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Hi Amelia, The agency had their own platform, so there isn't an AdWords account to take ownership of, per se. Thanks again! Erik

Could you let us know what the error message is, or what you're seeing, or attach a screenshot? Thanks!

Thanks Matt, that's really useful

That sounds like an interesting suggestion and definitely something to look into, thank you. Sadly, the developer for the site is on holiday until next Monday, so I won't be to get an answer until next week. Theoretically, if the changes were not possible, would it be better to have one single meta description on the home page and none across the rest of the site? Or would it be better to leave the site as it is?

Unfortunately, Moz Analytics/PRO don't process rel=prev/next properly at this time, so we may give false alarms on those pages, even if the tags are properly implemented. It can be tricky, but Google recommends a combination of rel=canonical and rel=prev/next. Use the canonical tag to keep sorts from getting indexed, and then use rel=prev/next for the pagination itself. Your 3rd example (page=2...) should rel=prev/next to the URLs before and after it but then canonical to the page=2 variation with no sort parameter. It can get complicated fast, unfortunately, but typically rel=canonical can be implemented in the template. So, once you've got it figured out, it'll work for the entire site.

Samuele- Sorry to hear that the server was down for five days.  That's not a lot of fun to deal with. Here's a great link to an interview by Matt Cutts about Website downtime and how it affects Google rankings: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2281151/Matt-Cutts-Short-Website-Downtime-Wont-Hurt-Your-Search-Rankings Basically, if the server is down for a day, you're fine.  More downtime than that, though, and Google sees this as a signal that the user experience might not be amazing. My recommendations to prevent this from happening again: 1. Back up each site to at least two locations.  In the case that a server like this goes down, you can migrate the sites to a different host quickly.  Make sure you have the database + the site contents backed up.  I recommend backing up locally to a hard drive, as well as another cloud-based site, too.  For a critical site, it may be worth having a "hot" backup site that can be pushed live via DNS quickly and easily.  For a site with 100+ sites on it, make sure you have a list of all of the sites on the server, and order them in importance of what is most critical to work on first. 2. Make sure that the DNS doesn't route through the server with 100+ sites on it.  Use the DNS controls at your domain name registrar, instead.  That way you can quickly re-route the DNS to go to a new hosting platform, and not have to wait for the server to come back up. 3. Consider moving to a different hosting platform that has more uptime / reliability.  100+ sites on a server is a lot of eggs in a basket.  (Note: I've done something similar in the past, and it's not worth it to have all of those sites sitting together on a shared server.  Better to break them up and put them on several different servers if possible.) Finally, once the site is back up, I'd try to bolster the importance of the site with additional relevant content, inbound links, social media, etc.  I might suggest a permission-based email campaign to past customers to bring them back, and let them know about the site outage. Hope this helps... -- Jeff

Hi Dave, Yes you can test conversion tracking...its the first thing I do when launching a new campaign.  You will need to go to Google.com, search for a keyword, click your text ad, and perform an actual conversion on your site.  I recommend performing this test for each individual conversion page on your site. Use a different keyword for each conversion page. This way you can verify each thank you/conversion page has the AdWords conversion tracking code installed correctly.  Wait until tomorrow (There is a 12-24 hour delay in AdWords conversion reporting), and verify AdWords and Analytics are reporting each conversion was tracked. Hope this helps Branden

Hi Michael, First, I need to clarify something. If you have .es, .it. de, those are not language domains, they are ccTLDs, targeted at different countries. .es is for Spain based sites, not Spanish language sites. If your translations are on ccTLDs, you are sending the wrong signals to Google and Bing. A ccTLD is always geo-targeted to that country and for some of these domains, the language you mean to target is actually much larger than that country. For instance, only half of the world's French speakers live in France. If you are just meaning to translate your content, I'd suggest moving that to your main domain and putting them in subfolders, so www.domain.com/es www.domain.com/it (for italian, not Italy). Once that is all settled, linking to the others in the footer is not hurting your link equity, but it isn't necessary either. For translated content, you should be utilizing HREFLANG and the Meta Content Language tag (for Bing) to note to the search engines what pages are translations. Then you simply need to give users a way to change the language either at the top of the page (preferred) or the footer. If you mean to geo-target (developing different sites to target different countries), then my answers change completely, let me know if that's what you are trying to do here rather than just translate. If you're not sure what to do, check out this tool I made to help you pick the best international strategy. http://www.katemorris.com/issg

