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Hi Diane,
Have you tried checking out the Joomla extensions gallery? There are a ton of extensions presently available in their gallery that can help you implement the noFollow tag on designated links. Please check out http://extensions.joomla.org/search?q=nofollow+links
Hope that helps and good luck!
p.s. Linking out does NOT damage your website but paid link/advertisements will if you don't use the rel=nofollow tag (granted only if you get caught).
Although I don't have an explanation as to why your SEOmoz rankings vary greatly every week, I can offer some suggestions/ideas to get over this little issue.
Have you tried e-mailing the SEOmoz customer service team (help@seomoz.org)? They might be able to look into your specific case and diagnose any technical problems.
In the mean time, have you tried creating a completely new campaign to see if the same thing happens?
What about using the rank tracker that is NOT part of the PRO web app? It has weekly updates and if the same problem occurs you can try manually refreshing the rank once every day.
Lastly, a little more legwork here but you could also try running your rank checker about the same time SEOmoz updates their rankings in the web app/rank checker tool. Maybe you might see a difference there?
Best of luck!
Hi Bill,
I wouldn't set a hard and fast rule to look solely at PageAuthority because it doesn't provide the big picture. Instead, I would use it in conjunction with DomainAuthority so you can understand the authority/trust behind the referring domain and get some context for the link.
That way you aren't ruling out "good" links because they have a low PA. For example, I would rather have a PA=13,DA=100 link from Stanford.edu than a PA=56,DA=5 link from some random article directory.
Does that make sense?
"Links to external sites would cause me to lose out on link juice and would hurt me in google's eyes."
That may be the case back in 2001 but not so much anymore. In fact, NOT linking out and hoarding your PR/link juice could actually hurt you instead.
I performed a quick crawl of your website and immediately found part of the problem - it looks like your HTML sitemaps is still linking to the pages in question.
With that in mind, I would NOT recommend using the canonical tag here. Instead, I would check whether or not these pages have links pointing to them. If they don't, then just change the URL in your sitemaps to the correct location. However, if you do have inbound links to these pages then implement a 301 Permanent Redirect to the appropriate page.
I didn't conduct a comprehensive crawl but if you'd like your own data then please check out Xenu Link Sleuth. Also, I think inside the SEOmoz PRO campaign you can click on each individual URL and it'll show you the referring links as well.
Hope that helps and good luck!
UPDATE: Actually, the problem looks like it's coming from your source code. You have your old URLs still located on the page under
. A parallel issue is 'products.php' and 'Products.php' both resolve completely different pages so you might want to look into 301 redirecting them.
No, you will not gain additional SEO value in your links if you include the link title in conjunction with your anchor text. All it does is increase the relevancy on your page.
Link title and image title work in similar ways but unfortunately do not pass any extra SEO benefit. You will know when a website employs link/image titles by hovering over the image or link - words will display near your cursor.
And although this wasn't part of your question, image ALT text (which is different from image title text) will help your SEO efforts if you are trying to optimize for image search as it is one of the major ranking factors.
I was expecting that people who come to my site through adwords to be completely new visitors (100% instead of 67%).
Not necessarily - there are numerous possibilities why is happening. For example, someone clicks on your ad the first day and leaves your website after browsing it for awhile. They come back the next day and perform the same search and click on the same ad (maybe because that's how they remembered you) - that would make this person a returning visitor and NOT a new visitor.
That being said, you'll need to do a deep dive analysis to figure out what's really going on. To start, try creating an advanced segment between new and returning visitors, check out the navigation path, top content, see where they fall in the conversion funnel, etc.
Hope that helps guide where you need to go!
Yes, from my link building experiences in the past 11 months I've noticed partial-match anchor text offer the best boost in rankings. It's a way to create a natural profile unnaturally...if that makes any sense? Although I have not conducted an actual experiment on this, including your company name is very beneficial as it helps brand your website as well.
For example, you can use these derivatives to get you started:
Boat Covers from [Company]
Buy Boat Covers only at [Company]
Go to [Company] for Boat Covers
Of course, there will be some who disagree with this method so at the end of the day I would suggest you test out both techniques.
Happy link building!
And to supplement THB's response...
Definition of Page Authority - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/page-authority
Definition of Domain Authority - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority
How soon do you need the 404 error data? If you are okay waiting for a few days until Google or SEOmoz crawls your website (or your clients) then that works.
If you need it immediately I would highly recommend checking out Xenu Link Sleuth or Screaming Frog. They crawl your entire website (or client and competitors) and report on the HTTP status, title tag, h1 tag and many other things.
