Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I agree with Alan. SEMRush all the way. I highly recommend Annie Cushing's presentation from MozCon 2013. She discusses how you can do some pretty amazing competitive analysis using SEMRush and some pivot tables that she provides tutorials for in her accompanying blog post. I am not a Moz affiliate, just a fan, but if you can swing the $299 for the videos I'd go for it. If you by any chance attended Mozcon they are available to you free and you probably already know that Annie's presentation was ripe with info on this topic. Good luck!

P.S. I also use AWR, [Advanced Web Ranking] but find it stodgy in terms of pulling data out and showing it to stakeholders in any kind of meaningful way. Perhaps some other folks here might have some tips on that if you're curious about AWR.

Thank you Patrick for the link and Scott for the question. We just replaced all of our canonical tags with absolute URLs and i solved a lot of problems with weird URLs showing up as duplicate content in GWT.

UGH, but you both totally burst my bubble! I tell you what, just when you think you're cranking along in the world of SEO something comes along to humble you. Recently, I had been going through many old articles, some of which had absolute URLs. I was methodically going in and replacing them with relative links because we are on the page speed warpath right now and our IT director is convinced relative URLs reduce server calls and make the page load faster. After everything I read tonight, including the Yoast Post, it seems that the difference in page load speed between a page with absolute and a page with relative URLs is so tiny that it just doesn't matter. Furthermore, search engines my attribute more authority flowing from one page to the next on a site using absolute URLs for internal links.

Follow up question: We do not have gzip enabled. Our site speed is painfully slow (GWT reports average speed as 698 milliseconds) and we also don't have anything like the mod_deflate enabled on Apache....could the relative URLs in our case, actually have an impact on page speed?

If not, clearly I've got to circle back and undo the relative URLs I've put up on both of our sites in the past 2 weeks! ...sigh

Let me know - tomorrow's another day!

Dana

Yes, absolutely. Attribution is considered to be a very reputable way of linking.

Hi! I'm sure there are a number of folks here who would be happy to help. What is your product and who are your top 2-3 competitors? What is your website URL? Can you elaborate a bit? If you are in a highly competitive space, you may not want to use specifics, and that's okay. Just share as much as you feel comfortable sharing and I'm sure a nuber of folks will be happy to jump in.

Dana

I have been researching this further. If I want to change this on our large Website, I'm going to need major evidence that it's better and that it won't slow down our pages. In this article, Andy King makes the case for relative URLs. But he also says:

"Using the base element and mod_rewrite can alleviate the need for absolute URLs, and save additional space."

Is this a true and accurate statement?

Hi Chris,

From my very quick look around your Website, it appears to me you have a fairly solid business and a decent site. I am thinking that perhaps it's the keyword research that might be weakness. I assume when you say you aren't ranking, it's because you aren't ranking for keywords that you are hoping to rank for...is that correct?

Web design and development is hugely competitive (as you well know I'm sure). If I were you, I'd go back to the drawing board with your keywords research and perhaps look at it through different lenses. Explore more localized terms and long tail keywords that have less competition, perhaps even try combining some local search terms with larger scale, longer tail terms, and go for those instead.

Also, explore what terms you are ranking for, and perhaps spin-off of those with some variations.

The content you are creating, is it fulfilling a need for information that people are searching for but perhaps having trouble finding? For example, I am an in-house SEO for a mid-sized AV business that is preparing to completely revamp their e-commerce site. The biggest challenge for us is exploring and choosing the right platform for us. I can tell you, there is precious little unbiased information available online to help business owners make that choice. How to guides and checklists that go beyond fluff and offer unbiased information can be great link magnets.

Those are just my thoughts. I hope they help a little!

Dana

What Semalt is doing is also known as "referral spam." Here is more information from the Google Product Forums, including how to block Semalt...however, don't go to Semalt's site and try to do it with their tool, block them via your .htaccess file

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/VdmF4xDYnDE

My favorite line is "The company is engaged in old school stupid customer acquisition techniques (referrer spam).  As to their links from their site, they belong to a class of links that I call fungus (automated crap).  As to the referrer traffic, it is crap traffic that is meaningless to you.  If you can isolate the IP addresses used by the company, block them via .htaccess (but beware that they may spoof their IP address and you don't want to block a legitimate IP range)"

The thread contains instructions for adding code to your .htaccess file that will block them. Hope that helps!

Matt's suggestion of adding unique, valuable and interesting contextual info around the video is a very good approach.

I loved this. The new robots.txt file is a big yawn. I miss the video. Can you guys add it back (or something equally delighting)? Pretty please?

Hi Trung, Thanks so much for your excellent suggestion. I'm going to try it out. You did confirm a hunch that I had a while back that the data in the Redirect Chains report wasn't spot on. I'll report back here with what I discover. I appreciate you responding!

This isn't really an answer about the structure of the title tags. It's more of an observation and comment. If your current title tag is this: Austin 4 X 6 Postcard Printing, Full Color Postcard Prints - nameofcompany.com, unless your company name is zero characters, your titles aren't fully displaying in Google. Google truncates, or in some cases completely replaces title tags that are over 60 characters.

That being said, my suggestion would be to make it: 4 X 6 Full Color Postcard Printing | Austin Texas

This makes the city clearly a "city" and not the name of a design choice for a postcard.

