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Category: Algorithm Updates

Discuss algorithm updates and impacts.

  • B-man


    For example, what if I was to conclude each meta-description tag with the line... "Free shipping for orders over $90." The rest of the meta-description tag on every page is unique, but the last sentence would be the same or at least similar. Thoughts?

    | B-man
    0
  • MiracleCreative


    I have been reading and trying to learn more about how google takes social media into account when ranking sites, but I cant seam to find a definitive answer to this, does it make a big difference or does it not really matter?

    | MiracleCreative
    0
  • Linwright


    We've been slowly working up the rankings for some targeted keywords, and though it's been slow we have recently moved up to pages 1,2 and 3 for some of these kwyrods. Friday I got the rankings report from SEOMOZ and we have completely dropped from all rankings. Everything is gone. We've dropped at many at 40+ positions almost overnight. I haven't gone into deep research as to why this happened yet, and I have not asked the client if he did anything off-site to hinder our rankings, but I know that I have changed nothing in terms of SEO techniques in the past week...and these techniques have been working and moving us up so I'm at a loss as to why all of a sudden we've lost everything. If anyone has dealt with this issue before or can take a look at this site I'd appreciate it: http://www.EraseDisease.com Thanks

    | Linwright
    0
  • iAnalyst.com


    http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401732,00.asp According to this, Google is bringing the hammer down soon on another 10-20% of the search results.  While we don't advocate keyword stuffing, exchanging links, or anything too risky I am still concerned. Do we know if the example "perfectly optimized page"; http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization  is now going to be penalty bait? Is this over stuffing? Also, how might this effect ecommerce sites in particular?

    | iAnalyst.com
    2
  • BizSparkSEO


    As per instructions from a SEO , we did a 301 redirect on our url to a new url (www.domain.com to subdomain xxxx.domain.com). But the problem is we lost all the google rankings that the previous url had gained. How can we rollback this situation. Can we retrieve the rankings of the previous url if we remove 301 permenant move redirection ? The new url does not figure in the google search for the keyword that use to fetch the previous url at no 3 in the results Please help ...

    | BizSparkSEO
    0
  • MASSProductions


    Hello, I am working on a web project that breaks up its sections by utilizing hidden divs shown via javascript activated through anchor links. http://www.janandtom.com/ First question: Is this SEO suicide? I have confirmed that the content is being indexed by searching for specific text but have been led to believe that hidden div content will be afforded a lower 'importance'. One suggestion has having the text as display:block and then hiding it on page load. Will this make a difference? Second: Is there any way to have Google index the anchored content by the specific anchor text? An example for the second question: If you search google right now for: buyers like to look at floorplans Tom & Jan You will get a link to: http://www.janandtom.com but I would rather it be: [http://www.janandtom.com/#Interactive Floorplans](http://www.janandtom.com/#Interactive Floorplans) Sorry if this is redundant or addressed before. I tried searching the questions but wasn't getting and definitive direction to go and this project is a little unique for me. Also, I'm just getting my feet we into this 'high-end' seo (new member of SEOMoz) so please bear with me. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

    | MASSProductions
    0
  • loopyal


    Just when I thought I'd seen it all, google hits me with another nasty surprise! I have a CDN to deliver images, js and css  to visitors around the world. I have no links to static HTML pages on the site, as far as I can tell, but someone else may have - perhaps a scraper site? Google has decided the static pages they were able to access through the CDN have more value than my real pages, and they seem to be slowly replacing my pages in the index with the static pages. Anyone got an idea on how to stop that? Obviously, I have no access to the static area, because it is in the CDN, so there is no way I know of that I can have a robots file there. It could be that I have to trash the CDN and change it to only allow the image directory, and maybe set up a separate CDN subdomain for content that only contains the JS and CSS? Have you seen this problem and beat it? (Of course the next thing is Roger might look at google results and start crawling them too, LOL) P.S. The reason I am not asking this question in the google forums is that others have asked this question many times and nobody at google has bothered to answer, over the past 5 months, and nobody who did try, gave an answer that was remotely useful. So I'm not really hopeful of anyone here having a solution either, but I expect this is my best bet because you guys are always willing to try.

