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Hello all!

One of the biggest challenges we face here at Moz is keeping up with Google's ever-changing SERP features whilst maintaining minimal impact on customer data.  However sometimes this is inevitable for us to be able to stay relevant.  We are deploying a change today that will have an effect on rankings for some campaigns.

As of today, we will now track tweets as verticals instead of organic ranking positions.  This will affect around 7% of SERPs.

I have attached an image that shows how tweets look when integrated into the SERP.  In this example, prior to today, we would have measured https://twitter.com/Moz as the second organic ranking position and https://www.facebook.com/moz/ as the third organic ranking position.  After today, we will measure https://twitter.com/Moz as a Tweet SERP feature, and https://www.facebook.com/moz/ as the second organic ranking position.  The Tweet SERP feature will appear in our tools soon.

We expect this to have a pretty low impact on a campaign's Search Visibility score (~ 0.1% on average) but we wanted to call this out as it will manifest as a page 1 ranking change for those keywords.

Any feedback or questions please reply below! Or contact the help team!

Thanks,

Jon

twitter-serp.png

Hello!

I am the Moz Analytics product manager here at Moz, and I want to let you know about a change that is coming.

Brand and Mentions is being retired
On August 20, 2015, we are retiring the Brand and Mentions feature in Moz Analytics in order to focus our efforts on features core to search marketing. Don't worry though, you can still use Fresh Web Explorer to access the same data instead (more below).

Why?
When we first launched Moz Analytics in 2013, one of the goals of the application was to allow you to track the visibility of your brand and how it relates to your branded organic traffic and direct traffic. However, since then, a couple of things have changed:

• (not provided) for Google, and now Bing, have meant that it has become almost impossible for us to accurately estimate the amount of traffic that has come from branded organic keywords. We had to adjust product direction based on this.
• We have learned our Moz Analytics customers are still more passionate about our core SEO features (rankings, links, traffic and crawl) than they are about Brand & Mentions.

Unfortunately, it didn’t evolve as we intended
While other tools and features have seen significant iteration and improvement over time, Brand and Mentions has not. We no longer feel it is the quality we owe our customers, and recognize that Fresh Web Explorer offers better functionality. A retirement benefit, if you will, is that we will be able to focus time on innovating our other core SEO tools.

Fear not! Fresh Web Explorer gets you all the data you need!
If you are a regular user of Brand and Mentions, don’t worry – You can still get all of the data in Fresh Web Explorer; a searchable database of millions of recently published pages and articles, which is updated every 4 hours. To learn more, visit the Brand and Mentions page for any Moz Analytics campaign. Now there is only one place you need to go to find mentions data. We have also increased the number of Fresh Web Alerts you can setup from 10 to 35.

What Brand and Mentions users need to know

A small number of customers will be impacted in the following ways:

• If you have a custom report setup with Brand and Mentions data, this data will disappear from reports published after the feature is retired. You don’t need to do anything, this will happen automatically.
• Fresh Web Explorer allows you to see historical data for up to 30 days, whereas Moz Analytics showed saved query history longer. To see trended data for longer than 30 days you will need to export it periodically.

OK got it! What should I do now? If you were not using Brand and Mentions, then this change doesn’t affect you.  If you were a regular user, you’ll need to move your queries to Fresh Web Explorer before the shut-off date: Visit a campaign and use the link at the top of the Brand and Mentions Overview to learn how.

More questions?
Please feel free to post comments and feedback below. If you would like help migrating your data, use the Help button in the bottom right of your screen to chat to one of our Customer Success team members.

Thanks!

Jon

TL;DR

• Many sites and CDN’s across the internet use SNI to help keep pages and resources secure

• Right now, Moz Pro is unable to crawl sites that use SNI, affecting these customers (you will see an 804 HTTPS SSL error if you are affected)

• This is being fixed, and we are almost ready to provide beta access to SNI customers

• If you have an SNI site, are a Moz Pro customer, and wish to be a part of this beta - sign up here http://goo.gl/forms/LCvL9Ix8JDHfbAvr1

Detail

SNI (Server Name Identification) is an extension to the TLS security protocol that allows for multiple HTTPS websites to be served from the same IP address without requiring them all to use the same certificate.  This was always possible using wildcard certificates, but these are often impractical, since they are restrictive, and require a webmaster to know all of the hostnames to be served at the time of requesting the certificate.  With SNI, a webmaster can issue a single certificate and support multiple (and changing) hostnames.

