Welcome to the Q&A Forum

SproutDigital

Your WordPress plugin has probably taken care of this, but check you're canonicals.

Beyond that, I'm not sure. Hopefully some other MOZ friends will chime in and help ya out

Good luck!

SproutDigital

Have you tried previewing and validating your AMP pages recently?

The AMP project is moving so fast, we've discovered validation issues on pages that validated perfectly only a month or two ago.

SproutDigital

Hello awesome MOZ community!

Our agency uses JSON-LD for our local business schema markup. We validate our markup using Google's Structured Data Testing Tool. All good!

Recently, I discovered a competing agency using our similar JSON-LD markup (that's ok) and "http://purl.org/goodrelations" markup.

The latter appears to be–potentially–black hat SEO. Why? According to MOZ, "there is no conclusive evidence that this markup improves rankings."

BUT, the purl.org markup has provided an opportunity for "keyword stuffing". Using purl.org markup, the agency has stuffed/used 66 of the same keywords into the validated markup.

I would love to get feedback from the MOZ community. Can schema markup–of any kind–be used to "keyword stuff"? If so, why aren't sites getting penalized for this? Is this practice flying under the elusive algorithm radars?

Thanks! Your feedback, insight, and snarky remarks are welcome

Cheers!

SproutDigital

Thanks for your prompt feedback Oleg!

Your proposed action is exactly what we're implementing.

Randy Holland, Sprout Digital

SproutDigital

Hello awesome MOZ Community!

Our development team uses a sub-domain "dev.example.com" for our SEO clients' websites. This allows changes to be made to the dev site (U/X changes, forms testing, etc.) for client approval and testing.

An embarrassing discovery was made. Naturally, when you run a "site:example.com" the "dev.example.com" is being indexed. We don't want our clients websites to get penalized or lose killer SERPs because of duplicate content.

The solution that is being implemented is to edit the robots.txt file and block the dev site from being indexed by search engines.

My questions is, does anyone in the MOZ Community disagree with this solution? Can you recommend another solution? Would you advise against using the sub-domain "dev." for live and ongoing development websites?

Thanks!

SproutDigital

This is a great discussion and I appreciate the dialogue and awesome answers here.

I'm performing a backlink profile and developing a 301 redirect strategy for a website that has a forthcoming relaunch. I've found success using multiple platforms, including the magnificent MOZ.

And I agree with Erica, not every platform, including Google, crawls the entire web. I use multiple platforms. For example, in Google Search Console the website I'm working on shows 10,000+ backlinks. Most of them are the main domain (e.g. website.com).

But, a backlink profile ran in ahrefs.com shows around 5,000+ backlinks. What I've discovered in ahrefs is that the website has thousands of backlinks linking to other pages on the website (website.com/page-one, website.com/page-two, etc). This is really helping with my 301 redirect strategy and will help retain link equity when the new website launches.

So, yes! Use multiple platforms to discover your website's backlinking profile and choose your battles from there.

I recommend:

MOZ, of course
ahrefs.com
SEMrush.com
Majestic.com
Google Search Console

Happy backlinking to you all and good luck Jared!

SproutDigital

Sorry for the late respond Dave.

Incredible response and answer to my question.

I appreciate the time and effort that went into your response. I will share this with our development team and discuss.

Best,

Randy

SproutDigital

Hello fellow MOZ'ers!

Like many of you, I've been reviewing the Search Engine Ranking Factors 2015 Expert Survey and Correlation Data. My SEO Specialist position requires me to create positive SEO results for our clients' organic search ranking campaigns.

As I understand it, "Relative CTR is a valuable number that can show users how their ads are stacking up compared to their competitors ads appearing on the exact same websites."

My question is...Does relative CTR affect organic SEO efforts (positive or negative) in anyway? The campaigns I'm working on do not include AdWords efforts.

Is this a factor I should ignore/look over? Or is there something I can do "organically" to influence this ranking factor in a positive way?

Thanks!

SproutDigital

There are 200+ ranking factors, so I'd just compare the 'industry-know' factors for starters. I'm assuming you want to compare homepage to homepage. Here are a few things I quickly noticed.

The word Accountant in the Domain Name of you competitor!

H1 Tag - "Accountants" vs. "Think Smart. Think Bullet. Driving Startup Growth"

Appearances of the word Accountant (w/ variations) - 17 vs. 9

Appearances of the word Accountant (w/ variations) above the fold - 17 vs. 2

Appearances of the word Accountant (w/ variations) in bold - 4 vs. 0

P Tag about the fold using Accountant in the text - no vs. yes

Domain Age - 1 Years, 9 Months vs. 4 years 3 months

There are many more factors, but you should start with the basics. I like to get my preliminary on-page stuff completed before moving onto social and back-link strategies.

Good Luck!

SproutDigital