I think that with your knowledge and enthusiasm you will quickly earn enough MOZ Points to get free access to the Q&A Forum so the decision will be based upon how much you get out of the tools.
Best posts made by EGOL
-
RE: Convince me to stay! How should I best use SEOMoz tools.
-
RE: Effects of link bait page
-
YES! Especially from your homepage. Tell everybody that visits your site!
-
YES! Every quality links helps the authority of your entire domain.
-
If you have superb linkbait then share it will other people by tweeting to your friends, posting on facebook, ask your mum to tell visitors to her blog, share it with reddit, put a sign on your dog..... but I don't think that I would buy any stumbles... because if your link bait is really good it should get tons of stumbles without paying for them.
-
-
RE: Internal Linking
We add appropriate internal links in all of our articles. Although we don't syndicate or grant permission for our articles to be republished, many webmasters copy/pasting quotes into their content have produced thousands of backlinks.
-
RE: How I plan to go about getting business - what do you think?
It will take me about 8 minutes to look at their site and run it through a couple tools and and have a quick list of things that are missing.
Eight minute SEO?
You are going to tell me what is missing on my site in 8 minutes?
This hits really high on my BS meter.
I can spend more than eight minutes writing a title tag.
Just sayin'.
-
RE: Sitewide link dilema
You say that this is a very good site.
Instead of worrying about it I would be yelling YEEE HAAA! out the window on every morning that those links are still there.... and depending upon who owns that site I would send him/her thank you gifts of wine, imported beer, chewing tobacco or roses just as a thank you.
That's what I think. Others might disagree.
-
RE: Landing Page Drop Out
To submit a DMCA to Google, log into your search console and go here https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-dashboard
Fill out the form, press "submit" and the complaint will be filed. Then push the back button, edit the form, press submit again and your second complaint will be filed. Using this method you can file a hundred complaints in an hour or so.
Before you start filing DMCA complaints you need to have a thorough understanding of copyright law - especially fair use. I suggest going to an attorney, explain your problem, how you intend to solve it and let the attorney educate you. Filing an inappropriate DMCA against another webmaster can get you sued.
-
RE: Estimating the number of LRD I need to outrank competitor
Or to determine whether the costs of attempting success are just too high to be worth it.
I would really respect an SEO who told me something like this.
-
RE: Site-wide/Blogroll Anchor Text Linking
My blogs are in the blogroll on many other blogs. Every one of those links has my domain as anchor text. None have a keyword as anchor text. From my experience it is really rare to get a keywords as anchor text on blogroll links.
-
RE: Landing Page Drop Out
In a lot of cases, this is caused by thin or duplicate content in one of the following ways.....
--- verbatim use of manufacturer's description
--- description of minimal length
--- two or more websites using the same description
One of my websites was selling a number of products that were made in China. I wrote unique and lengthy descriptions for each one of them. Then dozens of other websites grabbed my descriptions and used them verbatim. My page (and many of the duplicates, went into supplemental). Back then I did nothing and stopped selling those items. Today, I would get aggressive and file a lot of DMCAs to Google, to hosts and to Adsense, if they are using it.
-
RE: Does linking to relevant high authority websites effect your MozTrust or Rank?
I don't know how they influence my MozTrust or MozRank..... and I don't care how they influence those numbers.
What I do care about is.... "Does linking to relevant high authority websites effect my search engine rankings?"
I believe that if you have two identical articles.... One that links to source, supplemental and superior information on other websites.... and One that links to nothing... the article with the helpful, relevant links is a better information source for the visitor and could be ranked higher by search engines.
So, when I write an article I often link to supplemental, source and superior information on other high quality websites.
I have zero mental problems linking to websites that are superior to mine in some way.
The only thing I noticed is they're linking to their clients website, which are all high authority websites.
When I read this I don't quite understand why these links are being given? If they are linking because they are relevant and helpful information for the visitor on the page then that is good.
However, if the are linking to them just to link to them then why bother? I think the linking page and the linked-to page must be highly related to one another and the page receiving the link should have supplemental or superior information.
