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Category: Algorithm Updates

Discuss algorithm updates and impacts.


  • All right mozers... What do you think? Apparently Google has just realized the next wave of "Panda" .... I'd love to hear your experiences with the new Panda Update. Have you experienced any decline in organic traffic?

    | NerdsOnCall
    0

  • Ever since Google Places started merging with Google+, my client's business listing is now showing up in local search results incorrectly under another business name who shares the same address as them. Has anyone else encountered this problem or a way to correct it?

    | TheeDigital
    0

  • I have created 1 campaign for my site, www.giftbig.com The campaign ID is - 206474 I added 7 keywords on my campaign out of 7 there is a one keyword "gift vouchers" as per pro.seomoz the google rank is 4. buy when i search on google its not coming on 4th rank. can anybody tell me why its showing wrong result on my campaign.

    | Joydeep_das
    0

  • Hi Mozers, I have a  ecommerce furniture website, and I have been wondering for some time if showing the product descriptions on the sub/category page helps the website. If there is more content displayed on the subcategory, it should be more relevant, right? OR does it not matter, as it is duplicate content from the product page. I think showing the product descriptions on non-product pages is hurting my design/flow, but i worry that if I am to hide product content on sub/category pages my traffic will be hurt. Despite my searches I have not found an answer yet. Please take a look at my site and share your thoughts: http://www.ecustomfinishes.com/ Chris 27eVz

    | longdenc_gmail.com
    0

  • My client wants to show more links on google once someone searches for his company name. Im wondering whats the best way to setup a blog to solve this. Should I create it as blog.website.com.au or website.com.au/blog? What are the pros and cons of each? Thanks heaps guys.

    | Uds
    0

  • The company I do SEO work for is a vacation rental company.  Through research, reports, and crunching numbers I've discovered the seasonality of the buiness (when what we do is a popular search and when it is not). The problem I've encountered is that our average position for google seems to follow this exact same seasonality, but only for us.  What I mean is, as the season for looking up vacation rentals in our area fades away we take a serious nose dive in our positioning, yet when the season comes back we once again are first page.  The other interesting fact is this isn't happening to the other companies who are in the same area. How can the same key term change positioning seasonally like that and impact some companies and not others?  Can you give me some insights into where to at least look or pursue?  I should have started with you guys, but I had so far spent 4 months trying to get answers and so far I've come up with nothing more than guesses and frustration.  Please help me.

    | SSRMarketing
    0

  • I have noticed a large drop in a number of keywords in the latest rankings report. I have checked the results on the 'Ranking History Graph' and it appears that Google is reading different pages for the specific keyword and therefore, giving large fluctuations in ranking dependant on the page from week to week. Why would this be happening?

    | Benjamin379
    0

  • Hello, our company's website goo.gl/7Q56G lost all our rankings after the EMD algo update. Our domain is NOT a EMD. At the same time, I found that we have about 6000 new, extremely low quality spam backlinks with the same anchor text ("loan"). I saw some of those a few weeks ago, but didn't really pay much attention because I didn't believe Google would think we build those. I didn't get any messages on webmaster central. If this occurred with the EMD update, is it because of the low quality backlinks? Most of the real spammers, brokers (we are the actual funding source) are now dominating the top 10 for our main keyword "merchant cash advance". We were in the top 10 for the past 4 years, why would we get hit so hard now? I really appreciate your advice.

    | DaveMri
    1

  • Hi all, Has anyone noticed any ranking changes over the weekend? I've noticed an almost uniform drop of a few positions across almost all of my chosen phrases. Nothing major has occurred on our site, no messages in webmaster tools. An analysis of our competitors positions (which we track the top 10) doesn't reveal any clues. Cheers Aran

    | Aran_Smithson
    1

  • Our domain (www.absoluteautomation.com) has just today started appearing in search results as www.AbsoluteAutomation.com. Any ideas why?

