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Category: Algorithm Updates

Discuss algorithm updates and impacts.

  • SwanseaMedicine


    Hi all, I'm looking to re-direct one domain to another so that the content can be edited more easily under one CMS. Is this possible or will search engines penalise you for such a move? Not overly worried about losing link juice by implementing a 301 because the website we're hoping to re-direct from is a new page. Cheers

    | SwanseaMedicine
    0
  • jpeg80


    Over the past c. 3 weeks our average Google SERP rankings for a site have been as follows : week 1 : average 3rd in SERP week 2 : average 1st in SERP week 3 : average 7th in SERP Reading on sites including Moz, SEO Roundtable and looking at Moz's mozcast tool it seems there is allot of change going on with Google's algorithm at the moment. Is there a general consensus as to what the new algorithm update is targeting so that we can adapt our site / marketing accordingly ? Or is it too early to adapt ? When Google rolls out an update like this is it common to see fluctuations as they try out things or if we are currently down in the rankings should we take action now. I know there a tools that look at your google analytics data an overlay a list of major google updates such a penguin and panda, but from what ive read this is a generic algorithm change rather than a defined named update.

    | jpeg80
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  • SamClicks


    Is there a way in which meta descriptions can be altered on AMP pages? The meta description is not pulling from the original page for each post, and current plugins such as Yoast/Glue for Yoast & AMP by Automattic do not appear to offer customisation of titles/meta descriptions. Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

    | SamClicks
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  • BeckyKey


    Hi I have noticed strange drops in our rankings, some last Monday 12th & some Sunday 18th - has anyone else experienced anything on these dates? I've seen talk of a possible algo update, but nothing concrete Thanks!

    | BeckyKey
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  • Michelle0821


    I have the urls urlA.com (est 2010) and urlB.com (est 2015). The newest (siteB.com) is currently redirected to urlA.com. For branding purposes, I think it is important to market and direct traffic to urlB.com (the newest). What effect will it have on SEO if I make a change to switch those...and have urlA.com (which older site - 2015) redirected to urlB.com?.

    | Michelle0821
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  • Clojobobo


    Hi there I wonder if anyone can advise on this. Since the latest google update on 1st Sept or whenever it rolled out, we noticed an initial spike in hits on our site, which was great. However now we are noticing levels going back to where they were and less people visiting the site. It also seems to be very sporadic. So we have a period of say a couple of hours with no one on the site, then suddenly loads visiting. We have also noticed a big dip in enquiries, despite the site having roughly the same amount of visitors. All our stats on Moz, Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs, Serpfox and various other rank trackers are showing that we have had an increase in visibility on our tracked keywords. There is a definite spike on all, but where is our traffic and where are our enquiries? Usually we are able to work out where the problem is when updates occur but with this we have no idea. We are utterly baffled. Is this normal? Is this just fluctuations and will settle down? Has anyone else noticed weird things happening? If anyone has any ideas or experience of this then would be most grateful for any advice. Feeling rather desperate at the moment. Many thanks in advance. Clojo

    | Clojobobo
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  • QubaSEO


    I'm hoping that Mozzers can weigh in with any recent experiences with eCommerce SEO..... I like to assume (perhaps incorrectly) that Google's 'Quality' filters (formerly known as Panda) have evolved with some intelligence since Panda first launched and started penalising eCommerce sites for having thin product pages. On this basis i'd expect that the filters are now less heavy handed and know that product pages with no or little product description on them are still a quality user experience for people who want to buy that product. Therefore my question is this...
    Do thin product pages still need noindex given that more often that not they are a quality search result for those using a product specific search query? Has anyone experienced penalty recently (last 12 months) on an ecommerce site because of a high number of thin product pages?