-
RE: Site-wide/Blogroll Anchor Text Linking
I never request links.
I spend 100% of my time on content and links appear as gifts from people who like what I create.
So, I can tell you with great certainty about the anchor text that appears on natural links. The links that I receive do not come from anyone who is thinking about SEO or has received any incentive to link to my site.
Almost all of the links that point to my site have "mydomain.com"...... "here"...... "this"..... "video"..... "photos".... as anchor text.
When the anchor text is a keyword it is usually a single word such as "Chicago" or "diamonds".
So, when I hear google talking about cracking down on "overly SEOed websites"... I am thinking that they could easily do that be removing the credit given for anchor text links. That's what would happen if I was the boss at Google.
-
RE: Breadcrumbs versus in context link
Use both.
Breadcrumbs help search engines and visitors understand the structure of your website.
In-content links get clicked by visitors, and they might pass anchor text value to pages within your site.
-
RE: Keyword Difficulty / Search Volume
I use these numbers in a different way.....
Before I consider a keyword I want to know if it has any traffic. If it has traffic then I am interested.
After that I go look at the SERPs. To receive worthwhile traffic you usually have to earn one of the top five positions. I want to see who holds those positions and what type of content I will need to produce to be competitive.
If I think that I can beat their content then I will attack no matter who holds those positions. However, if those positions are held by authority sites and creating highly competitive content is going to be too expensive or impossible then I will look for another keyword.
In my opinion your content creation abilities are more important of a metric than keyword difficulty. If you can create competitive content you should not fear competition because where there is competition there is also (usually) a lot of traffic and a lot of money changing hands. If you can get into the thick of that you will do OK.
-
RE: Big Link Network Taken Down
lol.... right... that did hit really high on my BS meter.
-
RE: Delay to rank for authority website versus new website
The answer to this question depends upon
-- the strength of your site
-- the competitiveness of the niche
-- who is competing in the niche
-- how much work you plan to do to promote the page
-- your skill level
-- and many other factors
One of the biggest problems in online marketing is faced by the client who asks an SEO to promote his website. SEOs often give them a monthly price to work on the site - such as $1000/month - and have no idea of how long it will take to get a return for the client. SEOs can give a severely low number and work happily for a long time without producing results. Why? Because the SEO is doing $1000 worth of work per month but the competitors are doing $5000, and the client sees his rankings fall after hiring the SEO. Furthermore, the SEO might be charging $1000 and don't know what he don't know and that $1000 has negative value for the client - for example, those hit by Penguin.
It takes a lot of experience, knowledge and study to know how much force must be applied to move the needle. Sometimes you can know what to do and how to do it but you don't have the ability to pull it off.
"One may know how to conquer without being able to do it." Sun Tzu
"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle." Sun Tzu
-
RE: Why SEOmoz bot consider these as duplicate pages?
I am not going to look at this site any further because it is at the limits of my ability to diagnose.
However, I think that parameters are causing a huge problem, I think that there is a lot of linking into search results, and I think that there is a big problem with thin and duplicate content.
If this was my site I would hire a pro who knows about this stuff, be willing to undertake a major restructuring, and be willing to write an awful lot of content.
===================
that's the last I can offer.... good luck
-
RE: Big Link Network Taken Down
Most of my "alerts" are from crap on sites.google.com
-
RE: Link Building for Ecommerce
I believe that a retail site should have an article library where there are articles about how to select the proper product, how to use it, how to maintain it, how to enjoy it, history about the product, trivia about the product, and many other topics.
The decisions about what type of content should exist in this library are guided by the customer questions that you receive every day. As the library grows it answers more and more customer questions and this reduces your need to respond to questions by email. Many people find the answer in your library and don't need to ask you. Many people don't know about your library and write and you respond with a couple of links to library articles instead of composing a lengthy reply.
