Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Welcome to the Moz team, hope you enjoy working at Moz - they are a lovely bunch of staff. Lol

I've just joined the company to it would seem, look forward to meeting you all Monday. Does that mean I get MozPro for free?

Have you made some changes on your website, like adding noindex to the certain sections of your site or have you removed an internal link to a section meaning Google can't access that section. I would investigate firstly what changes have been made on the site.

Might also be worth checking your server logs to see which pages google are crawling - this might also help find out which pages they aren't indexing.

Reason why you might be seeing more pages when you do a site search is because it might take a few days to disappear from search.

Hi

I would install it on part of your site so example.com/blog if possible, if you have to put it on a sub domain that is not as good, but still better than trying to embed (i.e. blog.example.com).

We use wordpress and is very easy to use, never used blogger so don't know what can and cant be done, but we was about to install wordpress on our server.

Hope this is helpful.

Thanks

Andy

I am assuming you are not changing the domain name so you don't need to worry about any links pointing to the home page as this page will be live.

And for any pages you don't want but have links pointing to them, then yes 301, nope you don't need to recreate the urls, just add the 301 to servers.

Unfortunately if you are changing some of the site urls, you are going to lose some rankings in the short term but I am sure the new site is much better written for the search engines that you improve - but you will lose some short term rankings

without a doubt its either been hit or has changed something drastically.

From the image below - its search visibility dropped to basically zero on 16/5 last year so either has been hit (which it looks like), or changed something drastically.

http://imgur.com/QwcJC9v (UK visibility)

http://imgur.com/GGeWvGj (US Visibility)

While the visibility isn't a great factor on its own, when there has been a huge drop like that I suspect its been penalised.

From looking at the list of updates I would say it possibly got hit by Penguin 2.0 http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change or could have been a manual penalty.

But I would stay clear of the website and not pay to put anymore links on their website.

Your current redirects are fine and the best way is if its live to test it. Even thought I knew I had done it right recently when i went to https, I still do several random checks. They all came back as working - but no harm in testing.

Your point 2 is doable and as I am not on my laptop I don't have the code to hand. I will update in a few hours when back in the office for you, but your point 1 is correct.

have to agree with DJ123 - just write naturally for your description, but for your video title's I would recommend thinking what someone is likely to type in Google.

If you can get any type of keyword research software (I use software called Hitwise) to find out what people are searching for then this can be very useful.

Always remember to put useful links to your website etc, while these are nofollow links (so no SEO benefit), they do drive quite a bit of traffic for us

Hi

Mozbar as mentioned above is the best tool. Its simple and easy to use.

But the source code is always the best.

Thanks

Andy

The only other thing we do is infographics, whether you would class that as part of a content strategy or not is a different matter, but these usually have some great results, but like every GIGO comes to mind, to actually make a infographic work, firstly you need to do the research, and get some interesting and relevant facts in there, and then spend a lot of time trying to publishing it, speaking with blog owners, news sites etc.

Our last infographic we managed to get a link of mashable.com and I believe there DA is around 94 ish so was worth all the time and investment in making it look good, have decent content within it.

If your client isnt all ready doing infographics I would recommend them

Hi

We had the same issue here, before Business pages was around we created a user. But when we could create a business page (why Google didn't think you wouldn't want to do this, every business wants to promote themselves, i dont know), but after speaking with Google it was advised to us to create a new account and close the old one.

This was a while ago and things might have change, but we was told we couldn't even transfer followers, we could just do post saying we have a new page and to follow the new page, but they couldn't help us a lot.

As far as I know, nothing has changed, so your going to have to create a business page and start all over again, getting followers - would highly recommend running both in parallel for a time before closing the current one and keep posting about your new page, it did help for us.

Ok, are any of the pages ranking. If not I would look if Google can easily find these new urls from your nav / internal links.

Also I would recommend checking your server logs, if Google can't / haven't crawled the pages they can't index them.

Final point, if these pages are completely off topic and the rest of the site is about toothbrushes and you add pages about cars, Google might be unsure about these new pages and how authoritative you are in the niche especially if these fall into the YMYL categories. If its the last issue you would probably need to work on link building into this section of the site from authority sites within the niche.

So basically we are unsure and will have to wait until 21st April to find out.

Thanks for everyones input, been very useful and informative

Also depending how new the site is Moz Domain Authority score only really updates once a month (ish) next update is due on 24/7. http://moz.com/products/api/updates so you probably wont see any movement until then.

Like mentioned above welcome to the world of SEO where nothing makes sense and can drive you up the walls. Google is a cruel mistress that you won't never understand and are always trying to please.

And have to agree with Andy - never ever pay to go on directories and in honest stay well clear of them, I am trying to get old links removed from these places. A few years ago this was the thing to do to get to number 1 in google and was very simple, now it actually hurts you more in the long run than benefits you.

If you are new you might want to run read this history of SEO as a starting point http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/history-of-seo-glimpse-into-future-tl-ss

Yes this is a bad idea, you want the blog on the main domain.

You could put a wordpress blog within a folder on your server and just use one instance of wordpress for the blog away from the main site.

