Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi all - here's a question for everyone running Google Ads through the Ad Grant. How much of the $10,000 available to your account per month do you actually end up spending? I'm trying to see if I am in line with others in the industry. Would you mind sharing with me the type of nonprofit and the amount you're able to spend of the grant per month, on average?

Thank you!

Thank you both. We have pretty great content and many high quality contextual earned links already. And we're always working on expanding this. This is stuff that I know from all the years in SEO.  We don't have a lot rich snippets, and while I know they help search engines, they're assumed not to actually help rankings, right? In my experience they've done very little to actually boost rankings (or CTR), but if you've seen some huge impact from them, we can see if a complete schema markup is viable. I'm hesitant to direct a ton of time and resources toward busy tasks that don't have much results.

[Insert word "hack" if you prefer that, but it's so overused that I'm using "trick" instead]

I've been doing SEO for ten years, and I'm pretty good at covering my bases. For the client I'm seeking help with, here's what we're doing: strong and regular onsite keyword optimized content (both long tail and competitive keyphrases), good local SEO, high-quality guest posting on relevant local news sites and blogs, heavy community involvement and support, scholarships and sponsorships, lots of videos, all the social media, tons of competitive research and link building, ongoing website architecture analysis and tweaking, a systematized process for getting reviews, onsite chat, Google Search Ads, etc.

This client has been around for years  in a very competitive industry in a medium-sized American city. We do alright in the local pack for certain search terms, but overall his rankings are not good.

For anyone who works in a super competitive industry, do you have any tricks you'd be willing to share? I don't want to steal your secrets, but I could use some advice. Thank you!

Thank you!

I'd like to use Moz Local for two of my clients who share a space. The first one is an independent tattoo artist, who operates inside a larger tattoo shop. Both the tattoo shop and this individual artist have websites, and they'd both like me to optimize for local search. Will this be a problem using Moz Local to add both businesses? I will buy two different Moz Local subscriptions for them, but I don't want one business to override the other since they're inside the same address.

Thanks!

A client of mine lost their domain when an ex business partner sold it out from under them. They've filed with WIPO, but in the meantime we're trying to figure out how to help them out. They had two really excellent links - one from the NY Times and one from a .edu website. I'm going to reach out to the authors of those articles (the articles are pretty old, so I doubt they'll change the links), but does anyone have any advice on how to let search engines know the new domain replaces the old without having the ability to do redirects? The content on the site is exactly the same - we were able to get the files over, happily. I've re-submitted the site for indexing, changed the domain links in Moz Local, changed in Analytics, and on all their social sites. Is there anything I'm not thinking of that can be done to let Google know that this new domain replaces the old? Thank you!

Often my Google Scholar alerts result in exactly what I think they will: scholarly articles published in academic journals. However, today I got this completely non-scholarly article https://www.t-nation.com/training/the-exact-reps-that-make-you-grow and I have no idea why Google Scholar is indexing this site. I've read up on how to get indexed by Google Scholar, and this website doesn't seem to have the necessary requirements. I'm curious for anyone whose clients or industry need to get indexed by Google Scholar, what has worked for you?

We have an ad grant through Google, so it's free ad money that we'd like to use. Facebook's ad platform seems to be working fine and we use that as well.

Hi guys,

I do marketing for many nonprofits, and one of my clients is a Jewish women's organization. In the past week or so, Google has started disapproving ads and keywords that have the word "Jewish" in them. I know Facebook got called out recently for allowing people to target based on anti-Semitic sentiments, so I'm wondering if this is just Google's terrible execution of caution. It's telling me that keywords with the word "jewish" in them (like "jewish women's organization in boston" is derogatory or dangerous). I've asked for Google's help, and they've been incredibly slow to respond.

Is anyone else facing this with other religions or content?

Natalie

Hi Charles,
Thank you for the response. We spent a good chunk of the day testing, and it looks like the data is coming in correctly, and we were right in seeing that the banner ad wasn't converting at all, though they were convinced it was.

Thanks!

Natalie

Hi all,

For one of my clients it seems that we're not seeing conversions for one particular source (an online banner). I've been recommending that they do away with that paid advertising since it hasn't been converting. However, my client recently made a purchase from the ad to test it, and it's not showing up in conversion data. All other conversion data seems right on, so I have no idea what could be going on with this one referral source. It's showing accurate page views, accurate time on site, but no e-commerce data.

Any ideas what would cause this source to not show up in conversions? The campaign info is also showing accurately in Analytics.

I've attached what the redirect looks like, from the banner to the actual URL.

Thank you!

N6eUjT1GJv

Thanks, Patrick! The strange thing is that this comes as direct traffic, not referral traffic. We've definitely experienced the referral spam phenomenon, but this is like nothing I've ever seen. I don't think it's spam, but I'm not sure how or why it's being created.

