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AdWords doesn't let you build a remarketing list based on impressions, no, probably because of privacy reasons. There's no way to advertise in Gmail other than through AdWords, which means you're out of luck in this scenario.

The only way around it I can think of is, if you advertise through Gmail with a sponsored email rather than in the top or sidebar; then you get to use your own HTML, so you can slip a tracking pixel in there. But no one sees that unless they click to open the email, so I don't think this is what you're looking for, exactly.

Sorry I couldn't give a better answer,

Kristina

Hi Susan!

I'm sorry that Google's been tough for you to crack, but glad to hear that social media has paid off for you! To be honest, this may be the best bang for your buck. David Tennant is kind of a big deal online, which means you have a lot of competition.

That's not to say we can't help you here, though. You've covered a lot in this conversation so far that I think I can help with, but let me start with the original anchor text question.

It's not a blanket rule that you can't rank unless you use keyword rich anchor text. Keyword rich anchor text helps pass Page Authority across the site and increase the destination page's relevance to the keyword. This means that you don't need to add anchor text to any links that are pointing to timely posts that are no longer popular/relevant. I'd spend some time identifying the pages on your site that you want to rank well, and only add anchor text links to those pages, not to every post on your site.

I mentioned that links pass Page Authority: the amount that they pass has to do with their own PA. Pages that have inbound links will have the most Page Authority to share. Start by updating the links and anchor text from pages with inbound links to best transfer Page Authority. If the pages that you want to rank aren't already in the top or side navigation, add them.

Other than that, you don't need to change links on historical posts. Google can see the date, and if a post has 0 inbound links and a date 2014+, my guess is Google is barely paying attention to it. Rather than worrying about doing a big audit, you may want to focus on changing your practices moving forward.

You brought up a lot of other issues in your posts, so I have a few other comments:

• You mentioned that you want to rank for "David Tennant" - that's going to be tough. Think about what makes you unique and go for those keywords.
• It looks like a lot of content on your site is timely, and you mentioned that you get some information early. In that case, I'd argue that you should get Google News status. I've never personally set that up for a client, but there are a lot of people on Moz who do.
• You said that you don't want to ask for links, which is why you've had a hard time increasing your DA. Rather than asking for links, focus on what you can do to make other site owners' lives easier: offer to guest post, syndicate content, create some partnerships. Think of link building as PR that Google can track.

Hope this helps!

Kristina

Hi Karl,

That's tough! Unfortunately, I've heard of a lot of weird stories like that, where Bing gets confused. Have you shared a sitemap with Bing, which only includes non "www" URLs?

Best,

Kristina

Typically, no. You can see a discussion on this on another Moz Q&A here. There are exceptions to this rule, like when you're using AJAX and have a #!, but in your case, I'm pretty sure Google would ignore the filtered version of the page.

Hi there,

I think this can be done a lot of ways, if you take the time to state your case well. Definitely don't pretend like you're a neutral party. Here are some examples:

• A heartfelt message from your founder: Balsam Hill vs Frontgate
• A press release: Comodo vs Norton
• A table of comparisons: Lose It!
• If you're the little guy, prove you're better: Bing It On (not that this one necessarily worked, but, it was interesting)
• Simply saying, "Why [company]?" which will capture some of those searches, without picking out a competitor Conductor

Hope these examples helped! I'll bet some other Mozzers will jump on with examples.

Best,

Kristina

Hello there!

This isn't a question that we can answer for you definitively, but I think I can help you figure out the best method here.

(Before we start, I want to clear something up: if you use a # in your URLs, Google only indexes the page as it's loaded with the URL before the #. So, if you make the page title change for t-shirts/#/?=1&filter.style=vintage_, Google won't even see that.)

To restate your question, and make sure I'm understanding you correctly: you're migrating a smaller site into a larger site. Your options are:

1. The standard option, redirect pages to the most similar page on the bigger site
2. A (slightly sneaky) SEO option, where you redirect pages to pages that are similar enough for good user experience, but are pushing link equity to the pages that need it.

My answer is: go with option #1 unless you can prove that option #2 will have an impact on rankings for the right pages.

To determine if you can make an impact, map out which pages you'd like to redirect where. For simplicity sake, assume that all inbound links to oldsite.com/vintage-tshirts and oldsite.com/hipster-tshirts will transfer full equity to biggersite.com/tshirts. Add those links to the current count of inbound links to biggersite.com/tshirts. Then, go through the top keywords you want to rank for, and see if this new number of links will cause your rankings to increase. (I like to use the Mozbar and actually search for whatever keyword I'm targeting, and look at the number of inbound links and the total DA of competing sites.)

Be sure to look for potential increases in traffic if you send oldsite.com/vintage-tshirts to biggersite.com/vintage-tshirts too - typically, you get more conversions for pages that are already better targeted to the query.

