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Search for keywords like criminal defense lawyer detroit or criminal defense lawyer detroit mi and Google knowledge graph is highlighting one competitor. No maps results are shown. How have others dealt with this situation? I know others have noticed this too: http://www.webpronews.com/sometimes-googles-knowledge-graph-highlights-brands-for-generic-queries-2013-10

Actually, I agree with you. What you're describing are sites that look like the link has been deleted, but where the link actually still exists. My answer was regarding sites where the link actually has been deleted and doesn't exist.

Yes, I would be very surprised if Google wanted you to do anything with links that no longer exist.

No, I would not spend time on links/domains that no longer exist. (I've never heard of that being necessary.)

If you search for locksmith Phoenix, this Google+ page is ranked #3 in the local results: https://plus.google.com/117543374216451236579/about?hl=en

The phone number is a VOIP number, they don't appear to have many/any citations, no reviews, etc. They've listed the Yelp search results page as their website. Strange.

How are they ranking so well? Is Google ranking them well because it's associating them with Yelp.com?

Any thoughts?

I don't see anything that I would think would trigger that. Let me PM you the URL.

Thanks for the suggestions!

1. The homepage, category, and product pages have all lost traffic.

2. So far, I haven't found any noteworthy changes in content.

3. I've been wondering if this might be part of the issue.

4. I've reviewed Majestic link data, and only see a few deleted backlinks, so I'm thinking it's not a backlink issue.

Thanks for the suggestion. So far the only significant difference in optimization I've found has been that they added Schema.org markup.

Have a client (ecommerce site with 1,000+ pages) who recently switched to OpenCart from another cart. Their organic search traffic (from Google, Yahoo, and Bing) dropped roughly 40%. Unfortunately, we weren't involved with the site before, so we can only rely on the wayback machine to compare previous to present.

I've checked all the common causes of traffic drops and so far I mostly know what's probably not causing the issue. Any suggestions?

• Some URLs are the same and the rest 301 redirect (note that many of the pages were 404 until a couple weeks after the switch when the client implemented more 301 redirects)
• They've got an XML sitemap and are well-indexed.
• The traffic drops hit pretty much across the site, they are not specific to a few pages.
• The traffic drops are not specific to any one country or language.
• Traffic drops hit mobile, tablet, and desktop
• I've done a full site crawl, only 1 404 page and no other significant issues.
• Site crawl didn't find any pages blocked by nofollow, no index, robots.txt
• Canonical URLs are good
• Site has about 20K pages indexed
• They have some bad backlinks, but I don't think it's backlink-related because Google, Yahoo, and Bing have all dropped.
• I'm comparing on-page optimization for select pages before and after, and not finding a lot of differences.
• It does appear that they implemented Schema.org when they launched the new site.
• Page load speed is good

I feel there must be a pretty basic issue here for Google, Yahoo, and Bing to all drop off, but so far I haven't found it. What am I missing?

Thanks, it definitely seems that results vary greatly by keyword. I've noticed sometimes BuzzFeed is great and Yahoo Answers has junk...but in your case the results were the opposite. Thanks again for the feedback.

Thanks. Using negative keywords will work on some of the sources, but not others. I'll see if there is anything we can do to make it work better.

We haven't yet figured out a good way to integrate Google+ results.

We've created a (free) tool to help content marketers brainstorm ideas and topics for content pieces. Just enter your keyword, and see related content pieces from social media.

You can try the tool at http://www.rypmarketing.com/tools/topics/

Any ideas or suggestions to make this tool better?

So, I was reading Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Battle of the Labyrinth tonight, and found a description of a graffiti tag in the Labyrinth that says "MOZ RULZ". What do you think? Is one of the Mozzers a demigod who has explored and survived the Labyrinth?

(See attachment for book quote.)

F1WmT5r

Is it just me, or is it getting harder to sell SEO services?

• SEO costs more now and takes longer to achieve results
• There seem to be more good SEO agencies out there (gone are the days where the primary competition was offshore outsourcers and web design agencies)
• It seems that the number of agencies is growing faster than the number of companies buying services
• As online competition heats up, it takes more and more budget to really "win" in a market, but so few companies are willing to invest enough

Any others notice similar trends? What will the future look like?

I'm not an SEOmoz employee, but that sounds reasonable to me.

How important is it that you gain backlinks from websites in the same country you're targeting?

Scenario: You have a website targeting users in Japan. How important is it that backlinks to your website are from Japanese websites? Do you need a majority of links from Japanese websites to rank well, or will you do OK with 25% Japanese links and 75% links from other countries?

According to Majestic, sites for popular Japanese brands like tsutaya.co.jp and seiyu.co.jp get more links from US sites than from Japanese sites.

If the URLs you want sharing metrics for are in an RSS feed, you can use this tool: http://www.rypmarketing.com/tools/rss-social-analyzer.php

This isn't necessarily surprising. Penalties and negative ranking algorithms can be applied at a page level, a subdomain level, a root domain level, etc.

For example, HubPages used subdomains to help escape from a Panda slap.

Another example: Google placed a manual penalty on a single page of BBC's website.

I don't know how Google would view links to a 302 redirected domain. It would definitely be a bit unusual.

After reviewing your site, I can see that:

• Your site is well indexed by Google.
• Your site has very thin content.
• Your site is mostly duplicate content.

I think you'll need a content strategy to achieve and maintain significant rankings. You'll probably need to noindex your entire site except for a few pages that you add significant and valuable content to. (Unless you have the resources to write good content for your entire site.)