Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yup - for this first time, I think ever, one of my clients DA jumped up about 10 points to a number that's more in line of where I thought it should be, based on industry standards. At the same time, the two closest competitors dropped by 5-10 points each, which was very relieving. It was relieving because I had been monitoring their own content and links for the past few years, and much of their links have been spam or purchased links. I had been waiting for their drop for awhile, and now there's vindication!

So for the first time in awhile, I'm very impressed with this update, and from my narrow perspective, the new index seems to be right on the money.

In response to the part about "you need people to miss you", a good example would be the owner of a small quaint Italian restaurant in your neighborhood that everyone loves. The owner moved to your 2nd rate smallish big city from Italy 10 years ago and just loves what he produces and his customers. He's constantly making the rounds every night complimenting, talking to, and cracking jokes with customers. When he's not around people miss him. He has a distinct opinion and perspective, and that's why people keep coming back.

Scaling this up and broadening it out to all businesses, I think it means focusing on a specific segment of your market and putting your stake in the ground, forming an opinion, and keeping the conversation open with that segment of your customers. I mean if you read some company blogs, they're just checking the box to say they have a blog. They're not going deep and passionate and getting opinionated.

Off the top of my head, https://baremetrics.com/blog has an awesome 10x brand blog. It's opinionated, helpful and goes above and beyond. I trust http://www.thekitchn.com/advice more than I trust allrecipes.com or something generic. I love how Ian is a honey badger in his posts - https://www.portent.com/author/ian - he writes like he talks and that's way more engaging than perfectly formatting a long post.

I would view the Moz blog as going deep and connecting with the audience. Contrast that to HubSpot, while although they are volume animals, they kinda just pump out mehh content and let you find the golden nuggets.

Just a few examples so far! It's an open discussion so I don't have a proper conclusion.

Thanks for the transparency as usual. A question I've always been wondering:

Moz seems to have much more stature, clout, and maybe funding compared to many other SEO software companies based around the world. And of course you offer more of a suite of products rather than just focusing on Open Site Explorer. But to me one of the most important SEO tools is the backlink explorer tools that companies offer, and it seems like OSE, although one of the first, lags compared to a few others. I've read that OSE isn't looking to just grab all the links, but only the most important ones. It seems though that there's been lots of technical challenges, and I can't help but think that there are other companies that have already solved their indexing challenges or are a few steps ahead of OSE.

Would Moz ever go out an buy a pretty good backlink explorer company like Ahrefs or Majestic or some other upstart that's solved that piece of the puzzle? Combining that new technology that's solved the indexing part with your DA algorithm seems like a match made in heaven. I'm sure you guys have considered this years ago internally, but it's a question I've always pondered...

Really hard to know for sure without knowing the industry/vertical, but it sounds like you've started somewhat of a system for scaling this up.

I would estimate a half-hour per article with time to upload to the CMS included in that, so around 15 pieces I would estimate is fair. Again a lot depends on the research and ultimate quality of the content, but it sounds like it's fairly straightforward.

One thing you could do to help is identify what features are being identified over and over, and see if you can help with some Excel spreadsheet magic.

I managed a project like this in the past for golf course descriptions, and since there were about 1,500 of these, using Excel came in clutch.

Yes you want quality content, but if you're listing features over and over, then you should use tools to help speed up the work!

I would say it depends on the size of the site, if it's a large site, you can be wasting Google's crawl capacity by having it spend time following 301 redirects from nonexistent pages.

Google does a pretty good job explaining the soft 404 conundrum:

Returning a code other than 404 or 410 for a non-existent page (or redirecting users to another page, such as the homepage, instead of returning a 404) can be problematic. Firstly, it tells search engines that there’s a real page at that URL. As a result, that URL may be crawled and its content indexed. Because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently and your site’s crawl coverage may be impacted (also, you probably don’t want your site to rank well for the search query [File not found]).

We recommend that you always return a 404 (Not found) or a 410 (Gone) response code in response to a request for a non-existing page. You can improve the user experience by configuring your site to display a custom 404 page when returning a 404 response code. For example, you could create a page containing a list of your most popular pages, or a link to your home page, or a feedback link. But it’s important to remember that it’s not enough to just create a page that displays a 404 message. You also need to return the correct 404 or 410 HTTP response code.

