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Category: Algorithm Updates

Discuss algorithm updates and impacts.


  • Hello Mozzers! Hugs. Question. How seriously do search engines take the grammar on web copy. Our Fab copy writers are writing  copy for a site and also using Grammarly to check the copy. Thank you, Much respect, V

    | vijayvasu
    0

  • I came across this question on why the poster's rankings in Bing/Yahoo were so much lower than his rankings in Google. One of the links responded with was a presentation Rand gave about the difference in ranking elements of Google and Bing. My purpose for looking into this is to boost rankings in Bing to be more in line with my Google rankings. My takeaways from Rand's presentation were that Bing likes shorter URLs than Google and it's better to have more links from more root domains with more precise anchor text. Unfortunately this presentation was given at last year's SMX Advanced and is almost a year old. Since then Microsoft has been accused of basically scraping the Google SERPs and Google unleashed at least two maybe three rabid Pandas. Needless to say the environment has changed. So my question is for those people who are happy with how they rank in Bing: What SEO factors are you seeing make a bigger impact in Bing vs. how they impact your Google rankings?

    | rball1
    1

  • Hello, I've been using open site explorer, dabbled with seo spy glass, and other back linking sites, but I was wondering if there was a manual way of searching for back links? Such as site.www.widgets.com +keyword -widgets.com to show me results of all the sites pointing to www.widgets.com, or pointing to the keywords linking to widgets.com. I do enjoy Open Site Explorer, but it takes a few months index the back links ive done.

    | Modbargains
    0

  • Hi, All! The figure I've seen going around is 3 billion and is attributed to ComScore, but in the comScore press release that was linked to (actually the one from Rand's article - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/21-tactics-to-increase-blog-traffic-2012) all I could find was percentage of market share, but no total numbers of searches. Anyone have a source on that? Thanks, Aviva

    | debi_zyx
    0

  • I went to a really interesting conference last week and one of the speakers who has been working in the SEO industry for 15 years now said that it doesn't make a difference anymore ranking wise. I would like to see what the community thinks on this subject? Thanks Ari

    | dublinbet
    0

  • I'm a relative SEO newbie, so please go easy on me. I've been an SEOMOZ pro user for a few months and have used it to dramatically improve my organic rankings. However, for the life of me, I cannot determine why the site that currently ranks number one, does so.  For the factors I can determine, they shouldn't be ranking where they are, but reality is different.  Could someone please offer me some ideas? My target keyword is "photography classes edmonton" My site is www.bsop.ca and I'm targetting the Google Canada engine. Any and all assistance is appreciated.

    | pburwell
    0

  • I've been doing some local SEO lately and noticed something today.  When I do a search for "State/town name Cat Toys", I see the title tag of the website in the local results as opposed to the business name. I'm happy they are showing up above the normal results, but I wonder if having the brand name at the end of the site title impacts clicks.  For example: Site name: New Hampshire Cat Toys and Accessories | Cats R Us But in the places results the title is cut short because they show the address, so all they see is: New Hampshire Cat Toys and.... Do you think branding is especially important in local results?  Or less important?  I could hear arguments for both sides.  I realize the site URL is shown in green below the title, but it's not the same as having a brand in the title portion.  It also looks like some of the competition has just their name show up as opposed to their website title.  Is this something I can fix in Google Places, or is something Google does on its own? Cheers, Vinnie