Your customer service people are already being asked these questions, they are probably already writing replies or they are answering the questions by phone every day. If you have customer service people who know more about your product than anyone else on the planet then they can be your source for the content that you need. But, if your customer service people don't know anything about the product and can't answer these questions, then you should do something about that so they can do a better job. Then they will become your source for the content that you need
If you are serious about doing a good job in your space, having customer service people who can help the customers, then you will have a program in place to educate them about your products. On the basis of the above, every retail site should have a growing content library.
However, the most powerful site in the retail SERPs is going to be an information site with a small store.
-
RE: Reminder: PRIVATE Q&A going away
Right!
I think that we will get a larger number of really interesting questions.... and will be great to see associates posting.
-
RE: Big Link Network Taken Down
lol... thanks for the report.
Those are probably the guys who have already been banned from Adsense.
-
RE: Can’t put a finger on, what is causing 12 year domain, SEO optimized and decent link profile to rank lower than other less superior domains.
Lots of Google ranking factors are beyond the reach of the typical SEO toolset...
The entire area of visitor engagement, how people arrive at your site through non-search methods, and more can all be important.
I believe that Google uses these more and more every year.
-
RE: Noob question about keyword research
Question 1) When it says "local monthly searches", is it defaulting to MY local area based on my google info? So if im in Philly area that local area is whats displaying?
Quoted from the google Help.... "Local Monthly Searches: The approximate 12-month average of the number of searches on Google for each keyword in the locations and devices that you selected. If you've selected multiple locations, a location that isn't a country, or if we don't have enough data, you'll see this noted with a dash (-)."
Look under the box where you type your queries into the KW tool. Note the locations.
Question 2) I tried to run the same keyword list I pulled from Adwords tool through Moz KW tool, and it tells me some of the terms don't have ANY traffic! So know I am real confused as to whether the KW's i picked are good or crap! I attached image of the stuff.
Most of the people that I know who need commercial construction are not searching google to find the right guy. They already know him. So it does not surprise me that search volume is really really low.
-
RE: Where to start?
I don't know how much SEO has already been done on your site...
... but if I was just starting out I would hire a pro to do a study and recommend on your site. You explain your goals and your site and they spend an hour or two reviewing your site and your SERPs, then prepare a to-do list that they review with you by phone.
That's better than shooting in the dark. You get immediately actionable items that should produce ROI.
-
RE: Homepage keeps disappearing and reappearing for important keywords every few days
Its possible that you have a single-page penalty, though those are rare.
For another site with duplicate content to displace a page of your site from the SERPs, it usually has to be about the same strength as your site or superior to your site.
Some of our pages will swap in and out of the SERPs when the same content is on other websites of similar strength. If we can't get the content removed by contacting them, and their use of the content is infringment, a DMCA complaint to google will usually fix the problem within a few days.
-
RE: Seomoz Customer Service does anyone feel let down
I think that lots of people have given you very good and very generous advice here.
-
RE: Do you consider it risky to hire outside firms to build links?
If you hire me to build links for you. I could see where all of those links come from and then as soon as my contract is done with you I go straight to your competitor and ask if he needs links... then get paid by him.... by then you will need more links.
Or, I could toss up my own crappy site, immediately get all of the links that I got for you and that puts me into the money.
So, where the links come from could be considered the most valuable of competitive intelligence.
-
RE: Homepage keeps disappearing and reappearing for important keywords every few days
Try copy/pasting a couple random sentences from your content between quotes in a Google search. This will show if someone has grabbed your content and has a verbatim duplicate indexed. If another site with reasonable power has grabbed your content, they can displace you in the SERPs. Also, do a screen capture of the SERPs when your site is present, and another when your site is missing. If a different site is on the first page of the SERPs, check it out to see if they have grabbed some of your content and pasted it on the page that replaces yours.
-
RE: High DA, PA and A grade at page level not ranking in SERP - why?
High DA, PA and A grade at page level not ranking in SERP - why?
The most common reason is a Panda, Penguin or some other problem.. or you are looking at local search where these metrics don't work well.
-
RE: Can bad backlinks harm your website?
Lots of people (philosophers) have an idea about how they think google "should" behave. Then you have people who know what they are talking about and philosophers who are unwilling to believe that they are wrong.
