Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Gregory, Thanks for writing in. It would actually be really helpful if you could send this over to help@moz.com with screenshot examples of what you are seeing so we can investigate further and send it over to the correct engineers. I look forward to hearing from you there soon. Chiaryn

Hi, while I do not know why Yelp uses 303 but all that I can say is 303 does not pass the link juice and it is not recommended to be used in place of a 301 as 301 is the best way to pass on the link equity to the destination URL. Here you go for a small experiment that proves 303 redirection worthless. Hope this helps my friend. Best, Devanur Rafi

Hi Nick, If you can take the business owner through door number one, I agree that will be the very best choice. Good luck with the conversation with him.

Even if you get everything right when undertaking a re-design, you can't get away from the fact that some things have changed and your search performance is likely to impacted. It can take weeks or months for the site to regain the lost traffic. From the analytics screenshot, it looks like you've done a pretty good job. As Jeff mentioned, you do need to take into account seasonal traffic fluctuation as well as any other external activity. One site I manage has experienced a significant change in traffic since the end of British Summer Time. Can you compare you traffic with the same period last year. Can you see any similar fluctuation when you look at Google Trends for some of your keywords? Have your rankings changed? What keywords and what was the landing page for each keyword. How has the landing page changed in the re-design. The problem with aggregate/average analytics metrics is that they don't provide you with much of an insight into what's happening. Can you segment your non-paid search traffic, and your direct traffic and see if both segments are affected in a similar way. If your non-search traffic is also affected then it might suggest an external factor. Take a look at your landing pages for your search traffic and compare them to the previous higher traffic period. Are all pages similarly affected or are there significant differences on particular pages. If there are you can compare the content of these pages to the previous incarnation of the site and see if you can explain why there might have been a drop. Of course, I'm assuming that the main goal of the re-design wasn't to "get more visitors", but to get more leads or sales. You say that the bounce rate is much lower and the time on site is better. What about conversions? Again, segment your non-paid search traffic and compare the number of conversions and the conversion rate before and after the update. It's perfectly possible to have less traffic and improve your conversions if the traffic is more relevant and with the right commercial intent. Hope this help.

Hi Aaron If the website is new I would still encourage you to build a blog of articles on the site showing your expertise for the products the site is selling. Also share the articles in social media channels including Google+ by publishing snippets of each one (i.e. headline + intro) with a link through to read the full article on the website. Peter

Daniel, All of the tools I know about for checking outbound links only really tell you whether the link is working or not. They are designed to look for error codes so you can update your outbound links that go to 404 pages and such. There is a ScrapeBox plugin that will tell you how many links the page you're linking to has, which could give you a general idea of whether you're linking to a directory, links page, etc... but I'm not sure how helpful that will be to you. As Federico mentioned, you may check with the people at Link Research Tools to see if you can customize one of their products to get the job done, but I don't think it works that way out of the box. Good luck and if you find something please post here so we know about it too!

Do you suggest we keep the site navigation link to the blog in its current location or move it some place else in the footer or in the header? If they are proud of this blog and want people to read it then it should have a link that is slappin' the visitors' face. The bounce rate for the blog is over 81%. What is a reasonable goal for a bounce rate for a blog on a business website? What are some tactics to improve the bounce rate? The best way to reduce the bounce rate is to give the visitor something juicy to click. If you want people to read a second article then featuring the best posts that your visitors will want to see, in a way that visually stands out and mentally speaks to the visitor. I would get rid of the wordcloud and change the category names to something more meaningful.  For example: "Church"... I would make it "Church Accounting"..... "Payroll" would be "NonProfit Payroll".  In the content manager I would change the visible title tag for this to "Church Accounting Software" and "NonProfit Payroll Accounting and Software".... Right now your title tags are simply "church" and "payroll".  Add more detail to compete for better traffic. The blog also need some visual appeal.  I would change that tiny gray font to something larger, blue and clickable - put more space between the lines to make them more readable. Do you suggest including a call to action to sign up for a free trial on the blog home page and/or individual posts? Yes.  And, a sign-up for people who want to receive an email message when a new blog post is published. Do these guys get lots of questions about the software?  If they do then "tips" might be good subject matter for the blog. My response here is not an answer to your question.  It is a starting point for a possible brain  storming session with the client.

That's up to you. There's no guide that can tell you how many times to contact a Webmaster or how often. Just try with the available means: email (if any), social (if any), phone??. The important thing is to document your process, responses, and actions taken (link removed, wants to charge me to remove it, no response - disavowed, etc). The more you wait from the moment you start your analysis and the moment you request the reconsideration the worse it becomes. Sometimes, Google finds links that they were not part of the previous file you downloaded. Recommendation: once you are done with the assessment, do it again, but really fast and only with the new links (under WMT), then send your disavow (you can wait a few days now), ask for reconsideration. And don't feel bad if Google responds with a negatory with 2 new links that were never listed in previous exports... it happens almost every time.

Thanks for advice Paul - I've edited pages with poor backlink profiles out of redirect and 301'd the rest to relevant pages within the new website, and traffic has spiked up a bit. There were some very powerful links (national newspapers, etc) the new site was missing out on.

Hi Jen, thanks for the update. I'm very happy that you now have one less headache to deal with. Hooray! Christy

Yes, that should work.

I second what Michael is saying.  More content is better.  Your page has 346 words of content.  The top #1 result has 1,399 words of content. So, taking a look at your site vs. other sites... The other sites that rank ahead of you all have the keywords you are trying to rank at the beginning of the title tag.  Yours starts four words in. (see screenshot) The 1st ranked result has the keywords in the title tag, and in the page name (not directory) www.zeldadungeon.net/Zelda15-a-link-between-worlds-walkthrough.php Same thing for the 4th ranked result: www.linkshideaway.com/a-link-between-worlds-walkthrough/‎ Your page has 346 words of content; the top #1 ranked page has more than four times that amount of content at 1399. Sometimes Google will rank pages well that have short content. In this case, I think that Google's algorithm is determining that a site that has lots of content, graphics and information is somehow more useful to the end user. My recommendation... agreeing with Michael, above, is to beef up the amount of content on your page, and include a few more screenshots. I know that this is tricky for something that you are selling, when what you are selling is the content.  It's a balancing act. I have a page that I wrote for an extremely competitive term that ranks very well.  It has more than 12,000 words of content and 80+ screenshots.  Does everyone who lands on the page read all 12,000 words, or watch the 48 minute video?  No...  But it outranks other pages that are just a few words of content. link-between-worlds-screenshot-Google-results.jpg

Google updated their webmaster guidelines about a year ago to specifically frown on lists of keywords like this. See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358?hl=en

Hi Mark, No, not stupid at all. Integration of Google's products is definitely a work in progress that has left tons of people confused! I hope the TCs in the Google forum may have some guidance for you. Good luck, and if you get an answer, I'd appreciate you coming back to update this thread with what you've learned.