First, I have to second Marie - the easiest way right now to detect a Penguin drop is to look at the publicly released update dates and compare them to your search traffic. Penguin often hits hard and fast - it's not usually subtle. One thing I think you have to be careful about is your definition of "quality" vs. Google's. For example, diversity matters to Google. If you guest blog on generally decent sites (non-spammy, for lack of a better word), but that's your only link-building tactic, you could still be in trouble. It's just not natural, in Google's eyes, and they're going to think you're only guest blogging to get links (which may be the truth). It's not that your posts are bad, but you're relying too much on one tactic to the point that it could look manipulative. I'm not saying this is what you're doing - just making a general observation (and one that affects a lot of people right now, IMO). At first glance (and, please note, link profile analysis can be tricky), I'm seeing a lot of keyword-loaded anchor text. It's a bit tricky, since you have an EMD (so your "brand" is keyword-based), but you may be pushing the variants of "banner(s)" too hard. Again, that can be a sign of artificial link building patterns. Frankly, you've also got some links that look outright spammy. Take this one, for example: http://www.constructionindustryscheme.org/ Your link is at the bottom (not even really in a footer) with no context or relevance to the page. This looks incredibly artificial.

Does anyone know the effect hreflang declaration has on GWT's reporting of duplicate titles and meta descriptions. For instance you may be targeting en-gb and en-us, the page content is different in terms of currencies, addresses, phone numbers, etc. but you do not see a reason to change the title or meta description. There might be cases where you want the same title and not want to add an arbitrary reference like the country name to make it different.

Hi there! It looks like your site has now been indexed. Martijn gave you some good advice. Did it help answer your question? If so, please mark it as a "good answer". Thanks! Christy

Egol, Thank you for your advice and for your commendation. I really appreciated that. We worked hard on it and it is a fun niche to be in and lots of active and involved cyclists who appreciate this kind of piece. I will edit the properties of the document. I hadn't thought about that.  Thanks very much!

Right! And there can be secondary effects.  If you are running surveys and people bounce back into the SERPs instead of answering the question, could that result in a ranking reduction because of poor engagement?  I have been running surveys and am cautiously watching my engagement and rankings.

Hi, you need to fix this by using the rel="canonical" in the Head section of pages so that where there are duplicates they all point to one of them as the original. You can see more information here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en In Joomla and other Content Management Systems, duplicate pages can sometimes be an issue because of the way search engine friendly URLs are created. With these systems you can generally find an extension / plugin to help resolve the issue. For Joomla there doesn't seems to be much on offer in their Extensions Directory, but you can see them here: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/seo-a-metadata/url-canonicalization- I hope that helps, Peter

Moeez, Internal linking with anchor text is fine but it should be done in a manner that assists the visitor, not in a manner that hits them over the head with spammy anchor text links all over every page.  When it's appropriate to link to another page because information on that page is helpful to the reader, it's worthwhile.  Keep in mind, anchor text can help a bit with relevance of the page being linked to but it will not be a super-strong signal, regardless of how it's implemented. Matt Cutts mentions that there isn't any penalty for having too many anchor text links from within your domain pointing to any given page.  You can also take this to mean that there's really no particular value being derived by having a bunch of anchor text links pointing to a page.  On closer inspection, you may find that there is some other reason that your competitor's page is ranking the way it is. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-internal-links-anchor-text-16864.html

Hi Joey, I would definitely keep that as the homepage. It looks much more appealing and interesting than the guides page! You should think on other ways to keep the visitors in your site, perhaps some little design changes that could help. I would start with the header, it is FAR too large. The main content is moved far away to the bottom. Although it is a responsive design, the header remains always too large. I have a 1920x1080 and I can barely see the main content, but look what happens with a smaller screen, you can't see anything but the header. gNUxeJo.png x5g7QhP.png

Hi Sebastian - unfortunately, I'm not sure there's much help I can give you on your question (I'll explain why below), but I did want to pop in to say that I'm worried about the goals you're attempting to achieve and how they conflict with what Google and its users are seeking from websites. The build + flip model of creating an exact match domain (which have been trending down in Google's results and no longer provide much benefit) along with the concept of hosting many sites and simply publishing articles without regard for the quality or the broader mission or the end-user's goals and experience in mind is dangerous. Years ago, those types of systems worked and today, they can still work ocassionally and temporarily, but given the amount of effort required, I'm certain you could find other ways to accomplish far greater financial returns and give the web something truly excellent - something Google wants to rank and people want to visit, rather than a gallery of article-heavy built-to-flip sites. The last point I'll add is that the links you might find to sites like these are not going to be high-quality, editorially given endorsements from trusted sources. They're far more likely to be the kind of links that get you into trouble. And, generally speaking, the Moz Q+A community doesn't focus on those and may not have great recommendations for how to acquire them. That said, we welcome all kinds, and I wish you luck whatever you choose.