    | absoauto
    0

  • Ok... so I'm looking for a way to understand what my site already ranks high for.. I don't necessarily want to have to manually type in keywords. The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate to a client what keywords they're already ranking high for. Is there an easy way / tool to go about doing this? Thanks in advance, Gene

    | BGroup
    0

  • With Google's penchant for listing at times many results - one on top of the other - from the same domain, is it now advisable to not worry about having multiple pages in the same site targeting the same or very similar keywords? Is this (keyword/page internal competition) one less thing that I have to worry about or worry about less or what? Thanks! Best... Jane

    | 94501
    0

  • My website has a significant number of inbound links (1,000+) from a single website, due to a sponsorship level contribution. Both my website and the other are authorities in the industry and in search results (PR of 5). Since even ethical websites can suffer a penalty from each iteration of Panda, I'm considering significantly removing the number of links from this website. Do you think that measurable change would be seen favorably by Google or would the drop in links be detrimental?

    | steelintheair
    0

  • Hi there Thanks for everyone here for their posts. As a newbie (with dozens of SEO providers asking me to pay them!), I was wondering if there's a preferred / better backlink profile to target in light of Panda/Penguin. I get a lot of companies offering 1000's of profile creations, which seems worthless to me! Surely certain types of links (local vs international), blogs, articles etc, have more value just through the fact that they offer something to the user who sees it (and hopefully that something is sticky, high quality content!) I understand that there is no magic formula, but at least want to know whats not worth doing and working backwards from there. Any opinions from users who have ranked well recently? I've got a mailbox full of sales pitches, so would be good to see this from an expert's eyes! Thanks in advance Regards

    | avgjoe007
    0

  • Hi all, Newbie here. I am looking at ways to drive traffic to my new site and wondered if it's worth attempting to rank in the lesser known search engines.  Getting to the top of these may be easier but I wondered if anyone has ever targeted traffic in this way? Thanks

    | stebutty
    0

  • Hey guys, I noticed alot of titles of webpages in Google now vary from search to search. They also differ from the Title tag that has been set by the webmaster. Anyone else notice this? (My results are depersonalized)

    | benjaminspak
    0

  • Maybe this is a common SERP for a generic product type but I'm seeing it a lot more often.  Here is an example SERP "rolling stools". The top 4 results are dynamic in-site search pages from Sears, ebay and Amazon (among others).  I understand their influence and authority but why would a search return a dynamic in-site SERP instead of a solid product page. A better question would be - How do I get my in-site SERPs to rank or how do I get my client's page to rise above the #5 spot is currently ranks at? Thanks

    | BenRWoodard
    0

  • Hi.  I was wondering if others have had this happen to them.  Lately, I've noticed that on a couple of my sites the homepage no longer appears in the Google SERP.  Instead, a Facebook page I've created appears in the position the homepage used to get. My subpages still get listed in Google--just not the homepage.  Obviously, I'd prefer that both the homepage and Facebook page appear. Any thoughts on what's going on? Thanks for your help!

    | TuxedoCat
    0

  • One of my pages dropped 22 places last week and I'm not sure why - can any body give me some suggestions to why this might have happened?

    | lindsayjhopkins
    0

  • Hello guys, So far I have found this Q&A to be very helpful. I have a couple of product pages on my website which rank very low in the search results. This was because in the past they were not at all optimized in terms of title, description, etc. I would like to now optimize these pages, get some inbound links to them, etc. I'm not sure whether to do this with the existing product pages or create new ones. I'm afraid that if I optimize the current pages, the low ranking from before will carry over. Would it be better to start fresh? Thank you, Pravin

    | goforgreen
    0

  • HI All, We are an Australian business with our hosting currently based in Australia. We have recently been considering moving hosts for a few reasons.  In particular when we have done analysis of hosting in the US and also with Rackspace say in Hong Kong we have found that the prices can be significantly cheaper or with more bells in whistles provided in the hosting of a dedicated server offshore vs Australia for the same price. Therefore from this point of view we would be much better off moving our hosting to the US or HK with Rackspace. There are the issues such as latency to take on board but lets put that to the side for the moment as we are mostly interested in understanding if offshore hosting will impact us from an SEO perspective and if so how and can these impacts be mitigated. So our first question is a) if we move our hosting offshore, will this impact our SEO? b) if it does impact our seo, how will it impact (ie lose rankings for organic pages due to IP address being offshore)? c) is A is also an impact are there ways of eliminating these impacts outlined in B? d) net - if the impacts on seo can be mitigated will the net result still be negative or could we still be seen on the same footing as a domain hosted in Australia? Thanks Sean

    | sbcinv
    0

  • I am looking to make a list of go-to questions when I talk to clients on the phone. What are some good questions that would help me evaluate their website/internet goals?