Here's the thing, if you keep it as a 301 redirect from the old listing page to the property overview page, that old listing page will stay in the search index longer since you're not showing a true 404 response code. So if people are in the search results and click on that listing there's two ways of looking at it: if they click on the non-existent listing, well at least you'll still be driving a little bit of traffic to your site and hope they look at other properties. On the flip side it's a poor user experience since they were expecting to see that property page when they clicked from the search results, but instead are just being led to another page.

I think the decision lies in the size of the site. If it's a huge site, let them hard 404 and follow the best practices. If it's a small site and you're hoping people stick around serendipitously, you can probably keep doing what you're doing.

A few thoughts - pretty good explainer video, I would imagine that would take a ton of time to write!

First impressions on user profiles:

• From looking at a few of the profiles, it seems like you'd be missing out on a lot of good user data if you simply retired these profiles permanently. From a search engine perspective, it sounds like they're not bringing in much on their own. But there's also qualitative and quantitative data that you can glean from all of those profiles to inform and create content, charts, data, reports, etc for your site. You can map out all the user profiles to create personas for your site. You wouldn't want to trash these and lose the data.

• I do see the point on the content being somewhat thin, but thin content pages don't always harm your site if they're serving a purpose on your site. If you look at Moz's profile pages, some of them aren't very meaty if the users haven't contributed many posts or comments. So it should be evaluated on a case by case budget.

• What you can do - and I believe Moz does - is if the user hasn't been active in the last year, you deactivate/archive their page until the user signs in again. That way you only have active user pages. Conversely, you can leave the profiles up but just automatically noindex those pages that aren't being used so that the crawl budget isn't being wasted. Another idea is to automatically noindex some of the pages under a certain word count threshold.

• Yes the user profiles may be eating up your crawl budget when Google crawls the site, so you wouldn't necessarily want the profiles being crawled above other important pages if the crawler is hitting it's limit. Check out Search Console to see the crawl activity and stats (under Crawl Stats)

• It looks like you have 8,000+ profiles currently indexed - which is both good and bad. Good because it's proof that Google is able to crawl all of those profiles and deems them worth indexing. Bad if you don't want all of them indexed or to waste your crawl budget.

• You are write that all of the title tags are the same. I would automatically rewrite those and run a 90-day experiment to see if you can actually get some long-tail organic traffic to those profiles. Perhaps in aggregate they can actually bring in some traffic. Or maybe you'll learn after 90 days that they just don't rank for anything and so aren't worth spending time on.

• One thing I noticed is that you don't have an XML sitemap designated in your robots.txt - https://www.hairlosstalk.com/robots.txt I would add multiple XML sitemaps to your robots.txt by creating a sitemap index. The WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast does this well for your WordPress pages, but you should make sure your shop and profile pages get their own XML sitemaps as well.

• You should submit all sitemaps in Search Console and track the page indexation % for each XML sitemap.

• You should also run a cohort report in Google Analytics to see if those with profile pages on your site have higher engagement rates than non-users and let that inform your decision as well. Do they purchase more than others? Visit more often? You don't want to chop off a community that contributes to the health of your site and revenue.

• From a UX perspective, it's a funk thing to have your headers and design different among the WordPress, Magento, and Blogs sections. I'm sure you're aware of that, but it's definitely something that stands out.

• Action items:

• Rewrite all title tags on user profiles (auto generated is ok) and test for 90 days to see if the traffic changes

• Also optimize the profile pages with on-page best practices as well

• Generate XML sitemaps for each section of your site, and submit them in Search Console

• Create some type of programmatic way to deindex old or extra thin profile pages

• Run cohort reports on profile page owners vs anonymous visitors

There's your free mini-site audit! Let me know if you have other questions!

Highland brings up some great points that I agree with. I definitely am learning as well that for some clients that are larger and has an in-house team that you support as an SEO, they might just want you to focus on SEO. But if it's a smaller company you're working with that maybe doesn't have their own Director of Marketing, then you kind of want to take on that role and provide a variety of services. It's kind of a business-dependent approach, meaning every company has different needs - no two are the same. Although productizing the services for clarity, ease of pitching is a good idea too.

