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Cheers Kate. From doing more reading, MOZ/ Google views thin content (300 words or less) or webpages with 95% of the same HTML code as duplicate. That will be the majority of what is showing in my crawl diagnostics. That means I'm back to your original advice of fixing up duplicate page titles from GWT. Currently, the canonical tags are generated sitewide through a template function. Without full control over the canonical tag I can't fix or structure things as easily as I'd like so I will see if a web dev can help out with this. We should be able to add the whole link too. Thanks again, Dave

I agree with Andy. However, you could look at new visitors vs returning visitors within direct traffic. Typically returning visitors are coming back DIRECTLY to your site and new visitors (assuming they didn't see an advertisement elsewhere) aren't coming DIRECTLY to your site. That's my best approach; if I see a large number of new visitors, (assuming not a large ad just ran), then I can assume fairly reasonably that those are long tail keyword search terms.

Though you are correct. I believe the talk you are referring to from Rand is about Google.

Thanks for the link. Interesting. Looks like deleting posts could have many unintended consequences. I think I'll hold off for a bit.

Hey there! This is Michael on the help team and I’m happy to help out with this. Answering these questions will involve specific details about your campaign and in the interest of preserving user privacy, I will be reaching out to you in a help ticket.

Hi Again:) As Donna has said, the lack of footer NAP could have a a negative SEO impact, but if this argument does not sway the customer, I would totally set it to one side and explain to the business owner that customers are entering their website on a variety of pages (not just the homepage) and having the complete contact information on every page of the site definitely increases the chances of phones ringing. Why make the customer click extra links and hunt around for a phone number or address? Give it to them right away! Making it as easy as possible for the customer should increase conversions and that is language any business owner can understand.

2 things nobody said: 1st Robots.txt says disallow to image and Theme (where i guess css and js is included) 2nd WebOfTrust warning to not enter the site because of not trustworthy

Hi Sheena: Thanks so much for taking the time to respond. Previously I worked with an SEO firm that had prepared a keyword matrix. So we tried to integrate those terms and perhaps have gone over board. What do you mean by making the home page text more "brand and user" focused? We tried to eliminate promotional type add copy and cliche type language like "best", "great" etcetera. Tried to focus the content on why users would be in the real estate market for office space (search scenarios). Do you think that approach is too remote and academic? THANKS, Alan

Hi Easy answer: get relevant links to your website. But its slightly harder than that. First of all read: http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-increase-domain-authority You want to find relevant and influential people in your industry and link to your content and share your content. (Followerwonk) is a great tool for this. I would worry less about the DA of the website you are getting a link from, and more about the relevancy of the link. Image if Google didn't exist. You would want links on the web that drove potential customers to your site, not on high DA sites that are not important, so if you think like this - you don't need to worry about potential algorithm updates. If you want people to link to your site, you have to give them a reason to, so you need something on your site worth linking to, whether that is a blog article, infographic, etc. Hope this is helpful, its the basics of what you need to do, and there are a lot of tactics for link building, but just make sure they are genuine long term strategy and not short term wins. Things to not do for link building: Ignore directories (yes you can potentially get a good relevant link, but there are a lot of pitfalls that aren't worth the risk) Ignore all the emails from India etc (sorry, there is too much spam that comes from there, there are probably some very good services from India, but there are more than would cause you harm) Anyone claiming to get you to get you number 1 Link farms Many more here: http://moz.com/blog/17-types-of-link-spam-to-avoid Thanks Andy

Send the CSV and name of the campaign to help@moz.com. We would be happy to take a peek and find the cause here.

Thanks for the feedback! We have looked at the mobile vs. desktop and both are down. I segmented just the mobile and it doesn't appear that any browser type is the cause. I do recall us reviewing the iOS issue awhile ago but that didn't appear to be the issue we saw this March. The missing direct traffic has not moved to another channel either and online sales have decreased so we haven't been able to identify this as a incorrect GA implementation. We have seen some issues with organic traffic too. Since a certain amount of direct / none traffic is organic, do you think this could be an organic SEO issue? The percentage decrease of direct traffic is higher but the actual decreased number of sessions for direct/none and organic are comparable.

Thanks Erica!

Hi Thom, I don't know anything about "endpoints", but you maybe don't need a Yahoo store specialist, but just a regular SEO who can help you diagnose some of your problems. Moz has recommended companies you could reach out to ask if any offer hourly consulting. If they don't, try going thru the Q&A searching for any questions related to ecommerce and see who pipes in with helpful advice. (There is no ecommerce category in the Moz Q&A. I checked.) You could try approaching them. I say that b/c I did a scan of your site and saw some duplicate pages, for example, http://www.atlasphones.com/reli.html, http://www.atlasphones.com/reli1.html and http://www.atlasphones.com/reli2.html, two of which look like they might be errors or oversights. It could just be that you need someone to help guide you through the process of discovering root causes and potential fixes. I worked with Yahoo store a few years ago, it has its querks, but is much like any other online store so if you can translate Yahoo terminology working with a SEO you might be able to make some great headway. A second thought is whether you might be able to tag your "endpoints" or "items" as canonical and see whether that deals with the problem. It's a start anyway. Good luck!

