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These are the ones I recommend:

1. Moz: https://www.youtube.com/user/MozHQ
2. Brian Dean: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx7J37QuXsGL7QG6SMIpqKg
3. Ahrefs: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWquNQV8Y0_defMKnGKrFOQ

My only response would be this. Sometimes it can work especially in the short run, but is often penalized. I would wait until the next penguin update comes out and take a look at the competitors site again. Again, not linking site wide from the footer is not a hard-and-fast rule but more of a general best practice.

The problem is that these are not editorial links per se. As such they are at constant risk are being devalued or penalized by Google.

You can roll the dice and sometimes see a short-term victory. But more often than not you risk getting burned.

Great question! We do often see a positive correlation between the number of followed outbound links and higher rankings (though I'm not sure we've scientifically measured this recently). Anecdotally, we hear this often as well. Most famously when the NYTimes made external links "followed" which was followed by an increase in traffic/rankings.

It's an interesting perspective. Looking at the pages+links, they all look trustworthy and normally I wouldn't see a reason to nofollow them, especially since they are all editorially controlled by you and your team.

Linking equity is a concern, but I honestly doubt you're saving anything by making them nofollow, especially since Google updated how they handle PageRank sculpting back in 2009.

Not that there aren't legitimate ways to preserve and flow link equity (such as including internal links withing the main body of text instead of sidebar areas/navigation) but in this case I think leaving the links follow won't hurt at all.

Hi Amelia,

Great question. It doesn't mean your site is spammy, it simply sounds like your link profile likely looks like a lot of sites we see that do happen to be spammy.

My guess is that in order to rank better, you may want to work on increasing your visibility by attracting more external links to your site. Does that sound reasonable? (Additionally, this would eliminate most of the spam flags)

It's a big task, but a few resources that may help:

• https://moz.com/blog/category/link-building
• https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building
• http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

Hope that helps!

The study was looking at the correlation between the amount of HTML and higher Google rankings. Although I don't believe it's an actual ranking factor, we typically find a small but positive correlation with longer content pieces. The simple explanation being that longer content has more "stuff" to rank for, and there's a corresponding correlation to longer content and links earned, which also helps with rankings.

Interesting note about iframes. Google typically attempts to associate the content of an iframe with the originating/hosting site. How this plays into how Google interperets the "link" from this site - I have no idea, but I doubt it's very harmful.

There are a few possible reasons Google might adjust rankings after seeing a change in your title and meta descriptions. Among them: (keep in mind these are only possibilities)

1. The algorithm determines that the page is less relevant to the target query keywords

2. The title change deviates from earlier anchor text pointing at the page, meaning the page might not be as relevant to the query

3. Over-optimization

4. After changing your title+description, you experience a lower CTR in search results. In theory this could lower your rankings. But because you describe the old title/description still showing in SERPS, this is less likely

5. The drop in rankings is temporary, or is unrelated to any changes you made.

If Google is still showing the old title/description, #5 is a strong possibility. You may want to check Google's cache of the page to see if it's picking up on the changes. Depending on the site this can take anywhere from a few hours to several weeks.

If nothing else, you can always change the title/description back to the original version and test what happens.

We observe only a small correlation between HTTPS sites and higher rankings (like 0.04) - so there's very little apparent pure SEO benefit. It really seems to be the "tie-breaker" Google claims, though this difference may increase in the future.

Hi Jason,

I've been involved with a number of migrations (including this site, moz.com) and in my own experience I've seen anywhere from zero traffic change to a loss in the range of 8-9%.

Google says that in theory, you shouldn't lose any traffic, and several large publishers I've spoken with can attest to this.

In practice, HTTPS migrations can be complex, and with more moving parts the potential to do things less than perfectly can escalate. If you mess up your 301s or create confusing redirects, the potential for reduced traffic is real. My general advice is don't let the migration to HTTPS scare you, but proceed with caution. This post may help: https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

There's a couple of things that can add concrete SEO benefit when adding video to your site:

**1. Video Schema: **This can tell search engines what the video is about and add a ton of relevant information. https://developers.google.com/webmasters/videosearch/schema

2. Video Sitemaps: You can additionally provide some of the schema information here. But at this this can help get your videos indexed https://developers.google.com/webmasters/videosearch/sitemaps

3. Transcriptions: You can see how we do this on Moz with our Whiteboard Friday series. Basically it combines the best of both Video and blog post formats.

So the benefit is 2-fold. When implemented properly, a video can add contextually relevant information for SEO purposes (although "simply adding a video" likely isn't enough. And secondly, the increased user engagement, if/when successful, can add an important boost.