    | QubaSEO
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  • KevnJr


    We hired a new website/marketing company that is a Preferred Google Partner (one of two in Charlotte according to them) and they hosted a presentation by Google at the Google Fiber office in Charlotte yesterday. As expected, there were lots of self-promotion by Google, accompanied with a plethora of data they created to support their PPC Marketing. It was an impressive performance with Molly Dince and Celena Fergusson, presenting Google Marketing Solutions: "Making the Web Work For You" and the keynote speaker Tim Reis, Director of Performance Agencies at Google: speaking on "Mobile Micromoments: Why Your Biggest Opportunities Are In The Smallest Moments" They ended with 15 minutes of Q&A and my question was answered with "I don't know" which I found surprising. So, here it is Thursday morning and I'm asking the same question to my Moz Family for some feedback: "Since the removal of Ads from the right column of a SERP, what percentage of Google traffic comes from Ads vs. the Organics?" I look forward to your comments. TY,
    KJr

    | KevnJr
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  • Brett-S


    Hi all, As everyone is most likely aware, Google have recently announced that if a site has intrusive intersitals that push the main content below the fold, will be downgraded in the SERP's from January 10th. At the moment we have a range of international sites, .ca, .com.au, .co.uk, .fr etc - if a user from a UK IP goes to a .ca site - a country switcher dialog will appear. I am aware that this may affect our sites performance in mobile search when the update comes out - however, if we block Google from seeing this - will they still pick it up? Thanks.

    | Brett-S
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  • Chenzo


    I'm curious to know what us MOZ folks have to say about an update on Google. Article here: http://searchengineland.com/big-google-search-update-happening-chatter-thinks-258142 Any ideas?

    | Chenzo
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  • Pwhitfield


    The site in question has been operating for around 3 months and for the first two months was nowhere to be seen in google results (literally page 10, 11 etc for all but branding searches). Then through a lot of hard work and the help of MozPro I managed to build it to a respectable 6th-10th place for the main keyphrases. Overnight on Wednesday we suddenly dropped half a dozen places or so and were rooted firmly mid table page 2 for both these phrases. Last night however we suddenly dropped from 14th to the very last result on page 10! for the biggest keyphrase where it has slowly dropped through the day to currently be sitting in 8th on page 11. Nothing is showing in Dashboard, theres no reason that I know of to be penalised, however even if we were penalised then surely that would be the site as a whole and not just 1 keyphrase? The weird thing is, when you look at the 1st 2 pages of the search a number of items have changed, a competitor which closed down is suddenly sitting mid table while other newcomers that were doing well have dropped, some of the older faces have gone up suddenly. If I didnt know better I would say that google has suffered a timewarp and is now serving results from a month ago for this keyphrase. Ive now noticed that the MozCast is reporting very stormy weather last night, surely however this couldnt be down to a change in Algorithm etc, not to produce such a massive drop for a site that has followed the rules (I refuse to link with a site that even remotely could be thought of as spam). Someone please tell me that google has been glitching and all will be well when I wake in the morning? Peter

    | Pwhitfield
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  • BeckyKey


    Hi Has anyone noticed anything strange with their rankings? I've had a few drops out of the blue at the start of August. Thanks!

    | BeckyKey
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  • BeckyKey


    Hi I wanted to find out whether pop up messages affect Google rankings. We only have one voucher code pop up. Thanks Becky

    | BeckyKey
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  • tigersohelll


    We've have been facing a strange issue with our Organic Image Search Traffic since July month, 10th July 2016 to be precise. There is a significant decline in our Organic Image Search Traffic that we can see in our Google Search Console Account, We have noticed a sudden drop (Almost 80%-90%) in our daily clicks through image search in Google Search Console, Does anyone here have any idea why this has happened suddenly though everything is same as it was before and we haven't done any changes in image names and images path. IWPbQ

    | tigersohelll
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  • WWWSEO


    Has anyone else noticed their rank positions falling to competitor sites that aren't optimized and are less relevant? I've noticed that we've lost some rankings or have dropped over the past few weeks and the competitor pages that have replaced us haven't been optimized, aren't as relevant, and it doesn't look like there has been any updates (looking through archived versions). For example, their main "shoes" gallery is ranking for more specific shoe types, like "sandals", and "sandals" isn't even mentioned in their metadata and they have no on-page copy. Their DA is slightly higher, but our sites have a denser link profile (although, yes, I do need to go through and see what kind of links, exactly, we've gained). Has anyone else seen this happen recently, or have any ideas of why or what we could do to get our rank positions back? My main initiatives have been to create and implement fresh on-page copy, metadata, and manage 404s/301 redirects, but I'm thinking this issue is beyond a quick copywriting tweak.