    | loopyal
    0
  • PeteGregory


    First off, I just wanted to mention I did post this on one other forum so I hope that is not completely against the rules here or anything. Just trying to get an idea from some of the pros at both sources.  Hope this is received well.  Now for the question..... "Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site:" Gotta love these messages in GWT. Anyway, I wanted to get some other opinions here so if anyone has experienced something similar or has any recommendations I would love to hear them. First off, the site is very large and utilizes faceted navigation to help visitors sift through results. I have implemented rel=canonical for many months now to have each page url that is created based on the faceted nav filters, push back to the main category page. However, I still get these damn messages from Google every month or so saying that they found too many pages on the site. My main concern obviously is wasting crawler time on all these pages that I am trying to do what they ask in these instances and tell them to ignore and find the content on page x. So at this point I am thinking about possibly using robots.txt file to handle these, but wanted to see what others around here thought before I dive into this arduous task. Plus I am a little ticked off that Google is not following a standard they helped bring to the table. Thanks for those who take the time to respond in advance.

    | PeteGregory
    0
  • EGOL


    If you have added google plus one to your website you can check on the impact by visiting your webmaster tools account. In your GWT account you will see a left menu item for "+1 Metrics".  If you click on "Search Impact" you can see the CTR change attributed to +1. Anybody seeing anything there yet?

    | EGOL
    0
  • Ben-HPB


    I am looking into building a mobile version for my website, knowing that Google Likes Google should I stick with using their mobile building tool or build something from scratch in Dreamweaver? How to optimize for Google Mobile? Thx

    | Ben-HPB
    0
  • ificallyoumine


    Hello and Good Day, Does having a dedicated IP Address to my site affect my search engine ranking? https://www.astigtayo.com

    | ificallyoumine
    0
  • blocker0408


    I have a portfolio of blogs, and have just had 9 de-indexed by google. What worries me more than anything else is that :- 1. there is no interlinking whatsoever 2. content is all unique and on topic 3. most have no outbound links This is truly bizarre - you stick to the rules and get de-indexed ! Has anyone else had a similar issue, advice or comments as I am truly perplexed. Thanks

    | blocker0408
    0
  • jhogan80


    When doing a google search for the term "ulster county real estate" the related search list at the bottom of the serp includes 7 obviously related search terms and 1 brand name of a competitor. (see attachment) The competitor doesn't rank for this term organically at all yet he enjoys a link on the first page with those of us that do by being in the related search list?  I don't get it. Anyone know how something like this happens? Innhs.png

    | jhogan80
    1
  • rahijain


    Google has Google Plus. Facebook has partnership with Bing. How much social media affect your ranking ?

    | rahijain
    0
  • Corp


    I am told the crawler has been updated and wanted to know if anyone else is seeing the same thing I am. SEOmoz reports show many months of no duplicate content problems. As of last week though, I get a little over a thousand pages reported as dupe content errors. Checking these pages I find there is similar content (hasn't changed) with keywords that are definitely different. Many of these pages rank well in Google, but SEOmoz is calling them out as duplicate content. Is SEOmoz attempting to closely imitate Google's perspective in this matter and therefore telling me that I need to seriously change the similar content? Anyone else seeing something like this?

    | Corp
    0
  • applesofgold


    We have had a quality website for 12 years now, and it seems no matter how many more links we get and how much new content we add daily, we have stayed at PR3 for the past 10 years or so. Our SEOMoz domain authority is 52. We have over 950,000 pages linking to us from 829 unique root domains. Is this in line with PR3 or should we be approaching PR4 soon? We do daily blog posts with all unique, fresh quality content that has not been published elsewhere. We try to do everything with 'white hat' methods, and we are constantly trying to provide genuine content and high quality products, and customer service. How can we improve our PR and how important is PR today?