In response to your question, I would agree with you that it is a difficult situation - writing content for a law firm that you don't have the technical chops for. Assuming that you're dealing with lawyers - I would imagine they are super busy and their billable hourly rate is so high that they're incentivized to work on their own client work rather than help you write content.

Perhaps rather than a blog, you can organize and repackage lawyer-approved information and helpful guides to post on their site. Think about who their clients are and what the clients need help with and serve them the best info possible on the site. Showcase the trust and authority of the firm with evergreen content.

If you do decide to continue blogging, perhaps take the Movado approach - where in their real estate niche instead of talking about real estate jargon and industry issues, they broaden out to talk about cities, neighborhoods, and local topics in cities across the world.

@Trevor - I've noticed an anecdotal trend since around 2011/2012 as the average thumbs up on any Moz post has decreased. Seems that after the switch from SEOmoz to Moz there was a dip, and then a second dip after this most recent redesign. Am I totally off here, or is this something you guys are seeing.

Would be a cool blog post to compare the trends of page views and thumbs up over time and any big meta trends that go along with that, could be very informative. I'm sure there's some UX and brand engagement metrics to go along with that.

Have also noticed less comments from well known SEO/other leaders since around that time. Could very well be a correlation between those who were leaders in 2012 that have since just received so much business that they can't keep up with commenting and/or they've shifted attention to their own websites and content. I'm thinking of people like Wil Reynolds, Ross Hudgens, Dan Shure, even Cyrus Shepard and Dr. Pete, among others!

Again, would make an excellent blog post!

This is definitely still a sound strategy, especially since you're essentially cleaning up parts of the web! You're reclaiming links already pointing to the clients site, so it's a fairly straightforward strategy. The title led me to believe you might have been snapping up deleted domains and redirecting to the client site, a general gray-hat strategy.

A few issues to watch out for:

• In order to recover the most value, try to recreate the original content on your site that the external sites were linking to. For example, if you had 30 external links to a resource page that's now dead, it would be best to recreate that page if it still applies to your business rather than 301 all the links to the home page
• Be wary of redirect chains, Google will stop following a few redirects chained together (4 or 5 hops)

Here's a good article from PageOnePower on the subject as well.

I've read a good amount here and in other blog posts about strategies for national brands to rank locally as well with local landing pages, citations, etc.

I have noticed something strange that I'd like to hear if anyone else is running into, or if anyone has a definitive answer for.

I'm looking at a custom business printing company where the products can and are often shipped out of state, so it's a national brand. On each product page, the client is throwing in a few local keywords near where the office is to help rank for local variations.

When looking at competitors that have a lower domain authority, lower volume of linking root domains, less content on the page, and other standard signals, they are ranking nationally better than the client. The only thing they're doing that could be better is bolding and throwing in the page keyword 5-10 times (which looks unnatural). But when you search for keyword + home city, the client ranks better.

My hypothesis is that since the client is optimizing product pages for local keywords as well as national, it is actually hurting on national searches because it's seen as local-leaning business.

Has anyone run into this before, or have a definitive answer?

EGOL - awesome example, and I think it perfectly applies to many many industries, especially ecommerce. It has a bit of a pessimistic outlook at the end, but that's the reality for many online brands who are juggling too many tasks to try to beat, or even compete with, the mega retailers.

What I was imagining you would head towards was that HappyJoe realizes that Google doesn't reward him for his 10x customer support, so after he shuts off his phone he moves the hundreds of questions and answers to his website to create 10x content out of it, and he lives happily ever after.

You might have experience with a similar client but I'd be surprised if someone bought the drill from Amazon and then called HappyJoe for support. Maybe if they have no one else, they have to. At the end of the day if Google wouldn't recognize him being a helpful guy, he needs to build out a massive online help and support center with tons of training docs and videos, right?

Yes you can redirect the 3 URLs to the new product page and everything would be alright.

The question to consider though, would be if you had tens of thousands of product pages and so then would need tens of thousands of redirects. If the old pages did not get much or any traffic, or just the popup URL was hardly ever visited, it might not make sense to implement the redirects. Those redirects could slow down portions of your server or site while processing those redirects.

Essentially if you had a bunch of old pages that were just never useful, let them 404. If they were useful and linked to or in the index, then 301 redirect to the new page.

Hope that helps?

Not sure if it completely disappeared or just moved somewhere else. Would be curious to hear!