    | vforvinnie
    1

  • Good Morning Moz Community, I have a local SEO/regional SEO question. I apologize if this question is duplicated from another area on this forum but, a query of the term Regional SEO showed no results, as did similar queries. Please preference this entire question with "Knowing what we know about the most recent changes to local search" I know what has worked in the past, my concern is Now. Working with a heavily regulated client that is regional, mostly East Coast US. They are in Financial Services and state licensing is a requirement. They are licensed in 15 states. Obviously, it would look foolish, in this day in age, to Title Tag individual pages with local modifiers and have numerous pages covering a similar topic with not much difference than localized modifiers in front of the keyword. I've never found that SE's can understand broad regional terms such as New England or Mid Atlantic or Southeast or Northeast, if someone knows different please share. Aside from an exact match search. The client does have 7 offices in various states. Perfectly matching and consistent listings in G Places, Bing Local and Yahoo Local was step one and all their locations are now in those services and there are many more smaller local citation listings are in the works. We have also successfully implemented a plan to generate great reviews from actual customers, for each location, they're receiving a few a day right now. Their local places listings, where they have physical locations, are doing very well but: 1. What would the community's suggestion be on generating more targeted traffic in the 8 states where they have no physical location? 2. The client wants to begin creating smaller blogs that are highly localized to the states and major population centers that they do not have a physical location in. There is an open check book to dedicate to this effort however, I do a lot of work in this industry so I want to offer the best possible, most up to date advice, my concern is that these efforts will have two results: a. be obscured by the ”7 pack" by  companies with local brick and mortar b. would detract from the equity built in their existing blog by generating content in other domains, I would prefer to continue growing the main blog. 3. As a follow up, it has been documented that Google is now using the same algorithm for local, personal and personalized, that being the case, is there any value in building links to you Places page? Can you optimize your Places page by using the same off site techniques as you would traditionally? Sorry to kill you with such a long question on a Sunday 🙂

    | dogflog
    1

  • During the web development stages of our Joomla CMS website, we have managed to get our site indexed for totally irrelevant test pages mainly to do with Joomla and some other equally irrelevant test content. How damaging is this to our domain from an SEO prospective and is there something we can do about it? When we do a site:domain.com search we see hundreds of testpages with test/irrelevant meta tags etc.

    | Fuad_YK
    0

  • I know that no question is supposed to be a dumb questions so I am going to go for it... Our keyword ranking on google for one of our companies  capitol collision  is getting better all the time but the same can't be said for yahoo or bing. Could you please offer some advice on how to improve this as well? Thanks

    | allstatetransmission
    0

  • With all of the talk about Panda V2 I am just curious as to whether Bing has also updated their algorithm in the past month. I have seen some reports about the number of indexed pages dropping in half on June 10th as reported in bing's webmaster tools, as well as experiencing that drop on our websites, and a significant decrease in rankings do to them dropping some high performing pages out of their index. So Just wondering if anyone else had seen this or had any info on an algorithm update rolled out from bing. Cheers, Josh

    | prima-253509
    0

  • I've been reading conflicting reports that social bookmarking is really useful and that social bookmarking is a complete waste of time that passes no real juice. My gut tells me that every answer will tailor around "make your content spreadable" and then bookmark socially, which seems to be the right answer. 2 part question -- what if the content is really hard to make exciting (i.e. for chiropractor, funeral director, etc)? Does this mean that just linking to the site with a cut-and-paste paragraph will do nothing SEO wise? I just need to know if it is even worth looking into or if I should invest in other areas.

    | Boogily
    0

  • How can I, the owner of a 5 thousand page website, take advantage of Search Plus Your World to increase website traffic?

    | StreetwiseReports
    0

  • Hi everyone, Something weird has happened to one of our client's site. First of all I want to explain that the client's name is something like a Person Name plus another generic keyword, for example Truxy Lawyers. Before when you searched for the brand keyword (in my example Truxy), Google would show in the SERPs the client's site as first result with six sitelinks below. Now when searching for the same branded keyword (for example Truxy), Google doesn't show the sitelink anymore, but the first result is the home page and the second and third results are subdomain pages. Does anybody know why Google all of the sudden decided to stop showing the site link? Things get more weird when you search the complete brand name "Truxy Lawers" for example, because in this case Google shows the site link. Does anybody know what has caused this? Thank you!