    | WWWSEO
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  • BeckyKey


    Hi I am seeing a large drop in our traffic from Bing - this is usually a good traffic source for us. The drop seems to be at the same time Google had the slow roll out of Panda 4.2 - would this have anything to do with it? Becky

    | BeckyKey
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  • HLTalk


    17 year old support site on the topic of hair loss.  The home page (and pretty much all internal pages) enjoyed Page 1 Place 1 ranking out of 64 million search results for 12 of those years, for our main search phrase:  hair loss.  Other internal pages ranked #1 for other search phrases. I believe we were blessed by Google because we did everything the best we could:  Genuine, manually constructed, unique, relevant content that was created from the heart.  Other generalized health sites linked-to our site for more information on hair loss, and we had a couple thousand back-links that we never had to pay for. For the last 7 years or so, core content and news center went stagnant, but user-driven content (discussion forums) continued chugging along.  Very old CMS systems had created duplicate content (print pages, PDF pages, share pages) and the site was not mobile-friendly at all. By the end of 2013, our home page had been bumped to the middle of Page 2 for "hair loss" as Google began pushing us down.  Replacing our 700 page site dedicated to the topic of hair loss with random news articles, and dermatology organization sites that had little more than a paragraph of content on the topic. Traffic and income dropped by over 75% with this change, and by 2015 we were looking at a 9 year old site design that wasn't mobile-friendly, and had no updated content outside of the Forums for about as long. Mid 2015 we began a frantic renovation.  The store was converted to a mobile-friendly design, tossed into HTTPS, and our developer screwed up, forgetting to put canonicals in place.  Soon after, our store rankings dropped to almost zero.  By the end of 2015 this was fixed, and we were spending tens of thousands to convert a very large, very old site into WordPress with a responsive, mobile friendly, lightning fast page-load design.  We had no Google Analytics data prior to this either. Actions Taken starting Jan 1, 2016 - May 2016: Static Homepage + core content > Now put into WordPress.  (80 pages) - proper 301's. News section running a 10 year old "PostNuke" CMS > Now put into WordPress. (300 pages). 301's. Forums running a 5 year old vBulletin > Now put into XenForo. (160,000 pages).  301's. Profiles section running a 10 year old "SocialEngine" CMS > Now put into new SocialEngine. (10,000 pages)* Site moved from HTTP > HTTPS. Proper 301's. Store CMS already finished months prior but sales dropped by 90%.  Almost zero. Old forum CMS had created countless duplicate URLs.  All of these 410'd. Old forum CMS had 65,000 pointless member profile pages indexed.  All 410'd. Old news CMS created 4+ dup pages for every article (print, etc).  All 301'd to new Article URL. Our HTACCESS file is thousands of lines long, trying to clean everything up, and redirect everything back to one, accurate, proper URL for each piece of content.   It was a lot of work! After 17 years, we obviously had spammy sites linking to us.  I quickly deleted content on my site the worst offenders were linking to.  Then hired an SEO person to create a disavow audit on the other 20,000 sites liking to us.  He settled on around 300 URLs needing disavow, but commented that didn't see any evidence we'd been penalized by Panda.  He finished Friday and we will submit disavow Monday. Ran Screaming Frog audit on the site Cleaned up Google Search Console fully Created properties and submitted new sitemaps there. Monitored each property for the last 3 months and addressed 100% of issues raised. Revived Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram Accounts. Began publishing new content in our /news/ section and cross-posting to Social Media. Began improving up our Title Tags in the Forums as they often were pointless:  "Hi! Need help!?" **Despite this, nothing has helped.  Nothing has budged.  Our traffic hasn't moved an inch since January.  Sales have dropped 90% and site income has almost dried up. ** I have taken out a $25,000 personal loan just to cover my mortgage and pay my bills while I attempt to identify what's going wrong, and how to fix it.  It bought me about 3 months, and that 3 months is almost up.  I hired 2 or 3 different SEO experts with varying levels of experience.  Due to no Google Analytics data to draw on, none of them could come up with any specific explanations for our drop in ranking over the last 4 years. That's why I took the approach to just "do everything" to fix all problems identified, and then cross my fingers.  It hasn't worked.  As of today our home page is not even found in google for our main search phrase: hair loss.  Its simply not there.  At all.  And the only thing that is ranking is our forums, ranked at "67", which is horrible.  But I don't understand why a site that was doing so well for over a decade has now been completely dropped from Google, without a single notice in Console or otherwise, explaining any problems. I realize this is a massive undertaking, and an equally massive post.  But any time you can spend helping me will be forever appreciated.

