Can you provide the site address?

Mike

It definitely can.

Typically your homepage is going to get a bulk of your inbound links and traffic - giving it more authority than your subpages. If you target the same keyword on your homepage or a subpage, your homepage will more than likely win every time (not in all cases).

If you have a new integration with a product, that page should target specific keywords related that integration/product. If there isn't enough differing text to warrant its own page, then you should take a step back and ask whether a new page is needed OR if you should just have a mention of it on your homepage.

All of that said, you could rephrase and/or write about things from a different angle than your homepage and you should be fine and not have to worry about duplicate content as long as you are not just copying and pasting content.

Think about your user and whether the page is actually benefiting them or if you are just creating a page to try and get it to rank.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi David,

It sounds like you did everything right. As long as you cannot see the dev site in the live SERPs, you should be safe.

I have seen it take MONTHS for WMT to update any information regarding crawl stats, resolved errors, etc.

Just keep a close eye on things, but you should be safe if you can't find it by doing a Google search.

Hope this helps,

Mike

PS you may want to check Bing as well.

Hi Sarah,

If you are seeing a discrepancy between where Moz says you are ranking vs what you are seeing when you perform a search, it is because Moz tries to represent the ranking "most" users would see.

Here are some factors that can cause discrepancies found at Moz.com/Help:

Why do the rankings in SEOmoz not match what I see in Google?
Great question! Although there is never one “right” ranking for any keyword, SEOmoz tries to represent the ranking results that “most” users will see. If you see wildly different results from your search engine compared to your Ranking Report, it could be because of the following reasons:

• Personalization – Most search engines will personalize your results based on your search history. Make sure you are logged out when performing a search. For Google, try adding &pws=0 to the end of your query string.

  For example, if you searched for “SEO” the URL in Google would look like google.com/search?q=SEO. To turn off personalization, append &pws=0 to the end, so it would look like google.com/search?q=SEO&pws=0.

  

• Geographic Bias – Search engines also customize results based on location. This means users in one city often see very different results than users in another location.

• Latency – Rankings can change between the time we retrieve them and the day when they are viewed.

• “www” vs. non-“www” Subdomains – The Web App is subdomain specific, meaning it only tracks rankings for the specific subdomain you track. So if you enter “example.com” as your subdomain, but “www.subdomain.com” is what ranks in the search results, this ranking won’t appear in your rankings report. This also might indicate a problem with canonicalization or duplicate content.

  If you set your campaign up on the wrong subdomain, the only way to correct it is to start a new campaign. You can either archive or delete your old campaign, or choose to keep it running if you have enough campaign slots available.

Hope this helps.

Mike

If you go to your Campaign and under the Rankings tab you can export your full rankings report to CSV. Once you have that report, you can quickly copy and paste the keywords from that campaign across your other campaigns.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Typically ebooks are in epub (for ereaders) and mobi (for kindle) formats. A book can be available in epub, mobi, and PDF versions, but they are not really the same.

True ebooks will adjust depending on the device they are on. The text and page length usually adjust with ebooks, while PDFs are more or less an image of a page. When you adjust the text size on an ebook, the layout can shift, while when you adjust the size of text on a PDF - you are actually just zooming.

Some ebook PDFs will have password protection to prevent book piracy; however, any PDF can be password protected... so it really isn't just for "ebook PDFs". If you go with any type of password encryption, your PDF won't be able to be indexed.

To my knowledge, Google does not index epub or mobi formats, but does index PDF. If you haven't already, you should read over this article regarding optimizing your PDFs for search.

Hope this helps.

Mike

No problem.

Glad to help.

Mike

No problem.

So, having keywords in your URL is really helpful for SEO, but don't over complicate it and don't stress about it

In the small amount of testing I have done, you probably wouldn't see a huge ranking difference between the different naming conventions as long as they are at the same level. Meaning you'd "probably" have the same ranking for /new-audi/a4 as you would /new/audi-a4.