    | Aviatech
    0

  • Hello all, If this is posted twice, I didn't mean for it to be - but it looks like last time I tried to post this question it didn't post. This is my question: How come some results on Google's SERP page are shown with a "www" and some are not? Does this effect SEO at all? I am including a screen shot so you can see what I mean. The Geary Interactive result has a "www" in front of while ingenexdigital doesn't. R6GLL.png

    | digitalops
    0

  • I've included two charts below. 1. Our organic search results for the last year and, 2. Results for the last 6 weeks. We were up to about 350 visits per day in June 2011. In late june we added affiliate links to our site and took a hit down to about 120 a day. At the end of august we moved the affiliate links behind a login. Only registered users saw them. And we started moving back up. Last week January 8-14 we were averaging about 550 per day. Then this Wednesday we dropped to 287. Thursday 268. And today is under 100. We have not updated our website at all. No changes. Does anyone have any idea what might have caused this plunge. Has anyone else seen their traffic drop in half. Thanks for your help. dash_month.jpg dash_year.jpg

    | openspan
    0

  • Is it a good practice to append our brand name at the end of every page title?  We have a very strong brand name but it is also long.  Right now what we are doing is saying: Product Name | Long brand name here Product Category | Long brand name here Is this the right way to do it or should we just be going with ONLY the product and category names in our page titles? Right now we often exceed the 70 character recommendation limit.

    | mlentner
    1

  • Our MD is requesting that we continue to renew a long list of domains that we purchased many years ago.  Is this practice still relevant or is there more to be gained from SEO and keyword strategy on our own site?  All of the domains are redirected to our main site, but the main reason for purchasing was to stop others using them. Can someone please advise?  Don't want to be spending money on this if it is of no benefit to us at all.

    | DonaldRussell
    0

  • Anyone seen these before? Small stars representing 'votes'? What's all this about?

    | MirandaP
    0

  • After reading this blog entry from Dr Pete on Mirametrix, my question would be:
    What's more important for a local company, being in the 7 pack or in the top 10 organic results? Which one attracts more clicks? Is the optimization for local ranking just became more important than the traditional SEO?

    | echo1
    0

  • Our listing is up for renewal in Yahoo Directory.  Is there a way to measure the impact the listing had  vs. the year before without the listing beyond direct referrals? Thanks!

    | leighw
    0

  • Hi all, I rank for around 40 keyword in the first and second pages in google.com.qa, this week im not even in the first 5 for all keywords on that search engine only. Adding to that also any keyword contains qatar on this campaign or my other website also lost position not less than 20! Normally i lose and gain 1 to 3 postions a week but this week it was scary. I thought i was pinalized but when i search for my website or site:my adress i find loads if pages. Any help ? Thanks for your time reading and answering

    | ali881
    0

  • Hi All I am completely new to SEO and I have a question about URL's which I would like advise on. We are about to launch an immigration consultancy website which caters for several countries. For the example below we are targeting the keyword "UK Visit Visa", which URL would be better from an SEO prospective? 1.  www.example.com/uk/visit-visa
    2.  www.example.com/uk/uk-visit-visa Thanks, Fuad

    | Fuad_YK
    0

  • Always looking for easier ways to identify new clients needed SEO help. I wondered is it possible to find newly registered domains ? Could an api be made to pull out domains listed via date registered.

    | onlinemediadirect
    0

  • I have not been known  the Panda. My site statistics knows it. I manage to endure and get back where i felt everytime with change of design, ad placement, content... I am very curious: if i did nothing, my site will turn back? why i kicked in every big update? Simply if you get hit by update, without any act, could your site healed?

    | MaxCrandale
    0

  • I am working on a friend's site and I've optimized his on-page stuff. It's pretty much perfect from SEOMoz analysis. I reduced his Errors from 150+ to 3 and his warnings from 50+ to 0. Notices are at 5. Now, a month has gone by and I've added 3 backlinks in what appears to be reputable sites PR7, PR7, and PR3. His site has dropped  from the 2nd listing on the 2nd page to the bottom of the 2nd page now. Now, I realize other sites may be doing seo as well and trying to move to the top, but, seems peculiar. I put in a bit of work to revamp 3 of his pages as well b/c each one had over 300 html validation errors and I reduced it down to 6 or so. The competitor I'm aiming for has these stats: DA: 16 MozRank 3.14 MozTrust: 2.73 My friend's site is: DA: 19 MozRank: 2.21 MozTrust: 2.64 Subdomain metrics is 0 for everything, whereas his competitors have good stats for subdomain metrics. What is that? And what can I do to improve his ranking in Google? Is it just more backlinks? Thanks.