Hope that answers your question. Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi there,

I see what you're trying to do, and I think I understand it. You're attempting to conserve your link equity and flow it only to the most important pages, or what we use to call "pagerank sculpting."

The good news is you don't really need to worry about it. These days, adding nofollow to your links doesn't really increase the equity flowing through the followed links. And in fact, you could be shooting yourself in the proverbial foot by denying equity passing links to your lower product pages.

Best time to use nofollow for internal pages is typically to increase crawling efficiency, or to prevent bots from visiting pages you don't want indexed anyway. Attempting to scuplt link equity in this way could cause lots of unintended negative consequences and my advice would be in most cases to let your link equity flow freely throughout your site in a way that was natural to both humans and bots alike.

Best of luck!

I'm actually kinda stumped. For whatever reason, Google is ignoring the sitemap date. Here's what I would do:

1. Even though the sitemap is valid, I'm still unclear if Google is reading it. The only way to know for sure is by checking the Sitemap function in Google Search console here and verifying indexation: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitemap-list

2. You could try to put a date on the page. Something like "Last Updated" at the bottom of the page.

3. A longshot, but you could add the <lastreviewed>Schema markup to the page, and see if Google honors that.</lastreviewed>

If you try any of these, let us know if any of them worked!

We've actually seen Google get harsh on category-type pages across a wide number of industries and sites. It's even happened here at Moz. If your HTTPS is implemented correctly (and sounds like you are reasonably certain it is) you might want to look to other areas.

I'd look at your category pages and make sure:

1. Pagination is implemented correctly
2. Canonical are in place, where appropriate
3. If possible, each category should have it's own introductory text, i.e. https://moz.com/ugc/category/link-building
4. Basically, do everything you can to treat your category pages like actual landing pages worthy of search traffic, including unique content, value, title tags, descriptions, etc.

You may be interested in this post titled "Cloudflare and SEO" : https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-seo/

"We did a couple things. First, we invented a new technology that, when it detects a problem on a site, automatically changes the site's CloudFlare IP addresses to isolate it from other sites. (Think of it like quarantining a sick patient.) Second, we worked directly with the crawl teams at the big search engines to make them aware of how CloudFlare worked. All the search engines had special rules for CDNs like Akamai already in place. CloudFlare worked a bit differently, but fell into the same general category. With the cooperation of these search teams we were able to get CloudFlare's IP ranges are listed in a special category within search crawlers. Not only does this keep sites behind them from being clustered to a least performant denominator, or incorrectly geo-tagged based on the DNS resolution IP, it also allows the search engines to crawl at their maximum velocity since CloudFlare can handle the load without overburdening the origin."

How odd. I'm not sure of the answer, but before we go any further I was hoping you could verify a couple of things;

1. In Google Search console, can you verify that your sitemaps are submitted and that Google is indexing/reading them? I would think since you have a "last mod" date in your sitemap it would send a signal to Google that the page was more up to date.

2. When looking at the cache of your page in Google, it doesn't look like all the resources are loading. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:**example.com**

Based on this, if you perform a fetch and render in Google console, does it show that you are blocking any resources?

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of good info out there on this update. Can you give us any insight on the keywords/URLs you saw impacted?

Probably not too harmful. Unfortunately, it's really hard to predict. There are three likely outcomes:

1. You get dinged because Google sees these links as manipulative, or alternatively over-optimized.
2. The extra linking (and cross-traffic) actually help you
3. Nothing. Google often ignores links from sites with an administrative relationship

I seriously doubt this would trigger a long term Penguin issue, but as long as your cleaning it up I really don't see what else you can do other than to per-emptively disavow links form the cross-sites. But before doing this, I'd seriously question if this is the route you want to take, as there could be other ramifications.

No, you're not crazy, and you're not doing anything wrong. Twitter's advertising platform is still younger and somewhat less sophisticated than Facebook or Google. Some metrics such as audience size for keyword targeting are simply missing.

As for geo-targeting, Twitter does provide the following options:

• Country
• State/Providence/Region
• Metro Area
• Postal Code

Which while not as specific as Google Adwords Targeting, does allow you to narrow it down. My advice when working with Twitter is to experiment with smaller groups at first. As with any platform, the learning curve can be fairly steep.

Hope that helps!

Turns out I wrote a post that expanded on this idea of keyword themes: https://moz.com/blog/keywords-to-concepts

Hope that helps! Best of luck with your SEO.