SNI has become increasingly popular over the last couple of years thanks to:

• Increase in mainstream browser support

• Its flexibility for usage in CDNs, like Cloudflare

Unfortunately the Moz Pro web crawler has not kept up to date with this trend, and is at present unable to crawl sites that use SNI (the symptom is an 804 HTTPS SSL error).  This affects customers with SNI hosted sites, who miss out on the value of Moz Pro’s Site Crawl tools.  Whilst it might seem a simple fix to support SNI, our crawler software uses libraries that are unable to support the technology without a significant re-write.

However, I am happy to say that this re-write is in process, and almost ready for testing.  Behind the scenes we have been working on a major overhaul of our crawl technology which you are going to start to see across many of our products. In fact, Moz Content adopted the new crawler this week, resulting in much faster crawls and support for SNI.

Moz Pro is not ready for full implementation yet. That said, we are pretty close to being able to beta test with customers.  For that reason we would like to invite any customers with SNI sites into our closed Beta that will likely start some time in August.

Some notes about the beta:

• Initially, it will be a little behind where the current crawl tools are in terms of features and configuration. That said, we will be iterating fast and beta customers will get automatic access to all new features

• As with any beta there will be bugs and potential data outages - I want to be transparent about this up-front

• We will be looking for feedback throughout the beta, and we would love to have our customers help shape the future of our software

• You must be a paid Moz Pro subscriber (or in a free trial)

If you are interested please sign up here - http://goo.gl/forms/LCvL9Ix8JDHfbAvr1. Questions and comments welcome below!

Hello! This is still something we are considering for the roadmap.  If you could rate features on a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 is 'very unlikely we will ever build this' and 5 is 'we are working on it right now', I would give this a 4.  Very likely it will happen in the future, but we have not committed to it yet.

Hope this helps - thank you!

Hey guys!

We just launched MozBar version 3.1.54 for Chrome.  2 exciting new features:

• we now have Spam Score integrated into the MozBar (for Logged In users)
• the MozBar icon itself will now show DA when the MozBar is off. Click the icon to toggle this state (you can also click again to turn it completely off)

We also fixed a few bugs, and removed Google Authorship from the Markup tab.

Those of you who already have the MozBar installed, it will automatically update. For those new to the MozBar - you can download it here - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mozbar/eakacpaijcpapndcfffdgphdiccmpknp?hl=en

Also big shout out to all of our MozBar users, we are now at 243k Chrome Installs.  A full 110k increase from the version 3 launch in June last year. Thank you all!

Love to hear your feedback below!

Jon

Hey Robb!

Have you updated to the latest version of the MozBar (version 2.60)?  We updated the MozBar last week, including a change to authentication.  Most browsers will automatically do this for you (typically on a restart) - but you may need to do this manually.  We have published some instructions here http://moz.com/help/pro/mozbar

Let me know if this fixes the problem!

Jon

Hello!

Right now you are correct, there is no way to filter the SERP Features list by Feature inside the Keyword Explorer Tool.  However, very soon, this is coming to our Rankings tool.  So for keywords that you are tracking as part of a campaign, you will be able to filter by SERP Feature, in the same way you can filter by say, Location, right now.

In terms of filtering in Keyword Explorer, I will pass that onto the Product team over there.

Hope this helps!

Jon

Hello Micha,

Thank you for your post - I am sorry you are so frustrated with the tool.  Let me address each of your points in turn, and then perhaps you can let me know if I have answered your questions?

Random Page Grades

The tool will grade any combination of URL and keyword for which we discover a ranking. I realize if you are looking to grade a specific keyword against a page (for example your use case around using the On Page Grader tool) this is not ideal.  We feel that for some use cases though, this is interesting data as you are able to see at a glance which pages are ranking for which KW and which have the biggest opportunity for improvement.  I do agree with you though that sometimes this list can become overwhelming, especially with multiple keywords ranking for the same page - example the homepage of a site.