    | HLTalk
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  • Michael_Nace


    I'm just at the beginning of a new analysis involving Google News visibility and ranking factors, and thought I could put the project out to you, dear SEO geniuses, to get your ideas and perspectives. Backgrounder: My company operates over 50 niche, disease-specific daily news sites, covering science, research and advocacy news about specific diseases. Virtually all of them are in Google News. They range in age from 3 years old to 3 months old. Varying degrees of page rank / authority Content on the site is completely niche to specific diseases, and we have a lot of sites for rare and orphan diseases. Most of the content is news, but we also have info/resources pages, blogs, and some short-form posts made for use in social media. The Project: I want to do an analysis of keywords in our news headlines and see how certain keywords correlate with articles that do well -- both in terms of search traffic and overall with users. Going to use our Multiple Sclerosis News Today website. Most of our search traffic comes from Google News. What I hope to gain: I'm curious to see if certain sets of keywords that relate to the disease, to therapies, etc. drive the most traffic. I want to compare these keyword lists to how well we rank in organic search for the same keywords (via news articles or info pages) to see if there is a connection. I want to also create a working keyword list of the best-performing keywords in the news as a way of cross-pollinating content production on our blogs, info pages, social content, etc. I want to increase my knowledge base of ranking factors specific for Google News. The last point is really something I wish I knew more about. I feel like there aren't many knowledge resources out there about Google News. Is it safe to assume that the same on-site and off-site SEO best practices that govern organic search engine visibility are at play in Google News, or are there independent factors as well? I'd love to get your thoughts. Thanks!

    | Michael_Nace
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  • BeckyKey


    Hi Does anyone know what impact the recent slow Panda roll out may have? Obviously content,  but would it perhaps include engagement/user behaviour factors regarding your on page content too? Thanks

    | BeckyKey
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  • Brando16


    If I were to start creating individual pages for things such as webinars or other resources for our visitors to consume would I be running the risk keyword cannibalization? The webinars cover topics around our products and services so my fear is that the content might compete with our product and service pages. I noticed here at moz that each webinar does not have it's own page and just links to the registration page (https://moz.rankious.com/_moz/webinars).

