Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I would defiantly say its something to do with Panda

Your drop as seen on the graph, is your search visibility and while its not a great indication on its own, it still pretty useful. Your drop in % terms in the same as Ebay's.

http://imgur.com/8XojR8P

Generally speaking people are saying Ebays drop is down to poor quality content, so if David is right about Matt Cutts saying its not affecting product descriptions I would take a look at your blog and add more content (however that does all seem unique).

I will still work on the product descriptions and making them more useful for the user, plus you win twice, higher ranking and more customer converting and they are getting the advice they need without leaving your site

Hi

I am in the process of launching a new version of my site and I know I need to get my current SEO Agency to check and test certain aspects of the site so that I don't lose any rankings.

The problem is I am unsure of everything to ask them and I was wondering if someone could help me out.

I don't want to have missed something basic and therefore want to give them a checklist to confirm they are happy before go live.

Any help appreciated

Hi

Hitwise is a great tool for this, but its pricey.

The data I can get from this is amazing.

SEMRush is good for telling you Organic and Paid traffic to the sites, there is a free version and its not to expensive, if you want the full package.

But Hitwise is the best tool for this, but it depends on the country you operate in, they are not fully Global.

Thanks

Andy

Hi

You have found the way using the Adwords interface. However are you just using the Adwords interface or have you got any other third party software like Double click etc.

Its very simple in software like that, you can add rules to say if not in position 1 -3 increase bids by 'x'% or x amount (I always go with a % increase personally).

I would check the ones you are pausing as sometimes being in position 4 - 10 on certain keywords actually convert quite well. I have one keyword that performs best in position 5 (I don't know why and can't explain it, but I am not going to change it).

Wow - that is a lot of questions within a question.

Trying to rank for highly competitive keywords is as the name suggests hard, I would either go for the long tail keywords or finding little niches within the industry and rank for these. While you are doing this you are building your DA, et al and therefore should start ranking for the more competitive keywords.

It doesn't in theory matter how many keywords you are ranking for, but remember the more you do, the less you can concentrate on them and you will spread yourself to thin and not actually improve any. Especially if its just you I would concentrate on a few keywords which will drive you high converting traffic.

I would track keywords in two sections (brand vs non brand), as branded keywords I would hope you are always in the top positions.

Ranking the pages, yes look at "Title, H1 Tag, Description, Meta Data, Fresh Content and using the keywords on the page" but also look to build decent, relevant links into the page.

Use the Page grader to find some quick wins to help boost these pages. They usually tell me some of the basic things I have missed.

Best practices for link building - http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links I would read this article, I could try and explain here but I would just be repeating the experts. I would recommend reading http://moz.com/learn/seo to further your reading.

Hope this is useful for you.

Thanks

Andy

it is around 20% of the world sites are run using Wordpress (as George says), from simple blogs like you mention to some of the worlds biggest sites.

Wordpress does have its very good features some great plugins like Yoast, which helps to improve your site from an google presepective - changing meta deta, titles etc.

I do use wordpress for my sites for one reason only - I can't code and wouldn't know where to start.

If you are a competent coder and by the sounds of it you are - I would stay away from WP, for all its great benefits and there are loads, its still an out of the box solution that is trying to meet everybodys needs so is not brilliant and while you can do some wonderful themes etc in wordpress you are still working within their framework.

Starting from scratch (if you have the skills and the time) is always a much better solution. So much more can be done

This all depends when the page with the link on it gets crawled and by who.

Would recommend using Google Alerts, these are a good way of spotting new mentions / links to your site.

Would also recommend watching White board friday from two weeks ago about using Email alerts for SEO http://moz.com/blog/8-ways-to-use-email-alerts-to-boost-seo-whiteboard-friday

But it does all depend on when the Page is crawled.

Hi

Yes its worth fixing.

Could you not add Disallow: ?route=product/* to your robots file?

Can you edit the robots file.

Thanks

Andy

I've found from my experience is that no two campaigns are identical. I would suggest trial and error and things that don't work - use negative keywords to stop the words that don't work appearing.

Go in with a lower CPC while your testing so your not wasting as much money and as soon as you have the stat's start to increase your CPC.