    | applesofgold
    0
  • Andrea.G


    I've hit a problem. A couple days ago my site's page authority was 51 and the PR was 3 and now they're 1 and 0 respectively. The developer did adjust some of the code in the site in the past couple days but that shouldn't have affected this. It was last cached by Google on the 5th. Can anyone offer some good advice? If it helps the page is www.duracard.com

    | Andrea.G
    0
  • First-VehicleLeasing


    Hi if I search google UK for the phrase car leasing, google returns my listing as Car Lease Deals However the same search on Yahoo or Bing bring back Contract Hire | Vehicle & Car Leasing Deals | Car Lease Deals this is the real page title. Why would this happen? Thanks Andy

    | First-VehicleLeasing
    0
  • WhiteCap


    I would like to know if you can modify (or suggest) the sub-links under an organic listing.  For Example: Main Link/Title = COMPANY NAME - What We Do.... Sub-Links (popular pages within site) currently include links like: Locations / Catalog Request / Bestsellers Is it possible to suggest other pages as sub-links or do the search engines determine these? Please advise, and thanks in advance....

    | WhiteCap
    0
  • PerriCline


    Over the past month or so I have noticed that Google is not using the meta description for my pages but is instead pulling text from the actual page to show on the SERP.  Is Google placing less emphasis on meta descriptions?

    | PerriCline
    0
  • MaddDogg


    What SEO impact factors am I missing if I am ranked 1st on Google for a keyword, but not ranked local search? The keyword being setup like {"company industry" "location" }. Its ranked 4th when searched on google and the location is specific to the location in the keyword. I've tried to varify that all of my citations are correct and identical. When I compare my sites Domain Authority and links to its competitors, I should be dominating that search. If you guys have any incite it would  be greatly appreciated. MADD DOGG

    | MaddDogg
    0
  • BluespaceCreative


    I am optimizing a site which uses underscores rather than hyphens as word separators (such_as_this.php vs. such-as-this.php). Most of these pages have been around since 2007, and I am hesitant to just redirect to a new page because I am worried it will cause the rankings to slip. Would you recommend changing the file names to be in hyphenated format and place 301 redirects on the pages with underscores, or stick with the existing pages? Is there anything else that would work better? Thanks!

    | BluespaceCreative
    1
  • easymatt


    Hits to my website have been gradually growing over the last 2 years to a point where there was 1300 organics a day. Recently the hits crashed to 300 a day and stayed there for a couple of days. They then bounced back to 1300 a day for a few more days before crashing down to 300 again. This has happened a few times now. Oscillating between two points. Its like the site is crossing a threshold of something, back and forth. I have looked at different parts of my site and every part is down by approximately the same percentage. Anyone out there have any ideas?

    | easymatt
    0
  • webdesigncwd


    We were on Page 1 - our server went down for about 4-6 hours and then we dropped to page 6. Would the server being down for this amount of time affect our position? Any advice would be much appreciated.

    | webdesigncwd
    0
  • jaybinary


    HI, i am pro member of Seo moz, i just want to know , How much  time take Seomoz for Crawl Diagnostics. Because last evening i have changes in my website pages as seomoz suggested but i am not getting any changes in Crawl Diagnostics.

    | jaybinary
    0
  • MichealGooden


    I was wondering what benefits there are to investing the time and money into speeding up an eCommerce site.  We are currently averaging 3.4 seconds of load time per page and I know from webmaster tools they hold the mark to be at closer to 1.5 seconds.  Is it worth it to get to 1.5 seconds?  Any tips for doing this? Thanks

    | MichealGooden
    0
  • PeterAlexLeigh


    Does anyone know if there's been an algorithmic update for google.co.uk in the last couple of days? My site has dropped 15 places or more for all of it's terms and I'm trying to work out the cause!!! Thanks.

