Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Glad you are good to go Steven! If anything else comes up, definitely let us know at help@moz.com if you wish to keep your info private. Cheers!

It could just be Google re-shuffling things and fine-tuning who gets stars and who doesn't. Here are a few things that have helped in my experience: Don't go crazy with the schema markup, especially for stars. I see people adding ratings to blog posts just to get stars, and those are all gone now. Add them where they make sense and are conventionally used (e.g. on product/place pages, not on category/type pages). Avoid re-using the same aggregate ratings or reviews that go into aggregate ratings on multiple pages. Make sure you've nested the right tags in the right orders according to the latest rules - they change sometimes. Sometimes the snippet tool will say something's correct when it's really out of order. Tag entities, not keywords. E.g. don't tag the entity as "The Marriottt Inn, Resort, and Spa in City, State" - tag it as "Marriott" or "Marriott Hotel" and list the location separately. If you're doing all these things it might just be a matter of weak entity association, borderline user metrics, or insufficient site trust.

I am using prerender to cache/render static pages to crawl agents but MOZ is not able to crawl through my website (http://www.exambazaar.com/). Hence it has a domain authority of 1/100. I have been in touch with Prerender support to find a fix for the same and have also added dotbot to the list of crawler agents in addition to Prerender default list which includes rogerbot. Do you have any suggestions to fix this? List: https://github.com/prerender/prerender-node/commit/5e9044e3f5c7a3bad536d86d26666c0d868bdfff Adding dotbot: prerender.crawlerUserAgents.push('dotbot');

The Matt Cutts stated that href-lang is important because it will help Google bot know that the page is intended for a different language, rather than a poorly translated page 'written' just to 'rank'. If it seems like everything is okay, then err on the side of caution and use href-lang. You may just see an improvement. However, the critical piece is making sure the pages are well written/translated for their intended target. Perhaps search engines have gotten better at weeding out/penalizing poor translations, but I would use href-lang just so I could sleep at night. At least you'll know you did that much. If you really want to go for the gold, get someone fluent in the target languages and see what they think. You may end up with some edits. There are a ton of Spanish dialects and what reads well in Mexico might not read so well in Spain.

No problem, it looks like you have a pretty involved project ahead of you. I would do a page level audit in GWT, Majestic and aHrefs. Be very careful which pages you 301. If you want to be surgical - you can try getting good links changed to the new domain. That will be incredibly time consuming. Regarding GWT reporting, I had a client that bought a link farm and did a blanket redirect... right smack into their root domain. Ouch. Luckily they had administrative control of said link farm - when the sitewide footer links were removed - it took about a month for GWT to remove them from link reports. Mileage may vary. Part of it depends on Google knowing it's not there - at least for the purposes of GWT reporting. They had about 2,000,000+ backlinks. A lot of them were sitewides, another portion was article spam and blog spam. Some of it was just scraped. I wanted to remove at least 500,000 (just to be cautious) they only allowed 30K. But I got the link farm out of there. The site stabilized - but it was clear they needed to remove more. Such is life. It would have been a great recovery story.

Although the Moz software is awesome, it only works to configure and setup campaigns if you are a PRO member which comes with a 99$ fee per month. This isn't for everyone unless they can use the software more than once.. I would suggest grabbing a few free tools online to use. You can check out : ScreamingFrog and/or Xenu Link Sleuth Each will provide you with detailed reports to filter through and see content from your site. ScreamingFrog will provide you with data for up to 500 URL's for free. You will need to purchase the license to go deeper, depending on your site. This one is a great for getting HTTP header checks and site wide duplicate content error notifications. If you want to try a tool to verify online duplicate content - PageSpotter is a checking and monitoring tool. A great post by Google Webmaster Center Blog about Duplicate Content and why you need to address it to help with your site. If you plan to go the route of moving the site to a new domain/URL this is a great forum piece on the steps you need to plan and execute for a clean move. Hope some of this helps you out!

You need to title the images what they are, not focused to SEO. So if the dress is called the Summer Green in Fields Dress, the file name should be summer-green-fields-dress.jpg (or something like it) and then the alt text be Summer Green in Fields Dress.

Thanks Miriam and Hemant, appreciate your help. To answer your questions Miriam we're not your typical local company and don't meet with customers at our office as we are in the satellite TV industry and work with customers throughout the country. Because our customers are national base our concern was a Google Local listing may be hurting our national results if they think we're trying to market locally. Has anyone had an issue with this before?