Google pagerank is probably still a ranking factor (not as important as it once was) however the public version of Page Rank, what you and me sees will never be updated again, last update if memory serves me well Dec 2013, but they will still be updating their version of pagerank - but as AI becomes more and more intelligent, traditional signals will disappear.

Moz DA and PA would be a better metric to use these days as thats still updated (monthly) and you can see whats impacting the score.

None of the software I use can't

Moz, will tell you where you have ranked historically, but this is after you have started monitoring it.

Searchmetrics - tells you where you was the previous week

There will be some software out there, and I would love to know find some, but the ones I currently pay for don't

The recently discovered is just that, recently discovered by Moz, its nothing to do with the date the article / link was published.

I use three bits of software, Talkwalker, Opensite explorer and Google Alerts. And if I am honest the only one I care about is Google Alerts as its Google rankings I monitor so the sooner google pick up the link the better.

In terms of time length, I am still getting alerts for links posted years ago on poor links, but get alerts within the day for links of places like Virgin.com so it all depends on when the crawler manages to crawl the page.

Have you checked the page with the link on is crawable. Can the bots find the page. If they can't find the page, it will never get indexed and you will never benefit from the link. So if its been 4 weeks check to see if the page has been indexed / can it be indexed.

If you send me the link I will do some analysis for you.

Hi

We use a company called Awin (Affiliate Window) in the UK and they are very good.

As far as I am aware there is no two way affiliates, but the easiest way round it is, to set your self up as a publisher and advertiser.

Its quite easy to do, and you could be up and running as an a publisher in minutes.

Thanks

Andy

again I would say trial and error, you might find though that words like that have a high CPC so might cost you a bit.

I would also recommend maybe extending the cookie window if they are high end products as people might not be able to impulse buy and may take several pay days to save up for the items. By doing this you may get to find out which keywords trigger the initial customer interaction.

I want a tweet from Roger too!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe he is busy crawling your website to give you some useful tips and tricks.

I think he will be in touch soon on twitter.

Hi

What does webmaster tools say. Is it showing any errors.

Also as Vizergy said, did you do 301 re-directs.

You might have been benefiting from long tail SEO, but these pages should have been traffic?

Has your domain Authority dropped in this time period?

There are many factors which could influence it, but someone actually asked Matt Cutts the same question, so while I am good at SEO I might as well let him answer your question

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STpCM-3K3KY

Some of the key things are:

• Domain age, does influence rankings, you basically have to start again when you start a new domain

There are also some very good answers on these similar questions:

http://moz.com/community/q/seo-s-done-301s-in-place-old-site-still-outranks-new-site-what-to-do

http://moz.com/community/q/outranking-a-crappy-outdated-site-with-domain-age-keywords-in-url

Would the business owner be willing to do a 301 from the old site to the new site - this is the best thing I can suggest, but it will take time for the new site to rank and appearing the SERPs where the old site currently ranks.

Hi

How about Facebook Ads, I have used this in the past and a good way to reach your target audience. It can be reality cheap as well to advertise.

Can you use the company's social media to post the articles.

Alternatively look at the key influencers in the industry (if you are in the UK, then Lad bible) and try get them to repost your content, they will be a relative audience that drives a lot of traffic.

Thanks

Andy

Hi

I would hate to leave SEO and then have to come back. I struggle keeping up to date and I spend all day looking after SEO.

You should probably read: http://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link its a great article on internal linking.

Whether you should have them as "nofollow" this is upto you, but I would suggest leaving them as follow, but if you have all internal links as nofollow, then any DA your home page gets, the "link juice" (and I do hate that word) wouldn't be passed to the rest of your site, so the other pages would struggle to rank, as they don't have any PA.

Outbound links is different: if someone has paid for a link, then defiantly yes. If you are linking naturally and actually would recommend the article then yes leave it as follow.

I hope this is helpful and good look in getting back into the world of SEO.

Thanks

Andy

If I am reading the question correctly, then its more of a maths questions rather than an SEO question.

