Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello fellow mozrs!
Been working on a few Property (Real Estate for our American friends)  websites recently and and two questions that constantly come up as we spec the site are:

1. What schema (schema.org) should the website use (throughout all pages as well as individual pages). Did anyone found that schema actually helped with their ranking/CTR?
2. Whilst setting up the sitemaps (usually Yaost is our preferred plugin for the job), what page would you EXCLUDE from the site map?

Looking forward to some interesting comments.
Dan.

Hi guys,

it seems that now days it is almost impossible to achieve 0 (Zero) Errors when testing a site via (The W3C Markup Validation Service - https://validator.w3.org). With analytic codes, pixels and all kind of tracking and social media scripts gunning it seems to be an unachievable task.

My questions to you fellow SEO'rs out there are 2:

1. How important and to what degree of effort do you go when you technically review a site and make the decision as to what needs to be fixed and what you shouldn't bother with.

2. How do you argue your corner when explaining to your clients that its impossible to active 100% validation.

*As a note i will say that i mostly refer to Wordpress driven sites.

would love ot hear your take.

Daniel.

Brilliant question. Its a shame we only got two replies. We are at the same situation trying to decide which tool to go with.

We did a month with Searchmetrics (fully paid - no trial version or anything). When you purchase the basic account ($69) it is really basic which many features removed. The next level up is for $2000! (yes you read it right), so unless you are a large company its out of the question. If that's not enough, the Searchmetrics support sucks! and there is hardly any supporting videos and tutorials on the other hand, they have just lunched a "Mobile" position tracker which shows you Mobile SERP results alongside the Desktop results, this is something (and please correct me if i'm wrong) i haven't seen anywhere yet. That said, we were able to get some proper data about competitors and their viability and rankings.

SEMRUSH on the other hand seems to be much more engaging with their customers (paying  customers and the community). Their pricing start at $69.95, $149.95 and $549.95 and from data point view i cant really see any downside with the exception of the nice mobile SERP feature that Searchmetrics have.

I would love to see what other experienced companies has to say about those two competitors.

Dan.

Hi Monica,
Although i appricate your comment and although it was Staff Endorsed here on Moz i think it was a very general answer that doesn't touch the core of my question.

and i will explain, whilst i agree with you 100% regarding the fact that one should add Schema markups to the things that are important on your site it didn't answer the dipper question of combining the front end and back end when it comes to Schema. In other words, by defining schema for sidebards, top menus, footer etc. (all of which which are only visible to search engines bots on a code level) are we helping our SEO efforts? is Google going to award us for taking the time and specifying schema throughout elements that are not your usual suspects (Review, Ratings, Products etc.)?

I hope i get my point/question across, as we both share the same principles it is not clear from your comment what level of technical code level schema should be implemented.

Dan.

Hey everyone,
As you all probably has seen Google has changed their structure testing tool and alongside that has also changed what is considered as valid and not valid.

I have been struggling with this question for quite a while now where opinions are really split.

**1. How important is Schema for SEO? **
2. How far should you go Schema'ing your website pages?

From the one hand i can see how it can be easier for a BOT to read a code that has proper "road signs" (our schemas markups), on the other hands, Google is already extremely clever is working out what is the header, sidebar or footer as well as review and or a blog posts (especially for those of us who use Wordpress.

Would love to know if someone has seen a "Like to Like" show case with schemas and/or have some factual information regarding what should or shouldn't be done when it comes ot Schema.

Dan.

x1aw

Hi guys,
When working with advanced modern websites it many times means that in order to achieve the look and feel we end up with pages that has almost 1000 lines of code or more. In some cases it is impossible to avoid it if we are to reach the Client's visual and technical specifications.

Say the page is 1000 lines of code, and our content only starts at line 450 onwards, will that have an impact from a Google crawlability, hence affect our SEO making it harder to rank?

Thoughts?

Dan.

Hi Tom, thanks for that.

Not sure where i read (or heard) a great metaphor exactly about that. Specifically speaking of hosting and treating your hosting company and server as the "Neighbourhood" of which your website resides in.

I'm confident that Google is cleaver in assessing your "Neighbourhood". Now, lets say that Google is the Police in our case, when the police is called out to visit a bad neighbourhood its already have pre-conceptions when it arrives (assuming high crime rate etc.) and it will be much harder for a resident in the "bad neighbourhood"  to argue he is innocent (im not taking sides, but simply say it as it is).

