of the SERPs I track this morning that the domains that formerly had multiple pages listed on pages 1-3 for the same keyword are now reduced to one listing per domain. I'm hoping that this is a permanent change and widespread as it is a significant boon to my campaigns, but I'm wondering if anyone else here has seen this in their SERPs or knows what I'm talking about...? EX of what I mean by "duplicate domain listings": (in case my wording is confusing here) Search term "Product Item" Pages ranking: domain-one.com/product-item.html domain-one.com/product-item-benefits.html etc...

    | jesse-landry
    1
  • Spletnafuzija


    Hellow I am having some problems with my site www.kondomanija.si. It was ranked on the first page for my main KW kondomi (in www.google.si, Slovenia) but now it is not in the top 10 pages. And this has happened before, it drops out of the top 10 pages and in a cople of moths it is back for a short time (till it drops out again). It think the site has a week link profile... Could this be the reason? Does anybody know what is going on?

    | Spletnafuzija
    0
  • sanj5050


    Hi, I wanted to pose a question How soon do guys think itll be before author rank becomes a one of Googles major ranking factors? From what I can see the way they have designed it signals that it is only matter of time, before they start using it as a major ranking factor... And I have a question on Author ranks impact on the ability to sell a blog/site in the future. Surely if the blog is tied to an author(s) and the ranking of the site in the search engine is somewhat based on this authors author rank who is a part of the site/blog, then it becomes harder to sell the property if the author is not going to be a part of the property after the sale?. I look forward to your responses on this,

    | sanj5050
    1
  • sanj5050


    Hi, I have a question regarding the power of internal links and how much link juice they pass, and how they influence search engine ranking positions. If we take the example of an ecommerce store that sells kites. Scenario 1 It can be assumed that it is easier for the kite ecommerce store to earn links to its homepage from writing great content on its blog, as any blogger that will link to the content will likely use the site name, and homepage as anchor text. So if we follow this through, then it can be assumed that there will eventually be a large number of high quality backlinks pointing to the sites homepage from various high authority blogs that love the content being posted on the sites blog. The question is how much link juice does this homepage pass to the category pages, and from the category pages then to the product pages, and what influence does this have on rankings? I ask because I have seen strong ecommerce sites with very strong DA or domain PR but with no backlinks to the product page/category page that are being ranked in the top 10 of search results often, for the respective category and product pages. It therefore leads me to assume that internal links must have a strong determiner on search rankings... Could it therefore also be assumed that a site with a PR of 5 and no links to a specific product page, would rank higher than a site with a PR of 1 but with 100 links pointing to the specific product page? Assuming they were both trying to rank for the same product keyword, and all other factors were equal. Ie. neither of them built spammy links or over optimised anchor text? Scenario 2 Does internal linking work both ways? Whereas in my above example I spoke about the homepage carrying link juice downward to the inner category and product pages. Can a powerful inner page carry link juice upward to category pages and then the homepage. For example, say the blogger who liked the kite stores blog content piece linked directly to the blog content piece from his site and the kite store blog content piece was hosted on www.xxxxxxx.com/blog/blogcontentpiece As authority links are being built to this blog content piece page from other bloggers linking to it, will it then pass link juice up to the main blog category page, and then the kite sites main homepage? And if there is a link with relevant anchor text as part of the blog content piece will this cause the link juice flowing upwards to be stronger? I know the above is quite winded, but I couldn't find anywhere that explains the power of internal linking on SERP's... Look forward to your replies on this....

    | sanj5050
    0
  • MangoMM


    Baidu Spider hits my UK site every 5 minutes of every day for the past 2 years. It has no consideration whether a domain exists or not. I know this because looking at etc/httpd/logs/error_log, i am getting every 5 minutes hits from Baidu spider trying to access a domain which points to my server which no longer exists. Given that I have absolutely no trade with China, and given that the only spam comments I get on my wordpress blog originate from China, do you think it's a good idea to either do a China country block in my .HTACCESS or block out Baidu spider? Baidu is consuming bandwidth and is clogging my error_logs!!! Why is it that Google, Bing, Yahoo etc... can all crawl my site nicely, but Baidu just abuses?

    | MangoMM
    0
  • IrvCo_Interactive


    Are Google site links only ever shown on the top website? Or is it possible for certain queries for the site in position #2 or #3 or something to have site links but the #1 position not have them? If there are any guides, tips or write ups regarding site links and their behavior and optimization please share! Thanks.

    | IrvCo_Interactive
    0
  • mwuest


    Does anyone have any insight as to why our organic search traffic would go to nearly nothing for roughly a 2 week span Oct 2 - Oct 17th?  Our regular traffic remained fairly consistent so we were still being indexed.  It has now resumed to more normal numbers but I cannot think of anything we did that would make this happen? We did make a 302 switch to be a 301 permanent redirect on our site in early August but that is all I can think of? Any insight or help would be appreciated!