You simply can't average % as some figures have more weighting than others, pages with more page views will have a higher weighting to the total average %, than the pages with 1 page view and 100% bounce rate. So simply using the average formula in Excel wouldn't take into account the weighting and assume they all have equal weighting (which unless ever page had the exact same number of page views, isn't the case).

Here is probably a better explanation: http://www.ehow.co.uk/how_6437936_calculate-averages-percentages.html

Hope this is useful.

Thanks

Andy

firstly that is not quite true. If something is shared on twitter it will not automatically rank in Google, as Google won't use Twitter as a signal, as Twitter can cut off their service at any point (http://www.brafton.com/news/qa-with-matt-cutts-at-ses-san-francisco-social-reputability-for-seo-traffic-cannibalization-and-the-promise-of-transparency-from-google)

Posting on G+ might be different as it will tell google about the new page, however so long as your page is in the sitemap and Google can crawl your site, this is still the best way to initially get a page to rank.

Improving a page rank is a different question to getting a page rank.

Search metrics among other great sites reveal correlations that sites that rank well have (http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/knowledge-base/ranking-factors/) but this isn't a check list and just because you do them all, doesn't mean you will rank highly. Moz has one too http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors

Both of them state that pages that have more +1s tend to rank better, and while this might be the case, they usually also have great content, high DA, large user base etc

Search engine land did a great article on social ranking factors (http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389 - bit old but still relevant).

So in answer to your question - does posting a link on twitter help it rank - Nope and does it improve rankings, probably not.

Hi Urkeman

I would have to partly agree with Robert, with what are the competition doing that is better what you are doing, but I would also look at the "produce the most useful content" like Robert said that is subjective - have you looked at how much of your great content is generating links to it, it could be as simple as that your competitors are better at using their "less useful content" but getting good quality links to it.

Writing brilliant, amazing unique content is only part of the content strategy you must outreach this content to gain links, mentions traffic to it.

I would maybe look at what links your competitors are getting that you are not.

Hi

Firstly Affilaite links usually don't help towards SEO as they go through the affiliate company i.e. Awin, so the link juice actually is passed to awin, not yourself.

Once a product has sold out on our site, we 301 to the category page as this is the best user experience, while they can't get the exact product they are after at least they are still landing on a relevant section of the site - I've seen some examples where companies 301 to the homepage, but this isn't a good user experience.

Time periods for the 301s is a bit hard to say, I would track and see if they haven't had anybody click on the old link for 6 months to remove the 301 - but thats my opinion. Some would argue longer and I have spoken to others who say three months. What ever time period you do chose, keep an eye on 404 errors and if a decent number of these keep popping up, keep extending your 301 window.

Thanks

Andy

Thanks Vijay, its only on my windows machine (I really only use it for Server Log Analysis) and the above seems like to much work. Its working fine on the Mac - so will just install and leave it off the windows machine.

first of all I am glad I am not the only person who thinks about this before sleep (its when I come up with my crazy ideas and thoughts) - tip, have a notebook next to you otherwise you might forget by the morning.

I've never seen any direct correlation between this and I would guess it would be very hard to prove either way, but I would tend to agree.

Google wants to rank sites which are more popular and answer their users experience, so if a lot of people are searching for 'x' and search term. I.e. 'bbc televisions' and someone else did a search for televisions, I wouldn't be surprised to see bbc ranking higher as a lot of people had suddenly been searching for the site. The only caveat I would add would be, that if your site has a poor user experience and a lot of people search brand name an query and bounce, you would probably rank lower.

I have never seen any evidence for this, however its not a silly question / thought.

Michael - I disagree, if you are doing everything naturally then you don't need to worry about Google updates.

If you are producing, good original content then that people naturally link too then Google isn't going to penalise you. All Google wants to do is rank relevant content to keep people using Google happy and not going to other search engines. Play by their rules and you don't need to worry about future updates.

John Mueller from Google has just confirmed:

Google has just confirmed that mobile friendliness is now a ranking factor for people on smartphones. The date it goes live is 24th April 2015.

There is a great presentation on the hangout - which will be available later to watch and once its available I will update with a link - but I would make sure your checking webmaster tools for any alerts / messages if you care about smartphone users.