I'll filter the landing pages from Analytics, but we're mostly just curious where and why those URLs are being created / hit.

Thanks again.

I'm doing a site audit for an organization that has a bunch of really messy old Drupal sites. In looking at their traffic, I see that a majority of it is coming to landing pages that look like this:

http://clientsdomain.com/rss_feed173.8.208.97 plus other IP addresses.

The bounce rate is 100% and time on site is less than a second. It looks like something that an RSS feed tool might use, but I've never seen something like it before. It creates its own landing page, hits the site, then appears to bounce. This is making their Analytics data look a whole lot worse than the site is actually doing, since the bounce rate is 100% on all that fake traffic.

I have some experience with Drupal, but I've never seen anything like this in Drupal or any other CMS.

Has anyone out there ever experienced something like this, where direct traffic comes to an rss feed landing page and bounces immediately?

Thank you for all your help. The strange thing is that Analytics shows the proper quantity, but the wrong average price and total revenue. It does seem like the "unit price" is off. I think they're running _additem for the entire transaction, vs. each item within the transaction. So if someone buys 4 tickets (at $10 each), unit price is showing up as $40.

I'll reach out and see if this is the problem.

Thanks again! You've helped so much.

This is the email I've received back from the developers. They're really unfamiliar with implementing e-commerce tracking, so I'm hoping to get a little more feedback here!

http://screencast.com/t/yWQyzWrR

The first code fires when there's any transaction at all (they sell stuff other than tickets, and those other items are showing up fine in GA). And then the second code fires when tickets are purchased.

Thoughts?

Thanks, Kane! Sorry I didn't respond earlier. I've taken a screenshot of a basic tutorial I've been reading. My question is where does the "Click ID" come from? I'm trying to track clicks to social media profiles, for example, or for when someone submits their email address (the contact form is javascript--doesn't redirect to a thank you page).

There is no "id" for the social media profile links, but there is a "class." My question is where does "smshrt" come from in the screen shot below? The author of this post gives no more information about his Click ID.

http://screencast.com/t/DjUZIwga

And the original URL: http://www.optimizesmart.com/beginners-guide-google-tag-manager-v2/

If my<a class="social-icon-twitter" would="" i="" somehow="" put="" that="" in="" as="" a="" click="" id?="" thanks="" for="" you="" help.="" feel="" like="" understand="" lot="" of="" the="" tricky="" parts="" gtm="" v2,="" but="" simple="" stuff="" has="" me="" confused.<="" p=""></a>

<a class="social-icon-twitter" would="" i="" somehow="" put="" that="" in="" as="" a="" click="" id?="" thanks="" for="" you="" help.="" feel="" like="" understand="" lot="" of="" the="" tricky="" parts="" gtm="" v2,="" but="" simple="" stuff="" has="" me="" confused.<="" p=""> </a>

<a class="social-icon-twitter" would="" i="" somehow="" put="" that="" in="" as="" a="" click="" id?="" thanks="" for="" you="" help.="" feel="" like="" understand="" lot="" of="" the="" tricky="" parts="" gtm="" v2,="" but="" simple="" stuff="" has="" me="" confused.<="" p=""></a>

Hi everybody. I've recently discovered that I have a problem with the ecommerce tracking on a client's website. The client sells concert tickets at an average price of $10 per ticket. The custom ecommerce platform they use is kind of unusual; the same product often has different SKUs, but not always. This isn't associated with different seats, etc. In fact, I don't yet know why they've set it up that way.

The problem that I'm facing is this: the data in Analytics is calculating the "average price" of a SKU item as the total price. If, for example, the actual average price for a SKU item is $10 and four of those SKU items were sold, Analytics will tell me the average price is $40. This means that the total revenue for that SKU shows up as $40 x 4 = $160. Needless to say, this is enormously skewing the data. Here's a screenshot. Note, it's the same product: http://screencast.com/t/JyLQkb3jzz6s

The total revenue for ticket sales is way off because of this, and I'm not sure if it's a problem with the ecommerce tracking code in Analytics, or something that the ecomm platform is doing.

Have any of you experienced anything like this, and if so is it a fix in Analytics?

Thank you!

Thank you! I have a pretty basic question about this statement, which is one thing I've been struggling with with all these guides.

You also need to set up filters to specify when your link click trigger should fire. For example, I want to fire a tag on the page whose URL contains ‘/shop/men/shirts/’ and when the ‘Click ID’ is ‘smshrt’.