Finally, just because we see something happen doesn't mean we know what caused it.
-
RE: High or low volume keyword
My gauge for this is to visit the SERPs and see WHO is ranking on the first page. The number competing and the volume matters a lot less than who is competing and what type of content has earned them these rankings. If I think that I can compete with their content then I attack - it does not matter the number competing or any other metric - if you have a good site and can defeat their content then you can probably attract enough links to become competitive over time.
I think about it like this... Do not fear competition, because where there is competition there is probably also a lot of traffic and a lot of money changing hands. You can often make decent money from long tail keywords on the edges of the fight and if you can break onto the first page of the SERPs there is likely a good payday.
-
RE: Just how accurate is anyone's appraisal on this forum?
Overall, you are doing great. Fantastic. How many people can say....
....my two websites produce the majority of my income....
You are doing better than most professional SEOs would do on your site.
So, I don't think that you need or want someone to "take it over". You want a brief amount of SEO consulting. That is what I get. I have paid people for their opinion on what should be done with my site and I have paid people for technical work such as responsive design, moving sites into wordpress and coding a custom content manager. These are generally one-time costs.
If I owned your site, I would probably pay for an opinion of its Panda and Penguin vulnerability. And I would pay to have someone recode the site and incorporate responsive design. That might be all that I would do. This might cost a few to several thousand dollars. I have paid for both of these services several times over the past few years. It does not cost as much as you think.
Then, after that work is done and I gave it some time, I might get advice on how to kick-up its competitiveness safely. Here, I am paying for ideas, not someone to do the work.
There are plenty of people who provide "SEO consulting" services.
-
RE: What are the pros and cons of having comments posted on your blog?
I think that it is important to be a critical judge. Are those comments relevant to your topic? That is the first test.
Then, where to do those links go? If they are not going to high quality relevant pages then the people who are placing them are using your website (and your visitors) to promote their own interests.
If your website has links going out to trashy sites it will not be good for your image in the eyes of your visitors but the search engines can detect that and lower your rankings.
I have tried allowing comments but the amount of spam and the amount of junk links were too high. So, I turned comments off. I lost good interaction but I don't have time to do that work and paying someone to do it would not produce a positive return.... and I don't want to depend upon volunteers.
If your site has a small amount of traffic then keeping the comments clean and relevant might not be too hard. But once your traffic gets high it can be an overwhelming task.
WordPress (and other content systems) have filters that you can install. They will block the worst of the comment spam.
Finally, a lot of these comments are not placed by humans. They are placed by robots that crawl the web, find open comment forms and deposit a comment with links. So when you see comments like... "Great information, nice" (link)... that is probably a robot.
-
RE: SEO Strategy - Content/Outreach/Links
I agree. We have thousands of products. But, most of our effort has focused on products that....
* People understand poorly
* Where there is not a lot of information available online or in print
* Where (this is extremely important) a lot of consumables are purchased. That way all of your building is for customers who make recurrent purchases.
-
RE: Just how accurate is anyone's appraisal on this forum?
Where I compete, the short tail is becoming enormously competitive. Almost all of my revenue comes in from extensive long tail content. Extensive. More than all of my retail competitors and manufacturers combined.
Most of my traffic comes in from long tail queries that are informational rather than transactional. So, although it looks like my conversion rate is bad, the number of conversions is higher because a few of the informational content visitor will purchase.
-
RE: How do I get the most links out of one QUALITY article/post??
We don't have the time or resources to be writing hundreds of original quality articles each week
I hear you.... But if you want the rankings you must fight for them. We have a three person biz.... One takes care of customers and the other two spend almost 100% of their time working on websites and creating content.
We are not making 100's of articles per week... maybe just one or two.
The problem with the word "quality" is that most people mistake crap for quality. They spend an hour on an article, call it "quality", toss it onto the site, then complain that nobody links to it. If you want your content to attract attention it has to be better than "pedestrian"... you need to make "best on the web".
-
RE: SEO Strategy - Content/Outreach/Links
**Do you try to push product or category pages? **
Neither.