    | StreetwiseReports
    0

  • Our company started a WordPress blog about 14 years ago. It has since added a third-party forum, a user-submitted photo gallery, and a huge database of searchable products. We also have almost 4000 posts. With all that said, Google Alerts often lists our content under blogs rather than websites. Sometimes it shows up in both? Does anyone know what criteria Google uses for determining the type of content, and how we can signal to them that we are a website?

    | TMI.com
    0

  • Because my vocabulary isn't up to par, it may be easier for you to skip ahead to the image I've attached. One of my web pages shows up in the Google SERP like this. It has the blue "title" link that goes to one page (URL A), and under that, there is a green "breadcrumb" link that goes to a different page (URL B). Any idea why this is happening and how it can be fixed? Thanks in advance, Benjamin FjhUX.jpg

    | 1000Bulbs
    0

  • I've worked extremely hard re-ranking for the key word "kayak fishing" after our site migration and panda/penguin our site www.yakangler.com was lost in the doldrums. I couldn't find us on any of the results page 1 thru page 64. The good news is we have managed to make it to page 3 for the past month but I feel like we have hit a wall. I can't seem to get any more moment in my SERP for "kayak fishing" Google US. Anyone have any recommendations on what I should do to move us up more? We have good content that is updated daily, an active community and forum. site: www.yakangler.com key word: kayak fishing

    | mr_w
    0

  • Hi guys, After looking on the Internet and reading the Learn SEO section on this site, I've realised that Google doesn't like duplicate content and penalises it, whether that's duplication on your own site or of another site's content. We are an online retailer currently selling on different platforms including Amazon, eBay and our own ecommerce webstore. Is it okay to have the same item description (i.e. main page copy) on each of these sites, or will our search rankings get negatively impacted? Thank you in advance, I have researched on this issue also but I couldn't find a concrete answer. Tanay

    | goforgreen
    0

  • I have several pages that rank highly in the SERPs and these pages are linked directly to my homepage in the footer. I want to clean up my footer because I have too many site wide links but don't want to hurt the SERP rankings during the transition. Will removing these page links from the footer impact SERP rankings?

    | braunna
    0

  • I have noticed many of my sites took a beating this month on Bing and Yahoo, while Google stayed pretty flat.

    | netviper
    0

  • We are launching a new site with a non traditional top level domain . We were looking at either .ca or .in as we are not able to get the traditional .com or .co or .net etc . I was wondering if this has any SEO effect ? Does Google/Bing treat this domain differently .Will it be penalized ? Note : My site is a US based site targeting US audience

    | Chaits
    0

  • When I do a site search with Google (i.e. site:www.mysite.com), Google reports "About 7,500 results" -- but when I click through to the end of the results and choose to include omitted results, Google really has only 210 results for my site. I had an issue months back with a large # of URLs being indexed because of query strings and some other non-optimized technicalities - at that time I could see that Google really had indexed all of those URLs - but I've since implemented canonical URLs and fixed most (if not all) of my technical issues in order to get our index count down. At first I thought it would just be a matter of time for them to reconcile this, perhaps they were looking at cached data or something, but it's been months and the "About 7,500 results" just won't change even though the actual pages indexed keeps dropping! Does anyone know why Google would be still reporting a high index count, which doesn't actually reflect what is currently indexed? Thanks!

    | CassisGroup
    0

  • One of our site webpage appears to be found in the first few pages on google.ie / google.co.uk but not on google.com. Is there such a thing being penalised on a specific Google domain? Traffic is healthy despite this but I want to rank well for the page in google.com. Any ideas?

