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Hi Matthew,

Sorry to hear about the lower rankings. This situation totally sucks, I know.

Unfortunately, this situation is more and more common with infographics. By all rights, you should rank higher for this term. A couple reasons why this might be happening:

1. Over-optimized anchor Text: As the other commenter pointed out, most of your incoming links are the phrase "hot tub yoga". We see this in Open Site Explorer as well - http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.swimuniversity.com%2Fblog%2Fhot-tub-yoga-infographic

In the past year, especially since the Penguin updates, we've seen Google target this type of anchor text. When you get the same, repeating exact match anchor text for a phrase, it often triggers a filter which prevents you from ranking. Many SEOs now advise to use generic or branded anchor text as your link, such as www.example.com, which most likely won't be penalized.

Other SEOs advocate rotating your anchor text. Mike King recently wrote a post about this. http://blog.iacquire.com/2013/01/03/using-embed-code-randomize-your-links-anchor-text/

My personal preference goes a step further: don't use an embed code or specify an anchor text. Let folks know they can repost your infographic - even give them the file to do so - then simply ask for attribution. This way your anchor text is randomized, and likely carries more value.

2. The page may be over-optimized in other ways. I see this often when the title tag, URL, headline and anchor text all match up, Google sees this as over-optimization and will knock you down in rankings.

It's too late to change the URL (unless you want to do a rediret) But you can back off on the title.

3. Aside from the infographic, there's very little text on the page. And, of course, the words on the infographic are all an image. Adding a couple hundred words of unique text at the top, then adding an HTML text only version at the bottom could help this page to rank.

There's still a chance to turn this page around. New links (not optimized) may reverse a Penguin-like penalty, and you can add more content and alter the meta data of the page (not too much!)

Hope this helps. Best of luck!

Hi Joel,

Great question. In general, Bing is similar to Google in it's ranking factors, but there are a few differences. For most webmasters, they are similar enough that best practices for one will generally produce favorable results with the other, but it's not a one to one relationship.

For example

• Creating High Quality Content
• Relevant, editorial backlinks
• Strong Social Signals

...all help improve your ranking with both engines.

Like GIGS20 mentioned, domain age seems to be a bigger factor in Bing's algorythm. It often takes longer for sites to rank on Bing than Google, all other factors being equal.

For what it's worth, Tim Grice (aka SEOwizz) notes that Bing seems to prefer links from pages that contain keywords in the title tag. You can read his analysis here: http://www.seowizz.net/2009/06/bing-seo-how-does-it-differ-to-google.html

As far as Bing is concerned, I'd make sure you're following best practices, like making sure you've registered with Webmaster Tools and making sure your site is indexed, etc. Then work on making your site the best it can be in the eyes of all search engines and you'll be just fine.

Hi Frederik,

Domain Authority is highly correlated with both mozRank and mozTrust, and includes factors from both of these metrics into the final Domain Authority score. Most of the time, a site with both superior Domain MozRank and superior MozTrust will also have a higher Domain Authority, but not all the time.

In this instance, I think we are seeing an edge case where Linkscape was reporting funny numbers. In the time since you posted your original question, not only Linkscape has been updated but the way Domain Authority metrics has also been updated for the first time in a couple years. The old Linkscape calculations were accidently including certain types of binary and junk files. If Duft og Natur had a large number of these types of files included in the Index, it could have certainly thrown the numbers off.

The end result is more accuracy today.

In fact, looks like Netspiren now scores a DA of 45, whereas Duft og Natur scores a 40. Nice!

If you're willing to do a little experimentation, all of these are good ideas. Best of luck.

Hi Stefan,

If Google is finding those https pages, instead of a noindex, nofollow tag, I'd try on of the following:

• Redirect https pages to http via 301s (preferred)
• Add a canonical tag pointing to the http version (as Malcolm's suggested)

By using these methods, you have the best chance of preserving your rankings for any of the https that appear in the SERPS, and you also preserve any link equity that is flowing through them. If Google is finding https pages of your site, then there is the possibility that some link juice is currently flowing through them.

This also solves the problem of any visitors accidentally landing on https that you don't want to be there. Although in reality, there is nothing wrong with this. Today, entire sites are https and rank quite well.

