Category: Intermediate & Advanced SEO
Looking to level up your SEO techniques? Chat through more advanced approaches.
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Should I use **tags or h1/h2 tags for article titles on my homepage**
Thanks, Alan. That helps!
| blankslatedumbo0 -
Meta refresh bad for SEO
Live sites will get badly damaged if such this happens. Consider the cases of Sports live score sites, Online chat frames, News feeds, etc. So mostly this won't damage the SEO factors.
| welcomecure0 -
Drip Feeding Free Top 10 Blog Sites for Link Building?
Is it a good move to pick 10 free blogging sites to build links No is the simple answer really. Google is targeting these types of link building practices so I would be looking to create amazing content and the performing your outreach from there. By Amazing content, I don't mean that you should write 500 words and how that will suffice - because for the most part, it won't. If you want to really succeed with link building, then you need to create content that takes you past what most others are doing. If you can create 10 articles in a couple of days, then you are't doing enough. Take your time - spend a number of days creating something that is fully researched, very in depth and answers many questions. You will have a really good chance of this being picked up by a number of reputable sources. -Andy
| Andy.Drinkwater0 -
How to Submit My new Website in All Search Engines
be careful with that. dont fall for site that promise to get you links or have your site listed in their directory or submit. do a through check like security and whether the site hasnt been blacklisted by google or maybe the site look to spammy google punish site with trust issues especially when you are linked to malicious sites
| Rosebankcollege0 -
Social Links through Link Shortners. Does it count?
I've never read or heard of there being any hard evidence that it wouldn't affect your social signal. It should have the same effect as it would come through on your Analytics as a Social visit. Almost everyone uses link shortener services now so I would be very surprised if it had a negative effect. As for the description its good practice to get into the habit of writing new fresh descriptions and content for your posts, this will encourage more engagement with the post. Especially if you re-post the topic a couple of times, people will get bored if you just copy and paste the same text each time.
| O2C0 -
Unnatural Links Warning Disappeared from Search Console Account
Your article pretty much sums of my situation. The warning that I saw a couple of months ago was a "partial match manual penalty", but it is gone now. I want to see if I can get a few more things to come do or add the no follow and then I will go ahead with the disavow. Thanks for your response.
| pajamalady0 -
Ajax Module Crawability vs. WMT Fetch & Render
Hey Scott, You're good. If you see it in the fetch and render, you're seeing it as Googlebot sees it. Google has had capabilities to crawl Ajax content for some time now. And while you don't see the content when you view source, that's not a big a problem. As long as the content is on the page at load Google should not have a problem indexing it. So after load, you should look in the Inspect Element section, that's how Google will see the content. Where there may be crawlability issues is in content that requires user action to display. Google is inconsistent with how many actions they will attempt in order to index content. -Mike
| iPullRank0 -
Noindexing Thin News Content for Panda
Hi Alfred, if I mine the logfiles and only deindex stuff that Google sends no further traffic to after a year could this be seen as trying to game the algo or similar? No, this wouldn't be seen as gaming the algorithm. All you are doing is finding those pages that are serving no purpose and removing them. if the articles are noindexed but still exist, is that enough to escape a Panda penalty or does the page need to be physically gone? There are two thoughts on this. The noindex route is seen as the more gentle way to see if this fixes things for Google - in my experience, it is generally not enough. What you need to remember is that even if you noindex a page, Google can still apply a penalty based on the page existing as the content can still be seen / crawled. There is no hard and fast rule to say they will, but it is a real possibility. The advice to my customers is generally to remove the pages in question to avoid all possible doubt. Find the pages that are not delivering benefit to the site or visitors and start there. I would be advising you undertake a content audit to fully assess the site and what really needs to be done. There is little point in killing lots of pages if it isn't lots of pages causing you issues. -Andy
| Andy.Drinkwater0 -
Google Index Constantly Decreases Week over Week (for over 1 year now)
Thanks EGOL. Makes sense.