Delete and ‘Add and Manage’

I hear you here - our management interface on this needs work. To your above point, it can be really confusing to see new keyword/page combinations appear that were previously deleted.  I think you are right - Moz Analytics can do a better job in the management interface of this particular feature.  To be completely transparent with you though, this is not a tool section we have on our roadmap to update in the next couple of months.  As Moz Analytics has a bunch of different features and sections to maintain, we tackle only a few things at a time. We have learned that doing a larger number of things on a single area makes our customers much happier than doing a smaller number of things spread across a larger set of features.  That said this will likely get looked at soon, but perhaps as an overhaul of the feature.  Sorry this is probably not the answer you wanted to hear, but I must be honest about our current priorities.

Anyway - hopefully this goes some way toward answering your concerns.  If you want to discuss this more I am happy to jump on a Skype call with you to get more feedback? We really appreciate passionate feedback from our customers - no matter how positive / negative it is.

Let me know if I can help further!

Thanks,

Jon

We are testing in-house beginning next week, I don't have a sense how long this testing cycle is going to take, but this is the final stage before we launch it.  Thanks for your patience.

Thank you for the feedback! How many campaigns would you setup if they were unlimited? And how many do you have now?

Hi - which mail address did you use to sign up for the beta?  And which email address do you use to log in to Moz Pro?

Hey!

The MozBar allows you to see the followed links on the actual page itself. If you hit the Pencil icon, and choose 'Followed', the MozBar will overlay all followed links on a page with a highlight.

Does that solve you problem?

Thanks!

Jon

Hi Ricky,

Thanks for the question!

Adding goals from GA has always been something we intend to do at some point.  We just need to figure out a way to do it that doesn't duplicate GA and adds some extra data or value.

Would we ever add CRO functionality? Maybe one day, but for now we are focused on the top of the funnel - for example I don't see us adding Moz javascript snippets to the page any time soon to track user behaviour.

What would you find useful? Where are your pain points around measuring conversion?

Thanks,

Jon

Hi Auke,

Happy to help!

1. Branded Reports are coming soon in Moz Analytics, in the meantime you can create reports in PRO.  This is a workaround while we put the finishing touches on the Custom Reports feature in Moz Analytics.  Campaign data will be identical between MA and PRO, you can switch back to PRO by using the 'Back to PRO' link in the Moz Analytics UI.  Let me know if I can help you out more here?

2. Do you have the URL to the campaign you are having issues with? If so I can help you out with diagnosing the issue

3. Claudio's answer is spot on - it is not an 'issue' - it is a 'notice' that we found a rel=canonical on the page - so it's all good and you don't need to do anything with the information! You are definitely no the first person to be confused by this, we are working on a better way to communicate it in the UI or app.

Hope these help - let me know the URL and I can do a deeper dive on the keyword rankings problem.

Thanks!

Jon

Thanks for your response.

Firstly, I empathize with your decision to cancel, and I hope we can win you back in the future.

In terms of why a customer might participate. Many of our customers who have SNI problems are still Moz customers, and still use our Rankings, Links and Keyword Research tools.  In this case, they would also be able to get some crawl data (albeit in a beta form) as a temporary fix whilst we finish the crawler.  We had already planned to launch a beta with select customers, we think this might also help us help some customers who are having struggles with our product.  But I realize this route is not for everyone.

Please let me know if there is any other feedback you guys have about Moz.  [email protected]

Yes! Though I just added you to the next batch based on your Moz Profile.

Hi David!

Correct - if you wish to see traffic data, you will need to connect GA to each of your Moz Analytics campaigns.

If you do not have a GA account for each campaign, then you still be able to see other data and metrics about your campaign, for example links data, mentions, crawl data, and any social accounts you have connected.

If you have connected a GA account to your campaign and you are not seeing data appear, that might be a different issue. I would recommend disconnecting GA from the affected campaigns and then re-connecting.  If this doesn't work then let our help team know and we can help you debug.

Thanks!

Jon

Hello!

Thanks for the questions!

