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Hi Lisa
I read those before posting.
I guess my question was more around once you take proactive measures so the site is less spammy, how long does it generally take Google to stop looking at it so negatively.
Interested in both MOZ's views on this and the community here based on their experience.
Hi - Looking at acquiring a domain name that has a great product fit. The problem is it is currently getting a 10/17 Open Site Explorer SPAM score.
The existing site for the domain is running Google sponsored link ads and is full of internal pages that link off to these ads.
That explains the existing SPAM score.
If I acquire the domain I'll throw out the Google ad pages and build instead a site with real valuable content that behaves like a normal site and look at building backlinks etc.
My question is, following this approach, how long is it likely to take Google to not see the domain as some Spam factory so it starts getting well positioned SERPs?
Thanks for the very helpful responses here. I am still a bit unsure what I've done, because at the end of the day I seem to be on Google Plus either way. But I presume if I can see my page listed on https://business.google.com/manage/#/pages then it is a business page and not a Plus page? Is that right?
I received a postcard from Google a month or so ago and used that to verify my page. The page has address details and phone number and photos and videos and posts, which I would have thought covers off on the "rich content" requirement.
This is a link to my page taken from the above "pages" link: https://plus.google.com/b/101693763581475613867/+QlddronesAu/posts?gmbpt=true&hl=en-GB
Maybe the real question is why On-Page Grader is so limited in its ability to assess URLs, page titles, etc. I don't believe the tool behaves at all like Google in its assessment of content, so I wonder about using it at all. What do others use?
What prompted my question is that sometimes the MOZ page grader discounts our URL for not having keywords in it even though the keywords are one step back in the path (as in example 2 above).
How do you get your business name to appear on Google Maps? See attachment. What's the process to get this to happen? I have a Google Local listing, but that doesn't seem to be enough.
I notice that the MOZ Page Grader considers "/keyword1/keyword2-keyword3" in a URL string to be less effective than "/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3". Is this correct from Google's perspective?
If I am trying to maximise my SEO for the page title "Business building tips", for example, does Google think my URL is more relevant if it's in the form:
1. www.website.com/business-building-tips
2. www.website.com/business/building-tips or
3. www.website.com/business/business-building-tips
My instinct tells me 3 is more powerful, but logic tells me if I have a whole section devoted to "business" and one of those pages is "business building tips" then 2 should work just as well, possibly better?
I have just allocated Moz Pro seats to three team members so they can see what's happening in a specific campaign, but I find that they are automatically receiving notifications for all campaigns. How can they tailor what campaigns they get notification about (crawl reports and ranking reports)? I though you had to subscribe to notifications for campaigns? That's what it says in the help.
No responses so I'm guessing no-one really knows what the answer is? FYI my rankings have started to recover since early December, with about half back to where they were and traffic at about 40% of pre-drop figures. Still no real understanding of why it happened or what I did (if anything) to start the recovery process.
Option to index images? Or option to index image attachment pages? I've not seen the first, but I have de-indexed attachment pages because I didn't have time to make them all unique. Where do I find the option to not index images? And why would that make SEO scores better?
I am trying to diagnose a massive drop in Google rankings for my website and noticed that the date of the ranking and traffic drop coincides with Google suddenly only indexing about 10% of my images, whereas previously it was indexing about 95% of them.
Wondering if addition of lazy load script to images (so they don't load from the server until visible in the browser) could cause this index blocking?
I notice my Moz Rankings report from yesterday shows I've regained about one third of my rankings but my search traffic has not increase yet. I'm hoping it was just a glitch and it will recover in full, but I don't know. I was about to ditch my new theme (which makes the site 10-15% faster and much better mobile experience) and return to my old theme when I saw the Moz report.
Would still like to get some input from experts as I see a lot of people now complaining about this on the GWT support forum (including myself).
It seems my "rookie mistake" is not the real issue. I rectified this problem three days ago, my URLs are listed in Google but I still have less than 10% of the traffic I had a week or so ago.