It can take a long, long time for Google to remove URLs from their results. Before you can request removal, the URL either has to return a 404 or a 410 status code, or be blocked by robots.txt. Since neither of these are a good option for you, I'd stick with the 301 or the canonical solution.

Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi There,

SEOmoz flags your content as duplicate if finds 95% HTML similarity. You can use an online tool to compare pages yourself. I like this one:

http://www.duplicatecontent.net/

Google obviously uses a more sophisticated method than Moz, but it's still a good warning because pages without much unique content - even if they aren't true duplicates - often have a difficult time ranking for their targeted keywords.

In general, it good to have different title tags for each page of content. This most important at the beginning of the title tag. You raised the suggestion of using the main subject of each magazine - which sounds like an excellent idea to me!

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

SEOmoz provides an API of it's Linkscape data that other companies, even individuals can use for their own purposes. Oftentimes companies buy this data and use it in their own reports. Sometimes they use all of the data, sometimes just a portion of it.

Unfortunately, there's no good way for me to tell how Link Diagnosis uses the SEOmoz data. To save money and resources, some companies "cache" the data - which works fine as long as they update the cache regularly. I'm not saying this to disparage Link Diagnosis, I simply don't know enough about them.

That said, you can be assured that Open Site Explorer always has the latest, freshest and most accurate OSE data. Every time you use OSE, fresh data is served with no long-term caching, so it proves itself a very reliable tool for webmasters.

Hi Anton,

Great question! Folks get really caught up in the proper way to use H1 tags and there's a lot of misinformation and rumors out there.

In the old days SEOs discovered that there was a correlation between words in the H1 tag and rankings, and so it became best practice to load all of your keywords there.

As time drew on and Google became more sophisticated, new research by SEOmoz and others discovered that there really wasn't a statistical significance to adding keywords specifically to the H1 tag - in fact the simple use of keywords in a large font towards the beginning of the document worked just as well.

So the best thing you can do for an H1 is the way it was intended - use it as the unique title of the document.

I don't see a problem if this means it's placed after the h2, but I would be wary of placing your most important content further down the page. Google seems to discourage important content pushed too far down the page, but sometimes there's legitimate reasons to place your CTA in a prominent place.

Just make sure your readers can easily find your important content - especially true if you're placing a CTA on every page!

Hi Michelle,

In addition to what Alan said, I might take a couple of more actions on this page. Since it sounds like you're a beginner, don't worry if you don't understand all this stuff, but I wanted to include it for anyone else reading this question.

I've also tried to include links to relevant sources where you can learn about each topic addressed.

1. Yes, add the canonical. This basically tells search engines that even those these pages all have different URL addresses, they are meant to be the same page.

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

2. The "numbers at the end" are called URL parameters, and there is a setting in Google Webmaster Tools that you can use to tell them to ignore parameter settings. This is advanced stuff, and Google does a pretty good job these days of figuring this stuff out on their own, so it's best not to adjust these settings unless you're comfortable doing so.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687

3. Honestly, there's no reason for this page to appear in search results, or waste search engine resources crawling the page. So, if possible, I'd add a meta robots "NO INDEX, FOLLOW" tag to the head element of the HTML.

http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html

4. Additionally, I'd slap a nofollow on any links pointing these pages, and/or block crawling of this page via robots.txt, because there is no reason to waste your search engine crawl allowance on these pages.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569

5. And finally, I think it's perfectly legitimate to block these thowaway pages using robots.txt. Alan has good point about link juice - it's usually best not to block pages using robots.txt, but in this particular case I think it would be fine.

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt

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Honestly, addressing all of these issues in this particular case probably won't make a huge impact on your SEO. But as you can see, there are multiple ways of dealing with the problem that touch on many of the fundamental techniques of Search Engine Optimization.

Finally, to answer your question in a straitforward answer, to dissallow this directory in robots.txt, your file would look something like this.

User-agent: *
Disallow: *mailto/

Which will block anything in the /mailto/ directory.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Micheal,

Sorry to hear about your Domain Authority dropping. But this isn't always as bad as it appears. First thing is to take a deep breath. Often times these things happen for perfectly innocent reasons, and often have no relation to your website in the real world.