• Opportunities will be staying - that is very core to SEO and something we recently revamped!
• Please continue to use Brand Rules to distinct between branded and non-branded keywords - this is also staying!  We are also launching a visibility score soon which will be really useful to segment by branded/non-branded.

Let us know if you ever have any more questions!

Jon

Thanks Michael - great idea!  I could see this fitting in the MozBar, maybe in OSE.  Let me do some digging into how our index is structured and I will get an update back up here on feasibility.

Happy to say we added all survey respondents to the beta today.  Let me know if you don't see the option?

Hey Christina / Gregory,

Sorry to hear that you guys are feeling frustrated.  Have you tried Moz Analytics recently?  Are there particular things that are you prefer in PRO that mean you prefer to use it over Moz Analytics?  We are working really hard to get newer features out in MA and make it more useful to you than PRO, we would love to hear your feedback.

If you like you can email directly - you can find me at [email protected].

Thanks,

Jon

Hello! I work on the MozBar!

What information would you like to see and how would you use it?

Thanks!

Hello!  Very sorry for the delay in response here.

We are planning to open up the beta to all SNI customers beginning next week.  You will get an email to the email address you use to login.  We really appreciate your patience - thank you again.

Hey Eric - I responded a little bit earlier today - you can see it here https://mza.bundledseo.com/community/q/can-t-access-social-overview.  Please also feel free to reach out to [email protected]. Thanks.

Hello!  Thanks for the feedback!

The overall goals of the redesign of this page were:

• support configurable date ranges (you can now see our entire keyword history instead of a fixed 12-week / 12-month chart)
• make your keyword ranking data clearer with a couple of new charts (the old chart was confusing if you had multiple pages rankings for a KW, and didn't work with configurable date ranges).  We have added the Search Visibility to chart to show the overall impact of all of your rankings pages on your keyword performance.  We also added the Highest Ranking Position chart as a simplified version of your Keyword Performance.
• provide some room and scale for some new things we have coming soon (SERP Features, more KW metrics)
• move to the latest version of KW difficulty
• move the page onto our new, faster, more reliable KW rankings platform (this is more of an internal Moz goal, but I thought I would include it on this list. Plus you will see the benefits through faster pages and more reliable / timely rankings data)

I hear what you are saying - let me address your concerns in turn:

• extra whitespace on the page - I agree this looks a little strange right now, and sorry it stopped all the data you care about fitting on the screen (though if you use Chrome, the page scales really well with Ctrl +/-, I sometimes use that to fit more in a screenshot).  We have left a little extra space for some new things we have coming up, so that is why it feels a little weird now.  Sorry about this in the meantime!
• a writeup on the changes - no there is not, but this is a great idea, and I am going to turn this response into a post and publish it - thank you for prompting that
• Moz Analytics vs Moz Pro - Moz Pro is the name of the overall subscription product, we heard some customers were confused by the internal tool names so we are trying to simplify things a little by stopping using some names

Hope this helps! I am on [email protected] if you wanted to chat over email - happy to help in any way I can!

Hi Naomi.

Please can you email me the email address you use to log in to Moz Pro?  You can get me at [email protected].  I will get you manually added.

Thanks,

Jon

Hello! We use highcharts extensively in most of our apps and are pretty happy.  Our UI devs have built some very slick looking visualizations using it.  My personal favorite is attached.

Since all of our in-app charts are only available to logged-in users we don't have to consider SEO implications.  However Mozcast does (http://mozcast.com/), so Dr. Pete might have some insight.  I will ask him to respond here!

traffic.png

Hello!  A few questions:

• are you using version 2.63 of the MozBar?
• are you seeing this on any particular sites or pages?
• Which browser are you using?

I would be happy to test this end to see if I can replicate the issue!

Thanks,

Jon

Hello Bryan!

This is on our longer term plan - I think it will be unlikely in the next 6 months since we have higher priority projects ahead of it.  But we do recognize there is a significant segment of the market for whom this is very important.  I appreciate your feedback.

We have a team who have helped customers with moves from Brightedge in the past - if it is useful I can put you on touch with them?

Thanks!

Jon