Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks so much Rand. We are hoping to up next Monday so it will only be a week. I was concerned because on conference call yesterday I was told 4 weeks(our offices flooded and we had not transitioned to cloud completely and our back servers had issues as well). I really appreciate the responses guys. It might not seem like alot, but it means a great deal to a guy stuck in his house, not flooded, but surrounded by water.

Moz is a great community!!

I'm a Moz member, mostly just lurk, and love the Moz community. I work at a non profit company that does benchmarking data and helps school districts improve process in education.

Our building flooded and our site is currently offline, is there anything we can do to stop/lesson any SEO page rank drop between now and when we are back up?

We have worked very hard to get these rankings. I know it is minor compared to all tragedy in Houston, but we have worked hard to get these SEO gains (YEAH MOZ!) and I'd hate to lose them because of Harvey.

Any suggestions, assistance appreciated!

Ralph

I'd like to be able to easily track blog posts by month but in Google reports when you set a date range obviously older blog post still appear and with amount of blog posts we generate without seeing the date in the title it's not obvious what was published and when it was published. For example if a Blog Title was "/dangers-of-sharing-KM-knowledge-01-11-15 would it hurt SEO?

The reason is I'd like to have a quick way to know how new posts do each month compared to older content

Over this past weekend Google switched the page which usually showed in search results for keyword benchmarking. It went from from http://www.apqc.org/benchmarking to http://www.apqc.org/benchmarking-portal/osb. Also on Google the Rankings for the keyword 'benchmarking' sank from 15 to 47 for http://www.apqc.org/benchmarking

Just looking for some theories or ideas or anyone that has had this happen to them.

Dmoz? Please explain. Also the description I had was very relevant to the page,more relevant than what Google pulled. Now the meta description makes no sense at all.

For some reason Google is not pulling the meta description for one of our key pages. Instead it just takes the first sentence from the page which makes the description horrible.

Why would it be doing this if the meta tag field is populated?

This might not be exactly what you are looking for but here is what I've done to get noticed. At my company we aren't trying to do get guest blogging opportunities but have high quality people guest blog for us. For us we are are a ninche specialized market and the people who are experts and influence don't blog and told us no no no when we approached them to guest blog.

But when we asked for an interview..it changed everything. So we asked to do an interview over email. A simple INTERVIEW REQUEST in subject line did wonders. But remember if you are asking for an interview never send form email. It must be personal and show you know subject.

We are a member based company. Membership is by business not individual. So for instance if your widget business is a member anyone with a johndoe@widget.com email address can sign up and use all our content, portals, etc.

I want to take emails and figure out if they are on Twitter. I know Twitter allows you to search your contact list but this wouldn't be that. It would be a list of emails I create. Are there any tools or suggestions to do this in a efficient way besides searching each individual name on Twitter? Thanks for the help.

Thanks so much. I'm more focused and knowledgeable about on page SEO and haven't had to deal with clean up of bad practices before so dealing with directories ,paid links and other black hat stuff is very new to me. Page Rank is a great simple tip Takeshi.

The person in my position previously had quite a few paid directories our site was listed on. What is the best resources you guys have used or know of to figure out which ones are good to keep?

For instance one that is up for renewal this week is site-sift.com. I know the person previous to me did some not so ethical stuff and I'm trying to clean up messes. Any advice on directories would be much appreciated.

I need to do a voice of customer survey on one of our key webpages. It's  basic questionnaire of why did you come here today, did you complete your task, etc. The company we were using last time Ipercetion has gone up tremendously in price and I was looking for another vendor with same attributes of easy to build survey and simple code that can be put on page easily. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

Where I work we use Cogix to do in-depth surveys and I'd like to do as much indepth tracking of the survey as possible. My code experience in Analytics setting up code and tracking events is limited but my IT department could help if I knew which direction to go in.

Basically what I want to do is on a survey we have like this http://surveys.apqc.org/ViewsFlash2/servlet/viewsflash?cmd=page&pollid=OSBC!HCM_Recruiting_2013

What is the best way to set up tracking so I could know where they abandon survey? Would it be event tracking or something else?

I just wonder because we rank in top 10 for benchmarking on Google but Bing and Yahoo are 49/50. Your explanation makes sense except the yahoo/Bing rankings are all over the place. From 50 to 90 to 10 while Google has been steady.

If you have a Top ranking for keyword in Google but for Bing and Yahoo you rank considerably lower how do you balance the desire to rank better in Yahoo/Bing with not wanting to damage your Google ranking?

Have people found certain on page SEO tactics help one but damage the other?

Does anyone else have great Google rankngs for keywords but Bing/Yahoo are mediocre to poor?

Where I work the big cheese decided we had to rank high for 'custom benchmarking' search volume is about 110 per month. Once the page was built and launched it took three weeks to reach #1.

I won't get into the whether it's worthwhile to focus so much on keywords with search volume you can fit in a large bathroom but in my experience it took 3 weeks or so.

I completely agree and as a general rule I only focus alot of energy and time on meta description if a keyword ranking has shown a significant increase in ranking but has hit a wall. Say you have gone from 45-19 in Google but the extra links and social media don't seem to be helping. Then it's time to really focus on Title Tag and Meta description because the click through rate is going to really help you get that last mile to get on page one

whenever I an confronted with going off into the weeds trying to decide how to balance text/keywords on a page a always go back to non SEO thoughts

1.) What does a visitor want to do on this page?

2.) What Is my goal for them to do on this page?

Yes they have landed on your page for keyword 'Indian bridal sarees' but do they want to know what it is, buy it, rent it, get it cleaned..etc.

Write towards those questions and slide in keywords second. I know it's crazy and makes things harder.

I believe the meta description is a hugely underrated and valuable tool you can use. Especially once you get your on page SEO and link building set on a good course.

An example would be my company wanted to be on first page of SERP for benchmarking. and the change in Meta Description in title tag allowing me to mention member names has improved click through rates dramatically and gotten us to page #1.

I always try to tie in my company's biggest selling point in the title tag. I talked to the sales staff and asked, "What's your closing move to sell so you don't finish second and win a set of steak knives?"

It's been huge help.

Thanks, so when does a meta tage change usually begin to show up in SERP on all searches?

For a conference page marketing built the meta tag didn't have correct year and date of the conference. I updated and used webmaster tools submit to index to try and get it updated in google search quickly but meta tag has not updated.

Are there other avenues to get this corrected?