So, based on the above analogy if you host your website in a bad neighbourhood rather than a gated high end community (i.e. Dedicated server on a reputable host) there is a good chance you will also be treated more preferably by the "police".

Well, that's my take anyhow, and i strongly believe it has an impact (as small as it might be).

Dan.

Well pointed Thomas. This is a thing of the past with Genesis if you ensure to use Yoast. Generally speak Yoast and Genesis works extremely well together.

I will also note, although i cant prove it, that when Google crawl the code and notice Genesis frame work it is identifiable and i think adds value (same as noticing if a site is on a dedicated server or on a shared environment) which i believe give you (or deduct) brownie points for your ranking.

Dan.

Thanks Thomas,

This was very helpful. I would love to see a few more comments making a solid case for Genesis framework over the traditional way of themes.

Dan.

Hi everyone, i know this subject has been raised few times in the past, but i wanted to reach out to the community and find out what is your take on the advantages and disadvantage (if any) for using the Genesis Framework when building a new websites for Clients.

I know for fact that many developers are complaining that they find it harder to manage the Genesis Framework, which i do appreciate has a bit more of comparability issues when it comes to plugins and modifications, but i always looked at it as a positive rather then a negative.

My personal opinion is that Genesis framework is more of a stable Skeleton that is better read by Search Engine (from a technical SEO point view) and is harder for hackers to penetrate.

Would have love to hear the community experts opinion pros and cons.

Cheers.

Dan

In theory yes. Great quality content will pay off in the long run, people will find it and share it and some of them will convert but thats mainly down to your overal marketing mix.

There are many reasons you dont get traffic some of which i can think of right now;

1. Your content is not optimised for searches thus it is not ranking for anything
2. The content myth - Content is great for marketing but will not rank you for any commercial term (which is why white hat appraisal posts and Matt Cutt's worshippers never have examples of commercial terms ranking without links - cause they cant rank without links). You need to use it as a "sticky marketing" weapon rather a ranking/SEO for primary keywords weapon. People will find it, like it, bookmark it, come back for more, then when decide to buy a service they will remember you and you will be one of the people they get a quote from.
3. You have optimised your content but use wordpress with default settings which is an overoptimsied nightmare and need to amend some settings to make it rank higher.
4. you have a poor social media presence or not aware of other online properties where people will be looking for this kind of content. Posting it on your site is one thing, distributing it where people are looking for it, another.
5. you dont have rel=author set up.

Thats from the top of my head, I need more info to provide a more sufficient answer. In order to check the overoptimisation problem try and google the exact title of your post. If you are not in top 200 3 days after your initial post then you are over-optimised and you need to do more onpage work.

Hello adulter,

A small clarification here. As Ted said in general software link building techniques must be a no-no for anyone who is building his/her brand on-line. you need to follow the build-content root and stick to it and high quality links will come your way. If however you decide to submit links allow me to suggest you do this manually and not via a software.

Now in regards to seomaximus I will disagree with Ted to a slight extend as the web page you visited is showing as an example a "money web site". Money web sites are normally affiliate web sites, MNS (micro niche web sites) with 1000 searches per month and low competition or sites that are built with a purpose to rank for 2-3 months (for example a xmas shop), get some cash in and then get abandoned. This is their target audience, it is stated on their advert (for those who know about affiliate sites its pretty obvious) and it works really well. If your profile belongs to one of the categories I just mentioned then sure software will do the work. If you are going for a long building strategy as Ted already mentioned NO and STAY AWAY. You will get banned sooner or later and then all your efforts will be abandoned.

When it comes to online marketing people think it must be cheap due to internet's free nature. This is a mistake and a no no. you get what you pay for, same with offline marketing. The more you spend the bigger audience you reach, the more results you bring etc.

Hope this helps

Hello,

The answer to your question is No. Reconsideration request applies only to manual penalties and not algorithmic ones. What you need to do is to go clean/disavow your profile from most toxic links or links you acquired close to the date you got the penalty and wait for the next update or a Google algorithm refresh.

Hello Prime,

Do your business a good favor and do not sigh up for this directory. good thing your competitors are tbh as Google doesnt like directories and all these will be penalised soon. Even black hatters dont sign up to directories anymore, they go for high PR blog post pages. Even 3 years ago I wouldnt recommend this as it seems weak and spammy. Also the site might be PR1 but the listed pages are PR 0 thus no link juice at all and only troubles in your head.