The simple answer may be that users enter through organic traffic, add something to their cart, then go to some other tabs or do some comparison shopping, the session times out (after 30 minutes is standard) and so when they come page to the cart page directly they start a new session but they're still tagged as coming from organic.

David Sottimano has a really good write up on this Deepcrawl post:

"If a user enters a site via Google / Organic, allows the session to time out, and then navigates to a non-indexable page, that non-indexable page will be credited as Google / Organic Landing page.

I had been skeptical about this for a long time, even though experts like Mike Sullivan answered me on Quora, I had to test this many times to make sure this was actually the case – I also had a former colleague double check my test results (thanks Tom Capper)."

Another post on Jfet.io discusses the same idea:

"My guess?  People are adding items to their cart, then doing comparison shopping or coupon hunting.  This process lasts over 30 minutes (maybe they wander off to lunch or for a coffee break), and when they return to the browser with your site’s cart open, a new session starts.  In that new session, the landing page is the cart and it’s direct traffic.  Because GA rolls with the last non-direct source, it’s attributed to search/email/whatever."

I'd recommend testing out all the action items on both of those posts and see if their solutions work. My take is that it's probably people revisiting their cart after a timeout session! Let me know what you find out.

I've seen this happen several times and the first thing to do is really clean out your site first. I'd recommend Sucuri.net to do a thorough malware cleanup. Their free plugin isn't enough, you need to go with the paid version. Are you on WordPress? I've seen this happen to 4 sites already I've helped.

Then, let all the errors 404. If you 301 them then the bad pages and links will stay alive longer. Even better to let them 410, but 404 should do the trick. I wrote about some of the reasons behind those in a post here on Moz a few years ago that still applies.

Matt Cutts has a good reply on disavowing spam links in his video here, and says:

"If you're at all stressed, if you're worried, if you're not able to sleep at night because you think Google might have something, or might see it, or we might get a spam report about you, or there might be some misunderstanding or an algorithm might rank your site lower, I would feel free to just go ahead and disavow those links as well,"

I went ahead and disavowed the DOMAINS of the most recent site, just to be extra sure. Let me know if you have follow up questions!

Hey Anirban - internal linking is definitely a good tactic for the right sized site.

There's a pretty good overview of internal linking over on this Quicksprout video, one highlight:

"But, to find out how to get the most bang for your buck, you want to find the pages that have the most authority. Those are the ones that you want to link from to the pages you’re trying to rank.

Let me show you what I mean. We’re at Open Site Explorer. What I did is, I put in the home page of my site and pressed the search button. When you’re here, it’ll automatically rank inbound links coming from other sites, but that’s not what we want. We want pages from within our site. So, click on the “Top Pages” tab. When you do that, you’ll see the page authority of all the pages on your site. Starting from highest to lowest, these are the pages that you want to build internal links on, pointing to the pages that you actually want to rank."

Brian notes that you can automate some of it if you have thousands of pages, but you shouldn't rely on it too much since there's not enough anchor text diversity:

"I’m not a huge fan of doing the automated, because if you do it like this, you’re not going to have a lot of anchor text diversity which may get you dings for over-optimization. If you have a site with thousands of pages, you will need to maybe do some automation and at least have some of your internal links done by a plugin or some piece of software."

This Moz Academy lesson also has some good tips on internal linking:

• Make links relevant, and useful
• Don't stuff keyword into anchor text too much, and don't overuse footer links
• For huge sites, you can use sitemaps well and include them in the footer (see 5:00 into the video)

I recently wrote up a summary of ecommerce internal links best practices, but the ideas apply to non-ecomm sites:

• Link product pages together via the description if they're related
• Tell a story in blog posts of your products and link to those product pages
• Link blog post content to relevant category pages (underutilized)
• Make category pages more user-friendly with content, and link liberally to relevant internal pages
• Use user-generated content/curation pages to help you naturally build internal links at scale

Hopefully these ideas point you in the right direction, let me know if you have any followup or more specific questions!

If you haven't used Screaming Frog's SEO Spider to scan your site and show internal linking pages, that can be another great tool to help you out.

The first thing that comes to mind is if you have the correct version of the URL in Search Console. It's best to have both versions of the URL, both the www and non-www version.

