Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yes, I noticed this too. The workaround doesn't seem to help in my case as I already had images turned off. Not sure what to make of that?

Yes, your pages are crawled once a week. Consequently if you make a fix, it could take until the next crawl for it to show as fixed. Also, there may be times when not all of your pages are crawled. You can see the number of pages crawled in your Dashboard. Hope this helps! Be patient. I'm sure if it's fixed SEOMoz will recognize it.

Thanks Thomas. I agree with you on all points and Matt too. I have seen instances where someone does, very tactfully, request a thumbs up or to mark the question as answered. SEOMoz of course also prompts you if you've asked a question that appears to have been answered, but that you haven't makred as "answered," to take some action.

I think it really depends on the situation. I know I have also had newbies mark my answer as a "good answer" when they just intended to give it a thumbs up. I know you can reverse a thumbs up, but I'm not sure if you can reverse a "Good Answer." Hmmm, I'll have to check that out. You probably can. I've just never done it.

Has Rand ever done a WBF on "how tos" for the Q&A? If not, that might make a great one (but I bet he's already done one)....I'll investigate that too!

Hi Vladokan,

I hope I am understanding your question correctly. It sounds like you are wanting something that will show you what citations you already have, which ones you are missing and perhaps even which ones are there but not quite complete. As it turns out, SEOMoz just acquired a company that can help you do just that. If you go to http://www.getlisted.org and put in your information you can find out what citations you already have, which ones you should have (but don't) and which ones you might have partially complete that should have more information.

I am not sure how well this works (if at all) for international sites, so am interested to know what you discover for your own site and what suggestions some other members here might have.

Dana

Perhaps one way to re-open the content discussion is to show him that content, aka "conversations" are taking place online about his topics/products. Those conversations are going to take place whether he writes content or not. Does he want those conversations to be able to define his business, without his participation? Or would he prefer to be part of the conversation? I think it might just be a matter of showing him that conversations are going to take place regardless of what he does or doesn't do, and that ultimately it would be much better for him to participate. Hope that makes sense!

I think there could potentially be great advantages to having a different title tag from the page headline. The title tag gives you the opportunity to boil that headline down to its most important parts.

The title tag should avoid stop words. Think about the title tag as if you were a librarian. I don't know how old you are, but remember in the old days when you had to ue a card catalog to search for things? You never used words like "for, and, the, at, with"  etc.  Those took up space on the cards and made things harder to find.

Here's a hypothetical example. The "reader friendly" title of the first Harry Potter Book was:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Do you know how most people search for that book? (Library or Online, doesn't matter) - right, they search "Harry Potter - Book 1"

Okay, so the best title for the page would be "Harry Potter Book 1"

You did a good job at eliminating stop words from your title. However, also be cognizant of the character limitations in Google for displaying titles. You are good with 53 characters. I'd say 59-65 absolute max. Otherwise, you risk being truncated in ways you don't want/

A word of caution. That "%" sign at the end of your title could pose a problem for some engines. It might be better to spell out "percent."

I really hope this is helpful!

Hi Thomas,

This is actually not uncommon, and depending on your situation, may or may not be a cause for alarm. Is the number of your linking root domains also drastically decreasing, staying the same or increasing?

The explanation for the drop you are seeing could be one or a combination of several things. For example, it could be that you paid for advertising that is expiring. It could be that you had a news story break or a press release that got a lot of short term attention and now it's naturally dropping off. It could be that you are being hit by an algorithm change. I would audit the links that you are losing to see if they have something in common. Start there and let us know what you see.

Hope that helps a little!

Dana

Hi again,

Again I want to be sure I am understanding the question. Are you asking how to determine which citations are the most valuable and whether or not the value of those citations is determined by Google or by the SEO community? If so, I would answer that neither Google nor the SEO community determines which citations are the most valuable.I would say it's determined by the followers and subscribers of any particular source. For example, Yelp is extremely popular and many people go to Yelp to read restaurant reviews, find restaurants based on type of food, etc. Because so many people visit and use  Yelp, Google then looks upon a citation in Yelp as pretty necessary for certain types of businesses. If you are a restaurant and you have no presence in Yelp, it could cause Google to view your restaurant as less of an authoritative business.

That's a pretty long-winded answer on my part, lol. I hope it helps a little. Again, I might be misunderstanding your question so I apologize if my answer isn't helpful. Hopefully I am helping a little.

Dana

Any number of things could have happened William. How many links did you have before the drop. Some fluctuations are normal, especially if you released a new product or made it into a news story, your links can skyrocket for a time then settle back down. Or, it could be that you had a lot of links from bad directories that Google has de-indexed (same is true for blog networks, etc.)

Have you tried viewing your link profile in http://www.ahrefs.com ? You might get a better idea of what's going on if you look there. Interested to know what you see there? Hope that helps!

Dana

I agree 100% with MagicDude. After watching Everett Sizemore's E-commerce webinar I tried an experiment. We had a huge block of SEO copy on our home page. We were #2 in Google for our most important keyword.

I removed the copy and put it into the blog instead.

We dropped to #4 in Google.

