Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you so much Jason.

What's your address - I want to send you a puppy or something.

Very much looking forward to executing all of this.

Thanks again

Is it really quality? I'm surprised that it costs so much

So my overall bounce rate is around 70% and the average time on page is around 2 minutes.

Obviously, this is no bueno, but I feel like I've been staring at my own website so long that I have trouble viewing it from a fresh perspective.

Are there any tools to I can use to diagnose the usability of my site?

Would the SEOMoz community mind taking a look a my site from a fresh perspective and giving me some pointers on how to improve those metrics?

Thanks!

homepage: http://www.cleanedison.com/

Most viewed pages:

http://www.cleanedison.com/courses/leed-green-associate

http://www.cleanedison.com/solar

http://www.cleanedison.com/courses/bpi-building-analyst

Phew, that's quite a relief.

Well okay, time to get back to work and stop freaking out.

Thanks Ian!

So SEOMoz says that I've consistently ranked #6 for a certain keyword. But when I search I'm no where to be found. I've done regular searches, incognito and some non-seomoz reports and all come up with nothing in Google. I noticed it a week or two ago, but didn't think it would continue.

This is no bueno. I wouldn't be surprised if I got penalized (luckily my homepage relatively well for similar keywords), an old seo consultant used very spammy tactics. I recently removed them, but not before I started to notice that I fell off the map.

Why would SEOMoz not recognize this, and continue to say I'm ranking well?

The keyword is bpi building analyst

the page is http://www.cleanedison.com/courses/bpi-building-analyst

Only for one set of my keywords.

But I fell from first page to off the map in one fell swoop.

Did this happen to anyone else? Should I be worried?

I get it, a truly authoritative source will not be able to control the exact anchor text that others link to it with. Google is trying to deliver the most authoritative source, so non-exact anchor text is more likely a good option for them.

This makes total sense and I have been varying the anchor text of my blog posts.

But this begs the question: How am I supposed to know I am increasing my rankings for the high volume key words in my industry, and not leaving it up to Google to decide which keywords are most important?

The product page is http://www.cleanedison.com/courses/bpi-building-analyst and the homepage is http://www.cleanedison.com/

I wouldn't say the homepage is "going" for the same keywords as the product page.

But like I said, the keywords "BPI Certification" and "BPI training" are the 2nd and 3rd (although distant) anchor texts for the homepage.

Thanks for the input.

Yeah, but the URLs haven't ranked anywhere close to the first page at the same time. It is one or the other, and when one is up there, the other falls off the map.

My product page had been solidly in the middle of the first page for months. Now, it is being replaced by my homepage for the same keywords.

I don't understand why this is happening and I'm worried about it, particularly from a business stand-point (we offer a variety of products that appeal to completely different audiences)

In terms of SEO, Is this necessarily a problem? What can I do to ensure that Google recognizes that the content that those keywords are tied to is on the product page, not the homepage.

One thing I did notice is that the 2nd and 3rd most common anchor text for the links to my homepage are the two keywords in question (they are a distant 2nd and 3rd however).

If nothing else, is there a way I can get SeoMoz to recognize the homepage on its page rankings so that my heart doesn't drop once a week.

Thanks,

Yes, I have started developing some very strong relationships, so I have a good stream of my stuff being linked to from elsewhere and requests to have guest posts on mine (takes some pressure off, lol).

As far as the "credit" - One time I had an article re-posted on a super-authoritative blog and it got a ton of comments, likes, tweets, etc...

In the article was a link to my product page - which shot to the first page and has held steady at number 4 for over a month

So, even though another blog got the "credit" (if you type in the name of the article my blog is nowhere to be found)  - I got what I really wanted. In other words, even though I really enjoy doing research and writing good content, my main goal is to get the product pages to rank highly, not the blog.

So given that, does it matter which version of the article gets the "credit"?

Yes that definitely helps, thank you.

I think I may be putting too much emphasis on the power of the domain, and not enough on the power of the page itself.

I've been trying to get a bunch of other blogs of the same subject to re-post my articles, thereby adding to the number of linking root domains.

But you're saying that it may be more worth my time to focus getting any one of those (or even my own blog) to get a lot of shares, likes, tweets, etc... and build the authority of the linking page itself.