    | notnem
    0

  • I have a client who would like to include Meta Keywords in their site as they have seen competitors with it, we haven't used Meta Keywords tag before as doesn't impact ranking as we all know - however if I am to put them in - is there a limit - would 200 + negatively impact the site? Thanks

    | lauratagdigital
    0

  • I'm working on iDeal Chooser, a Comparison Shopping site and we've been having a weird problem with some of our major keywords on Google for the past couple of months. We keep moving between the first page of the results to disappearing completely. For example a Google search for "price drop alerts" returns idealchooser.com as result 3-5 for a while and suddenly doesn't return us at all, then we are back to the top results only to disappear again later. We can't figure out what causes it, we didn't see any pattern and it seems completely random. We can be the 4th result for 2 weeks and suddenly we are gone for another 2 weeks. SEOmoz PRO had some good SEO suggestions which we implemented, however nothing that could explain this and even after fixing these issues this weird behavior continues. Any idea will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

    | corwin
    0

  • Hi, I have a particular page I am working on fully optimised as per the page rank tool and grading A. Problem is, there is still one issue on the page, the keyword I want to rank for in particular on that page is reporting that I am over using the word. I have looked through the HTML on the body of the page and see that the actual content is not an issue, I have less than 15 mentions of the keyword, the problem actually arises from the Nav Bar The word I am ranking for say is football Well in the nav-bar, I have several pages that are named football-xxx.html So where the actual page content only has 12 mentions of the keyword Football, list has another 13 due to my page naming properties.* Football- xxx Football- xxx Football- xxx Football- xxx Football- xxx Football- xxx ....... And so on up to 13 different pages with a similar naming structure (obviously the XXX are products like socks, shorts, tops, boots etc) So, without asking the obvious, I assume that the way to change is would be to rename the pages (can't really happen), or remove the term football from the body of the content on the website. So firstly, is the Google algorithms not smart enough to recongise that the content in the menu tag is in fact the nav bar ... and page names as opposed to keyword stuffing. Also, how did anyone else handle a similair situation And lastly, I am assuming basic on common sense alone that Keyword stuffing is a big no no, of everything I have learned though SEO Moz, this makes clear and concise sense to me ... So how do I resolve the issue I have here Many thanks in advance for any help offered Regards John

    | Johnny4B
    0

  • A simple question maybe, but how and where do we start if we want to improve our 'Domain MozRank & Moztrust', 'assuming of course that by improving both these we will improve our rankings with Google plus sales?

    | ewanTHH
    0

  • Having trouble to figure out why one of our pages is not ranking in SERPs, on-page optimisation looks decent to me. Checked by using gInfinity extension and searched for the page URL. Can one page be penalised from Google engines (.ie / .com ) and the rest of the website not penalised? The (possible) penalised page is showing in Google places in SERPs. I assume this would not show if it was penalised. Would appreciate any advice. Thanks

    | notnem
    0

  • With the exponential growth in mobile device sales and usage and an expected 980% growth in advertising next year for/on mobile devices, we at http://www.mobilewebsitegurus.com decided that it was time to help companies create great looking mobile websites that are user friendly and SEO friendly at affordable rates with tons of features built in from the start. However, when selling our design, how important is it to have a GOOD mobile site compared to a big one to rank on mobile devices? We head that Google was thinking of only showing mobile sites on mobile devices. NOT TRUE. Then we read/heard that the rankings were MUCH BETTER if you had a mobile site, but after a lot of research we found that too NOT to be true. On most sites there were NO difference. So what is the TRUTH about this and is it maybe just that it will happen, just has not happened yet - the different rankings for mobile and regular sites on mobile devices that is? ANY insight in this would be great not only for us but for the entire SEO community 🙂 Thanks. ALSO, add "Mobile SEO" to the boxes below of "Topics" since mobile SEO will grow in importance.

    | yvonneq
    0

  • I realize the major search engines use different criteria but I don't see how - for the same home page keyword - my site could rank #3 on page 1 for a Bing search and be off the charts (Page 15+)? on Google. Has Google gone so far off the charts with their new Penguins and Pandas so as to be in a different universe?  Seems Google is now extremely over-weighting big sites like Wikipedia, WebMD, eHow, etc. and in doing so vastly reducing the diversity of results shown. I am commonly seeing different pages of the same website appear multiple times in the first 2-3 pages of Google results.  What's the point?