The 'Click ID' -- is it set up only in Google Analytics? Is there also somewhere in GTM to set that up as well? Or do I need to include it in the link's HTML on the site as well? I know GTM is designed so that marketers don't have to rely on getting into the code too much (and for some of my clients it's nearly impossible to get anything done in there).

Thanks for your help, everyone.

Hi all! Do you have any great resources on Google Tag Manager Version 2? I'm looking for some help and I keep seeing info on V1, which looks pretty different. I'm having quite a bit of trouble implementing it correctly.

Thanks!

I think it's erroneous to say that users don't want to see "built by" in the footer. I am often curious about who built or designed a website, and seeing that in the footer helps me navigate there. How does Google decide what a user wants to see or doesn't want to see? If a link is clicked on often, by a variety of IP addresses, could that indicate that it's a useful link and shouldn't be discounted, even if it's in the footer?

Hi again! We're set to launch a new inventory-based site for a chain of car dealers with various locations across the midwest. Here's our issue:

The different branches have overlap in the products that they sell, and each branch is adamant that their inventory comes up uniquely in site search.

We don't want the site to get penalized for duplicate content; however, we don't want to implement a link rel=canonical because each product should carry the same weight in search.

We've talked about having a basic URL for these product descriptions, and each instance of the inventory would be canonicalized to this main product, but it doesn't really make sense for the site structure to do this.

Do you have any tips on how to ensure that these products (same description, new product from manufacturer) won't be penalized as duplicate content?

Thanks for the answer! This is great info.

I've now briefly combed through all 800 linking root domains listed in Webmaster Tools, and it appears that there are thousands of links coming from fake blogs as well, so it looks like my task will be to go through these, one by one, to make sure they really are the links Google is penalizing.

Unfortunately the client doesn't have very many natural links, and I am a bit afraid that his rankings will briefly dip if I disavow most of these. It's possible that some of them are not being penalized.

Anyway, in our efforts to make the Web a better place, it's worth it to our client to go ahead and disavow.

Thanks again for your feedback!

We just took over SEO for a new client who is being penalized for a bad link profile. They've asked Google to reconsider multiple times, and Google still claims that the links are bad.

Because of this, and because I don't have direct access (logins, etc.) to what the former SEO did, I am considering using the disavow links tool. The most obvious links to disavow are a group of almost 1000 links that come from the same forum.

However, when viewing the links on this forum they actually seem natural. People are reviewing the product (ipod cases), both negatively and positively. While this could have been an SEO tactic for link building, I don't want to disavow these links if they're not the problem, even though this domain is the source of almost all the low-quality links.

Another site that has more than 200 links is Askives. Do any of you have experience with links from Askives, or removing these links?

Thanks again!

We're not planning on mimicking these strategies at all, it's just difficult to explain to a client why their competitors, with terrible sites and spammy link profiles, are at the top of the SERPs. And, as I mention below, many of these sites have risen to the top after Penguin with no apparent redeeming qualities. We'll keep doing what we do and keep our fingers crossed that white-hat SEO really will prevail!

I agree that it's worth the long-term investment, but we've actually seen that some sites, that fairly recently have dumped a ton of effort into link spam, suddenly surge in the rankings. Needless to say, our clients begin to doubt our white-hat strategies!

This week I've been diving into competitive research again for several clients in different industries, and unless the data in Open Site Explorer is wrong, it really does appear that Google continues to reward sites with unnatural links in certain industries, especially industries that are less tech-savvy (agriculture, finance, manual labor).

I've combed through all the links carefully, to ensure there aren't some secret high-quality links lurking, and for some of these sites that are showing up in the top ten for search they do not even one real, high-quality link.

Also, their onsite optimization is often way over the top and the user experience is nothing less than nauseating.

Could it be a MozScape issue, or does Google continue to reward terrible sites and link structures in certain industries?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

We just discovered that one of our clients' sites (not one we manage, but another one of theirs) has approximately 7000 links coming from luxa.org, and they recently took a huge dip in organic traffic. Is anyone else familiar with luxa.org?

I'd suggest making sure that you're completely transparent about who you are when writing a Wikipedia post--make it known that you represent the company. It can be really hard to get a Wikipedia page approved unless your company already has quite a bit of clout.

We're looking at them from a conversion optimization perspective, while also ensuring that they're SEO-ed for the appropriate products and services. We're pretty good at onsite optimization and quality content creation, we just feel in a slight pickle sometimes with larger corporate clients when it comes to building new pages (landing pages or otherwise).

Thanks for the responses.

We have had this problem a couple times now!

A corporate client will not sign off on any new landing page development. Instead, we need a creative content strategy that we can use to target their keyphrases AND maintain a corporate/professional veneer.

I'd love to hear your ideas and things that have worked for you for onsite optimization, when creating landing pages is out of the question.