What do people recommend, regarding responsive vs mobile site vs dynamic serving.

Is your site ready? What are you planning on doing since the update has been announced.

Hi

Marty is correct there is no way of currently doing this, but I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't out soon, as they are always trying to get a better user experience for their users.

I will ask Google later this week and let you know what they happen to say, I will keep you updated as soon as I find out

Isn't the main question: Why do you have duplicate pages, are these essentials - the easiest option would be to remove them. But in terms of whats the best option, here is a great article from Moz: http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt

I would read that and decide based on your websites and situation the option best suits you.

In my opinion I would suggest:

I used data from Hitwise (I am based in the UK) and can get this data. Its aggregated data so not 100% accurate but its a good estimate.

Software however is not cheap, but very very good.

Hi

I think it was at BrightonSEO where PI DataMetrics were talking about similar pages on a website can cause rankings to drop for your main page. This has got me thinking.

if we have a category about jumpers so: example.com/jumpers but then our blog has a category about jumpers, where we write all about jumpers etc which creates a category page example.com/blog/category/jumpers, so these blog category pages have no index put on them to stop them ranking in Google?

Thanks in Advance for any tips.

Andy

Hi

Adsense doesn't affect ranking in either a positive or negative way, Google freely admits they keep them completely separate (otherwise everyone would just chuck Adsense on theirs sites to get number one in Google).

https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9717?hl=en-GB

Having three ads on a page doesn't seem to excessive IMO, but without seeing the page its a bit hard to tell.

I have a google alerts for 'brand name' and set it to email every time the 'brand name' appears on the web.

Its then when Google finds a new mention of my 'brand name' anywhere on the web it triggers an alert to me.

It doesn't send me historical mentions on the brand, but it does send me an email every time the brand is mentioned. I sometimes get really old articles but it just means Google have just found the article.

If its on the bigger, more popular sites I can get alerts within minutes / hours of the article going live, sometimes its a few weeks later and the longest I've had is a few years.

So the alerts are triggered every time Google find a new mention of the 'search term' you have requested. They don't send historical mentions about the brand.

yes I get exactly the same when i search for 'windy skirt', all youtube videos. Is this something which has happened recently. Did there used to be many youtube videos. Where do you rank now. Almost all of page two is also Youtube video's as well.

Hi

I still only have version 8 so I can't test it, but my GA is showing data for version 9 with sales.

I have also checked that these aren't Paypal orders.

Once I get version 9 I will test, but our visitors are currently able to checkout.

Thanks

Andy

Very good question. Lets think for one minute that Google and SEO doesn't exist - which option would you go for, I would personally say the first option as they offer a better user experience.

From an SEO point of view having anchor text help to tell the search engine what your page is about is still very useful, especially if there are not many pages around linking to them pages.

If you feel the pages can rank well without the anchor text, have good PA, rank naturally currently I would go with option 1, but if the site is new, or the pages aren't easily discovered in SERPs option 2 has to be the best option.

Sorry I can't be more helpful without knowing the URL you are talking about.

Some good advice can be found here:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/anchor-text

http://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link

Google made a big announcement last week about Google news: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-in-the-news-19259.html

The news section is not just coming from a human news approved sites, so how you get listed in here I don't know if you still have to go through the old method or whether Google will now just rank you if you are relevant. If anyone knows if you still need to apply be great to know the answer.

yeah have to agree with Logan - there isn't 1 metric to analyse - its a combination of factors.

Google have publicly stated that there are over 200 ranking signals, so even if you 'win' in one metric you could be losing out on all the rest.

Sorry there isn't a one metric to determine your SEO score vs your competitors.

Edit your existing ones change to:

Redirect 301 /article1.htm http://mysite.net/article1/
Redirect 301 /article2.htm http://mysite.net/article2/
Redirect 301 /article3.htm http://mysite.net/article3/

but also add in:

Redirect 301 /wordpress/article1/ http://mysite.net/article1/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article2/ http://mysite.net/article2/
Redirect 301 /wordpress/article3/ http://mysite.net/article3/

There is a plugin in wordpress for 301 redirects and it tells you how many times the urls have been hit, if say after 6 months nothing has hit the old urls and there are no links pointing to them, feel free to delete.