    | veezer
    0

  • If you have sold out products that will never come back in stock.  Should you remove the items and urls from your sitemap and site.  Or should you keep them active with a sold out image.  The purpose would be for search engines will think your site is larger due the products and amount of urls you have ?

    | TeamLogo
    0

  • How to do SEO for Google places.New trends and tips .Most clients wants their biz in Google places in First page .

    | innofidelity
    0

  • It seems that Google now requires authors to have a valid email on the domain. This is easy for the traditional web publication. But what about community websites like SEOmoz? How can a community website allow users to link their Google+ profile? Will community websites like SEOmoz be required to 1. Give all users a domain email 2. Ask users to validate the email address with Google? Seems overly complicated.

    | designquotes
    0

  • We may be the only people stupid enough to accidentally prevent the google bot from indexing our site. In our htaccess file someone recently wrote the following statement RewriteEngine On
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$ [NC]
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301] Its almost funny because it was a rewrite that rewrites back to itself... We found in webmaster tools that the site was not able to be indexed by the google bot due to not detecting the robots.txt file. We didn't have one before as we didn't really have much that needed to be excluded. However we have added one now for kicks really. The robots.txt file though was never the problem with regard to the bot accessing the site. Rather it was the rewrite statement above that was blocking it. We tested the site not knowing what the deal was so we went under webmaster tools then health and then selected "Fetch as Google" to have the website. This was our way of manually requesting the site be re-indexed so we could see what was happening. After doing so we clicked on status and it provided the following: HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
    Content-Length: 250
    Content-Type: text/html
    Location: http://www.mystie.com/
    Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
    MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub
    MS-Author-Via: MS-FP/4.0
    X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
    Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 02:27:49 GMT
    Connection: close <title>301 Moved Permanently</title> Moved Permanently The document has moved here. We changed the screwed up rewrite mistake in the htaccess file that found its way in there but now our issue is that all of our pages have been severely penalized with regard to where they are now ranking compared to just before the indecent. We are essentially freaking out because we don't know the real time consequences of this and if or how long it will take for the certain pages to regain their prior ranks. Typical pages when down anywhere between 9-40 positions on high volume search terms. So to say the least our company is already discussing the possibilities of fairly large layoffs based on what we anticipate with regard to the drop in traffic. This sucks because this is peoples lives but then again a business must make money and if  you sell less you have to cut the overhead and the easiest one is payroll. I'm on a team with three other people that I work with to keep the SEO side up to snuff as much as we can and we sell high ticket items so the potential effects if Google doesn't restore matters could be significant. My question is what would you guys do? Is there any way we can contact Google about such a matter? If you can I've never seen such a thing. I'm sure the pages that are missing from the index now might make their way back in but what will there rank look like next time and with that type of rewrite has it permanently effected every page site wide, including those that are still in the index but severely effected by the index. Would love to see things bounce back quick but I don't know what to expect and neither do my counterparts. Thanks for any speculation, suggestions or insights of any kind!!!

    | David_C
    0

  • Hello, So I have a situation I haven't seen that happened today.  I checked in on my keyword rankings, and all seemed to drop off the rankings in one day.  Even googling my domain name, I'm not the first result (when I always have been with multiple sublinks under). There were no unusual errors in the webmaster tools, no issues "Fetching as Google".  The only thing I can find is in Crawl Stats, my "Kilobytes downloaded per day" and "Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)" dropped a lot in the last day or so (by about 90%).  Has anyone had this happen?  Any ideas for how to bounce back from this? Domain referenced is mediamegamall.com Thanks!

    | Ask_MMM
    0

  • The folks that built our website have insisted on including microdata and metadata on our pages. What we end up with is something that looks like this in the header: itemprop="description" content="Come buy your shoes from us, we've got great shoes."> Seems to me that this would be a bad thing, however I can't find any info leaning one way or the other. Can anyone provide insight on this?

