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Hi David,

I waited another week and just now checked the new and redirected URL again. The data STILL has not transferred over to the new URL.

It's been a long time. This excessive lag time in moving data across re-directs really needs to be fixed.

Personally I can mentally keep track of it, but what about the other SEO programs out there that are using Moz data? They have to experiencing "garbage in - garbage out" problems on any analysis involving re-directed URL's.

Can you check into this and let us know what's up?

Unless I missed it, the current site doesn't have Buy buttons or a Shopping Cart. So it's more of a portfolio site than an ecommerce site.

If you're not planning to add Buy buttons and a Cart, you could use almost any CMS. With the small number of pages there, you could even use hand-coded pages (I do that for my sites which have around 80 pages)

If you want a fast and inexpensive solution, there are probably a lot of themes for Wordpress and other CMS that are much nicer portfolio designs than the current site.

That is a bit more tricky. But not impossible...

You just need to get the ones who are interested in coming to your place SOON to click something. Couple of ideas....

Make a special secret landing page for your PPC ads (it can look much like your current homepage or where ever your ads have been going so far) and do either #1 or #2...

1. leave off something important (like your Hours, or your Specials, or the Nightly Schedule) and put a big obvious button like "Click here for our hours" to goes to a hidden Hours page (which is only accessible from the PPC ad's special secret landing page) which becomes your conversion page (where the PPC conversion success code goes). The assumption here is that only those who are serious about coming to you place will click the link. It's not perfect, but better than nothing.

2. create a limited time offer (like "Get a Coupon for free bar nuts - good for the next 2 days only!" or maybe "Get a Coupon for a half-price cover - good for next 24 hours only") and put a big obvious button going to a hidden page like in #1 above. This is perhaps more accurate, but also could be a pain in the neck because of dealing with the coupons and because the possibility your regular patrons will learn about it and go click you PPC ad just to get coupons.

The "special secret" and the "hidden" pages should not be listed in your sitemap should probably be tagged like this:    The "noindex" hides them, while the "follow" lets your PPC and Analytics track people to the conversion page.

What do you think?

It will help to know more about your site. Do you have a subdomain like mobile.mysite.com that goes along with your normal desktop site? Or do you just change CSS based on screen width (responsive design)?

There are probably many ways to code and display the buttons.

If they show up nicely, and function properly, that is probably more important than having the W3 Validator see them as error free. From what I hear, few sites pass the validator test 100%...

Hi Cindy. My stores used to be on Yahoo Merchant Solutions, so I know that changing things in that system can be tricky. Besides being a Moz member, you may also want to join the Yahoo Store Owners forum at yourstoreforums.com to get tech and marketing advice on Yahoo store issues.

When you say "clean up" do you mean removing the links or disavowing them?

You will never be able to get them all removed, so in the end you will need to a Disavow anyways. If your time frame is short, you may want to make Priority One be doing a Disavow for each of the 50+ sites you are working with. Then you can proceed with attempting to get the links removed. I have not heard that there is any downside to having a link removed that already appears on your disavow file...

As for the order of the Priorities, you may want to shuffle them a bit depending on the different situations on the different websites. I suggest you read this Moz Blog article called It's Penguin-Hunting Season: How to Be the Predator and Not the Prey

...and then test a few of your sub-pages that used to rank well at the program used in this article which is called the Penguin Analysis Tool.  I say sub-page because it needs a single keyword phrase you want rank that particular page for so it do the anchor text analysis. And that works better on focused sub-pages than on general homepages. $10 per website will let you fully evaluate two typical pages on each and see which facet of the link profile is most valuable to attack first.

Have you looked at your Keywords / Details / Search Terms reports for the different campaigns? They will list actual search queries that triggered the displaying of your ads.

It is a great place to find out what is really happening. Look for search queries that never convert because they are not really pertaining to your goods, and see if you can put in some Negative Keywords to avoid them. Also a good place to look for more Phrase match and Exact match opportunities. I find that they convert better and cost less than the Broad matches.

Focus less on clicks. Instead really focus on the "Cost" and "Cost/Conversion" columns. Pause (not delete) the ones that have really have too high a "Cost/Conversion" and look for any with a ZERO Cost/Conversion and a high Cost (those are gaining you nothing)

Hello Chiaryn,

From what I see on my campaigns, what you are saying is only true if a site is all redirected to the root domain version, or if both the root and the www version are active.

If a site is redirected to the www version, a campaign that uses the root domain will show faulty data. Please see the images from my Campaigns for my site (which is redirected to the www version) that I have attached for proof.

The old Moz Pro campaign (shown on the left) is set up for the www version of the domain. The Moz Analytics campaign (shown on the right) was set up for the root domain. The data on the right is much more accurate for Page Authority, LRDs, Total External Links, and HTTP Status. The other odd result is that few of the Top Pages match from www-campaign to root-campaign.

Please let us know if I am interpreting these things wrongs, or if I have the campaigns set up incorrectly...

www-vs-root.jpg

Hello David, Thanks for jumping in!