To answer your question, a flat architecture is awesome to have from a crawler standpoint and from a user standpoint. If you have a landing page /new-audi and a "product" page /new-audi-a4 at the same level, that is great. It is easier for people to remember and share on social vs having it go down another level.

The only time this flat architecture can become a headache is when you have a ton of pages and trying to remember where everything is from a site structure point of view when you are managing things.

Hope this helps.

Mike

No problem.

Yeah, that is the canonicalization problem I referenced.

Depending on what you use to manage your website this can be fixed in an administrative panel of sorts, web.config, or .htaccess file - but those can sometimes be pretty advanced.

Mike

No problem.

While your internal links are pointing to the non-www version, you have 14 linking root domains pointing to your www version.

You can you opensiteexplorer.org to get this info.

Also, check out the best practices for canonicalization to help you fix this issue.

Hope this helps.

Mike

This article from Google Webmasters Central should solve it for you, Supporting Rel Canonical HTTP Headers

Mike

Lynn Powers from Google says, "Google autocomplete is algorithmically determined. As you type, Google's algorithm predicts and displays search queries based on other users' search activities. In addition, if you're signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, you may see search queries from relevant searches that you've done in the past. All of the predicted queries that are shown in the drop-down list have been typed previously by Google users. Predicted queries are algorithmically determined based on a number of purely objective factors (including popularity of search terms) without human intervention. The autocomplete data is updated frequently to offer fresh and rising search queries."

More or less stating that your client needs to become more popular and people spell their name correctly ; )

Here is a bit of strategy from Internet Marketing Ninjas on How to Prevent Google from Thinking Your Name is a Misspelling?

Hope this helps.

Mike

Here is some additional great info on optimizing PDFs:

http://moz.com/ugc/how-to-optimize-pdf-documents-for-search

Ah! I see what you are saying.

No. The "title" style will not help you; however, H1-H6 in a PDF will still help you, along with the file name.

You can specify the Title, Author, and Subject on the Description tab under File > Properties in Acrobat.

That should help you optimize your PDF.

Mike

You will want to have your heading 1 style configured to use an

tag. You would not want to use <heading1>or any variation... you'd want to use

.

If you are using a WYSIWYG editor and you copy text from Word that is using a Heading 1 style, the code version should interpret that as

- which Google should see the code equivalent of heading 1.

Make sense?

Mike</heading1>

Hi David,

No there isn't any benefit.

The "Title" style is just that, a style. It will occur in the body section of your HTML and will not impact how Google ranks your page. It just changes the physical attributes of the text to look nice.

The "Title" tag is an element in HTML. It occurs in the head section of your HTML and will impact how Google ranks your page. This is one of the more powerful, if not the most powerful, on-page SEO elements.

Does that make sense?

Mike

Sure thing.

Yes. I was referring to the URL in the second portion of my original comment.

Right on. I wasn't completely following the reasoning behind "new", so that is why I suggested just /a4 or /audi-a4. After you explanation that you are having new and used, that makes perfect sense.

You are correct. It is another level deep and that makes it appear as though it does not hold as much importance from a structural point of view - that is why I would suggest it being /new-audi-a4 vs /new-audi/a4; however, it all depends on your site structure (although URL naming doesn't have to follow site structure). If you have /new-audi landing page, which has links to different cars, a4, a5, etc. then it would make sense to use the /new-audi and /used-audi format. If your site does not use that type of structure, it may seem confusing to someone who is just looking at the URL.

Does that make sense?

Mike

Hi Niraj,

Shorter, higher level URLs "typically" perform better in the SERPs.

I personally would probably do either /a4 or /new-audi-a4 or even /audi-a4.

There is a difference between your domain (brand) and the page (product), so I would feel comfortable using the product name "audi" at the page product level, even though it is already in the domain - if that makes sense.

Hope this helps.

Mike

... killing me Steven ; )

It is really tough to say; however, I typed "website builder reviews" into Google Trends and it looks like there was a drop in searches for that terminology in March, which would correspond to what I am seeing on your graph.

Mike