    | webtarget
    0

  • We have multiple screen cast videos being made that are the same all except for city names being switched out. Does anyone know if this might be frowned upon by Google in the same way that duplicate content is?

    | Stevej24
    0

  • For retailers (or commercial queries), it seems like PPC ads, product ads and google shopping links were allocated more pixel real estate in December than in previous years, and the amount of pixel real estate allocated to organic listings declined further.  I was wondering if anyone had any knowledge on when these changes were rolled out.

    | enoch
    0

  • I am curious to know if anyone has any data that correlates site/page changes like content or Title Tag, H1, etc. and subsequent movement in rankings on Google and Bing and Yahoo? The equation is for example: ABCSite.com/home-page/ makes a change to the H1 and H2 and one paragraph of content is changed. Over next 6 to 12 weeks changes in page rank for the 3 engines is tracked to see where it started and where it "stopped." Obviously, there are more factors than individual algorithms in play here. An example of that would be that a significant number of sites will be indexed in Google by a dev and not in the others. We see this regularly. So, at least from a timing standpoint, different sites are entering/leaving the fray at different rates. We are going to begin to track this but I would love to see any data already around or speak with anyone involved in such a study about what they found. Thanks

    | RobertFisher
    0

  • French Keyword : "Chauffage électrique" Currently Ranking 4th on Google.ca (French) It is not even top 50 on Google.ca (English) Why so much gap between them? Both are on Google.ca, just different language. Also, when searching the keyword on Google.ca (English), all the results shown are in french anyway ! Why is mine way off ? How can I help the ranking on the EN version? Why does Google.ca FR and EN have different rankings?

    | Kezber
    0

  • A few of the sites that I 'compete' with have blogger accounts...and according to the research I've done they have over 500 million external, followed, links! These are mom blogs....and they aren't trying to do any SEO. I've noticed that if you are using blogger (as opposed to wordpress) and adding embed youtube videos to your blog you can set it to auto populate to youtube and also get a link in return. From what I can gather this just happens with blogger accounts since bloggers...and youtube...and google are all related.  Does that have something to do with the crazy amount of followed external links they are getting?  They also have a domain authority of 96 (which is because blogger is a trusted domain.... Is the sub-domain a better number to look at since their blog is a sub domain on blogger? Also, does anyone know who to get the same sort of exposure in youtube as blogger blogs get...or if it's even possible? Thanks.

    | NoahsDad
    0

  • Just noticed something I've never seen before..and I just wanted to see if anyone else experienced this. I work for a 15000+ item eccommerce website, and today I noticed that on a few brand searches, several individual product pages were coming up. This is actually unusual because most of our individual item pages (including these) aren't ranked well enough to show up well in a brand search (and don't try to target brand terms either), but a correlation here was that both items contained videos referenced within. These were not videos hosted on our YouTube brand page either..these were videos done by separate manufacturers - one was hosted on their site, one on ours. Google actually pulled the snapshot of the video to the SERP as well... even though it was embedded within other product copy. Has anyone else noticed any preferential treatment given to effectively random items on your eCommerce website because it was augmented by video? I can assure you there was nothing otherwise unique about these products and they're not really that sought after. Neither item or url was new, and neither were the videos within. Also, this was a Universal Google search, not one for videos. (Sorry, I'm not allowed to reference directly). Thanks.

    | Blenny
    0

  • I just came across schema.org, which has a massive list of attribute tags that can be added to HTML code, presumable with the benefit of giving search engines clear signals about your content -- and by extension, presumably boosting the ranking of good-quality content sites. Many of the tags point back to schema.org for definitions of content types. Since it's the first time I've seen this, I thought I'd ask the question: Do the tags listed at schema.org carry any weight with Google, or is this a self-promotional effort by schema.org to become an arbiter of SEO and content encoding? Thanks folks.