The important questions are: Has your traffic dropped? How about a drop in rankings? This could indicated you've truly lost a good amount of your backlink profile, and might warrant further action.

Linkscape, and Open Site Explorer, are based on link metrics, so on-page factors like duplicate content generally don't make much of an impact. If your Domain Authority dropped it could mean a few things:

1. Domain Authority is a relative metric calculated fresh with each new index, meaning you shouldn't compare the score from one index to another. Instead, you should compare your score to your competitors and look for relative movement. That said, a drop from 41 to 29 is usually a sign of something bigger.

2. Mozscape and Open Site Explorer are updated about every 4 weeks. The metrics are entirely link-based, so downtime of your server won't effect the numbers.

Because we use a new index every few weeks, there's a natural fluctuation in the number of links we find. There are literally billions and billions of links on the web we have to crawl every month, calculate metrics for each one, and then package them into an index that makes sense.

Sometimes links will disappear or re-appear in the index. This is natural and usually minor, although a large jump or decrease in your Domain Authority can be scary - it doesn't mean your traffic or rankings will change. Mozscape may have trouble finding links on pages without a lot of links pointing to them, or links hidden under layers of navigation. For more, see this document:

http://www.seomoz.org/help/open-s...

3. Finally, it's possible you actually lost a portion of you backlink profile. Are you missing any important links that you are aware of? It's estimated that 80% of the web vanishes every year. If this is the case, you might want to use Google Analytics to find who was sending you traffic over the past couple of years, and verify those links are still around today. If you find links missing, perhaps you can take action, or be proactive in gaining new links.

Hope this information helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

There are some strange outlier instances, but in this case a domain that links to itself counts as a linking domain. (since it's entirely possible to have a domain not link to itself, we have to count it when it does.)

So, a domain that links only to itself, with no other links, would have 1 linking root domain and 0 external links.

It's generally best practice to link in a way that's best for the user. As Nigel noted, it's common to have more than one link to the same page - especially if one is a navigation link. There's nothing wrong with this, but keep in mind that Google puts more weight on the first link to a page than second or third links.

Instead of stopping link-juice to your Contact page, how about making sure that link juice flows back to your most important pages? You could easily link to top resources on your site that your audience may be looking for, and this could benefit both your users and how Google views your site. (nofollow link sculpting was a practice popular a few years back, but it's not really used anymore by most SEOs)

Since you're leaning on-page SEO, here's a video Rand did you might like:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/getting-onpage-seo-right-in-2012-and-beyond-whiteboard-friday

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your website.

Interesting question. Google seems to be crawling and caching the pages in question:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.kaufleuten.ch/event/klavierkabarett-sebastian-kraemer/

One of the possible problems I see is that the link element <a>is essentially an empty class which contains a background image comprising a button.</a>

<a></a>

<a></a>

I can't prove the following, but my gut tells me if you had to rank the "weight" of value that different types of links passed, it would look something like:

• HTML text links
• Image Links with Alt Text
• Image Links without Alt text
• CSS links that enclose neither image or text.

If it were me, I would turn those into actual text or image links, or at a bare minimum add a "title" element. (the last one is a superstitious long shot - the title element passes little or no value, but you never know)

As I interpret Google's language, this doesn't qualify as a "sneaky javascript redirect" but it's their opinion that counts, not mine.

It doesn't seem Google is indexing your AJAX pages, but there are some known workarounds to this.

If you really want the individual event pages to rank on thier own right, I would consider getting rid of the AJAX loads altogether. Right now, you seems to be walking a middle road with both types of content. By duplicating your pages through scripting like this, you risk sending mixed messages.

Hope this gives you some ideas!

Hi Bayan,

Sorry to hear your search engine traffic has dropped.

It might be helpful if you posted the section of the .htaccess file in question.

Here's some things I would double check:

1. Does the .htaccess file serve a 301 response code for the redirect? (probably, but worth double checking)  What I might try is create a file of all your OLD urls and upload them into a crawler like Screaming Frog and test them all out to see if they both redirect to the proper URL and with the correct response code.