| andreib0 -
Changing from .com to .com.au
Thank you for your feed back. Sorry for timely response I am inundated with work and have had an ill 2 two year old and Telsta line outage ( Aussie service provider ). I have chosen to stay with the .com mainly because I am starting to get weekly responses from google searches and actually just closed a big deal from someone who found us on google. So if it works don't to change it. I do agree with focusing on local links, which is what I have been doing over the past 4 - 6 weeks and it has increase our local ranking lately. Going to focus on that and build on local linking. According to Moz Search Visibility in the past two weeks we have had a higher visibility result than our competitors. As far as my international search result go that's an added bonus but not our main focus. All our hard work on SEO for our website seems to be paying off now. So going to stay with the .com than risk the move. Thank you.
| creativeground0 -
What would be best way to transition from mobile website to responsive
Thanks for your answer. So for you it's big bang. Google seems to use our alternate to index our mobile site and display our mobile URL in his SERP even if all our mobile pages are noindex, nofollow.
| Digitics0 -
Is irrelevant backlinks real? And does anchor text affect all keywords?
Hi there Technically, for the time being I would imagine, Google views that as a relevant link, since they are a web development company and developed those sites. I am not the biggest fan of links like this. While most are good hearted and natural, it just always seemed a bit gray hat. The plus side of this is that they tend to be in the footer and low value, especially when trying to rank for phrases outside of "website development". They aren't really worth it, especially if they are sitewide, it looks shady. I would let them do what they're doing - I always thought one link on the client's homepage or an "About Us" page was more natural and effective. Outside of that, I would look for different query and keyword opportunities that tend to be low competition and higher volume, those could be areas you're missing out on. Check out SEMRush for competitive rankings and search opportunities, your Search Console Top Queries for areas you may not know you have, and Keyword Difficulty to gauge what areas you need to work on to possibly see higher rankings (the SERP Analysis report is amazing for this). Here are some good resources as well: Why We Can't Do Keyword Research Like It's 2010 (Whiteboard Friday) The Illustrated SEO Competitive Analysis Workflow (Moz) Beyond that, when it comes to anchor text, I would focus more on branded anchor text and focus your efforts on the content of your website being based on what your audience is searching for. That way, your content associates your brand with the topic and when Google crawls it can understand that your content associates your brand with a topic and relevant variations. If you do this with your anchor text, you run into the issues of overoptimization, and that can possibly lead to issues down the road. Keep your link building and content development natural, and you'll be on the right side of history. Hope this helps! Good luck!
| PatrickDelehanty0 -
Linking to External Websites?
Hi there This totally depends on the content of the page you are A. linking from and B. linking to. There are also multiple factors that you should consider when linking to an external site. Take this list from Moz for example: The trustworthiness of the linking domain. The popularity of the linking page. The relevancy of the content between the source page and the target page. The anchor text used in the link. The amount of links to the same page on the source page. The amount of domains that link to the target page. The amount of variations that are used as anchor text to links to the target page. The ownership relationship between the source and target domains. Reviewing the above list and resource will help you gauge whether or not linking to an external page is necessary, and if the page you are looking to link to is worthy of your link. Hope this helps! Good luck!
| PatrickDelehanty0 -
Using cononical tag instead of 301
I believe that canonical does pass link assets. If you have a canonical on Page A, pointing to Page B, all of the links that go to Page A will start showing in the link profile for Page B in Google Webmaster Tools. They will show in WMT as..... Via this intermediate link: http://yourdomain.com/page-a
| EGOL0 -
Duplicate Pages #!
Hi, In most cases having duplicate content is not going to punish/hurt you in terms of SEO (unless it's deceptive content) - see https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en It remains however best practice to make sure that content on only one unique url - the example you give seems to be a text book example of 'when to use canonicals' - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en The fact that Google doesn't seem to index the #! pages is probably related to the fact that these pages have few incoming links and that it's making the correct guess that these duplicate pages are not really important. You should also take into account that the site: command is not necessarily giving you all the pages that are indexed. Long answer to confirm that you better add the canonical. Hope this helps, Dirk
| DirkC0 -
This redirect has me racking my brain
This looks like it could be a non issue, it doesn't do it in any other browsers and does not do it on other computers, which I think is strange. On another note I wanted to email you and ask you about something totally unrelated, is there a good email address for you? The only one I have is the support one. Or you can email me at lesley@dh42.com
| LesleyPaone0 -
How to reverse declining Google rankings?
