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Another way is to simply view what they've inserted into their keyword meta tag.  Although that tag has not been used by Google for some time, many websites still populate the tag with the terms they would like the page to rank well for.  To view the keywords meta tag, right click (if you're using windows) on the web page you're investigating and select "view source" or "view page source" and look near the top of the html page. There you'll see some code that looks like this: name="keywords" content="keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3, etc."/> While you're looking at the page source, you can also look at the title tag (usually just above the keyword tag by a few lines).  It looks like this: <title>...this is the page title....</span><span></title> If you see overlap between words and or phrases in the title and the keywords tags, you can be pretty sure they are trying to rank for those terms--maybe successfully, maybe not.

Either way is good.  Just as an FYI I likely won't be able to respond until tomorrow morning as my little one will be waking up from her nap soon and the rest of today (being a Sunday) is family time for us.  Thanks! Marie

Thanks. Let us bask in the warm glow of Motorhead.

This appears to have fixed the problem, thank you.  Had to add a non-breaking space before {% endif %}{{ page_title }} but from what I can tell, your solution resolved the character count discrepancy.  I expect this will be validated when Moz re-crawls the site.

Yup!

IMO.. Regardless of the age of the reviews, when you respond in a professional, understanding & helpful manner, this will help new visitors/potential customers to see that you care, and take the time to engage in the reviews left about your business. Good or bad, reviews are helpful to both potential customers as well as the business itself. As the business owner, this helps us understand how we can improve our service/product/customer support. I would go in and leave a reply to all reviews, Good & Bad and regardless of the age. It will only help the users. Good luck SEOSnyder!!

Thank you very much

Same here - I contacted support and they said "This is a known issue, and we are working on revamping that page entirely - you should see something new there pretty soon! :)".

We have a similar problem, but in reverse. It's a UK website that needs to rank in Asia but not UK. We've tried a few things - shifting the server made no difference (nor the speed benefits) and geo locating on webmaster tools was pointless as we have a 5 country target market. Targeting cities again didn't help because the number of location targeted searches was sub 1% for the relevant keywords. So there were two things that we did that seemed to have some benefit. First we targeted some non valuable but relevant keywords with high search volumes (2 orders of magnitude more than our real targets) and got a high ranking for that. Then put our effort into getting this traffic to convert to the non-ranking pages. Secondly because there was non substantial difference in EU and Asian ranking for our keywords we focused on ranking well in Europe and then just filtered out the EU and US traffic and we saw benefits. What I'd do here in your case is focus on the Indian market to get lots of relevant back links. It should be easier than the US in someways and take advantage of the size of the market and it's lack of sophistication to increase the volume of keywords. If websites are anything like they are in Asia there is a lot of crap design and zero optimisation. So it should be possible to put together an outreach package that generates lots of low DA links that are very relevant for lower costs than in the US. So for example if you were looking at outsourced accounting I'd build link bait that appeals to Indian accounting firms to get the links to your key pages - but optimise them for US consumption. Of course all this depends on your market and keywords but I hope it's given some ideas.

Unless your category pages pull together a group of products that formulate some sort of unique point of view that benefits the sales process, then there's no real reason for your category pages to stand out, in which case, minimize their overall impact on search and focus on making your individual product pages stand out in search. Do you actually get so many return visitors coming to the site looking for what's new since the last time they were there that you need a "new products" category? How about "hot products", are visitors indicating that they are at your site to find out what others are actively buying?  I wonder. If you were able to come up with categories that actually add value to the visitor experience, I'd be willing to bet that you wouldn't have this canonicalization  issue or this pagination issue.  In the mean time, what you describe might be the best way of doing it.

Yeah thats whats going on. Its using something called SiteCore. Looks like theres an issue on their end, but tough to troubleshoot from my perspective. Thanks.

I would go with the Event schema as you're just telling Google about the structured data of the event, not that you're not the organizer. If you correctly implement the data you should get intro trouble.

I wouldn't for the cart and checkout, I would actually no-index them. The reason being is depending on what measure you are using for cart abandonment, having people land on those pages will skew your results. Also at the same time there is no good reason for them to enter on those pages so it will increase the overall bounce rate if people are entering on them. Privacy policy, shipping, and return policy, I would not specifically no-index them, but I would not try to optimize them for anything other business name - page name. That being said, if you are like Costco and offer some amazing return policy that someone can return a product after 10 years for a full refund and it is a popular product; I might consider optimizing the return policy for that as well. Or if you are the only person that offers free international shipping on a large item like a baby grand piano or something. But if you fall in line with the rest of the industry I would just leave them as is and only optimize them for your business name - policy type. So then if people search for your business and return policy those pages will more than likely come up.

I liked your article.  You had a lot of really good points.  I think that a lot of non-SEO savvy people are still trying to build links by leaving comments, so it's good to advise people not to do that! I still think you should go looking for Panda issues for this particular client though.  Yes, it's good to get rid of the unnatural links.  But, if Penguin was the only issue for this site then you really should have seen your drop at the time of a Penguin update and there was no Penguin update in May of 2014.

Hi, only one version, either the non-www or www should throw an HTTP header status 200. Suppose you prefer the www version then you should ideally have the non-www version redirected to the www version via a server-side 301, permanent redirection. You can also set the preferred domain setting to the www version in Google webmaster tools account. With 301 in place, you should see things falling on the right track. Care should be taken that only the preferred version URLs are used for any and all of your campaigns as well as link building or link earning purposes. Best regards, Devanur Rafi

Hi Sean In my experience there are always many differences in the crawl reports from Moz and Webmaster Tools. Bear in mind, they are all just computer programs running automatically to detect "issues" - and that a human eye is the best tool at the end of the day. To step back a little, your overall ranking will likely have very little to do with these sorts of things (titles, descriptions, etc). They can have a small effect but will usually not bump the needle way up. So just keep that in perspective when fixing things. In general, I would aim to have your titles and descriptions unique, within length guidelines, compelling for users and so on. Google has a great guide here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en There can sometimes be a delay in what Google shows you in WMT as well. They might not have crawled everything as recently as Moz. I do tend to find Moz will check everything whereas WMT will only alert you to the pages they find are problematic. (For example, you might have pages with duplicate titles, but Google has determined the pages not important - a quality check if you well - whereas Moz doesn't make this qualitative check, they just crawl and rate everything). In order of priority I would fix WMT issues first and then move to Moz issues. But again, your overall ranking is likely more due to site authority & trust as measured by links and usage.

Upload the file with all of your backlinks you want disavowed, including the old links.

Hey There, There are a number of reasons why you may encounter this issue when creating a campaign, such as a slow server response or our crawler being blocked at the server level. I'm afraid we would really need the URL you are trying to input to investigate what the specific issue might be. If you prefer not to include the URL in this public forum, you can email it to help@moz.com so we can take a look for you. I look forward to hearing from you there soon. Chiaryn Help Team Ninja