I took the copy back out of the blog and returned it to the home page. Hopefully, we will recover the two spots we lost when I removed it.

I know people are saying this doesn't work. Maybe it's the quality of the writing that's the problem. We go to great lengths to make sure that any copy we include for SEO purposes reads well and is of some use to visitors.

Take a look at MozCast: http://mozcast.com/  It indicates the potential of something major happening yesterday or perhaps in the days leading up to yesterday. I've been looking at Mozcast for almost a year now (since it was released at MozCon last year) and I don't recall ever seeing it this hot.

Perhaps Dr. Pete can chime in with his take on the buzz that's causing MozCast to register such a hot temp.

You are very welcome.

Good question BB. Think about how news stories are published. Say you make page one for something. That news site might have 3 or 4 thousand pages. Say they have links to all the latest headlines on the right hand side of their template and that your news is in that list. As long as you are a headline, boom, you are linked from 3 or 4 thousand pages. As soon as your story is no longer front page, those links from all the pages go away and you retain just the one from the article that remain in their archive. In this scenario, you lost a lot of links, but you didn't lose any linking domains.

That being said, my guess is that you might have lost 100,000 links, but those links were from a small handful of linking root domains. If you lost 100,000 linking domains, that would be truly alarming. I am guessing that's not the case.

Hope that explanation made sense. What were you able to see in Ahrefs?

As is often the case, I think it depends on your specific business and products. I have seen the niche site idea work extremely well, and not work at all. Something to really take into account when considering the multi-site option is: Do you have the resources to develop manage and market multiple sites?

I am an in-house SEO for a company that just launched a micro-brand. They could have opted to put these new products on their existing Web site, but the products and customers were going to be vastly different than the core customer persona of the main site, although they are all church ministry related.

Our main site is very large and I have advised that it would be better to separate out the three subsections of the site because, again, the customers of each leg of the business are completely different. We are in a highly competitive category too, so this makes it extremely hard to rank for important keywords because our messaging is trying to address three different businesses with one Website.

If you have the resources to handle multiple sites, and you're in a competitive space, I'd say go for the niche sites. But beware of Exact Match Domains. Google is crackin' down!

Hope this perspective helps a bit.

I should have checked the Moz Blog for posting. Dr. Pete has already commented here: http://moz.com/blog/early-look-at-googles-june-25-algo-update

Thanks Dr. Pete!

Hi Christopher,

Yes, this is a perfect example of what I was talking about. Matt Cutts at no point in this video says that PR has no value. In fact, he says exactly the opposite. He says:

"There are a lot of SEOs and people in search who look at the PageRank toolbar, but there are a ton of regular users as well. You would be really surprised at how many just regular people have the Google toolbar and use PageRank as a way to figure out ihow reputable something is....We get into our tunnel vision and think no one else uses the PageRank toolbar, but the fact is a lot of people do."

He goes on to say that Chrome doesn't have a PageRank toolbar and IE10 won't allow toolbars or add-ins of any kind. He talks about how, if IE10 catches on, the PageRank toolbar might not be used by as many people.

He then reiterates: "A lot of people do use it. I believe we will continue to support those people while they use the Google toolbar...but it looks like the writing's on the wall that with IE 10 the Google Toolbar won't be allowed any more on IE 10 in Windows, so we'll see how things develop in the future."

So you see, his video is about the Google Toolbar. He never even addresses PageRank, aside from the fact that it is something in the Google Toolbar. He certainly acknowledges that people use it and that Google continues to support it.  In no way did he ever say or even imply that PageRank wasn't a valid way to determine the trustworthiness of a site. In fact, he said just the opposite.

What are your thoughts?

Dana

Did you pay for any featured links in any directories? Or perhaps maybe someone did this prior to you coming on board. I can't say for sure, but this is a very likely scenario. Again, focus more on the number and quality of your linking domains. I have seen fluctuations like this before and they aren't necessarily cause for concern.

For example, I am in house SEO for a company that does audio video installations. For a couple of months our products were picked up and listed in a trade magazine online. This temporarily inflated our links being reported in Webmaster Tools. Here's what that looked like. While this looks like a decrease, the number of linking domains actually has gone up:

<colgroup><col width="68"> <col width="64"></colgroup>
| 4/17/2012 | 20,339 |
| 4/20/2012 | 20,156 |
| 5/1/2012 | 18,812 |
| 5/8/2012 | 17,576 |
| 5/15/2012 | 17,432 |
| 5/29/2012 | 16,280 |
| 6/7/2012 | 13,544 |
| 9/21/2012 |

13,362

|

Are you planning on achieving this via a Meta Refresh? (I thought I'd better ask first before officially shouting "Danger, Danger Will Robinson!")

Mozzahonan!

I am curious to know what tools you are using to check your PageRank. Google very rarely updates PageRank. I think at most it's maybe 3 times a year. In my own experience it's been less often than that. So, the reason I ask is that PageRank is not usually changing as much as in the example you provided because Google simply doesn't update it that often.

There may be people here who know better than me how often this is done and how often it's been updated in the last year, like Dr. Pete Meyers.

I would check these things out before jumping to any conclusions about your new site's PageRank.

Cheers,

Dana