If you want google to pick up the meta title you want you need to tweak your on-page optimization, as per my previous answer. If you check both homepages, toyota and honda, with some keyword densitiy analyzer tools you will see differences, make changes till you convince google to accept your meta title. One difference in those pages is pretty obvious once you scan it with a keyword density analyzer.

This is something that I am very familiar with. We are in almost the exact same situation. Matt Cutts at Google is pretty responsive on this subject. Here is a video where he describes in detail how Google views duplicate content : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQZY7EmjbMA My professional opinion is that you should try to get as much unique content on the page as possible. I have been successful at getting my customer reviews to appear on site and in the source code of the page. I believe this has directly helped the rankings of my product pages. If everyone has the same content there is really nothing to separate its relevancy in the eyes of the engine and most times the searcher as well. If you are all on the same level where is your competition? What sets you apart from their pages. Customer reviews, in my opinion, are the holy grail of on page content. If you have no product reviews (tsk tsk) then you can implement in house reviews, like a manager's review or have someone in the company write, in their own words, some informative article between 500-600 words to help give you content that is unique. Content is king, even duplicate relevant content can be harmful in my opinion. Just because it won't cause a Panda penalty doesn't necessarily mean that the content isn't negatively effecting your SEO.

If Google isn't picking the "right page," then either 1) your pages aren't optimized well enough or 2) it's too niche and Google doesn't know what it's looking at. For the latter, you could combine higher categories and then have customer specify what they want when they buy. Example: If you were selling shirts, you wouldn't have separate pages for every size variation in every color, you'd just have one page about that shirt and then let the customer select color and size.

Hi there, Google tends to consider text in the main content areas more than text in supplemental areas (like the sidebar) and text in certain areas (i.e. the meta keywords tag, title element on images/links) may be ignored entirely. On the other hand, keyword stuffing in any area could lead to problems. Keep in mind that keyword density isn't a ranking factors. Never has been, never will be. Google tends to look at your page more holistically (or at least they try to) so taking this approach usually requires a bit more natural approach than inserting keywords at strategic locations. Not to promote my own post, but I highly recommend reading about these advanced SEO concepts for on-page optimization: http://moz.com/blog/7-advanced-seo-concepts These help explain how Google may judge your page beyond keyword usage and placement. Finally, you typically won't get in trouble for duplicate content if you stuff keywords, but you could easily suffer other algorithmic penalties. The best advice is to write naturally, make sure your content clearly communicates your main ideas, your content is focused around your primary keyword topics, and you provide a user experience that makes people want more.

Here's my $0.02: I think that these two companies probably made decisions, but not completely based on SEO or organic ranking. The Mic.com site that is using sub-directories will likely see much better SEO, because all of the content is on the same domain, and not treated differently. My assumption for the Vice.com site is that they want to have different channels or content on other subdomains. My hunch is that for Vice.com, they decided to go with subdomains, so that they could have this content live on different physical servers or different infrastructure. I took a look at the main site, www.Vice.com, and it's using Tumblr, running on AWS with Elastic Load Balancing. For the Munchies.vice.com, it's running on WordPress. While it is possible to have content displayed from WordPress on one subdirectory and Magento on another (by either installing both applications on the same server, or creating virtual links behind the scenes) a lot of companies will opt to do this on separate systems. That's probably the reason that they went this way. In the end, SEO doesn't trump everything... But, here's a reference about sub-domains vs. subdirectories on Moz: In the past, I've answered a similar question in the past here: http://moz.com/community/q/blog-on-subdomain But the gist of it is: store.mydomain.com --> content on the store. is treated as a different site, and SEO efforts (content, inbound links, social media) only help the subdomain. mydomain.com/store --> subdirectories are usually the way to go.  All of the content, inbound links and social media shares will help build the overall domain authority for you. My recommendation is to go with the sub directory (mydomain.com/store/, and there are a whole lot of articles that back this up: http://moz.com/community/q/blog-on-subdomain-vs-subdirectory-best-practices http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/ http://moz.com/community/q/best-place-for-a-blog-blog-mydomain-com-or-mydomain-com-blog Hope this helps, Jeff

Hmm, interesting. I had a feeling it was a kind of "yes and no" answer from similar questions I saw on other sites. Thanks for the help, everyone!