    | Brando16
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  • LizMicik


    The end of April, we made the switch from http to https and I was prepared for a surge in crawl errors while Google sorted out our site. However, I wasn't prepared for the surge in impossibly incorrect URLs and partial URLs that I've seen since then. I have learned that as Googlebot grows up, he'she's now attempting to read more javascript and will occasionally try to parse out and "read" a URL in a string of javascript code where no URL is actually present. So, I've "marked as fixed" hundreds of bits like /TRo39, 
    category/cig
    etc., etc.... But they are also returning hundreds of otherwise correct URLs with a .html extension when our CMS system generates URLs with a .uts extension like this: https://www.thompsoncigar.com/thumbnail/CIGARS/90-RATED-CIGARS/FULL-CIGARS/9012/c/9007/pc/8335.html
    when it should be:
    https://www.thompsoncigar.com/thumbnail/CIGARS/90-RATED-CIGARS/FULL-CIGARS/9012/c/9007/pc/8335.uts Worst of all, when I look at them in GSC and check the "linked from" tab it shows they are linked from themselves, so I can't backtrack and find a common source of the error. Is anyone else experiencing this? Got any suggestions on how to stop it from happening in the future? Last month it was 50 URLs, this month 150, so I can't keep creating redirects and hoping it goes away. Thanks for any and all suggestions!
    Liz Micik

    | LizMicik
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  • Brighton-Soundsystem


    Over the last year I have noticed a trend in a couple of industries. Google seems to prioritise landing pages with pricing information in the content. This seems more important than it used to. One industry is high end industrial machines. Traditionally there isn't a price list as everything is bespoke for the customer. Low end machines that display an off the shelf price are now ranking higher than they used to. This is frustrating because the different machines meet different customer requirements. However, both sorts of customers are likely to use the same search terms. Has anyone else noticed this trend?

    | Brighton-Soundsystem
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  • TowerMarketing


    Need some help in answering the concern of my client. My client is concerned that organic visits from the 1<sup>st</sup> and 2<sup>nd</sup> quarter of 2016 are LESS than q1 & q2 of 2015. Overall there was about a 15% variance. Basically, I am trying to explain why the 2015 quarters have more organic traffic than 2016 (over the same time frame)? I have explained that to the client: There are external factors that affect SEO such an increase in competitor presence That we have been focusing on generating quality traffic to the site rather than just quantity That Google’s new SERPs layout is pushing organic rankings down Unfortunately, my client does not believe the above points to be valid, despite the fact he is still receiving the same amount of conversions, with less traffic. Why would his traffic be less in 2016? What else could cause this? Any help would be appreciated so I can help him.

    | TowerMarketing
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  • ccdispoto


    I am currently optimizing for a site that does a ton of services:
    Web Development
    Logo Design
    SEO
    Copywriting
    Social Media
    Email Marketing
    PPC Marketing Is it better practice to optimize one "Services" page for multiple keywords or to break each service onto its own unique URL and optimize each page individually?

    | ccdispoto
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  • marketing91


    Dear friends, On 3rd of May, i suffered a Manual google unnatural outbound link penalty. I recovered from the said penalty on 27th of June. However, i have noticed that my traffic has been dropping since 23rd April. I am confused where to target my work. Should i work on thin content and is it an algorithmic Panda problem (but my keywords are still ranking good) or is it a Penguin problem (I had 6 domains with payday loans backlinks and i have dosavowed 32 backlinks recently) What should be my plan of action here and what would you recommend? An image is attached herewith for your reference, PHd8BzX.png

    | marketing91
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  • BeckyKey


    Hi I'm having difficulty managing our product pages for optimisation, we have over 20,000 products. We do keyword research & optimise product titles/meta of new products - however there's a lot to clean up but we have done a lot. I find we rank/convert better on product pages so they would be great to focus on - however when an old product is discontinued, the page is removed & we lose authority by creating new pages for similar products - does anyone have any ideas for managing this? This is something done automatically on the dev side in France. I then have the issue of trying to rank category pages - these are highly competitive areas competing with big brands. I'm finding it tough to know where to focus, the site is vast and I am the only SEO. I've started looking into low hanging fruit - but these aren't necessarily the areas which bring in much revenue. Thanks!

    | BeckyKey
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  • Jenny1


    Hi - my company has just had a site redesign completed, and our "old" site we have landing pages for a full product line. The new design has taken the content from those landing pages and placed them into one long scrolling page. We currently rank well on the "old" landing pages but now all that content is contained in a single page with anchor tags throughout attached to the headings. Can you set up 301's to anchor tags? Example: old site www.mysite.com/products/automotive/auto-parts.html new site: www.mysite.com/products/automotive#auto-parts

    | Jenny1
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  • fam-Properties


    Hello all, We implemented schema markup for the knowledge graph last month on our main business site and as per structured data testing tool, it's placed correctly but till now Google is not showing up. What could be the reasons?