    | PeterAlexLeigh
    0
  • loopyal


    Anyone notice a drop in Bing traffic on January 26th? Slashed by 50% and holding for the past three weeks. 100% white hat site

    | loopyal
    0
  • loopyal


    Google tells us to make our sites better for our readers, which we are doing, but do you think google has horrible site usabilty? For example, in webmaster tools, I'm always being confused by their changes and the way they just drop things. In the HTML suggestions area, they don't tell you when the data was last updated, so the only way to tell is to download the files and check. In the URL removals, they used to show you the URLs they had removed. Now that is gone and the only way you can check is to try adding one. We don't have any URL parameters, so any parameters are as a result of some other site tacking on stuff at the end of our URL and there is no way to tell them that we don't have any parameters, so ignore them all. Also, they add new parameters they find on the end of the list, so the only way to check is to click through to the end of the list.

    | loopyal
    0
  • sourcelinemedia


    We have a website that for the past several weeks has been very consistent at between 13,500 and 14,200 daily visits and this site received 15,600 last Thursday. THIS week, Monday is at 22,200, Tuesday is at 26,200, and at mid-day today (at about our traffic halfway point in the day) we're already at 14,000 today. This was a site that was bringing about 14,000 visits as of May 16th last year and dropped to 11,000 the following week.   The traffic to this site this week is so far beyond statistical analysis that there must have been something that happened.

    | sourcelinemedia
    0
  • applesofgold


    We always hear about how Google made this change or that change this month to their algorithm. Sometimes it's true and other times it's just a rumor. So this week I was speaking with someone in the SEO field who said that this week a change occurred at Google and is going to become more prevalent where content placed at the "top of the fold" on merchant sites with products are going to get better placement, rather than if you have your products at top with some content beneath them at the bottom of the page. Any comments on this?

    | applesofgold
    0
  • yahuie


    Pinnion offers online software for surveys and trivia games. Information about our product is at www.pinnion.com and then interested users create their accounts at secure.pinnion.com. The surveys that they create link back to secure.pinnion.com, so we would obviously like to gain whatever SEO benefits we can from that structure. We've been advised that moving from secure.pinnion.com to www.pinnion.com/secure would be the best way to accomplish this. A 2009 post by Rand seems to support that POV, but then a 2011 post over SEObook claims that everything has changed 100% since then. There was a little conversation here and here in Q&A last Fall that touched on this subject, but nothing really definitive. Would love to get thoughts on this subject based on the collective wisdom today. Thanks.

    | yahuie
    0
  • WhiteHat12


    We have a major client that gets over a thousand organic visits per day. They also self manage an adwords campaign that generates a few thousand clicks a day. Lat summer they got a new website with a blog. The blog has a couple of teaser paragraphs on the home page with the new blog posts, in addition to lots of static text about the items sold on the site. What has happened is, our organic traffic has changed form the main keywords of what the site sells, to things talked about in the blog. Traffic hasn’t dropped dramatically, but we have lost all our big keywords, for example, a keyword that was generating 40 organic clicks per day a year ago we receive no traffic for now, and much more obscure keyword combinations from the blog are being picked up. Is it the addition of the blog that is causing this problem, or the blog teasers that are on the home page of the site? We like the traffic from the blog terms, but we would like our former main keyword traffic back as well, how can we accomplish this, and what do you think has occurred here? Thanks for your help.

    | WhiteHat12
    0
  • jansimon


    Hi My Domain name is Replicahause.net, 2 weeks ago my server had an outage for 3 days and my rankings dissappeared in google entirely, however i also noticed that when i typed in my domain name "replicahause" or "replicahause.net" , i would see abhishekyadav.com appearing on #1 in google which does a 301 into Replicahause.net I was able to convince the owner of Abhishekyadav to remove the 301 but my site Replicahause.net's Rankings still does not appear to have come back to google, is there something i'm missing here ? We were ranked #1 to #10 for at least 40 keywords, they've just seemed to dissappeard after the server downtime we had and the 301 from AbhishekYadav.com Thanks

    | jansimon
    0
  • BrianCC


    I track around 1000 keywords for this site, and my rankings in Bing dropped for about half of them on Wednesday. No major changes have been made to the site, rankings are maintaining or improving in Google for a majority of these same terms. The average drop seems to be around 9-12 places, which to me signals more than just standard fluctuation. Anyone else seeing anything strange with Bing this week? Or does anyone have any ideas? I looked for posts about an algorithm change but haven't found anything. Thanks.