Most of our pages sell multiple products. We have very few "product pages" where one item is purchased. 90% of our sales come from pages that list closely-related groups of products.
Examples...
* A product and its accessories.
* A group of consumables for a hobby or craft activity.
* Multiple closely-related products that people often consider before buying.
* Multiple books about a single or group of closely-related topics.
Why? There are many benefits.
* Reduces the number of pages on the site, thus concentrating linkstrength into a small number of pages.
* Enables the production of pages with substantial amounts of text, images, buying options. We think these rank better.
* When a product goes unavailable or out-of-print or is discontinued, the page continues on.
* When accessories are listed on same page with product it leads to fatter shopping carts.
- When replacement parts are listed on the same page as the product then people feel confident in buying.
* People become familiar with the page about their product and return again and again for consumables, parts, accessories.
-
RE: Can increasing website pages decrease domain authority?
If the number of pages on this website increases to 10,000 can that decrease its domain authority or affect it in any way?
Are you adding gold or crap? Gold? Crap?
-
RE: How do I get the most links out of one QUALITY article/post??
All of the content that we produce is placed on our own websites. We never give it away or sell it. When we publish a new piece of content it is often submitted by our visitors to reddit, stumbleupon, digg or slashdot. We have AddThis sharing buttons obviously placed on every pages of our site to make sharing easy for our visitors. If you have good content they will do that for you. We also ask our visitors to subscribe to our new content by RSS feed and email. We use feedburner for this.
This method takes patience. If you keep publishing good content the size of your site will grow, the number of SERPs that you appear in will grow, the number of subscribers will increase, the number of visitors will rise. If you have great content in a niche that people care about that will happen. If that isn't happening then you must ask yourself if anybody cares about your content. If not then you need a different business model.
-
RE: SEO Strategy - Content/Outreach/Links
For your pages, do you focus pages with similar products on one/a few similar keywords?
Yes. As an example, lets say we sell "coffee makers". We will have a generic coffee maker page that lists many different coffee makers from various manufacturers. When a shopper clicks on one of the coffee maker models, they go to a page that sells the coffee maker, its accessories and its cleaning products. All of these are unique content with very little reuse of the accessory language on other pages.
Do you add written content directly to these pages or focus on creating good user guides etc then link back to these product pages?
We include the most important "user guide" information on the product/accessory page. This is information that helps select the item. We don't list the full user guide information, but give the shopper a link to a much more detailed page of user information. Both of these compete in search and often they appear in positions #1 and #2 in Google search. The product/accessory page might link to several "user guide pages". Sometimes we have positions #1, #2 and #3 in Google for searches on the product itself or product information.
The above is very costly to produce and it requires an author who really knows the product. It is only worth doing where there is good money to be made on a single sale and recurring consumable/accessory/parts/etc. sales are possible.
This type of presentation is intended to make you the expert in the field, rank #1 and inspire people to pay you full MSRP because they know that you know what you are doing rather than being a buy/resell merchant.
-
RE: Can increasing website pages decrease domain authority?
I have no opinion on this. It might work, it might not. I would not do this on any of my sites.
I think you are starting with a small amount of seed content and spreading it very thin through many pages. I can't imagine how this would produce a good experience for users.
-
RE: How do I get the most links out of one QUALITY article/post??
I agree. There are some good people on those sites but most of them have been trained to write $2 articles. Creating something that is "best on the web" is not what they are used to doing.
-
RE: Getting Authority Social Blogs to Index
I visited a few of the post pages on the blogspot site. These pages appear to be simply the first few sentences from the medicarefaq.com website. I don't think that Google will like these pages because they are: A) signposts for medicarefaq.com, B) duplicate content of medicarefaq.com, and C) thin content.
For the blogspot site to be an asset, the content needs to be unique and substantive. And, the blogspot site will not pass any linkvalue to medicarefaq.com unless it has unique links into it from websites that are outside of your own network and not duplicates of websites that already link to medicarefaq.com.