Hope you find this answer helpful

As you already pointed out, every time you upload a disavow file it replaces the old one. That being said if your new file contains a bunch of new links only and not the links you included in your original file then Google will take into consideration the new file and ignore the first one.

If you want to keep the old file and add the new links you found then download the old file add the new links and re-upload. That is the best way to do it

Ofcourse if google has already taken into consideration the old file then it doesnt matter as the links are gone, but better to play safe.

Hello there,

These are forum links, 99,9% sure from article spinning as I am on a soft penalty case for a new client as we speak and came up with the exact same links. The first one in an online gaming community for world of warcraft, totally irrelevant with your product and I highly doubt organic as you mention. Same goes for the 3rd one.

In regards to the yahoo forum, even if it was placed there organically, it is a nofollow link (<a <span="" class="webkit-html-attribute-name">href</a><a <span="" class="webkit-html-attribute-name">="</a>http://www.visualwatermark.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.visualwatermark.com/ ) so whether they remove it or not it doesnt really matter as it passes 0 link juice.

Hope this helps!

edit: I do not want to panic you by saying I am on a "soft penalty" case. The reason for the penalty was site wide links and in particular one domain pointing to one single page 250,000 times and not the links mentioned above. I see only good in removing these links.

Hello,

Firstly there is no "hummingbird" penalty. It is not a penalty, you got de-ranked because you do not meet the quality standards of the new algorythm to rank or your content is not good enough to deserver a high SERP. From what you explained, you are running microniche sites which depend on EMD...very well known story...1000 searches a month, low competitive keyword, £100 CPC minimum etc...correct?

You then bought bulk services on PR, comments, social signals etc from warrior forum, fivver, BHW etc and you ranked due to low competitiveness and EMD mostly, well know that these kind of sites can rank with few blog comment spamming even if they are no-follow links. You got hit because other web sites with similar content/niche have better content than you and probably people stay on their site more. Even if you remove the links you wont jump up on SERPS because you lack the content to do so and you also lack good quality links which you wont get by running an MNS.

The only way to get your ranks back is to focus on writing good content, have a top notch on page optimisation and forget link building for a while. Clean your profile with disavow that's ok but make sure you know what you are doing because you might kill "good" links (if you have any).

Hope this helps

Hello,

I had a quick look at your link profile and it seems that you had a big spike in link building activity from 17 of July up to 24th of August (mostly from directory submission). Then it goes quiet again which looks unnatural.  You have used contextual anchor texts around "software development" keyword which covers pretty much 80% of your profile making your web site vulnerable to Penguin and my guess is that you got hit by the latest refresh/update.

I would suggest you make your anchor texts look more natural and remove all those directory links you got between july and august by using the disavow tool. Then monitor if you move up to SERPS and report back.

Remember that you might not move immediate results, sometimes the algorithm needs to refresh before you see any noticeable changes.

Jesse I think personal appearance is totally irrelevant with someone's skills in an area and I do not think that can be much of an argument (or appropriate).

In regards now to what the article says as opposed to the MoZ one I can see both points. Rand goes by the book (his tweet reply confirms this) and i agree with 99,9% of everything he mentions, it is definitely what SEOs should be doing these days. But that does not cancel million cases where there is simply not a reason for someone to rank. I mean NONE - Keyword stuffing, cloacking, 10,000 site wide links pointin in 1 page for 1 anchor text, sites with a non-content default wordpress theme ranking on page one due EMD, domain 301 redirects with affiliate directories to other domains for link juice passing etc etc and all this in 2013. And yes I know google will ban them/penalise them one day, someday.

I think that what the blogger tried to say was that the abovementioned techniques unfortunately bring results too and some times faster or easier with what Google dictate us to do. Either we like it or not black hat SEO works in many cases, especially if you are working on low competitive/profitable keywords.

Hello Ionut,

Since they are subscription profiles (and thus there isnt a link value concern) a 302 might be a better option at start.

The way I would do it is set a rule of permanent user expiration and say once someone does not renew for lets say 6 months or 1 year then I make a permanent 301, until then I leave it as a 302. The length of the month may vary but that's something your analytics will tell you.