    | BrianCC
    0
  • thepersuader


    I started my Whitby cottage website for years ago www.endeavourcottages.co.uk not knowing anything about SEO, but I now have very good rankings for the keywords on Google. I'm ranking quite well for Whitby holiday cottages on Google and I now list to other cottages in the area for my friends. The point is that I'm now starting a small letting agency and hoping to expand it now so I bought the domain http://www.whitby-holiday-cottages.co.uk/ and set up a WordPress site but it's not ranking are getting anywhere near the same amount of traffic. This domain name and website structure would be much more applicable now that there are more than one cottage to let. Whenever I get some free time I spend it doing SEO on my first website to improve its rankings and so which is the best strategy from here on. One try and develop the new cottages letting website at the expense of my main website, or forget about the new website are together and continue with my first website which was designed initially for just one cottage. It's hard to have enough resources to get both websites ranking high. Thank you very useful tips Alan Davidson

    | thepersuader
    0
  • upick-162391


    I noticed recently that one of the main sites I run dropped ranks quite heavily across the board. I then noticed that with very link building during the time that the ranks were down (about 1 month) that my ranks went back up again really quickly. All this with very little link building effort, and its the same link building campaign I've been running for a while. So I'm wondering has any been experiencing ranking flux between jan and feb? I know that people reckon if you fix some things your ranks can improve again, but I barley fixed anything on the site and yet it dropped some keywords from 1st page to 3rd page and then back to 3rd page; some keywords went back to original position some were lower but non were higher.

    | upick-162391
    0
  • eugeneku


    I work for an online retailer, and we have thousands of product pages and our vertical for content is brutal -- half of them are owned by our competitors. Are there any new linkbuilding strategies that can be done through a 1-man team? I'm not talking about bots or traditional link networks. Our current strat revolves around the following: 1. Link prospecting through buzzstream tools and singular contacts 2. Finding bloggers/vloggers, sending product and having them send backlinks to our homepage level with their reviews (slow turnaround, low juice). 3. Syndicating our videos through multiple avenues. 4. Being active on social. We need to gain more authority outside of simple content building. Are there any alternatives to link networks to optimize build outs via a 1-man team? Many thanks!

    | eugeneku
    0
  • waynestock


    Hi Hi, on the On-Page Ranking Card I read: "The meta description, while it does not influence rankings in the results, can still be valuable to employ to improve the click-through-rate of searchers from the results page and to provide context to those visitors about the page's topic/focus." And Google confirms that it doesn't influence the results. On the infografic on this page (text is in german), the say, it has a little relevance for the serps and that is what I experience, too. http://t3n.de/news/diese-faktoren-beeinflussen-365580/ What is you experience with meta description and serps? André

    | waynestock
    0
  • jay.raman


    Hi everyone, Ever since the Jan 19th Google 'above the fold update' I have noticed some strange ranking changes in some of my sites. 1. rankings increased dramatically (not in top 50 to page 2) on Jan 19th for about 5 days then dropped out completely from the top 50. 2. our rankings then did the same thing again around Feb 2nd for about 5 -6 days then has bottomed out ever since. We do not have any ads on the site but our pages are dominated by images for most of the 'above the fold' section then followed by the content down the page. Any insight into this would be much appreciated. Cheers, Andrew

    | jay.raman
    0
  • UnderRugSwept


    We are a custom patch company--we make patches for many different types of clients. I have a gallery of patches for almost every kind of client, and they all have their own pages. If I put navigation on the home page such as what I show below, will Google consider that to be too much? Boy Scout Patches | Motorcycle Patches | Fire Patches | Police Patches | Military Patches | Sports Patches | Business and Organization Patches | Paintball Patches | Scooter Patches | In Memory Patches They would all be links to different pages, and there would be literally 50-60 more! Would it be better to remove the word patches from all of the links? And then another question comes up: too many on-page links?

