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It's going to be hard to get the homepage to match for every keyword you want to rank for. When using the page grader you'll probably want to stick to one or two keyword phrases per page, otherwise you'll simply be stuffing a ton of keywords into a page like you've done with the title tag you provided. You want the page titles to read naturally so they look good to humans while still containing the keywords you want to rank for. To do this, you'll only be able to truly focus on a couple keywords per page.

I'm not too familiar with magic, but I'd guess that you probably want to optimize your homepage for the term "Close Up Magician" since that is what you are. You could include paragraphs on your homepage that briefly talk about each of the types of magic you do (wedding, table, etc) with links to the dedicated pages for each of those types of magic and so on. Those dedicated pages would then be optimized for those keywords and then you branch it out from there.

Once you start doing keyword research you'll be able to identify the supporting keywords you'll need to include on each page and which subpages you'll need to create. Remember to naturally link your pages as well.

BTW, it appears to be Geolocation results that are impacted. Notice in your screen shot the results that dropped were Woodbridge location results, not the national ones.

It appears to be some issues with the Moz rankings tracker, although it hasn't been confirmed. It has happened on my site and I noticed another thread earlier where someone was having the same issue. Not 100% sure this is the case based on the screen shot you provided but since others are seeing similar issues I would say it's not an issue with your site.

http://moz.com/community/q/is-anyone-seeing-consistent-fluctuation-in-geolocated-search-rankings

I started using Wistia a while back for my video hosting because of the SEO advantages. Currently the only advantage seems to be on page SEO if you ask me. None of my videos seem to ever show up in SERP results. I think at some point last year Google pretty much removed most videos from SERP results that weren't YouTube videos. I read an article from the MOZ blog last year that was pretty helpful. Hopefully it will answer some of your questions.

https://moz.com/blog/video-seo-post-rich-snippets

Did they recently try and do some 301 redirects to point all non-www pages to the www version? It looks like the redirects may have been setup wrong and they're going to 404 pages instead of redirecting. There are a handful of other broken links on the site as well that could be contributing to the decline in Googlebot crawling. That's where I would start.

These options allow you to view backlink results from a single page level up to the entire domain level.

If you only want to see what backlinks OSE has for a specific page on your site, select "This Page"
ex: (yourdomain.com/single-page.html)

If you only want to see what backlinks OSE has for an entire subdomain on your site, select "This Subdomain"
ex: (**blog.**yourdomain.com)

If you want to see what backlinks OSE has for any page on your entire site, select "Root Domain"
ex: (yourdomain.com*)

Hope this helps.

I have been experiencing this on my site as well. Just curious if you were still receiving this kind of traffic since it has been a few months?

Recently there have been one or two times throughout the day where I see a huge spike in direct traffic. As you mentioned, the GA numbers seem to suffer but as long as this does not impact my rankings or site performance I'm not too worried. I too am concerned that this is more than just an annoyance and possibly reason for concern.

I've had other sites show up on GA as sending tons of referral traffic and figured it was just spam, but not sure of the benefit to a spammer of sending ghost direct traffic unless it is some kind of negative SEO attack. Would love to find out.

I seem to have the same issue on my site. I get a sudden influx of visitors within minutes all coming from direct traffic. How did you discover the traffic was from Miami? The only identifying factor I could find in GA was that the Network Domain for the traffic was 1e100.net. Not sure how sending direct traffic would benefit a spammer.

Have you experienced an overall drop in traffic on days you get the huge spike in direct traffic? I feel like I do, maybe the high bounce rate is a problem and signal to Google?

Would be nice to block the traffic but possibly just filter it from GA to avoid skewed data if it is not affecting your site.

I don't know if it is the reason but I noticed the sites that showed up as backlinks to my site after yesterday's update were much different than those from before the update. After the update my site showed fewer backlinks but my domain authority actually went up. It's possible the Mozscape index crawler visited different sites than it did previously and fewer/lower Domain Authority links were discovered for your site. Either that or your site lost some quality links since the last update.

Have you been monitoring your links with other tools? That could help determine if it's a loss of links or just different links being used to calculate your DA. Either way that seems like a big drop in DA.

Thanks for the information. I don't know how to and don't think I have access to change those settings on my sitemap with my current website provider. I'll send this information to them and see if they know what the problem is. Google seems to update daily, so there must be a setting that Bing doesn't like.

I increased the crawl rate for certain hours of the day when the traffic is slower, will see if that does anything. It seems as though Bing is crawling my site, just not my sitemap for some reason.

Do those of you using Bing Webmaster tools find your sitemap last crawl date gets updated? I noticed mine never updates, just shows the date of the last time I submitted it. It seems like it would update daily as it looks like bing crawls my site daily. See attached image.

bing-screen-shot.png

Martin,

Thank you for the reply, that sounds great. It seemed like the most recent index came a few weeks early (was listed as Oct 1st) and the next one is scheduled about a month out which seems like forever when you're trying to see what progress you've made, but as you mentioned, it is a ton of data to sort through on your end so definitely understand the challenges. Will be great if the next update allows for index updates on a more frequent basis and additional insights, definitely looking forward to it. Thanks again.

Kyle

Even after the most recent index update I didn't see some of the links I have built show up. So far it seems to take about a month for new links to show up but they appear in Google Webmaster tools much sooner. Hopefully if the Moz Index updates more frequently in the future these links will appear much faster. Good luck with your link building efforts.

Thanks, was able to get it done on most of them but a few I don't think I have the ability to add the no index with how my CMS is setup so will be working on trying to include unique content to those pages. Thanks for all the great advice.

Thanks for the response Travis, it's only about 35 pages so far and the content in the iFrames does update automatically each month. Right now other than page title and description the pages are basically identical to each other, so was worried about it being seen as identical content, that's why I have already no indexed them, so they shouldn't be showing up in search engines. Just want to make sure I'm using the tags right as to not do more harm than I am benefiting the site. The majority of my site is made up of Real Estate listings (I'm a REALTOR) so most of those pages don't carry much link juice I'm assuming, since they change frequently.

My focus is on maximizing my core pages so they show up on search engines so trying to exclude content that does not add value to the site (in the eyes of search engines). Maybe I'm looking into it too deep but just trying to get started on the right path since my site just launched a few months ago.

I appreciate you taking the time to comment and yes, possibly down the road if I can add enough unique content to those pages I will remove the tags, that's probably what I should do.

I have some pages on my site that don't really have any content other than some iframes that are embedded from another site. I thought it would be best to tag the page with a no-index so that search engines would leave the page alone since it has no content as far as the search engine can tell (but does provide value to my site visitors). Is this the proper approach or does it do more harm than good?

Great, hoping to see some movement with the links I've added. This stuff is a lot of work and the results take a while to show up but will keep at it. Thanks for the info Keri.

Thanks for posting those sites. They charge a fee but hopefully worth the money if they can help with better rankings.

In the same boat here, I've been waiting 75+ days and see the links on Webmaster Tools but my MOZ DA does not change. Haven't found out why they're showing in one and not the other.