The definitions for the mozBar metrics can be found in the URLs below:
PageAuthority - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/page-authority
mozRank - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank
mozTrust - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/moztrust
Domain Authority - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority
For spotting a weakness in a competitor, I wouldn't rely solely on the mozBar. But for all intents and purposes of your question I would look at two key metrics to compare: the PageAuthority and total number of linking root domains.
PA gives you an idea of how much more/less authority you have compared to your competitor's page. The number of linking root domains gives you a rough benchmark of how many more unique linking domains you'll need to catch up to them.
Hope that helps!
Mike - thanks for clarifying it a little more. At this point I would turn to data for my decision rather than theory.
Check your web analytics package and see how many people are searching for the phrase "blue widgets small." Double check again to see how many actually drive revenue. Do they convert better than "blue widgets" searchers? How's their engagement rate? Etc.
I am confident once you find the answer to that it'll help you make your decision on whether or not you should create a new page and allocate link building resources to it.
Echo1 - no need to apologize as I wanted to help you make a decision based on more data points rather than solely relying on the Google keyword tool. As for your question about whether to use broad or exact match numbers I would always err on the side of caution and choose exact match. If you want to be even more pessimistic in your numbers then divide it by half.
In any case, you should still gather competition numbers by performing an intitle:"keyword phrase" and inanchor:"keyword phrase" search in Google (including the quotes as it denotes exact match). This will tell you approximately how many websites are optimizing their title and anchor text with exact match phrases. Those numbers should guide you toward the right keyword choice.
Lastly, try experimenting with the title tag and vary up your anchor text so you don't "lose out" on the "limo service Chicago" keyword. I looked at the results for that keyword and in the organic listings, no one optimized for it until the website ranked #7.
I pulled up some quick and dirty numbers for your target keywords using Google's search operators intitle: and inanchor: This highlights how optimized a keyword is in terms of the title tag and anchor text. Of course, this isn't going to help you win SEO but gives you a general idea regarding the competition for your search phrase.
Taxi Service Seattle - 1.7k results in title, 820k results in anchor text
Seattle Taxi - 3.8k results in title, 81k results in anchor text
Seattle Taxi Service - 996 results in title, 91.4k results in anchor text
To answer your question though, I would never stuff my home page title tag. Instead, based on the numbers above I would change it to this ~> [Company Name] - Seattle Taxi Service. I would then optimize for "seattle taxi service" but link build for all three keywords since they are essentially derivatives of each other.
What do you mean by "unavailable pages/pages that doesn't exist"? Are they returning an HTTP status of 404 NOT FOUND? Have you heard of or ever tried MajesticSEO (https://www.majesticseo.com/)? You can even try using Google/Bing's link: search operator but you won't be able to export the data like YSE. Lastly, have you tried looking in your web analytics referral data? Although it won't illustrate the number of links to the page, it'll give you an idea which links are driving traffic on what domain.
What is the ranking URL for "blue widgets small"? Is it the same as "blue widgets"? If so then I would go with option #1 and include some of your product modifiers on the ranking page. A benefit to this link building approach is it varies up your link profile with partial-match anchor text and can help boost your rankings for the competitive 2-word phrase.
On the other hand, how different is "blue widgets small" from "blue widgets"? Would it create enough value for the user to divert their attention to another page? If you answered yes then I would go with option #2. Just remember to internal link from the "blue widgets" page!
Yes, Google DOES recognize your request for branded sitelinks demotion.
The only down side is that they unfortunately do not update within a week. It took us two months of weekly tracking and demotion to finally get the branded sitelinks that we want displayed.
In a nutshell, give it a few more weeks and you'll eventually see the requested URL demotions take effect.
+1
Totally forgot about mentioning the inbound links part. Thanks for picking it up, Rick!
We implemented the Schema.org microdata format a few months ago and have seen no strong correlation which suggests using these tags would increase your rankings in the search results. I speculate it's not so much a ranking factor but more of a signal that tells search engines, "Hey, this is the exact price of our product named XYZ potion."
To answer your question though, the tags are "nice-to-have" but not necessarily a "must-have" and implementation is completely contingent on how your business prioritizes your SEO projects. For example, if you have other issues to take care of such as 404 detection & handling, content generation, link acquisition, etc. I would put those at the front of the queue (I think Vanessa Fox would agree).
Afterthought: Search engines are very smart nowadays and long before Schema.org was announced, our competitors had pricing rich snippets in the search results even though they didn't use the tags.
Hi Gary,
Yes, it is always a good idea to cut down the number of 301 redirects (or any redirects in general) because if I remember correctly, Google stops crawling a link after the 5th redirect or so. You also lose another 10% link juice for each additional redirect.
Lastly, don't forget to 301 redirect the URLs from the beginning of the year to the new re-structured website.
Hope that helps!