    | UnderRugSwept
    0
  • smsinc


    Before contracting SEO services, my client decided to change his established root domain to one more customer-friendly. Since he had no expertise on board, no redirects were set up until 6 months later. I ran stats right before the old domain was redirected and have a report showing that he had roughly 750 external links from 300 root domains. We redirected the old domain to the new domain in mid Jan 2012. Those external links are still not showing in Open Site Explorer for the new domain. I've tested it a dozen times, and the old domain definitely points to the new domain. How long should it take before the new domain picks up those external links? Should I do anything else to help the process along?

    | smsinc
    0
  • ydop


    I'm sure this question has been answered and asked a 1,000 different ways but what would be the best domain name to use in the long term (2 years +)? The plural versions (examples.com) which has a decent domain authority and is ranking 1st in Google search results yet has less search volume or the singular version (example.com) that has no current SEO value for the search term that we'd like to target however the singular version of the keyword has a much higher search volume? so basically will it be better to have the exact match that has more volume or the plural form that has better rankings after 2 years of doing SEO for each domain? My guess is that using (examples.com) with the better domain authority and tightening the grip on its dominance in Google will still be more effective than having the exact match domain with more search volume for that keyword while performing the same amount of SEO even after two years. Any suggestions?

    | ydop
    0
  • betadvisor


    Among Google, Yahoo, Bing etc... One of the line is "Conduit". I never heard about this engine but, accordingly to Google Analytics metrics, it is the engine that bring the best traffic to my site in terms of pages per visit.

    | betadvisor
    0
  • BobGW


    Hello, here's our site: nlpca(dot)com We had a big drop in rankings, going from about 19th to about 43rd for our main keyword and having significant drops in other keywords. This happened roughly 6 weeks ago We thought it was being caused by either: Placing keywords in titles before we had them in the content. or Trying to rank for Utah keywords - we're the NLP Institute of California and we are in both places now, but the site talks about mainly California. We changed both these things, and we're still at the low rankings. Will we move back up? What do we do? Will a backlink campaign be effective at this point?

    | BobGW
    0
  • RonSparks


    What's better .NET or a hyphenated .COM domain I know this is simple but in selecting a domain for my current project and I only have two options. firstname-lastname.COM or 
    firstnamelastname.NET I'm leaning to the .COM as after reading the how to choose a domain name post. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-choose-the-right-domain-name Thanks

    | RonSparks
    1
  • Total_Displays


    Our site at www.total-displays.com has ranked well for a variety of keywords over a long period of time. After the change on Jan 18th we have seen a dramatic drop in organic rank across a variety of keywords. Our site has very good unique content and has a large number of pages (it's a Magento site). Advice we have taken is that the site will bounce back after a few weeks but this does not seem to be happening. Any advice please? Thanks Nick

    | Total_Displays
    0
  • PerriCline


    Today Google announced "Previously we reported the average position of all URLs from your site for a given query. As of today, we’ll instead average only the top position that a URL from your site appeared in." Will this affect SEOMoz reports in any way?

    | PerriCline
    0
  • UnderRugSwept


    Our site has about 1000 pages indexed, and the vast majority of them are not useful, and/or contain little content. Some of these are: -Galleries
    -Pages of images with no text except for navigation
    -Popup windows that contain further information about something but contain no navigation, and sometimes only a couple sentences My question is whether or not I should put a noindex in the meta tags. I think it would be good because the ratio of quality to low quality pages right now is not good at all. I am apprehensive because if I'm blocking more than half my site from Google, won't Google see that as a suspicious or bad practice?

    | UnderRugSwept
    1
  • jchosler


    On our eCommerce website we sell products that each have about 20 color variations. When the site was built each color variation was added individually instead as a single product with a configurable color option. Would it be best to combine the different variations into a single product with a configurable drop down menu for color or to leave as is? I am worried the search engines see the individual product pages for each color as duplicate content. What are your thoughts on how Zappos handles color variations? On the category page they display each color variation as an individual product but when the product is clicked it goes to a single product page with the different configurable color variations. Thanks

    | jchosler
    1

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