    | fam-Properties
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  • Brian_Owens_1


    Why do some URLs display like this: cargurus.com › Used Cars › Jeep Wrangler and others display like https://www.carmax.com/cars/jeep/wrangler Is there a significance to having the sub folders separated with an arrow vs a backslash?

    | Brian_Owens_1
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  • BeckyKey


    Hi I still write meta descriptions to help with CTR. I am currently looking at a page where the CTR needs improving. I check the meta on Google SERPs & it isn't pulling through the meta description we have - but other info on the page. This isn't ideal - why does this happen? Will Google just make the decision and are descriptions not worth writing?

    | BeckyKey
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  • adhunna

    This question is deleted!

    | adhunna
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  • rubennunez


    My site was hacked some time ago. I've since then redesigned it and obviously removed all the injection spam. Now I see in search console that I'm getting hundreds of url errors (from the spam links that no longer work). How do I remove them from the search console. The only option I see is "mark as fixed", but obviously they are not "fixed", rather removed. I've already uploaded a new sitemap and fetched the site, as well as submitted a reconsideration request that has been approved.

    | rubennunez
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  • rubennunez


    I launched my redesigned website 4 days ago. I submitted a new site map, as well as submitted it to index in search console (google webmasters). I see that when I google my site, My new open graph settings are coming up correct. Still, a lot of my old site pages are definitely still indexed within google. How long will it take for google to drop off or "de-index" my old pages? Due to the way I restructured my website, a lot of the items are no longer available on my site. This is on purpose. I'm a graphic designer, and with the new change, I removed many old portfolio items, as well as any references to web design since I will no longer offering that service. My site is the following:
    http://studio35design.com

    | rubennunez
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  • ClaytonJ


    I am based in Australia but a US founded search on 'sciatica' shows an awesome answer on the RHS of the SERP https://www.google.com/search?q=sciatica&oq=sciatica&aqs=chrome.0.69i59.3631j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 The download on sciatica is a pdf created by google. Firstly is this common in the US? secondly any inputs on where this is heading for rollout would be appreciated. Is google now creating its own content to publish?

    | ClaytonJ
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  • Spindle


    We have a client who is experiencing some heavy google modification to the title tags being displayed on the search engine. It is adding "- 0 Reviews" to an ecommerce site. Obviously a bad start. There were no instances of these keywords anywhere on any of these pages, header tag or otherwise (on only a handful of the affected pages there was a single commented out image with an alt tag 0 reviews - but it was commented out and since removed) We have attempted to rewrite the title multiple times and it will modify the title but still include the non-relevant addition. Has anyone ever experienced anything like this?

    | Spindle
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  • Malika1


    Hi all, I have read and understood how to make sure that a site in angularJS can be crawled and indexed by search engines efficiently. However, I have a question around the pages and their meta data (title, description etc.). Since, headless browsers will run the code and then return the completed HTML pages, for an SEO, how it is possible to do a check on the meta data? This information wont be available in the code at first instance that SEOs can pull. How does an SEO get the meta data information from the code of the website? Also, how will tools like ScreamingFrog, Google Page Speed tool, Xenu etc. read websites developed in AngularJS?

    | Malika1
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  • BeckyKey


    Hi Does anyone have any good blogs or stats on which video hosting platform is better for SEO? I'm guessing YouTube as it's owned by Google - but I'd love some stats to support this for an internal debate. Thanks Becky

    | BeckyKey
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  • Globalgraphics