    | mwuest
    0
  • mmac


    Just recently we noticed that google has indexed truncated urls for many of our pages that get 301'd to the correct page. For example, we have:
    http://www.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/Doubletree-Hotel-Boston-Bedford-Glen.html as the url linked everywhere and that's the only version of that page that we use. Google somehow figured out that it would still go to the right place via 301 if they removed the html filename from the end, so they indexed just: http://www.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/ The 301 is not new. It used to 404, but (probably 5 years ago) we saw a few links come in with the html file missing on similar urls so we decided to 301 them instead thinking it would be helpful.  We've preferred the longer version because it has the name in it and users that pay attention to the url can feel more confident they are going to the right place. We've always used the full (longer) url and google used to index them all that way, but just recently we noticed about 1/2 of our urls have been converted to the shorter version in the SERPs.  These shortened urls take the user to the right page via 301, so it isn't a case of the user landing in the wrong place, but over 100,000 301s may not be so good. You can look at: site:www.eventective.com/usa/massachusetts/bedford/ and you'll noticed all of the urls to businesses at the top of the listings go to the truncated version, but toward the bottom they have the full url. Can you explain to me why google would index a page that is 301'd to the right page and has been for years? I have a lot of thoughts on why they would do this and even more ideas on how we could build our urls better, but I'd really like to hear from some people that aren't quite as close to it as I am. One small detail that shouldn't affect this, but I'll mention it anyway, is that we have a mobile site with the same url pattern. http://m.eventective.com/USA/Massachusetts/Bedford/107/Doubletree-Hotel-Boston-Bedford-Glen.html We did not have the proper 301 in place on the m. site until the end of last week.  I'm pretty sure it will be asked, so I'll also mention we have the rel=alternate/canonical set up between the www and m sites. I'm also interested in any thoughts on how this may affect rankings since we seem to have been hit by something toward the end of last week.  Don't hesitate to mention anything else you see that may have triggered whatever may have hit us. Thank you,
    Michael

    | mmac
    0
  • MarbellaSurferDude


    For quite some time our Google Places listing has been in the Universal Results...(for this keyword there is a 7-pack result). Which was great, we had a PPC ad at the top of the page, we were 3rd in the Universal Results (there was 3 places listings before the natural results)...and we were 6th in the natural results - meaning we were on the first page 3 times...which means a happy boss....and lots of traffic. The old places listing was linked to our new Google+ Page pending the eventual demise of places and the merge. The merge has happened, all information from the places listing has migrated (apart from reviews and photos??) and the places listing has been deleted (URL returns 404 error). Problem is now my Google +  Page is not even within the first 2 or 3 pages of places results never mind in the Universal results. So it would appear the rank / authority that the places listing had...hasn't been transferred to the Google+ page. My competitors...who were in 1 + 2 in the universal results above the natural results and who have Google+ Pages with NOTHING on...bar their name, are still there! Why would I be dropped when my Google+ Page, has more info, more followers, more photos, more relevant content (they don't have any content ) than my 2 competitors. It seems I've been penalised....somebody suggested that I had the keyword twice in my "About" and twice in my "Introduction" info and that could be it.  I thought the loss of the review might be it too...but neither of the businesses now occupying the first 3 spots..have any reviews at all. Anybody else suffered from this? Anybody any other suggestions to why I might have been dropped so dramatically in the places listings? (My SERP listing is unaffected for this keyword) Keyword being mentioned twice hardly seems like "stuffing"! I'm actually not too concerned about the places ranking....not a great driver of traffic...but appearing in the Universal Results did obviously drive traffic...and to appear in the Universal Results...I've now got about 30 positions to climb...... The whole Google+ Local  / Google Places thing has been a nightmare from start to finish.... Thanks in advance for any help or advice!

    | MarbellaSurferDude
    0
  • Esaky


    I am using All-in SEO plugin from the time we started using blog, can we use the new Yoast plugin, i mean i do not want to lose any data or value to our article. I want to migrate them Will it be safe ! some saying do not go - others says you can ! Please if you ever did or have experience tell me ! My Blog is important for me ! The Yoast plugin gives many features compare to All-in-SEO.

    | Esaky
    0
  • BBuck


    Hi all! I just noticed over the last week that directories have taken over the first page of Google for vanity/local searches. My client has shown strong for over a year, and all of a sudden got pushed to the second page and all of these directories have been pushed forward. My client is a law firm, so the directories are findlaw.com, lawyers.com, justia.com, avvo.com, elocallawyers.com, yellowpages.com, primebuyersreport.com, yelp.com. There is only ONE law firm website listed on page 1. It used to be only a couple directories and mostly law firms. I bet you smart people know what happened!

    | BBuck
    0
  • omarfk


    Hello, I have noticed that our our traffic is down by 15% (last 30 days to the 30 days before it) and I dug deeper to figure out whats going on and I am not sure I understand what is happening. Traffic from google country domains( for example google.com.sa) dropped by 90% on the 18th of September, same applies to other country specific domains. Now my other stats (visits organic keywords, search queries in WMT) seem to be normal and have seem some decrease (~5%) but nothing as drastic as the traffic drop from the google country domains. Is this an https thing that is masking the source of the traffic that came into effect on that date? Is the traffic that is now missing from google country domains being reported from other sources? Can anyone shed some light on what is going on? qk0CS7X

    | omarfk
    0
  • KnutDSvendsen


    Did Google roll out Hummingbird at the same time in all countries? I have seen stong growth in my organiz traffic in the US, but not in other countries. My content is similar or same in multiple languages using country tld's.

    | KnutDSvendsen
    0
  • Gavin.Atkinson


    I've just been comparing search appearances in Google Webmaster Tools with organic search traffic from Google and found that the two do not correspond at all. Why would this be? GWT says my appearances in search crash-dived around the second week of September (does this correspond with a Google algorithm update?), but my organic search data in Google Analytics for the same time period shows that search visits actually increased. Anyone else seeing anomalies like this? 525f2de7c58cc2-09483641 525f2e345acdf1-83344837

    | Gavin.Atkinson
    0

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