Assuming it's the company linked in the article, you should be using the non-www version in Search Console. Without seeing the configuration in there myself it's hard to know exactly the issue. Actually when trying both versions of the site, assuming it's TG, both versions (www and non-www) which is not ideal - you should have one redirect to the other!

You're right, Moz's OSE doesn't show any links [see screenshot 1].

But in Ahrefs it shows a bunch of domains [see screenshot 2].

I still don't see the Dallas News links in Ahrefs either, so you may want to check another backlink source like Majestic to see if they have it.

It's strange that Search Console wouldn't pick it up, which leads me to believe it's something off with the Search Console view. Be sure you're looking at the https:// version of the site as well.

Let us know what you find out!

aAaXl Fc7Ep

I don't believe there is such a thing as keyword dilution. Could be wrong as things change hourly in SEO, but haven't heard it myself.

The best thing to think of is targeting for the highest volume keyword as well as a long tail keyword. In other words, you want to target long tail keywords that also include a "head term". To put it a 3rd way, if you're targeting a head term, might as well include a long tail keyword.

I prefer your #2 above.

It includes "web design services" up front in the title tag which is great, but you're also including longer tail keyword with the rest of it.

As a quick grammar fix, you would say "Web Design Services with Focus on Conversion" or "...with CRO Focus" or "...with Conversion Focus" (last one not ideal though)

I agree with ViviCa1's methods, so go with that.

One thing I just wanted to bring up though, is that unless people are actually visiting those pages you don't want indexed, or it does some type of brand damage, then you don't really need to make it a priority.

Just because they're indexed doesn't mean they're showing up for any searches - and most likely they aren't - so people will realistically never see them. And if you only have a one-page site, you're not wasting much crawl budget on those.

I just bring this up since sometimes we (I'm guilty of it too) can get bogged down by small distractions in SEO that don't really help much, when we should be creating and producing new things!

"These also seem to not be working and I am wondering if it is because I re-submitted the sitemap with only the index page on it (as it is just a single page site) could that have now stopped Google indexing the original pages to actually see the 410's?"

There was a good related response from Google employee Susan Moskwa:

“The best way to stop Googlebot from crawling URLs that it has discovered in the past is to make those URLs (such as your old Sitemaps) 404. After seeing that a URL repeatedly 404s, we stop crawling it. And after we stop crawling a Sitemap, it should drop out of your "All Sitemaps" tab.”

A bit older, but shows how Google discovers URLs through the sitemap. Take a look at the rest of that thread as well.

It's definitely a tricky question to answer, and there are a few ways of going about it.

I'm a big fan of Page One Power and they do charge by hour blocks, which you've mentioned. The reason Jon Ball says they do this is because every site is different and they can't charge by the link because of that. A link is not a link.

On the flip side:

• One of the most well known internet marketing firms that employees high profile SEO speakers charges $500 per link.
• A UK link building agency that is medium-well known was charging around $125 a link in 2012
• A large multi-media agency based in California I know of was charging $750 a link on old domains in deep pages for their clients

In my opinion the most transparent way all around is to do it in the hour-block method that Page One Power does it because all links are not created equal. In this method the link builder should report to the client at the end of the month how efficiently they spent the clients money in the 20 hours dedicated to link building that month. This method could cause initial strain in the client-consultant relationship however because the client might look at the consultant's rate (say it's $100 an hour) and compare them to other consultants.

Another method is to charge by the link. The problem with this is all links are not created equal. The consultant is not incentivized in the short term to spend 5 hours to earn one extremely valuable link if they're not going to be paid any more than if they spent one hour building that link.

A hybrid method could be to charge the client based on where the link was placed, but evaluating the price of each placed link every month is a lot of work and a lot of discussion.

In 2014, creating super high quality content should be talked about in the same sentence as building links since they go hand in hand. So that brings us to another method, where a block of say 20 hours a month for a small-medium business is set aside to spend on content and links. Some months 70% of that 20 hours is spent on building that content piece, but then for the next 2 months 70% of the time is spend promoting that content piece. This is how I would prefer to work, and it's a win-win both ways. The SEO consultant is both incentivized to create good content and promote it at the same time. The client is ensured that their money is being spent wisely and for the right reason.

I like talking about prices, it's something we need more guidance on in this industry.

N8raiLH.png