    Hi there! We are working on clients site for SEO. We have noticed that our clients 'desk top search results' on Google differ from the 'mobile / tablet search results'. For the desktop - the client is in the top 4 results of page one for Google, but for mobile / tablet results they are at the bottom of page one. We converted the clients site to be responsive 6 months ago. We have been through Google webmaster tools and made all suggested alterations. All programming is to a high standard. Competitors all seem to keep their current rankings - whilst our clients seem to drop. Any suggestions what the issue is would be very much appreciated 🙂 Thanks in advance. Phil. . We re-built their website so that it was responsive. We have been But -

    | Globalgraphics
    1
  • RosemaryB


    I am being asked to provide hard data in support the migration to a responsive website for a large B2B website. I have searched for any case studies showing before/after comparisons - no luck. I can easily show: Current data on desktop vs mobile visitors, their bounce rate, pages per visit, etc. Google Analytics Benchmark data - really compelling stuff there! In the past year, 100K visitors have come to the site from mobile devices. GWMTs shows the client not receiving mobile impressions for important keywords, All the close competitors have gone responsive. In APAC regions, mobile is more widely used than in the USA. BUT, I can’t show that making this expensive and time-consuming transition will result in more revenue. The client is a financial services software company, with a 2-3 year sales cycle. Has anyone seen data to support this transition? Thanks everyone! Have a great long weekend.

    | RosemaryB
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  • Garrett57


    I've noticed that Google is now serving what looks like host-specific video cards on mobile for our site. Is there any way to control which videos are included in these lists without removing the structured data on those clip pages or user pages? We don't want to noindex those pages but we don't want content from those pages to appear as video cards. 1kzPW

    | Garrett57
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  • VERBInteractive


    Although we always recommend against onload pop-ups for clients, (we feel the effect the user experience) we do have a few clients that insist on them. I was reading this article the other day https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/05/17/how-do-i-make-sure-my-site-is-mobile-friendly/ which lead me to https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6101188 and I'm happy to see that Google is going to consider these types of content a downgrade when it comes to rank. My question is 2 fold: Has anyone experienced a drop in organic traffic on mobile due to this update? and do you think this will include user triggered content like photo galleries, bookings, email sign ups? We haven't noticed any drops yet but it is something we will be keeping a close eye on in the next little while. Let's hear what the community has to say 🙂

    | VERBInteractive
    1
  • Ag96adc


    Hello. Is possible to have just a page or two penalized?? From 24th april ( around that date i heard was an update) two of my pages ( out of 37) do not rank for their main keywords but are indexed. Also, lately a lot of my pages drop out of top 100 and get back on their position. Any help? Am I in trouble? Anyone has the same problem?

    | Ag96adc
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  • KasperGJ


    Hi, I own a couple of casting websites, which I'm at the moment launching "local" copies of all over the world. When I launch my website in a new country, the content is basically allways the same, except the language sometimes changes country for country. The domains will vary, so the sitename would be site.es for Spain, site.sg for Singapore, site.dk for Denmark and so. The websites will also feature diffent jobs (castings) and diffent profiles on the search.pages and so, BUT the more static pages are the same content (About us, The concept, Faq, Create user and so). So my Questions are: Is this something that is bad for Google SEO? The sites are atm NOT linking to each other with language-flags or anything - Should I do this? Basically to tell google that
    the business behind all these sites are somewhat big. Is there a way to inform Google on, that these sites should NOT be treated as dublicate content (Canonical tag wont do, since I want the "same" content to be listet on the locally Google sites). Hope there is some experts here which can help. /Kasper