Thanks

Andy

your not the only one worried about this, and can cause some serious issues.

You are going to lose some ranking and organic traffic, but its whether the long terms benefits out wight the short term loses. Can your business afford to lose upto 12 weeks of non organic traffic, while your sites gets reindexed and ranked

Just read a good article on this, and the main section is below.

There’s a few different ways you can hurt your sites rankings through converting your site to HTTPS:

1) 301s -

Got links pointing to the http still? You NEED to 301 to your new https link, or the juice isn’t going to pass over. Alternatively do this on a forced level within the .htaccess, but GBot is dumb and often doesn’t recognize it.

2) Internal Linking -

Again, the same as changing your URLs, you need to do this on your site as well – Change any internal links to https, or Google’s crawl rate is going to be so low you’ll be feeling the heat of hell on your ballsack.

3) Canonicals -

Exact same as what I just said about internal linking, 301s etc… Setup your canconicals with https, or you’re screwed.

4) Duplicate Content -

As I mentioned above, if you haven’t got your .htaccess configured right.. You could have a http and a https version of your site – Duplicate content is a real issue.

Read more: http://godofseo.co/industry-news/https-ranking-signal/#ixzz39ml3R3K8

yeah and most worrying is people are claiming to be affected by Negative SEO - which if true is a whole new SEO strategy to worry about. Protecting yourself as well as trying to improve

Just because Moz says you have the same score, it doesn't mean you have links in Googles eyes. I am a big fan of Moz so this isn't me knocking their software - buts its pretty easy to manipulate DA and PA either to show your site has higher metrics / or lower metrics.

Google also crawls more of the web than Moz, so Google could of found more useful links that Moz hence why they might rank above you.

It could also be that they have better user metrics or more people searching for 'brand name + query'

SEO isn't as easy as it was 5 years ago for working out why your competitors rank above you - there isn't a crazy formula anymore. Its softer metrics which are pretty hard to measure.

Concentrate less on them and more on your own site, can you get the site to load that little bit quicker, is your content '10x content' if not, make it 10x content.

Is your site super mobile friendly and I don't mean just "passing the google mobile friendly test" - that's the bare minimum, get real user feedback and try and improve it.

Is there anyway of keeping people on the site longer, could you produce a video.

Thanks

Andy

Million dollar question - firstly does your site deserve to rank. Do you actually answer the query or is it a 50 word answer and your just hoping Google will rank you. You need to be writing 10x content (https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/how-to-create-10x-content-whiteboard-friday)

Assuming you have a decent answer, the next question is. How often is Google crawling your website (the only way to find out is to look in your server logs). It could be that Google hasn't even crawled the page yet, if it hasn't crawled the page its not going to rank.

Finally assuming you wrote a great article and Google has read it, how authoritative are you in this niche. If you website is all about cars and suddenly you write an article about pens because its low competitive and you want the traffic, Google is smart enough know to understand you have probably written the article for SEO traffic and probably won't rank you high.

It sound like you have done some great on site SEO work.

However Domain Authority (DA) is based more on external factors, i.e. links pointing to your site. You might want to read http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

How you go about getting links is a whole different conversation. I would recommend doing it the hard and slow way. Trying to cheat Google / Moz will only get you penalised in the long run. DA is a Moz score, but Google will have a similar score, even though they will never reveal your score.

Try producing good content onsite that people in your niche want to link to. Once written instead of waiting for these people to find your content (they never will, or it will take years), be direct. Pick up the phone and speak with influencers in your niche.

There are two parts to SEO, technical and content / links. The content / link strategy is what was called PR 10 years ago and its all about getting mentioned and links in relevant areas. There is no point getting a link to your site from sectors which aren't relevant. Google will see through these.

Also never pay for a link, and never trust any of these emails you get offering to get you amazing links from PR6 etc sites. These never work in the long run and only will do more long term damage than help you.

I hope this is helpful in explaining why your DA hasn't improved and what you need to do to improve it. Also DA only updates around once a month, so any work you do now may take a few months to show. You have to wait for Moz to find the link, then wait for their next update. The more popular the site you get the link from the quicker Moz is likely to find it.

