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Are you talking about the incentives for Mozpoints? If so, they can be found here: https://moz.com/community/mozpoints

Hi,

Google Analytics is pretty good about assigning proper attribution to channels. If you had been sending out emails prior to tagging the links, that traffic was falling under either Direct or (Other).

PPC is the only medium that would cannibalize organic since you can have impressions in both spaces at the same time. The drop in organic traffic could just be the ebb and flow of your business. Since most businesses have seasonality, year over year comparison is  often a better yard stick for performance.

Is there a particular search engine that you can attribute the traffic loss to? Or perhaps a piece of content received more entrances last week simply due to the timeliness of that content?

Hi,

Putting 3 city names in your title tags is going make them way longer than the recommended character count for titles. This will probably also look a bit spammy to search engines. I'd recommend reading through Moz's guide to local SEO, which can be found here: https://moz.com/learn/local. One thing to note though, it's very difficult to rank for local keywords in a city that you don't have a physical presence in. For location-based queries, search algorithms tend to show results for based on geographical proximity since it better matches the intent of the searcher.

Happy optimizing!

Hi ,

Did you follow all of Google's Change of Address instructions? If redirects are in place, chances are you missed something else minor that can have a big impact.

Hi,

Duplicates of this nature can only be fixed by adding canonical tags to one preferred version of that product. When you have multiple instances of the product throughout many categories, search engines aren't sure which to show, so they'll usually not show any of your results. For more on canonical tags, read this Moz article.

You cannot remove it from the Moz report, as that's part of its purpose - to show you instances of duplicate content.

From an SEO perspective, they will count as a link pointing to your site. But since they're essentially 301 redirects, you loose a bit of the link juice.

There's a lot of reasons people use them, mostly for social media from what I've seen. Since they're shorter, and you can hide UTM parameters in them, they display better on FB/LinkedIn and are much shorter in terms of characters which makes them Twitter friendly.

Hi,

You definitely want to avoid redirects where possible, so scratch option number 2. Redirection causes you to lose about 10% of the authority that page has built up. Google tends to prefer pages that they have known about for a while.

If you were to do option 2, you'd also have to update all of your internal links to point to the new page, as well as outreach to any external linking sites to have them update.

All you need to do is take the source code for the variation page and make it the source code for the original.

It sounds like you may have used Google Content Experiments. If that's the case, the additional URL created for your variation doesn't need to be excluded from crawls or disallowed, Google knows it's there and there's no other way to get to it other than the code snippet they utilize to send your sample to the variation.

Hi there,

I track my redirects by creating parameters that I append to the resolving URL, for example: /old-page >>> /new-page?redir=301&src=/old-page

I set redir as 301 and src (source) as the referring URL. This allows you to analyze only this traffic in Google Analytics by filtering for pages or landing pages that contain 301 in the URL.

This should get you the data you're looking for.

Hi,

First things first, it's a common misconception that the robots.txt disallow: / will prevent indexing. It's only indented to prevent crawling, which is why you don't get a meta description pulled into the result snippet. If you have links pointing to that page and a disallow: / on your robots, it's still eligible for indexation.

Second, it's pretty weird that the noindex tag isn't effective, as that's the only sure-fire way to get de-indexed intentionally. I would recommend creating an XML sitemap for all URLs on that domain that are noindex'd and resubmit that in Search Console. If Google hasn't crawled your site since adding the noindex, they don't know it's there. In my experience, forcing them to recrawl via XML submission has been effective at getting noindex noticed quicker.

I would also recommend taking a look at the link profile and removing any possible links pointing to your noindex pages, this will help future attempts at indexing.

Hi Daniel,

SEO requires a great deal of patience. Your site is only 8 months old, and depending on your industry, it could take much longer than that to achieve good organic visibility. I would not recommend moving to a new domain, that won't solve your problem, it will only confuse the search engines more. You've had a lot of ups and downs it sounds like, so hold tight. I just migrated a site from HTTP to HTTPS and it took 3 months for Google to completely drop the old HTTP URLs out of the index. These things take time.