It does require a bit of set up, but it would be much better than having a blog on a different url (does require keeping it up to date etc, users having two logins. One of the main site and one for the blog) - it's not an ideal solution but much better than having the blog on a separate domain.

Hi

Gary illyes from Google confirmed today at BrightonSEO that its just mobile that will be affected - tablet rankings WILL not be affected.

He also confirmed this wont in the April 21st update it wont affect Google Business listings.

Thought I would let you all know.

Thanks

Andy

Hi

When we have used agencies in the past, we have always created some at the agency (we shall call him John smith) his own email with our domain so [email protected]

Just seems more professional and the person on the other ends thinks that the person works for the company and not an agency. Some manufacturer websites will only deal with peoples who's emails end with @mycompanydomain.com but I know some companies re reluctant to give out email address to none staff.

If the client gives you the opportunity to have the email address use it, at the end of the day your trying to grow your clients brand and not your own.

Thanks

Andy

This question has all ready been asked previously and you can find the answer here:

http://moz.com/community/q/google-webmaster-tools-and-open-site-explorer-s-links-not-matching-up

But to sum it up. Google has far more servers than Moz, even though Moz is a great company there is a big difference in the size of the companies so Google has far more reach to crawl even more websites.

Google isn't perfect and will also miss links so its good to use multiple sources for seeing link data.

Hi

I agree with the above, you run the risk of getting hit by Panda. If these pages are important to have live to help customers, then surely your priority should be to get good content on their to help your customers / potential customers. If they land on a low quality page with very little content, are they likely to stick around.

I wouldn't put any live until you have the content sorted. I would work out the priority and start there and once the content is good then put live.

There is probably a Panda update around the corner and you don't want to get hit with hit and then you are waiting for Google to release the next version to get out of it.

I wouldnt even run the risk of putting them live with noindex.

Unless of course as said above you have 100,000+ pages of amazing quality content then it probably wont affect you.

Thanks

Andy

I will wait and see what your opinion is from an agency point of view and see if it differs. Be interesting to see - but from client side I would always push the agency to use my domain name emails.

Depends when you did the update, but Moz does it update roughly once a month the next update is done on 24th July

http://moz.com/products/api

The last one was done on 20th June. Did you make your changes prior to this. Do you have new links pointing to the new domain, or just the 301.

I can't see any in opensite explorer, but you might be aware of some that Moz hasn't indexed yet. Might be worth trying to get some of the actual links pointing the new domain.

Hi

This is to spark a debate, rather than an answer which has a specific answer.

While Google may claim that being on the certified programme doesn't increase your ranking, but part of their algorithm looks into whether a website is trustworthy.

To get accepted onto the certified shops you have to prove your a trust worthy reliable business that constantly gets audited. So surely this must be directly / indirectly be a ranking factor?

Just thought I would throw it out there for a debate.

Hi

Sorry to tell you there is no 'magical' number here.

Firstly: what resources do you have, if you have a team of 10 people able to create content, 10 people link building, 10 analyst looking at gaps etc then I would image quite a few, if its just you doing SEO then the numbers will be a lot less and even less if as well as doing SEO you run the entire company.

Rather than looking at quantity look at quality and if your only focus is SEO for you company then when your looking at what work to do, work on the time/cost benefit analysis. Also your niche in which you operate will affect the number of links you can get.

If you work at Apple, getting links is incredibly easily, working for a company that sells products to businesses might not find it as easy.

Like you said quality links from in your niche area is always better than loads of general links (even if DAs are higher).

If your site is new, have you done some basic PR contacting relevant sites and telling them your about to launch, this is a great way to quickly build initial links.

In answer to your questions: How many links should i build? It would all depend on the time / resoures you have available.

Read this great article on how to go about getting links: http://moz.com/blog/my-recipe-for-success-how-to-launch-a-successful-blog

Hi

I've answered this question a few times, wish Rand would do a whiteboard friday on this and explain once and for all.

Google is huge and have a vast amount of severs that crawl the entire web (and they don't pick up on every link), moz even though its great, is relatively small and can only crawl a proportion of the web (usually the bigger sites and the most visited sites) and rand has said before that they keep growing there servers and can crawl further and further, but for what you pay for moz $99 a month for them to backwards engineer Google and go as deep as they do, you would probably need to paying a lot more, so I would happily take missing out on a few of the lower domain links for the relatively low price I pay each month.

So if Rank, can do a WBF on this subject that would be great - then I wouldnt have to keep typing the same answer I could just link to his video (Google doesnt like duplicate content).

Also mention above, if you really want to know all your links I use ahrefs and Webmaster tools, but even these aren't great.

If a new websites gets built today and links to you - you still have to wait for Google, Ahrefs to find this website - if this website doesn't get links from else where then it might take these sites a while to find the new website, so even these services aren't perfect.

Hi

It looks like you have done everything correct, but you might have to wait for the next big Panda update before you start seeing any movements.

Thanks

Andy

Hi

I have to agree with the above, but because Wikipedia is so big, if you are really after a set of keywords, its actually pretty easy to rank above them.

