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Thanks for the quick reply Martijn,

I will 301 these back to the homepage. Just strange that Google is reporting these when they do not exist anywhere on the site.

We have recently launched a new responsive website for a client and have noticed 2 "Not Found" errors within Google Search Console for /mobile and /m

Both these URLs are not linked from anywhere within the site. However Google is reporting them as being linked from the homepage.

This is not the first site we have seen in which Google has reported this error, however the other site was not a mobile friendly site.

My thoughts are to 301 them back to the Homepage. Anybody else have any thoughts on this? or have recently received the same errors?

To clarify

Its very difficult to obtain good links these days, generally they come as the result of creating good content, being a good brand and through a lot of hard work.

My suggestion would be to evaluate the sites you are dealing with, see what they are doing of interest to people, what they are doing which is different and try and exploit those areas. Promote that content through social channels, e-shots, good old fashioned word of mouth etc

Hopefully if the content is something that people find interesting, they will link to it, retweet and share it.

Admittedly, this is a simplistic overview but its the basis of what you should be doing.

If you are looking for further info, there is a ton of resource of Moz and other sites regarding content marketing, promoting content etc,

Hope that helps and good luck

Justin

If i hear the words Fiverr mentioned in a conversation regarding SEO, I run.

Don't do it....

Hi

It depends on your preferred domain going forward, in truth 25 linking route domains isn't enough to be concerned about (unless they are from very high authority sites), so I would chose the variant which works best for you and 301 to that version.

Going forward you should build new links which point the chosen variant (www or non-www).

Justin

We are going to (again) request they switch to Universal Analytics, although further tests show that both the google-analytics.com and stats.g.doubleclick.net events are registering in GA.

Therefore I'm more confused than ever as to the huge discrepancies between taboola and GA traffic, the same sort of discrepancy is also being shown on referrers such as Facebook visitors.

Any further suggestions/troubleshooting gratefully received!

The key thing here is whether the space is shown in the search results.

I think its unlikely that it would cause any SEO issues, if however the space shows in Google results there is a high chance it would affect your click thrus as extra spaces, weird characters etc in page titles tend to suggest that the site is less trustworthy (in my opinion).

So if space is visible in your page title and/or search results, get it sorted. If it is just tabs and line returns in the source code you don't need to worry about it too much.

Hope that helps.

Hey Mozzers

Recently a client of ours undertook a paid campaign using Taboola and have a vast difference between reported clicks and visitors reported by GA.

On further investigation the _utm.gif event is sent to google-analytics.com 50% of the time and stat.g.doubleclick.net the remaining 50% of the time

Is this likely to be the cause of the discrepancy and if so is it possible to resolve this without removing the remarketing tag (which seems to be responsible for stats.g.doublelclick.net).

Many thanks

Justin

I don't think the backlink profile to that page looks particularly natural and i think thats where your problem lies

OSE shows 19 backlines ahrefs shows 30, but looking through them, you have two infographitcs (with no social shares) a couple of links from .ac.uk (which are good links), directories and a number of very questionable looking links such as www.librerio.com/search/jobs/40

You also have some exact match anchor text

All of the above suggests to me that you have been hit by Panda/Penguin and the loss of links mentioned previously most likely suggests that you had questionable links that have been removed or the sites they were coming from have been shutdown (again a good indicator of poor backlinks)

To me, it looks like you are going to have to do some work on building some good links and adding a bit of content to your site to get your rankings back

Also you are on an exact match domain "graduate-jobs.com" which may be contributing

I'm sure its not what you want to hear, but I think thats where the problem most likely lies.

I hope that helps

Hi John

It appears to me that you are seeing in open site explorer "1 - 80 inbound links from XXX domains" is that correct?

If this is the case you may need to change the filter in the 3rd Dropdown from "this page" to "pages on this subdomain". Then click filter.

Now when you look at the links it should say "1-50 of #### external links" and should roughly tie up with the competitive domain analysis links.

Let me know if you get a problem.

Justin

To clarify

Its very difficult to obtain good links these days, generally they come as the result of creating good content, being a good brand and through a lot of hard work.

My suggestion would be to evaluate the sites you are dealing with, see what they are doing of interest to people, what they are doing which is different and try and exploit those areas. Promote that content through social channels, e-shots, good old fashioned word of mouth etc

Hopefully if the content is something that people find interesting, they will link to it, retweet and share it.

Admittedly, this is a simplistic overview but its the basis of what you should be doing.