Just my thoughts. Hope that helps a little!

You are very welcome Rick. Thanks for providing more details. Has your site experienced any other changes since the beginning of the year? I can see by looking at it in the free tools at http://ahrefs.com that you started the year with a lot of inbound links and many of those have been cleared out (most likely from Google algo) over the course of this year. Did you replatform the site, change URLs and/or change the architecture of the site since the beginning of the year?

Are you monitoring your Google Webmaster Tools account? There may be some clues there regarding potential site errors (503, 403 and 404 status codes) and duplicate content that could be getting in your own way.

Let me know. A thorough site audit would most likely get you some answers and give you some directions on where to focus your efforts to regain traffic.

Dana

Thanks for hopping in guys. You're awesome. This is a perfect example why Moz Q & A rocks Yes, my reason for asking was specifically related to site migration. Your answer is greatly appreciated.

Dana

Personally, I view appending the name at the end of the title to be more for branding than for SEO. If you are trying to build a brand, it can be very useful to reinforce it by placing it at the end of all of your title tags. This works great if you have a unique brand and your brand name is short enough to actually fit within the character limitation of the title tag while still giving you room to describe what's on the page.

Regarding whether or not to use ".com" - I think it depends on your business and your intent with the site. If the majority of your business is taking place online, then the .com might be very appropriate. Or, if whatever action you are hoping the visitor takes is an online action, then again, the .com would be very appropriate. If, on the other hand, you are a plumber and what you really want is for them to call you, then maybe leave the ".com" off...for example "Roto-Rooter"....if you search "roto-rooter Seattle" you'll see they append "Roto-Rooter Plumbing" at the end of their title tag, not "Roto-Rooter.com"

Hope that helps!

Hi Carl,

I don't blame you for being confused. Since none of us knows what Google is actually rewarding as an "authoritative mention," whether that be a followed link, no followed link or a brand name mention, my answer can only be based on conjecture and experience. Hopefully there are some fellow Moz folk out there with some data to support what I am about to say.

I think that if we can track brand mentions, so can Google. Consequently, while it might not be the case right now, very soon it may not matter at all if a brand mention has a link or not. As for sites that are adding the "nofollow" attribute to your citation links...I'd probably be thankful that they care enough about the integrity of their content and their sites to take the time and discipline required to do this. In a way, they are protecting you too.

While Google has brought down the hammer on guest blogging, I think they are smart enough to know that inviting a high-authority and knowledgeable expert to write a post for their blog is and has been very normal practice in journalism since journalism began. While they would most likely never come out and say it (because doing so would divulge too much info about their algorithm), but I firmly believe that a "nofollow" link from certain sites are more valuable than a followed link from others. Along those same lines, I think a brand mention without a link from certain places, my be much stronger than a followed link from other sites. While I'm sure it's a complex equation, Google is certainly capable of writing an algorithm that could take all of these factors into consideration and assign a value to that brand mention or link, regardless of whether it is linked, followed or nofollowed.

That being said, when we produce content, sure, if I see a brand mention that isn't linked, I most likely will contact the editor of the publication and ask if they would consider adding one. I think the key for us is, we don't produce content purely for the purpose of getting links. We produce content based on our company expertise and actual work/projects we've completed. Sometimes it's something we write and sometimes it's someone else writing about what a great job we did. As long as it's quality and relevant to our audience, I don't really worry about the other stuff, to be quite honest.

I am very interested to know what others have to say on the subject.

Here is a link to an insteresting thread on this topic in the GWT forums: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/1yhb_xcdtZ0

Judging from what top level contributors have said there, linking images and text links pass the same amount of PR, with a very tiny amount of advantage to anchor text for a text link versus anchor text from the image alt text. Ultimately, do what's best for the user. In this case, for e-commerce, I think the image link taking precedence is just fine.

Dana

First off, welcome!

Second, I would say don't worry at all about your call to action button. Every eCommerce site has call to action buttons on every page (i.e. "Add to Cart"). The pages that happen after that don't matter to search engines with one caveat...just make sure you have a properly configured Robots.txt file.

Third. If all of your product pages are indeed trying to capitalize on the same key terms....yes, you have a duplicate content problem. Don't wait for a tool to tell you what you already know in your heart!

Take some time, and prioritize and start to re-write you product pages to use a wider variety of keywords (particularly long-tail) that better describe the products you offer.

I hope this helps!

I completely agree with this. Well researched and reputable directories are still worthwhile. As long as they are part of a mix that includes some link diversity, I think they can be a very valuable way to jump start a brand new site.

Good thread and I agree with everything Brian has already said. One additional option that hasn't been mentioned is possibly using Repost.us . If your client's blogs are on WordPress, there is a nifty Repost.Us plugin, very easy to install. He could then use this to repost the content on his main blogs, without having duplicate content issues or problems for his SEO. It would get the content where he wants it, preserve authorship plus give a link back to his main site. He would also have the opportunity of monetizing his posts if that was something he wanted to do. Hope this is helpful!

Dana

I think this could be happening because of the way Google interprets the - I tried it with the opening quote, but not the closing quote and it worked. Notice too that the text that's highlighted (or bolded) in the search result is everything up to the