If these were my websites, I would put all of my time into medicarefaq.com and stop working on sites that merely link to it.
-
RE: ERROR: Too Many on-page links!
This question is asked over and over and over and over again in Q&A.
I would like to see someone from Moz respond to this question with a link to a page that thoroughly provides the answer. Also, a link to that page should be huge and obvious within the tools where people are encountering these error messages.
Noobs and first time users of moz tools are wasting lots of time worrying about these error messages. They might be needlessly tearing their sites up to respond to Moz telling them that they got too many links.
I would like to read an article about this question written by somebody who has done some research or someone from google. I think that Matt Cutts has given guidance on that old 100 links rule. I am sure that plenty of people would say that I have too many links on the pages of my site... but I am pretty confident that I don't and the number of links that I have actually puts me at an advantage over people who are listening and responding to these error messages given by moz tools.
-
RE: Two link building proposals, which one is better?
I would spend the money on beer.
-
RE: Same server for different client sites?
I think that this is usually fine.
My only concern would be that common page. I would put enough work into it to make sure that it does not have same structure, same code, same anything. Just to be safe.
-
RE: Errors in my coding how significant is this regarding rankings ?
So the big question is how important are these errors scores when it appears that most of the top competition also are in the same situation?
My response to this is a question. Are you looking for the competitive advantage?
Nobody knows exactly how Google or any other search engine assesses the code on a page.
I personally hold the belief that my use of
,
and
are valuable for informing search engines about the main, second, and tertiary topics of importance on my webpage. That is what I believe and I make a planned effort to present the hierarchy of my document's topics in a way that is marked with <h>designations. So, on that basis alone I would be doing major work on your website because there are hundreds of <h>tags in the code of every page on your website. <h>has been used as formatting instead of marking the important elements of each page.
You agree that you want a responsive site and that involves working in the code. That makes a good time to improve other parts of the code and the design as well.
Finally, you want a site that is quick to deliver and easy for browsers to render properly. For that reason you want code that is as light and as simple as possible. All the more reason to have the site recoded.
I am not a code evangelist. My site isn't perfect. But, I am just saying that if I was the owner of your site, I would want the site recoded from scrach to be as light and as simple as possible. At this moment, I am paying someone to completely redo my main site to improve elements that are less motivating to me that what I see in your code. So, I have put my money where my mouth is on this.
One risk that you have in getting the site recoded is that you could hire someone who will not do the job properly or well. So, it is really important to get the right person to do the job or learn all that is needed to do it right and well yourself.</h></h></h>
-
RE: SEO Over-optimization
I think that the biggest risk is doing a heavy attack using keyword anchor text on inbound links.
If you avoid that along with spamming keywords in content and title tags, I think that you will be OK.
-
RE: No Index thousands of thin content pages?
Just stating a couple of facts and a couple of things that I believe about those facts..... I'll be clear to state the parts that are beliefs below.
-
If you have a lot of thin content pages on a website then you run the risk of Google seeing those thin content pages and slapping the domain with a Panda problem. I believe that can cause reduced rankings across the entire domain.
-
Google recently said that they are going to stop following the links on noindex pages. From that, I believe that some pagerank will be lost from every link that enters them. I believe that can result in lower rankings for the entire domain.
If I owned the site above. I would place all of these pages where they can be safely noindexed without causing a loss of pagerank and not produce a Panda problem. That would require them to be in a subdomain that is noindexed or on another domain that is no indexed.
That's what I would do with these pages.
-
-
RE: Does Moz have any tools to see the amount of traffic certain keywords bring us in search? Does anyone know any tools that give the actual traffic numbers?
"Actual traffic numbers"...
You can get some numbers in webmaster tools. Also, some numbers at SEMrush. I don't think that either of them are "actual" but that's as good as it gets.
-
RE: Guest blogging on a "network" of sites. Good or BAD?
This is either a great opportunity or great danger.
Think about it.... 200 blogs that link to each other and that are linking out to a ton of other sites.
I am imagining a lot of crappy articles and copyright infringing images. If that is true then don't do it.