If you are looking for further info, there is a ton of resource of Moz and other sites regarding content marketing, promoting content etc,

Hope that helps and good luck

Justin

have you tried the on page report card?

Assuming you have a campaign set up in the SeoMOZ web app, load up your keywords then go to

Campaign -> On-page -> report card

select the keyword and enter the url and your will get the page graded

As part of the report it shows ranking factors such as broad keyword usage, appropriate keyword usage, plus a whole host of other ranking factors.

It is best to use the domain.com/blog as the link juice and authority picked up by your blog will be passed in part to the root domain, therefore increasing you domain authority etc

If you take the subdomain route the link juice and authority doesn't get passed and the blog is treated as an independent sites in Google.

Therefore i'd go domain.com/blog every day of the week

Its not really bad, but there is every chance it will affect your rankings as google will not know which page is dominant and in turn will not know which version it should show to searchers

the best method of resolving the issue is to use the rel=canonical tag as this allows you to tell google which page is the dominant version

see article here for more details:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

Yes I use it quite a lot, its a fantastic tool.

There are many ways you can use it to grow followers, but a couple of the more straightforward ones are

Analyse your followers against your competitors, you can see which followers you have in common and more importantly people who follow them and not you

You can search users bios based on interests, so for example if you were a clothes retailer you could search for location & fashion to find potential local followers

There is a whole host of other features that allow you to find how influential your followers are, how many followers they have etc.

So all round its a real useful tool and it is extremely powerful

Rand does dig a big deeper into the features in his acquisition announcement, so that is worth a read if you haven't done so already
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seomoz-pro-member-you-now-get-followerwonk-free

I don't think the backlink profile to that page looks particularly natural and i think thats where your problem lies

OSE shows 19 backlines ahrefs shows 30, but looking through them, you have two infographitcs (with no social shares) a couple of links from .ac.uk (which are good links), directories and a number of very questionable looking links such as www.librerio.com/search/jobs/40

You also have some exact match anchor text

All of the above suggests to me that you have been hit by Panda/Penguin and the loss of links mentioned previously most likely suggests that you had questionable links that have been removed or the sites they were coming from have been shutdown (again a good indicator of poor backlinks)

To me, it looks like you are going to have to do some work on building some good links and adding a bit of content to your site to get your rankings back

Also you are on an exact match domain "graduate-jobs.com" which may be contributing

I'm sure its not what you want to hear, but I think thats where the problem most likely lies.

I hope that helps

Personally I would go for option 3, creating a /directory for the Canadian site, as the search weighting your root domain has will in part get passed onto the /directory as it is seen as another page on your root domain.

By going for a root domain or even a sub-domain you will effectively be starting your SEO efforts from scratch.

That said, there is some argument that a local domain would potentially rank better on local searches, however if you set up the directory route correctly by ensuring you have the localised address and phone number on the landing page, get inbound links to point to this page, social mentions etc that should to large degree counter that argument.

One other thing to consider is that all your SEO efforts on the /directory will help your domain authority and search weighting for the parent domain.

Rand did an great whiteboard friday a while back which explains the pro's and con's of the above options, so I would definitely check that out for a more in-depth explanation
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

Hope that helps

I've been having similar problems, although not just with the Moz toolbar, but with the whole site.

I emailed support and they are doing some changes with cookies, see below. Also the info about Firefox could be relevant, but i haven't tried as yet.

Hey Justin,

We have updated the way we handle cookies and currently if you visit the Q&A forum it will reset the remember me option. This is because Q&A is a separate application and the updated hasn't rolled out to it yet.

Another thing you will want to check those is your cookie settings. When upgrading Firefox it will reset your cookie settings to clearing them when the browser closes. Regardless, what browser you are using it is good to go check out those settings.

We will have the Q&A issue fixed soon though!

Kenny

Hope this helps

There really is no correct answer to the .co.uk/.com debate.

In truth it depends on your target audience, there is a lot of research out there which suggests that uk based users prefer .co.uk domain names

In my opinion it depends a lot on how you see the brand developing and if you think it would benefit from the global perception that a .com can offer.

If its any help to you, in the circumstances you have outlined above 9 times out of 10 I would headline with the .co.uk domain name, just make sure you either 301 or rel=canonical the .com to the .co.uk (or vice versa if you go with .com)

Hi

It depends on your preferred domain going forward, in truth 25 linking route domains isn't enough to be concerned about (unless they are from very high authority sites), so I would chose the variant which works best for you and 301 to that version.

Going forward you should build new links which point the chosen variant (www or non-www).

Justin