    | RobM416
    0

  • Hi guys, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOvNtPGGeHc http://themovies2012.info/wanderlust Will google know what site copy the content and what site own the content? The description on youtube is exactly the same as my review on themovies2012.info, but in the description on youtube i put link to my website... Will google know the difference?

    | prunarevic
    0

  • In terms of a small flash slideshow and having text and links on various slides within, is such text and links as easily index-able (or even at all) compared to static html text on a webpage?

    | heritageseo
    0

  • We made changes to a site, including the addition of a new page and corresponding link/text changes to existing pages.  The changes are not yet showing up in the Google index (“site:”/cache), but, approximately 24 hours after making the changes, The SERP's for this site jumped up. We obtained a new back link about a couple of weeks ago, but it is not yet showing up in OSE, Webmaster Tools, or other tools. Just wondering if you think the Google SERP changes run ahead of what they actually show us in site: or cache updates.  Has Google made a significant SERP “adjustment” recently? Thanks.

    | richpalpine
    0

  • All of our pages have been indexed by Google and we are ranking very well thus far. Here is an example of a search where, based on my searches, we rank well. Search for "Indiana ERISA Bond". You can search for any state name followed by "ERISA Bond" and we rank really well (Top of page 1). The pages that should show up for you are here: 1.  https://www.suretegrity.com/surety-bonds/indiana/erisa-bond 2. https://www.suretegrity.com/surety-bonds/indiana/erisa My issue is with a different product we offer. Search for "Georgia Mortgage Lender Bond". The pages I would hope to come up, in order of priority, are: 1. https://www.suretegrity.com/surety-bonds/georgia/mortgage-lender 2. https://www.suretegrity.com/surety-bonds/georgia/mortgage-broker-banker-lender When I do my searches I show up at the bottom of page 2 and the URL that is being found is #2 above and not #1. I have spent a LOT of time thinking about this and am in need of some direction. What am I doing wrong? Thanks, Alex

    | dbuckles
    0

  • One of our clients sites rankings has been jumping around like crazy and I have never experienced this before. The site - http://www.tshirtsubway.com Was 2nd for Music T shirts on Google.co.uk Plus top of the 2nd page for T shirts. Then all of a sudden the ranking for T Shirts disappered. Do you think the site could be subject to a spam link attack from a rival ? What is the best way forward with resubmission to Google webmaster tools. The strange this is the site is now 4th for Music T Shirts so still ranking ? But for that word it has disappeared... Head scratching as I type...

    | onlinemediadirect
    0

  • We've been experiencing some unusual behaviour in the Google.co.uk SERPs recently... Basically, the ranking of some of our websites for certain keywords appears to be changing by the minute. For example, doing a search for "our keyword" might show us at #20. Then a few minutes later, doing the same search shows us at #14, and then the same search a few minutes later shows us at #26, and then sometimes we're not ranked at all, etc etc. I know the algorithm changes a lot, but does it really change every couple of minutes? Has anyone else experienced this kind of behaviour in the SERPs? What could be causing it to happen?

    | d4online
    0

  • OK, Here is a question which I can't find but think people have thought about. I would like to know others opinion. I have had a site that ranks well under generic national keyword terms. (not geographically specific)  Its a small website, only 10 pages. We get 85% of our business from online applications.  These applications come from all over the united states.Our SERP rankings generate 70% of all our traffic. My question is this: we operate in a state where we don't do business.  We are a virtual business.  Should I sign up for google places? Will It hurt my national SERP rankings?

    | FidelityOne
    0

  • I noticed that my page one ranked landing pages that don't get a lot of love from me have dropped in rank big time on Google this week.  This is a site that has static (meaning, I can't freshen up the content easily) landing pages for products that we sell.  The pages that dropped are the ones that have the fewest inbound links, and don't get much attention on the social media side.  Our most important landing pages have also dropped, but just a few spots on page one.  This is a first for me.  Does anyone think that this is a "lack of freshness" penalty? We are still number one on page one for our brand search terms.  Would fresh content give me a shot at getting the pages back up?  I'm willing to update them slowly, but before I go crazy, I'm reaching out to the pros here.