    | KasperGJ
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  • jessekanman


    Hi Moz Community and staffers, Would appreciate your thoughts on the following question: **Are SEO friendly URLS less important now that Google is indexing breadcrumb markup in both desktop and mobile search? ** Background that inspired the question: Our ecommerce platform's out of the box functionality has very limited "friendly url" settings and would need some development work to setup an alias for more friendly URLS.  Meanwhile,  the breadcrumb markup is implemented correctly and indexed so it  seems there's no longer an argument for improved CTR with SEO friendly URLS . With that said I'm having a hard time justifying the URL investment, as well as the 301 redirect mapping we would need to setup, and am wondering if more friendly URLs would lead to a significant increase in rankings for level of effort? Sidenote: We already rank well for non-brand and branded searches since we are brand manufacturer with an ecommerce presence. Our breadcrumbs are much cleaner & concise than our URL structure. Here are a couple examples. Category URL: http://www.mysite.com/browse/category1/subcat2/subcat3/_/N-7th
    Breadcrumb: www.mysite.com > category1 > subcat2 > subcat3 Product URL:  http://www.mysite.com/product/product-name/_/R-133456E112
    Breadcrumb: www.mysite.com > category1 > subcat2 > subcat3 > product name The "categories" contain actual keywords just hiding them here in the example. According to my devs they can't get rid of the "_" but could possible replace it with a letter.  Also they said it's an easier fix to make the URLs always lower case. Lastly  some of our product URLS contain non-standard characters in the product name like "." and "," which is also a simpler fix according to my developers. Looking forward to your thoughts on the topic! Jesse

    | jessekanman
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  • Ria_


    You know the ones I mean... Google have been infrequently displaying some meta descriptions as 3-4 lines long for some time now. But recently, I've been noticing them more. Not sure whether it's just a coincidence that I've been seeing more for my searches, or whether Google are displaying more in this format. Does anybody know what causes Google to prefer the longer meta description or extended meta description for some results?

    | Ria_
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  • Ria_


    First time I've seen this type of featured snippet and now have seen it twice in the space of a couple hours. Queries on Google UK desktop: surgical instruments Hawking radiation Is this new? It definitely is for the "surgical instruments" search. Google are highlighting related topics/keywords in bold beneath the usual featured snippet. b261ea5b3279991f8549d20127f8fde3.png

    | Ria_
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  • Firebox


    Hi guys, I wonder whether you can help me with a couple of SEO queries: So we have an ecommerce website (www.exampleecommercesite.com) with its own xml sitemap, which we have submitted to the Google Webmasters Console. However, recently we decided to add a blog to our site for SEO purposes. The blog is on a subdomain of the site such as: blog.exampleecommercesite.com (We wanted to have it as www.exampleecommercesite.com/blog but our server made it very difficult and it wasn't technically possible at the time) 1. Should we add the blog.exampleecommercesite.com as a separate property in the Google Webmaster tools? 2. Should we create a separate xml sitemap for the blog content or are there more benefits in terms of SEO if we have one sitemap for the blog and the ecommerce site? If appreciate your opinions on the topic! Thank you and have a good start of the week!

    | Firebox
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  • Yellow2000


    Hi Everyone. I keep hearing from different people that googles PAGE RANK , Will soon be eliminated. Has anyone heard anything more about this ? Or is this a myth? This would make it more complex for the average person to rely on DA and TF etc.. Would love to hear from you guys. I actually like the PR rating system. Also have websites more then a year old which are still not showing actual PR yet .Maybe delayed or maybe not. Robert

    | Yellow2000
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  • skandlikp9


    Is there no use of writing Meta Titles and Descriptions? I have them added to 100's of my articles but Google picks the actual title from the URL and title in the article only... any reason for this? How can i check if my Meta title and Description are being seen by Search engines but it will just take time to index the new metas may be few more months to change in Search results.

    | skandlikp9
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  • KempRugeLawGroup


    If I understand bounce rate correctly, what it basically means is that someone clicks on your SERP, and then clicks back to google? But, it doesn't matter if they spent 10 minutes on your page or 10 seconds...so if that's right, then can you lower you bounce rate by getting someone to click on another internal link inside the original page they visited from the SERPs? So for example, if a user clicks on the SERP result for our webpage X, then the users clicks on an internal link on our page X to another one of our webpages ,Y, will that lower the bounce rate, even if the user eventually backs out to the original SERP page? Thanks, Ruben

    | KempRugeLawGroup
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