There's definitely some wiggle room here. If you think that the new inbound links are significant but they won't actually get you up a ranking, go ahead and go with option #2. If you find that you don't have a whole lot of inbound links to oldsite.com/vintage-tshirts, though, this probably isn't worth you time.

Hope this helps!

Kristina

Hi Lora,

Yes, it's definitely possible! I work for Rover.com - if people search for "rover" Google's not sure if they mean us, Land Rover, Mars Rover, the movie The Rover, etc etc. I'll admit that we don't often compete with trending news, but we're competing with companies and concepts that are much older and better known than us. Here's what I've found:

• **Google likes variety. **So, even if you can't rank #1 for the name of your company, chances are, you're going to rank #2 after the celebrity/news, even if the celebrity/news has enough content to take up the entire page. If people are searching for your brand, they're going to see your results, even if you're #2. (In case this isn't a given, you want to make sure that you make your company _stand out _from the celebrity/news, not try to pick up on interest from it. Then you'll be competing with all the news media outlets.)
• **Google understands that two separate things can be named the same thing. **We never rank for "Land Rover" or "Mars Rover" and neither of those two very, very popular subjects rank for "Rover dogs." Google's pretty good at filtering out results that aren't a good match for all of the terms in a search.
• **Most searchers are willing to refine their searches. **If all else fails, searchers are probably okay with searching for your brand + your service if they don't see your site when they only search for your brand. An advantage here is, if people are looking for your brand, they won't be distracted by completely unrelated information, like celebrity news. This would be a bigger problem if this celebrity news were also a business competitor.

Hope this helps!

Kristina

Yeah, I'm not sure. One idea would be an algorithmic penalty that is rechecked every few days (although most articles I've read say that algorithmic penalties are applied and then stay applied long after the problem has been fixed). Another is that someone at Google applied a penalty manually, then someone else removed it, then someone else put it back on again.

But neither of those seem likely.

At this point, all I can think of is looking into the keywords themselves. I haven't done that so far, though, because I don't know Italian. Can you share them anyway, though, so someone else in the community can help?

Weird. So, that means that this isn't because of problems with Google's crawler not finding your content, and it's not that you are ranking for keywords that just fluctuate all the time anyway. My next guess would be that this is a poorly applied penalty of some sort. A couple of questions to see if it is:

• During the times where you're not ranking for most keywords, does your homepage rank for your brand name?
• Have you gotten any other messages in Google Webmaster Tools / Search Console since the original "Improved search visibility" that you mentioned in your original question?

Best,

Kristina

Hi Emanuele,

To clarify:

• When you say you've verified it with a site: search, do you mean that you verified that the pages that were no longer ranking were still indexed? Or, do you mean that you verified that the site itself was still indexed? I'm wondering if you're only losing certain pages.
• I'm not sure what you meant by your response about your competition. Are you saying that the competition doesn't fluctuate for the keywords that your site is fluctuating for?

Thanks,

Kristina

Hi Emanuele,

Wow, that's really weird! A few questions:

• On the days where your site stops ranking for keywords, have you done a site: search on those pages to see if Google has them in its index?
• What is your competition for these keywords? Have they been changing around a lot too, or is everything else staying about the same rank, with your site just jumping in and out of the list?
• Have you been making any changes to the site during this time? Even if you didn't change the specific page in question, it's possible that changing the link structure of the site is drastically changing their ability to rank.

Best,

Kristina

Hi Shahar,

Okay, this one has stumped me enough that I reached out to Moz associates, who were equally surprised. Rand tweeted about it, and the SEO of another site has the same problem, but no one can see anything that you or they are doing that's wrong enough to warrant this. Google's clearly got a bug.

So, my (and Rand's) broad advice is to make your brand as clear as possible:

• Make sure that all of your page titles end in your brand name. I know that you've just updated your blog posts to append your brand name, but double check that there aren't other pages on your site without it.
• Make sure that your title tag structure is clear. You have some title tags that start with your brand name and others that end in it. Choose one or the other (I prefer to end with it) and set that up across the whole site. The only exception here is your homepage, which can start with your brand when everything else ends in it.
• Use your brand name on your page more often. Leibish is on your homepage 3 times; my company's homepage uses our brand name 21 times. Don't do this to the point of keyword stuffing, of course, but find ways you can use it more often.

That's all I've got - we're all keeping our fingers crossed for you! Let us know if things start to right themselves.

Best,

Kristina

Gosh, this is so weird.

I will say, it looks like on desktop results all of the pages that end in "- Reply" are your blog pages which haven't been recrawled since you appended your brand name. You might want to go into GWT (or, Search Console, now, because Google likes keeping us on our toes) and "Fetch" the top pages that show up with "- Reply" and ask Google to add them to the index. Hopefully, if Google sees all of these pages showing up with your proper brand, it'll figure things out quicker.