Thanks

Andy

Hi

Free samples are a bit of a grey area, and in my opinion it depends on who is sending out the product and what they really want from it.

We send out quite a few products to be reviewed and we actually want them reviewing to find out what people think of them and to drive sales (if it gets a positive review). I like a link and only for the reason its easier for the customer to purchase the item, but whether that link is follow / no follow / affiliate - i don't really care. Its all about the review to build awareness of the fact we sell the products and sometimes to show the diversity of the products we sell, especially new categories.

Where it becomes and issue is when the person sending out the reviews start demanding followed links to certain parts of the sites, thee don't look natural and the only reason they are sending out the products are for SEO benefit.

Regarding your disclaimer, as someone who has sent out products I wouldn't have a problem with you putting that on there, and there was something earlier this month about vlogging now having to make it clear when they have been given free products to review.

I guess SEO isn't as White Hat and Black Hat as some claim, as this to me would be 'Grey Hat'. Plus review sites need to get there products from somewhere to review and these sites do add a lot of value to customers in the decision process of buying so I couldn't ever see Google penalising sites for either accepting review samples or sending them out - whether or not in the future the might a  'review follow' as well as 'follow and no follow' I don't know. This could be one way for the search engines to see that while the links haven't technically been paid for but are not 100% natural.

Great article here for aditonal reading on this: moz.com/community/q/soliciting-product-reviews-with-free-samples 

Thanks

Andy

Hi

As far as I know there is only two types of account (Free), which you don't get that many of the services or Pro ($99 a month).

http://moz.com/products

I used to have the free account, but since upgrading to the paid account about 18 months ago I wish I had done it sooner, has so much information and tools that are really useful.

The best thing to do would be to contact Moz directly, but I don't believe you can.

Hi

The best way I have found is to look in your server logs, its the only true place to find out what Google is doing on your site.

Download the logs and look at all the 404 errors - quite simple and depending on size of your logs can take you around 5 minutes worth a work - the longer time period you can analyse in your logs the better.

Thanks

Andy

Hi

I would have to agree with Dana - and again if I have read your question correctly.

Your current site has been penalised and basically you want to move to a new url to rank highly but not lose brand awareness or direct visitors to your site. If this is what your asking then its not possible, Google will simple pass the penalty to the new url.

Here is the solution, but it requires hard work and will take time.

Resolve the penalty and boost your rankings, I am only guessing that you have been hit by Penguin as its just rolled, but if you have. Do a full link audit, work out which links are toxic and are causing you to drop rankings. After you have complied this list you have two options and it depends if you have a manual penalty or just  been hit by Penguin.

Manual Penalty: you will need to contact all these web masters and try and get as many as the links removed as possible. Keep evidence that you have contacted these web masters, emails etc. Then the ones you haven't been able to get removed add to a disavow file and upload in WMT. Then go through the reconsideration request - at this stage you will need to show all the emails you have sent and a list of all the links you have got removed.

Been hit by Penguin: A lot easier (but will take longer to recover), once you have got you list of bad links, simply add them as a disavow file. Keep this disavow file as any future disavow files you do, you need to add to this original list. Now you just have to sit back and wait for Penguin to roll again and unfortunately we haven't been told yet when this will roll again and how frequently it will roll.

If it is the case you have been hit by Penguin, you need to do some white hat techniques of building links. If the bad links were done by you, then you might want to read this article: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links. If the links we're built by a previous SEO company / employee - make sure that the old tatics aren't used again. Sit down with the SEO agency and explain what you want. If its done by your current SEO agency, I would personally fire them, no agency in my opinion should be building bad links. Penguin has been out long enough for SEO agencies to have changed tactics of link building, but if you do want to stay with them, explain you want a different strategy to link building.

Basically 301 won't work in the long term, you will lose your direct customers and get the penalty passed anyway.

Hi Ryan is correct, it can be done by looking at the server logs, it's a bit tricky to set up so just checked your devs have done this before.

also and this is important do you want to show different data to organic visitors from Google or all Organic visitors from all search engines.