You just need to make sure your content is high quality, unique and is more useful to searcher.

Again its back to the simple technique of creating, good unique content that helps the user.

Thanks

Andy

These are large sites which I am guessing Moz is visiting fairly frequently and its great you have got a link from Google.com, however I was hoping you could send me the actual urls of where your links are located.

I had a similar problem in the fact I linked from our main site (DA of 68) to a brand site and the link still isn't showing up in Moz, but when I did some digging it turns out it was my developers / designers mistakes as it wasn't that easy for a bot to get to that page - so Moz was crawling the site, but the page with the link wasn't easily reachable hence why Moz hadn't found the link etc.

What would be a good feature would be like with Google you can see the last time a page was crawled, if Moz had a similar feature.

Hi

Yeah agree with Chris the first option is the best way to go and the way we went after loads of research.

Thanks

Andy

Experts don’t do outreach they do traditional PR and know the journalists and have the contacts that they have built up over the years – while most of us don’t have these direct relations we can rely upon to get links and mentions a great tool I use is Gorkana – a bit pricey but worth every bit of money.

Plus with Gorkana you can get PR requests from journos.

Simple trick search Twitter for hastags PRRequest and JournoRequest to try and get in contact with the PR guys when they need content (great free way of getting additional relevant exposure)

If your trying to outreach infographic and content try something like Buzzstream if you don’t know the journalists all ready.

Hi Ben

Ours dropped last week by 6, and our competitors we're similar between 4 and 6 drops so I wasn't too worried.

I never like drops especially when we drop more than our competitors, but DA is just a score and I now tend to look at traffic and revenue from Organic, more than things like DA and even rankings, these are good indicators but these days its just about the bottom line, Google is getting hard to predict and even rankings change per person, so I am not worried by these factors any more.

But your not the only person to see significant drops.

Thanks

Andy

Sean right I would check to see if your site has been hacked, I would also click on the keywords and see which page is being shown - this will help identify the issues.

Or comments on your website, have you got comments on your articles etc. Could be comment spam?

Yeah I can happily recommend Kerboo (formally Linkrisk) - great set of guys who run it and also a great software set.

They have a huge database of bad / toxic links which they check against when doing analysis.

You can even pay them to do your initial audit as well if you havent got the time - very reasonable price as well.

PRO membership you are getting a lot more tools, not just OSE. The moz community is probably worth the $99 on its own in my opinion.

OSE limitation - I will let an employee tell you the official definition but they do a great job crawling as much as the web as feasibility possible on there servers - but they do crawl a huge % of the web and expanding this each month.

Yeah have to agree sounds like 'doorway' pages that are there to generate search traffic which Google doesn't like.

You either need more content on these pages, getting UGC would be one way of adding more relevant content to the pages

i don't know if it would be classed as Black Hat SEO, but its definitely not great SEO. Why not focus more on writing great articles about weight loss etc, but within the article itself mention the place. But if all your titles suddenly have Boston in them you are opening yourself up to being penalised by Google.

Just be natural, when talking in the pub would you say "Boston Tummy Tuck After Weight Loss", no more likely "tummy tuck after weight loss" - think of your titles in how you would speak.

Hope that helps

Hi

The very basics would be http://seoservices.dotsquares.com/blog/daily-seo-checklist/ they are my must every day, but it all depends on how much time you can spend on SEO.

If you are really new to SEO try reading this blog on the moz site: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

Regarding conversion rates, I don't like FB advertising I have never been able to get it to work, so if you can get 2% from FB well done.

2% from Adwords, thats still quite impressive. I would like to get that as a basic level on all my campaigns, however I run campaigns that are far better than 2% to compensate for the ones that under perform, but are essential to long term business plans.

Hope they are useful links for you.

Thanks

Andy

I was going to try and write about which each one means, but I would just be duplicating this whole section of Moz:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

Down the right hand side there is a link to each of the sections, with videos and far more information than I could post in the answer box here.

Hope this is useful

Andy

First thing, keep it simple and easy to use otherwise people won't use it.

probably add to your contact page as well.

If you wish to use our content or quote a piece, please email [email protected].

Or:

Would you like to quote or reuse our content for Free, please email: [email protected].

assuming you are not wanting to charge for it.

hope that's hopefully

I have a few sites showing the same - I am guessing its a timing thing

Great additional to Moz.

Agree we use Google Docs - its great for sharing with team members, if you put a due date column and then do a simple formula it can calculate how many days are left, a great way of keeping things on track.

I would say building backlinks is the wrong way to look at it. You want to earn links, which is completely different strategy.

Building links, you are going to tempted to take a few short cuts to see quicker wins, but these quick wins are usually the signals Google see's to unnatural back linking.

Whereas if you earn links, by producing great content that people link to naturally then you don't ever have to worry about Google updates. Its a lot harder strategy and takes longer to get the results - but in the long run its a much better strategy.

Hi

I would recommend reading this before you do anything: http://www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/deleted-900-blog-posts-happened-next/

I want to do the same - but its a risk to search visibility.