I have a few thoughts. The Moz Pro Software suggestions are a good place to start, but will not constitute a thorough technical audit. Here's a good list, also from Moz to work on: https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015 "put strong emphasis on our blog, writing daily about the latest news and events in our industry" Be careful with this. If done poorly, it has the potential to do more harm than good. In the past, many SEO's would advise that we should blog every day..the more content the better. But, the mentality has shifted now. Quality is much more important than quantity. If you are blogging about news stories in your industry you have to be adding SIGNIFICANT value in order to convince Google that your content is worthy of rankings well. For example, let's say I am searching for a particular news story. I could read the original story on the site that broke the news, or I could read the story on a recognized news authority such as the BBC or the NYT, or I could read your version of the story. IMO it is very hard to rewrite news and convince Google that readers should land on your site. It's not enough to add a couple of extra photos, organize things differently, or have unique words. If you're doing this, you have to be a source that makes people say, "Wow. I got so much more helpful information on this site than anywhere else. I want to keep seeing this site when I search for news in this industry." If you can't do that, and you are simply rewriting the news then you are running the risk of Panda viewing your site as low quality. This is even more true if you are doing so on a daily basis. The ultimate goal when trying to decide what content to produce is to determine what you can produce that would be the absolute best of its kind on the internet. That's tough to do. One thing that you can do is ask your readers for help. Ask them what they wish you were writing about. Ask them what they feel you could do that would make them want to come to your site rather than any other. Links are still important too. I'm not saying to go out and build links, but brainstorming on ways to legitimately attract links can be helpful. You can also review the backlink profile of your competitors, but be careful not to mindlessly try to reproduce their links. Not every link is helpful, but if, for example, you see them listed on the resource page of an authoritative site, think, "OK, what can we produce so that we can approach this site and have them add us to their list?"
| MarieHaynes0 -
Website using search term as URL brand name to cheat Google
**"Some people will argue that Google penalizes keyword domains, but I know that isn't true. " ** I think that a lot of people in the SEO world are confused about this. When the EMD algo first came out I studied a large number of sites that had taken drops. Google confused everyone because they made a big deal of announcing the EMD update and then sneakily pushed out a Panda refresh a couple of days later. A LOT of sites were affected by this Panda refresh. At that time I had asked anyone who thought that they were hit by EMD to share their domain with me. A large number of these ended up being sites that, IMO were hit by Panda. The sites that were affected by the EMD update were ones that truly did not deserve to rank, and only previously ranked well because they were EMDs. There is no penalty for having an EMD. Now, back to the original question. I'm unclear as to whether OP is saying that there is a single EMD that is ranking well, or perhaps you are saying that this company has a whole bunch of service+location EMD's that are ranking well. If this is the case, then whether or not they deserve to rank depend on what kind of unique value they are offering. For example, if this was a plumbing site and every single location had almost the same content on it describing their overall plumbing business then Google wouldn't like that. But, let's say it's a real estate brokerage and the brand has worked really hard to provide helpful, unique content for each city they service. I could see this working. Google still would prefer that a realtor ran just one site, but if these individual sites were helpful enough to users then they still could do well.
| MarieHaynes0 -
I was wondering, do you know when you see updated results for a sporting event in the google search.
Ah, got it. Google calls those "Live Answers", I think. Short answer is: no, it's not structured data. Sports, weather, stock prices, and other highly specialized data comes from private partnerships with Google, generally, and each one is unique (and not particularly publicly discussed). Unfortunately, I don't even know what team at Google handles that or who you might talk to about a partnership. They aren't very transparent about it. In some cases, they list sources, but not for sports (not sure why).
| Dr-Pete0