    | Ticket_King
    0

  • Been using SEOMOZ now to analyze and crawl a client's website for a while now. One thing I've noticed is that our client's website is indexing well with Google. a few thousand pages are being indexed. However, when it comes to Yahoo and Bing, the website only has a 100+ pages indexed. We've submitted updated sitemaps to Google and Bing and have been fixing any broken links, and on-page SEO. Content is also good. Here's the website: www.imaginet.com.ph Any suggestions/recommendations are highly appreciated. Thank you!

    | TheNorthernOffice79
    0

  • Hi there This blog insert was flag suggesting there was too many page links? I cant identify the same problem? Can anyone explain?

    | footballfriends
    0

  • Hi everyone, Hoping that someone will be able to answer this question for us. If we rank first organically for a keyword, are we safe to assume that we'll rank first (or close to it) for variations of that keyword as well? E.g. If we rank first easily for "Hamilton Island", can we safely assume that we will rank well organically for close variations of that keyword such as "Hamilton Islands", "Hamiltonisland", "Hamilton Island Hotel" due to the fact that "Hamilton Island" is in those keywords? We're deciding which keywords to monitor in SEOmoz and we don't want to waste keywords on very similar terms if we don't have to. Really appreciate any responses! Cheers.

    | HamiltonIsland
    0

  • Rand Fishkin touched on the tiny links that can appear for your search result - not the 6 pack of links that show the structure of your site, but the 2-4 links that show up on one line below your meta description. Any idea how to earn or influence these? He mentioned them in the "New Opportunities in Google's Search Results" webinar from May 2011 on Slide 19 if that helps. An example would be if you search "seo guide" in Google search, the SEOmoz link has those mini links below the meta description. Are they random or can they be influenced?

    | Hakkasan
    0

  • Do you know of any evidence that explains how Google or any SE would handle pages with words that are commonly hyphenate? Our site for example has a large O-ring section. A couple years ago when we did our SEO we used Google's keyword tool and found that these words all have different Cost Per Click, Global / Local searches. O-Rings
    O-Ring
    oring
    o-ring So we assumed they were each unique keywords and designed our pages to alternate usage of the terms as they are fairly interchangeable. However we have not achieved the position we would have expected from all that work, now while I'm doing another SEO pass with the tools here.. I want to make sure we don't spam them, but still cover all our bases. Thanks for any tips, advice or links.

    | donford
    0

  • So I went to look at our keyword reports in GA today and our most popular keyword was "(not provided)". It now accounts for 10% of our referred visits. Unfortunately, it also has a 125% avg order value compared to the rest of our site. This is a really annoying policy that Google has implemented and will clearly have an effect on our ability to effectively market our site.

    | IanTheScot
    0

  • I make SEO in a major website (over 1M visitors/month). Our brand name is the most important term searched in Google, except this fact: our brand is written in plurial, but not the search term, so without "s". Some weeks ago, the autosuggest in Google SERPs began to show our exact brand with the famous " s ". YEAH! that's increase our visitors over 10%. But 2 weeks after, all this collapse....our brand does't appear anymore in auto suggest for same term... nada!... Even if we still ranking #1 and still have our 6 mega sitelinks... and the homepage PR increase by 1 during the same period. What Happens??? My theory point to autosuggest itself. Autosuggest to exact brand name show in Webmaster tools an increase over 180% on this term, but the historical most searched term (without this "s" decrease by 20%. Is it possible that Google looked a this as a lowest interest for us? If yes, this is bad! Any other idea?  Thanks!

    | Olivier_Lambert
    0

  • Hi, Is it safe to assume as soon as Google indexes updates I've made to my site that any  ranking changes the updates effected will happen at that same time, or is there ever a lag time before these changes ( if any ) take effect?

    | minutiae
    0

  • I work for a news site and some of our photo galleries get indexed by Google News while others never do. I'm trying to determine why some are more successful than others even though they all follow the same guidelines regarding keyword-rich headlines & copy, h1s, etc. When comparing what's been indexed in the past with current galleries, there doesn't appear to be an obvious pattern. Can anyone share some insight into this?

    | BostonWright
    0

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