The old URL was  http://www.easydigging.com/Garden_Cultivator/wheel_hoe_push_plow.html  and the new one it 301's to is  http://www.easydigging.com/wheel-hoe-hoss.html   Please reply back here so I know what the situation is.

Since it appears that Index updates only happen monthly, and it takes a few months for data to fully migrate over to redirected URLs, it would be really nice to change the little message that shows on OSE when an analyzed page is redirected (currently something like "Do you want to see the data for page this redirects to") to something that describes the lag, like.. "It takes a few months for Moz data to transfer to redirected URLs, so be sure to check both the old and the new URL since the one with higher statistics is the accurate one"

Hi David. Or it can be done more simply (If you have G+ pages for both your self and you business) by just putting these two lines in the head of your page

where publisher is your G+ biz page.

When setting up Moz Analytics you should target it for whichever version of your domain you use.

If all your pages redirect to the www version, and all the search results featuring your pages have the www in front, then that is what you should set up Moz for.

This is not real easy as the set up screens seem to assume that you want to put in the plain non-www version. So you do have to enter the www version in the "What site do you want to track?" box on the first page of the set up screens.

When you get to the Competitor section, look and see if your competitors search results show up with www or store or blog or anything in front of their domain name and enter them the same way. That way you can compare apples to apples.

Hi again Chris.  Mostly I was wanting to use Moz to evaluate my site for SEO reasons and frustrated that I kept having to use "old" page URLs to get data.

Also I have just started to experiment with the Penguin Analysis tool from Virante, and it uses Moz data mixed with data from other SEO programs - so I get corrupt results there whether I input the old URL or the new URL.  http://www.penguinanalysis.com/

If they really updated the Mozscape index on the 18th, it seems it should show by now...

Thanks Chris. But unfortunately that makes the situation even worse. I did these 301 redirects weeks ago, and your quote say that there was a Mozscape Index update was a few days ago on October 18th.

I just checked again in OSE and the old page data and strength still has not transferred over to the new page. I have attached a screenshot from OSE showing this.

Any ideas?

page-difference.jpg

I redirected a few pages that had funky URL issues (capitals and underscores and useless words) to the same page renamed with proper URLs. The sitemaps were changed also, and re-submitted.

Like this:  mydomain.com/Not_Pertinent_Words.html  >>>  mydomain.com/good-words.html

Google seems to have found them and changed the search engine results listing in about 8 days.

But it's been about a month now and Moz and OSE still have not transferred all the strength and link data from the old URLs to the new ones.

Question 1: How long does it usually take Google to transfer all the link and strength data for a 301?

Question 2: How long does it take Moz and OSE to do the same? Is there something I need to do to tell them about the changes?

I checked the AquaFarm page in your image.

My understanding is that G+ prefers to use schema data as it's 1st choice for presenting, but it does not look like you have schema data on your page.

Then it goes for Open Graph data (like Facebook uses) and you do have that. But when I looked at the image linked with your   meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:image</a>"   tag it is only 56x56px - which is maybe too small.

I know that the minimum image size has been changing recently, so I do not know exactly what it is right know, but I have been using 300x300px images successfully.

If you want people to be able choose which image to display with their post, you will need "tag" multiple images.

If you want to do Twitter Cards you will need add those tags also and make a 120x120 image for Twitter.

Basically you end up with two sets of pictures: one "visible" set sized properly for your webpages, and one "hidden" set sized properly for you social media accounts.

Hope this helps...

I think that on ecommerce sites it is good to display the social media icons only on certain pages.

Basically on the pages people are likely to share: Home, Product pages, on-site Blog pages.

You can probably leave them off things like the Category pages, Contact, Guarantee, and other instructional pages.

I'll second what Tom said. I used Link Detox's $50 for two audits plan a few times and it worked great. I even screwed up the first run by having some settings wrong, emailed their Help Desk, and they re-credited me the botched run.

If you already have collected a list of backlinks from other sources (Moz, Google or Bing Webmaster Tools, Ahref, Majestic, etc) you can also append that list to your audit. Link Detox finds most links anyways, but appending your own list makes it VERY complete.

They even have a feature where later you can append your Disavow file and the Link Detox system marks any matches so you don't have to keep reviewing those bad links. I keep hoping that MOZ and other analysis programs will add a feature where we can append our Disavow file so our link-based statistics will match what Google sees when they factor in the Disavow file.

I've bookmarked that .htaccess 301 redirect generator page. Always been afraid to mess with that file before, but maybe it's time to learn. Thanks again Peter!

Hi Peter,

They are all links from other sites. I have many versions of these types of links hanging around in my 404 report. I have not worked so far to "split" the ones that look like 2 URLs stuck together.

I will try to attach some screenshot bits from my GWT accounts so you can see what I see. Also I attached the form used by my cPanel for doing 301 redirects. Let me know if the image is not clear.

I really appreciate your help. Thanks!

baka-404-errors.jpg