The decline started on 24 November, so it's hard to connect it to the Phantom 2 update on 19(?) November? Would Google collapse my traffic that fast and take this long to send me traffic again after just 4-5 days of index blocking? I wouldn't have thought so. And I think the drop occurred just before I migrated to the new site template, but not sure. Nothing in console to suggest anything is wrong except index numbers were lower than I'd expected.
Anyone else able to see anything (e.g. in code) that could be causing this? It's a real disappointment as I'd just started to get some real solid SERP traction on this site following the domain name change a year ago.
I'm still trying to understand a total crash in Google organic search traffic that started on 25 November and hit rock bottom on 27 November. It has not recovered. At first I thought it was because I accidentally had "deter indexing" ticked in my Wordpress settings after a new site version was pushed live, but it's now been three days since I corrected that and there's no sign of even a small recovery.
I resubmitted my sitemap and forced re-index using GWT and my site is definitely indexed. But Google traffic had dropped from over 200 a day to around 10 a day.
I have a lot of links to TripAdvisor on my site (travel blog), so I don't know if that's the issue? Or if it's something in the new premium theme?
I read something about affiliate links using affiliate keyword anchors being punished by this update but I don't use affiliate links as such, just direct links to the relevant TA listing which are converted on click by a JS script provided by TA. They are all do-follow, which might be an issue (but has never been in the past). And they are all anchored by the actual hotel name or photo of the hotel. And not all my posts have them either, but the whole site has suffered just as I was getting some traction in SERPs.
There is no manual penalty notice in GWT.
Site is http://www.asiantraveltips.com if you would be kind enough to offer any advice or opinions about what's happened.
Stupid rookie mistake! I made all the changes in my development environment and copied the files and database to production with "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" still checked! Hopefully the damage is not long-lasting as I had been doubling my Google search traffic month on month for the past three months.
My Moz Pro report from Sunday shows I have lost ranking on about half of the 1000+ keyword phrases I track. Most of these drops are of the order of 50 places or more. But 6 went up and the rest stayed the same. I see no corresponding drop in Google search traffic or Google search impressions. So how do I read this?
About a week ago I switched my travel website to a premium theme and removed indexing on my Wordpress attachment pages. In the week since, There is no manual penalty visible. The new theme increased my page speed from C to A, so I thought it would help my rankings. Now I don't know what to think.
My website is http://www.asiantraveltips.com
Thanks Dirk, that's helpful. I'm not sure why the images are fuzzy on Google Image Search but those ones are rather small (576PX, whereas most of my images on newer posts are 800PX or even 1024PX). I don't know what size images work best for previewing on Google.
I do get into the image search strip for some search terms. Do you know how to track views of images (as distinct from click through to pages) at all? Is there a script I could be running on my VPS which would track view of images from Google Image Search?
I'm getting good, solid growth in my Google SERPs and Google search traffic now, but I do notice that 70% of my high ranking search results are images and the CTR on those is only 3-4%. All my images are illustrative and highly relevant to my travel blog, but I guess that hardly matters unless they get CTR so people see them in context.
Has anyone seen or done any good research on what makes people click through on Google Image Search results? What are the key factors? How do you optimize for click-through? Is it better to watermark your images or overlay label them to increase likelihood of click-through?
Thanks, Tony
FYI the travel blog in question is www.asiantraveltips.com and a relevant Google search where I rank highly is "songkran 2016 phuket".
Hi Charles, what results are you interested in? Invitations vs completions? Or something else?
Our popup survey is pretty intensive, about 13 questions, but people don't seem to mind completing it. We used to only ask 4-5 questions and when we went to the bigger survey as part of a new impact measurement model I predicted a big drop in completions, but in fact we saw completions increase! Who can tell?
We don't seem to have much of an issue with detecting exit intent. I think we do that as well as anyone does (and no-one seems to do it really well). Out problem is with deferred delivery. We don't want to pop up the survey if the customer hasn't finished their journey, and for our site that can mean anything up to 10 or more pages. We want to ask them and then somehow show the survey when they're really leaving. That's the challenging piece.
I like the idea of reading the cookie after they exit, but can we really do that? It might be the answer.