Makes sense

Say I write a great article about The Best Colleges at X

and in the article there is a keyword linking to www.mydomain.com/productX

my hunch is that it would actually be better for www.mydomain.com/productX if the article wasn't promoted to the colleges through www.mydomain.com/blog - instead it was promoted through www.yourdomain.com/blog

my thinking is that the authority of another site linking to /productX with a popular post is higher than my own domain linking to /productX with a popular post.

Am I right? Does it not matter? Am I completely wrong?

Thank you for your feedback Irving and Takeshi!  It's much appreciated.

To answer Irving's question, there's two main reasons we are thinking about using "productA.domain.com" rather than "domain.com/productA". 1) if it would help us rank better in SERPS, and 2) to improve the user experience.  Our hunch is that if users think they are dealing with a company that specializes in Product A, they will be more inclined to buy than if they realize that our company sells Products A, B, C, and D.

So far, we have been linkbuilding for each product separately rather than for the top-level domain as a whole.  For example, we will create content about Product A and get other sites that specialize in content about Product A to link back to "domain.com/productA".  We then repeat the process for Products B, C, etc.

So changing over to subdomains would not create more work for us from a linkbuilding perspective.  The main thing we are concerned about is, will this improve or hurt our rankings?  We only have 4 main product types, but they are all quite different from each other and targeted to different audiences.  From everything that I've read, domain authority and trust does pass from the main domain to subdomains if you only have a small number of them.

The company I work for offers a variety of very different products, that are sold to different audiences.

Right now (and for the past 4 years) all the products have been listed on one main website.

Over the years, we have accumulated over 200,000 links and rank relatively well in most of the product-specific keywords.

Still, for business purposes we really feel that having a unique site specific to each product would be more beneficial than having them all on one site.

What are the pros and cons of making a move to different subdomains from a main site.

(i.e. instead of www.cleanedison.com/solar we would set up a solar.cleanedison.com)

My blog http://www.cleanedison.com/blog/ doesn't seem to be indexed by Google even though my posts seem to get indexed within a day or so.

Is this not necessarily a bad thing? I feel like it would be nice to search "CleanEdison Blog" and get the homepage.

The robots say: name="robots" content="noodp,noydir,noarchive" />

Is there anything I can do?

P.S. My posts that get picked up by larger entities generally get ranked lower than the offshoot even though I have a rel="canonical" tag. Anything I can do there?

I'm sure this happens to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons.

My pages http://www.cleanedison.com/leed and http://www.cleanedison.com/courses/leed-green-associate suddenly dropped off the map over the past 2 weeks for the keyword "LEED Certification"

I tried to limit the number of times "LEED" was mentioned on the first URL (/leed) to try to combat an over-optimization penalty but I did not for the second (/leed-green-associate).

Both of them have fallen precipitously and are no where to be found on Google.

What can I do to troubleshoot this?

Is there anyway to guard against this in the future?

Hi,

So I spent time last week reducing the number of "LEED" mentions on the http://www.cleanedison.com/leed

But I got my keyword reports again today and the page has fallen out of the top 50 for "LEED Certification" - I can't even find it in Google searches anymore

Just two weeks ago both http://www.cleanedison.com/leed and http://www.cleanedison.com/courses/leed-green-associate were ranked 31 and 32 (not great, but still generating traffic)

What is going on?!?!

P.S. The link did show up in MajesticSEO, so that's good I guess

Thanks for your quick reply.

I see what you're saying, I had been doing that in order to fit in my main keywords such as LEED Certification, LEED Green Associate, LEED Exam Prep, but I didn't realize that those all have LEED in them.

Might I be running into the same problem with "Solar" on http://www.cleanedison.com/solar and with "BPI" on http://www.cleanedison.com/bpi-and-resnet ?

If so, how do I know which words are expected to be common and which I might be getting an over optimization penalty?

Also, would an over optimization penalty explain why the back links aren't showing up on majesticseo?

I've been doing link building by writing good content and getting other blogs to post my articles with keyword links embedded.

One example is:

Original article: http://www.cleanedison.com/blog/setting-the-stage-for-greenbuild-2012-1997

Re-published article: http://www.renewableenergyfocus.com/blog/2012/11/7/guest-blog-setting-the-stage-for-greenbuild-2012/683.aspx

(Keyword is LEED Certification - it goes to http://www.cleanedison.com/leed)

I have 2 questions:

Why isn't this backlink being found by majesticseo or open site explorer?

Why isn't my original article showing up a google search at all?

P.S. Overall, despite my best efforts, my keyword rankings have been falling recently, is there anything obvious that I'm doing wrong?