It sounds like your site could benefit from some on-site optimization. Build out a keyword map (pairing each KW with a specific URL), you don't want to have too many topics on one page, and you don't want to have too many pages for one topic (one piece of content = one URL).

You can write a single redirect rule that will apply to any request on the hostname. I'm not sure what server you're using, but if you use HTACCESS, there's a great post on StackOverflow on how to apply this rule: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29029049/best-practice-301-redirect-http-to-https-standard-domain

Becky,

The best scenario would be to roll out secure to the whole site and then apply a 301 redirect rule directing all http to https. But since you can't do that, your next best bet is going to be canonical tags. Canonicals are 'soft 301 redirects' and search engines treat them very similarly to an actual 301 redirect. I would go that route in the meantime until you're able to go secure site-wide.

This guide that Cyrus Shepard put together will be helpful when you get to the point of fully integrating HTTPS: https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

Hi,

I don't see this as an either or thing, if people find the website useful enough to go down to that next funnel stage, they're going to do their research and find those reviews regardless. If customer experience outweighs local SEO, there should be more effort at not having one star reviews, right? In lieu of improving custom service or whatever problems led to those reviews, they should be responded to and handled appropriately. People generally don't have a problem with bad reviews if the situation was handled well by the company. You could also work on increasing the number of reviews to over power the junk ones. Ask the client to reach out to their best customers and simply ask them to review. I've found it's very helpful when doing this to include detailed instructions to minimize confusion and make it as easy as possible for the reviewers.

Stephanie,

YouMoz is a section of the blog completely dedicated to user generated content. Though it looks like they've paused submissions while they reconfigure some things regarding YouMoz and the Moz community.

Hi,

You should also setup properties for all versions of your domain. Since you've got an SSL, claim non-www and www for both secure and non-secure:

• https://villacollective.com
• https://www.villacollective.com
• http://villacollective.com
• http://www.villacollective.com

You can set your preferred (https://www) domain in the settings. Having all of these properties established will allow you to identify any problems you might have with indexing of different URL types, or if something weird is going on with any of them other than your preferred.

It's not recommended to change URLs for the sake of rankings. Check out this article for a comment straight from Google on this topic: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-urls-seo-17889.html.

When you remove redirects, you also effectively remove any links pointing to your site that pass through those redirects. For this reason, it's not usually recommended that redirects are removed. Something I do to track which redirects are actually being hit, is adding source/medium UTMs to the resolving URL of my redirects - see example below. This pushes data into Google Analytics and allows me to see which redirects I don't need (i.e., if they don't show up in GA reports after a specified time frame), and which ones are still active.

Example of 301 redirect with source/medium UTMs:/my-old-URL >>> /my-new-URL?utm_source=/my-old-URL&utm_medium=301

That being said, if you had some high quality links passing through any of those redirects, it could certainly cause a drop in DA.

Hi,

I wouldn't measure your copywriter based on WPM, I'd focus instead on the quality of the writing. I recommend measuring based on the performance of the content. Is it helping improve rankings? Driving traffic? Nurturing leads? Increasing sales? I don't know what your line of business is, but I would choose some KPIs by which you measure the effectiveness of the content being produced. It doesn't matter if it's 1 WPM if that creates 3x as much revenue as content that was written at 100 WPM.

Hi Harry,

I've done this a number of times when taking over campaigns for other 'agencies'. It's a pretty common task for most SEOs. It usually involves some de-optimization of the ranking page in order to shift that emphasis over to your preferred page. Check out Moz's on-page grader, that might give you some insight into why the homepage is overpowering the interior pages.

Rand did a really good Whiteboard Friday on this topic about a month ago. It's definitely worth watching if you haven't already, you might find the key to what you're looking for: https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday

Looks to me like Google can't properly access your XML sitemap. I tried to put it into 2 different validator tools and URI Valet and none of those tools were able to access it. It could be something with HTTPS. Did you recently switch the site over to secure?