Hey Massimliano,

I responded to you over here too, but basically: Googlebot's user agent declares itself to be an iPhone, so I'd rel="alternate" over to your iphone.site.com version. Rel="alternate" is supposed to redirect based on the width of the screen, not the device type, so I don't know how you'd differentiate between your multiple rel="alternate"s otherwise.

I've never heard of anyone using this set up before, so let us know how it goes!

Kristina

I thought of that, but from what I remember, you still have <title>s on the mobile version of the HTML, right?</p> <p>Also, I double checked, and "site:leibish.com reply" returns desktop results with "- Reply" appended, too, though it looks like it's only doing that to your blog pages. Do you have any internal settings in the blog that may be off?</p></title>

Hi Massimilano,

Whoa, I've never heard of anyone creating a separate URL for every type of phone. There aren't that many differences between iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone browsers, so I'm surprised you're putting in the time to create one of each. If you don't mind me asking, what made you decide to build your site like this?

In terms of SEO, though, here's what I'd do: make the iPhone version of your site the rel="alternate," since Googlebot calls itself an iPhone. When Google sends mobile visitors to the iPhone version of your site, just redirect them based on their device type.

Hope this helps!

Kristina

Hello Edward!

I work for a site that has a lot of physical locations, so Moz asked me to step in.

Let me start with this: you don't have to call out locations if Google can establish you as an online service. When I was working for Distilled I had multiple clients with online ecommerce sites, and they ranked well in most locations in the US without specifically calling out any city or state. The key, I think, was that Google saw the "buy now" and "shipping" buttons and understood that this was accessible to anyone in America.

Your site is similar. You have "get started" or "call now" buttons that show that the whole of the transaction can be done wherever you are in the US, Australia, or NZ. You have different CCTLDs, so Google knows which countries you're relevant in.

My question for you is - why do you want to optimize for local? Do you have clients who can't find you because they're searching for local terms? Did you find a lot of local keyword volume? Because my gut response is, you probably don't need to worry about this.

Best,

Kristina

Hi Dino,

How often does Google crawl your site? Google may not have found some of those inner pages. You can ask Google to recrawl any section of your site by using Fetch as Google, which gives you the option to "Submit to index". You can ask Googlebot Mobile to be the one doing the fetching, and I assume if you "Submit to index" after that, it'll get Googlebot Mobile to crawl the page again. But, it isn't clear.

I would also double check that you have an XML sitemap which includes all of the URLs you'd like to rank. And, if this is at all possible, try adding links to the pages that still show "Try Anyway" to your homepage, even if it's temporary. Google crawls your homepage more often than any other page on your site, and is more likely to see those pages if they're directly linked off of there.

Good luck!

Kristina

Hi there,

I want to dig in a little about what's concerning you here. Are you worried that you're splitting link equity? Because, it's okay to have 4 pages about chocolate cakes. There's no penalty from Google for having multiple pages about the same thing - just think about how many pages Nordstrom has for black sweaters. There's actually a benefit to having multiple pages on the same topic, if you're willing to write unique content for each page. It means you can rank for more long tail keywords, just as you mentioned your .html pages do, since each page will have a slightly different angle.

So, if your question was about duplicate content, know that you're okay. Leave the URLs as they are, but tweak the page titles and headers so they more clearly target the long tail search term that they're ranking for. Link to the .html versions of /chocolate-cake from /chocolate-cake.asp so that's clearly the higher level page, and spend more time optimizing that.

If, on the other hand, what you're worried about is link equity, the idea that by having 4 pages about chocolate cakes (and 4 pages for every other other baked good), you're getting 25% of your link potential going to each page, making 4 PA 20 pages when you could have 1 PA 30 page, then there are a few things to look at.

If there are external links to all 4 pages, then your answer lies in your competition. Search for the primary keyword that you'd hope you'd rank for if you could combine link equity for all 4 pages with the Moz toolbar turned on. Look at your competition - would you be able to beat that? Does your DA compete with other pages? Would your potential link count, once you had links from all 4 similar pages, allow you to rank on the first SERP?

If you have no chance of ranking for your primary keyword, I suggest that you stick with your 4 variations and make sure you rank for a wide variety of terms around your core keyword. That'll get you more traffic, in the end.

If you could rank on the first page for your primary keyword once you redirected those links from the .htmls, try to consolidate the content from all 4 pages. If you're cautious like me, I would do it one page at a time, combining content from both pages, redirecting one page, and then making sure that the .asp page can rank for the long tail terms that the .html page I redirected was ranking for before moving on. If you're less cautious, you can do them all at once, but you may lose that long tail traffic.

Wow, that was a lot of "if"s! I hope I didn't lose you there. Also, I hope I answered the question you were getting at.

Let me know!

Kristina

That's a bummer, that Google didn't give more feedback.

My question about meta keywords is related to this: https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/68297?hl=en

Other than that and what I've listed, I can't think of anything else that you'd need to keep an eye on. Let us know how things go when Google reevaluates!

Best,

Kristina