2. Did you redirect the 2000 pages to unique URLs, or did you redirect them to a single url (or handful or urls)? If you consolidated your URLs to only a handful, this could effect your rankings.

3. Did the content and other HTML elements stay the same during the redirect? For example, did the title tags stay the same or reasonable close to the original? Big differences could cause the URLs to lose relevance and thus rankings.

4. Less crawl errors = good. I would check the Index Status in Google Webmaster to see if the number of pages discovered/indexed matches up well with the number of URLs on your site.

5. Proper sitemaps submitted? Oftentimes when you change your URL structure it's good to submit 2 sitemaps - one listing all your old URLs and another for the new. This way, search engines will attempt to crawl the old URLs and "process" the redirect. Probably not an issue for you since the change was 6 months ago, however.

6. Finally, I'd keep my eyes open for any other causes that may have caused the drop in traffic, i.e. Algorythm Updates, Site Issues, Backlinks and so on.

That's all I can think of, but there may be more. Let us know if you find anything!

The only way that SEOmoz will crawl your old URLs is if that is what your web servers is delivering to the SEOmoz crawlers. In this case, you might want to make sure all your redirect are in place.

I did a quick check of the URL listed in your public profile using the tool URI valet, and found at least 4 redirects from the homepage, including a 302, which passes no link juice. This is definitely something you want to look into.

Generally the SEOmoz robots will crawl your site once a week, so 99% of the time you will see new infomation contained in your campaign within 7-10 day. If you suspect an error, be sure to contact the help team (help@seomoz.org)

Also, here's my favorite article on site migration. Although you didn't migrate a complete site, many of the principals still apply.

https://seogadget.co.uk/surviving-seo-site-migration/

Best of luck with your SEO!

Hmmm... This is a hard one. (Oh man, did not mean to make the intentional sex referrence)

Yes, Google has made changes in it's algorithm in the past year that makes porn harder to search for on the Internet. These changes don't filter the porn per se - except when "Safe search" is set to on - but it does mean that you must be much more specific in your search queries to find what you are looking for. For example, the query "boobs" generally returns almost no porn in Google, but the query "boobs porn" will.

If I were building an algorythm to separate porn sites from non, a large amount of XXX in the incoming anchor text, or in the URL, would probably trigger it.

Oh the other hand, I'm inclined to agree with George - seems like there's something more going on here. The backlink profile isn't terrible.... but there's definitely a footprint of comment spam in there. I won't link directly, but some of the suspect, off-topic links I found include:

http://www.takarat.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=750&page=3
http://www.omyogapages.com/forum/showthread.php?t=43&page=7
http://www.atthepicketfence.com/2011/09/behind-blog-with-savvy-southern-style.html
http://www.marypoppins-homesweethome.com/2011/07/what-is-it-with-us-girls-and-ikea.html

These are pretty terrible   It's possible that there's 100's or 1000's more we're not seeing, and these are causing either a manual or algorithmic penalty.

My advice:

1. Check with Google Webmaster Tools for any messages - especially unnatural link warnings.

2. File a reconsideration request, even if you don't have any messages in GWT. Explain your concerns. Matt Cutts, the head of the Webspam team, helped write the original adult filter algorithms. He might take a special interest if you can get it to his attention.

   But mostly, what you're looking for is verification, or not, of a penalty.

3. You may need to clean up the links. Do your best to remove any suspect links. Use the disavow tool as a last resort.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

I think what your asking, at a deeper level, if the really crappy SEO on site A can effect site B, through some form of administrative relationship. Is this correct? If there is a lot of questionable linking between the sites, you can see some negative effects. (if there is no linking relationship between the sites, then the answer is almost always no)

I agree with Alan completely that changing servers, IP address and all that doesn't effect the issue that those links still point to your website. Changing the host or other administrative associations of any of these sites likely would have zero impact on any penalties.

First, you want to determine if site A really is the problem. Is it Panda? Is it Penguin? Make sure to match up the dates of your traffic fluctuation with historical algorythm changes. http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

We seen a lot of site-wide cross linking, with over-optimized anchor text, as a key root of a lot of recent Penguin penalties.

All of these penalties have a lot of factors that could be the cause, so I'd make sure to look everywhere, including the links between the sites.