In light of the fact that the client admitted that he recently paid for building spam links, it is more likely that the links being attributed to a negative SEO campaign were actually purchased by the client himself (knowingly or unknowingly) and that they are just recently taking effect. Nonetheless, in your reconsideration request, be clear about differentiating what links the client attributes to that SEO firm's efforts and the links are attributed to the negative SEO effort, which are continuing to show up. Treat them as separate issues in the same reconsideration request.  Start out with something like "We have two issues going on--the client hired an SEO firm that built links from these specific domains [domain 1, domain 2, domain 3,....]  but we also have these other links that are accruing from what is believed to be negative SEO and which we are disavowing as they show up...."  and then explain your outreach process for the links attributable to the client.   If that doesn't work, there's always the option to drop another reconsideration request with a different tactic.

That probably means they just have less html code, since it's a ratio (text/code). Text to code ratio has no impact on SEO, and I'm surprised some SEOs still obsess over it. If you have an incredibly code heavy page, Google may have trouble crawling it, but that's more about the sheer amount of code vs any kind of ratio. That being said, you should try to keep your html code to a minimum, as excess code will increase the file size of your page, leading to a longer load time which is a poor user experience and can have a negative impact on rankings.

Yes this is a solid strategy. Optimize your titles and descriptions for keywords that have good position & low CTR. You can also try adding Google authorship (if it's a content page) and semantic markup for reviews (for product pages) to get rich snippets displaying in the SERPs. Targeting keywords that are ranking in the 5-15 range is also a good idea. Organize those by search volume, and do some onpage optimization. A few tweaks could boost their rankings and give you more traffic for a little bit of work.

Julian, As TextureMediainc says keyword cannibalization occurs when you target the same keyword on multiple pages.  It may also occur when different keywords/key phrases are very similar or share the same words, "67 mustang" and  "67 ford mustang", for example or "pink wedding dresses" and "pink wedding dresses with straps" Keep in mind, too, that the On-page Grader report you are looking at is specific to the keyword you entered into the keyword field when you run the report If you change the keyword, you may get a different result.  For example, you may grade one of your category pages for the keyword "wedding dress" and find that it indicates you need to address cannibalization (and you get a grade of "A") but if you grade the same page for "pink wedding dress, you'll may find that it doesn't  (but that you grade of "F"). Be sure to look at your site's keywords hierarchically, with your most competitive keywords toward the top of the hierarchy (homepage); that each category of the site has a specific keyword reason for being it's own category; and that the keywords of category sub pages  fit logically and distinctly within the category.

if tppmc.co.uk has never been indexed and always (from the start) been redirected then yes...

There's information at http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection on how to do this. If you need additional help, the best bet is to create a new question, and include your website name, and if you have full access to the server. Thanks!

So it sounds to me that you really just need to focus on the SEO basics, don't do things that you know you're not supposed to do just to try to speed things up (like building a bad link profile) and focus on understanding who your audience is so you can create content that's better than "not too spammy".  Remember, doing SEO stuff without a high regard to its correctness or its adherence to Google's webmaster guidelines gets a lot of newbies in trouble.

My mistake. I must have been up too late and started seeing double. I can't find any equity with what I saw then and what I see now.

That sounds like a good compromise solution to just show the main pages reducing the links substantially whilst maintaining an effective customer experience Thanks Oli Ash

Rankings are a lot less stable than they used to be, so I think those days of cleanly seeing differences across data centers are pretty much gone. This is something I deal with a lot in the MozCast project, and today's ranking, even across short time periods on a single data center are pretty volatile, especially for keywords with a news/QDF component. I wrote a bit about it a while back: http://moz.com/blog/a-week-in-the-life-of-3-keywords Sometimes, different data centers will show things like features that are in testing and they may have regional differences for locally sensitive queries, but the index itself seems to propagate pretty quickly these days.

Lots of people say that you should target low competition keywords because the competition there is less.   In a general way that is true. However, I have found that it is a mistake to fear your competition and instead of targeting third- and fourth-class keywords go ahead and attack volume.  Why? Because where there is volume there is usually a lot of search and where there is a lot of search there is usually money to be made.... and if you attack with unique content you will automatically get your site in position for a lot of low-volume long-tail keywords that are easy to rank for. So in my opinion, it is a mistake to target something that nobody is searching for... I mean that is a fantastic way to waste a lot of time.