    | markcely
    0

  • If the homepage of a website has been sandboxed for certain keywords does this mean that the whole site is sandboxed for them keywords or just the homepage? If a new sub-page was created with quality unique content, would it be possible to get that sub-page ranked for the same keywords that have been sandboxed on the homepage? I have asked many other SEO professionals this same question and nobody really knows for sure. Do you?

    | Mark A Preston
    0

  • ok guys - hoping someone out there can help... (kinda long, but wanted to be sure all the details were out there) Already had this happen once - even posted in here about it - http://www.seomoz.org/q/client-s-site-dropped-completely-for-all-keywords-but-not-brand-name-not-manual-penalty-help Guy was a brand new client, all we did was tweak title tags and add a bit of content to his site since most was generic boilerplate text... started on our KW research and competitor research... in just a week, from title tag and content tweaks alone, he went from ranking on page 4-5 to ranking on page 3-4... then as we sat down to really optimize his site... POOF - he was gone from the Googs... He only showed up in "site:" searches and for exact matches of his business name - everything else was gone. Posted in here and on WMT - had several people check it out, both local guys and people from here (thanks to John Doherty for trying!) - but no one could figure out any reason why it would have happened. We submitted a reconsideration request, explaining that we knew we hadn't violated any quality guidelines, that he had less than 10 backlinks so it couldn't be bad linking, and that we had hardly touched the site.  They sent back a canned response a week later that said there was no manual penalty and that we should "check our content" - mysteriously, the site started to show back up in the SERPs that morning (we got the canned response in the afternoon) There WAS an issue with NAP mismatch on some citations, but we fixed that, and that shouldn't have contributed to complete disappearance anyway. SO - the site was back, and back at its page 3 or 4 position... we decided to leave it alone for a few days just to be sure we didn't do anything... and then just 6 days later, when we were sitting down to fully optimize the site - POOF - completely gone again. We do SEO for a lot of different car dealers all over the country, and i know our strategies work. Looking at the competition in his market, he should easily be ranked page 2 or 3 with the very minimal tweaking we did... AND, since we didn't change anything since he came back, it makes even less sense that he was visible for a week and then gone again. So, mozzers... Anybody got any ideas? I'm really at a loss here - it makes zero sense that he's completely gone, except for his biz name... if nothing else, he should be ranking for "used cars canton"... Definitely appreciate any help anyone can offer -

    | Greg_Gifford
    0

  • Hi everyone. We have a client that manufactures and supplies dietary supplements all around the world. We are slightly concerned that a recent Google shopping glitch (or change) is now seemingly excluding products from the shopping search results. This currently appears only to be happening in the US but we are really concerned, as our client ships all over the world and the potential loss of revenue could be quite large. There is already a YouTube video that demonstrates what is going on which is available below: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNDyS0tF4dY Just to clarify, these are products that should not be included in any of Google's “sensitive” categories as they currently stand. Taking Vitamin B12 as an example, it is recognised as a permissible dietary supplement within pretty much every regulatory framework around the world, including those governed by the US FDA, The Euopean Commission and the Australian TGA. Therefore there would be no legal reasons to prevent it's inclusion in shopping results in any country. Has this just slipped under the radar or can anyone point us to a resource that may be able to clarify why this has happened? Thanks in advance guys!

    | AduroLabs
    0

  • I have had several sites have their SE Visibility and Visitor traffic drop of a cliff on August 10.  I know there was a Panda update but I cannot determine why these sites incurred such a precipitous drop.  Any advice? Mike

    | mcsweer
    0

  • There certainly appears to be a certain climate of fear about backlinks at the mo, and not without reason. I was wondering why Google moved from simply discounting links to punishing site owners for their backlink profiles, many of which were built up when the risks of punishment weren't there? I mean, I could send them the names of at least 1,000 sites in linkfarms / blog rings - you name it.  I'm sure most of us on here could do the same. Responding to the whims of Google is such a waste of time and resources. Why doesn't Google simply choose a direction and stick with it? What is their strategy exactly?

    | McTaggart
    0

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