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Hi,

I think the standard line is that any links like this should be branded only and no followed if you want to be as safe as possible. If an option it has been suggested to try having them only on a homepage or on a partners type page rather than a sitewide link in the footer for example. As to if they should even be there at all, well I guess this depends if they were created purely for the link or if they bring in some marketing value from referrals/brand recognition.

Assuming you have been affected by Penguin then I wouldnt think that reducing the keyword usage on the homepage will help much. You will need to monitor carefully since #4 ranking is still visible and if you start adjusting multiple onpage and offpage variables at the same time you could all of a sudden be looking at a bigger drop and be stuck wondering which of the changes might have contributed to this! Even messing with the existing backlinks could cause further fluctuations so it sounds like a fine line you are on now. I would try making small changes and monitor for a week or two before proceeding with other edits.

Hi,

Hreflang will work on ccTLDs (.com, .co.uk, .de) etc so is not restricted to only sub domains. Yours is an interesting case where you have multiple domains for languages but all within the same TLD. I would think that hreflang would work in this case also although could not find much in the way of specific case studies or recommendations. I would be inclined to try it on a subset of pages and see what happens. On those three links you gave the content looks a bit thin and some is common across all the domains (the reviews for example which are in any of the three languages which could be confusing to google). Implementing hreflang should help clarify each domains intended target audience and could also help in better indexing of all the sites (which maybe you are also having some issues with?) check here for an interesting read http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/case-study-the-impact-of-hreflang-tag.

HI,

I don't think there is such a thing as a 'best' balance, just safer and less safe balances which can and do shift over time and through different industry verticals and niches. The dashburst article is I suppose a balanced enough approach to try to be safe(ish). Razvan at cognitiveseo has done some interesting case studies along these lines, check out here for example: http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/2522/brand-anchor-text-vs-commercial-anchor-text-ratio/

As far as I know there is no official moz research looking purely at percentage distribution of anchor texts exactly because there is no set numbers that is guaranteed to work in all verticals or for all time. Putting out exact numbers would just encourage people to chase a hypothetical best mix which is probably not the best way to go!

Hope that helps!

Hi Denise,

I'm not sure there is such a thing as a non competitive niche anymore! Competition isn't just sites actively targeting your chosen keywords but also just the sites that were ranking for those keywords before your site even existed! 3-4 weeks is not very long to be live and you might have to be a bit patient and do all the normal things you would have to do anyway (make sure all your onpage stuff is good, get the word out through social channels perhaps, get a few inbound links etc). If you care to share your site and the keyword we might be able to give some more specific thoughts.

Hi Brandon,

Its probably that robots meta noindex tag you have in there!

Hi,

Are you using the /updateCart url in goal tracking or pushing events to analytics using this url? I have seen GWT pick up 404's from us pushing virtual (non existing) page views to analytics for goal tracking etc. Just a thought.

Hi,

Yes it is ok and secure. Adding users with these restrictions basically gives them read access rights to the relevant accounts but they cannot change settings, add/delete users or generally cause any unforeseen trouble!

Hi Jessica,

Well that's a pretty good mix

Having a bunch of different kinds of errors like that could be due to a combination of issues, but I would think that first of all you have a duplicate content issue either because your cms is creating it through different urls for things like multiple categories, archive pages and that kind of thing or because you have a server setup issue that is allowing access to the same pages through multiple urls (like www vs non www urls). It might well be a combination of these things accounting for different errors so you are going to need to narrow down the data to find out exactly what is going on.

Download your error report in csv, open it in excel and select all and then do ctrl-windows-L combination. This will put your data into a filterable table. You can then go to the headers and filter (for example) only 404 pages or only duplicate title pages. Once you have filtered for a specific error have a look at the left hand column for which page or pages the problem is appearing on and then the far right hand column to see which page is linking to this page or pages. You will then have a better idea where the problem is and how it is being reached by the crawler and that will guide you on where to look to fix it. If you want to give a couple of example urls a few obvious things might stand out.

Hope that helps!

Hi Matt,

Sorry maybe I misunderstood your question... I thought that was what you are after. How/What exactly is currently blocking the moz bot then?

Hi Matt,

The user agent is called rogerbot, you can see a reference to it here (towards the bottom of the page).

Hi Kristy,

I don't think anything has changed with the crawler so a good idea to look deeper to see if anything has changed with the site. You mention 301s, so are you seeing a lot of www vs non www duplicates? Tell us the site so we can have a better look but it is the one in your profile then I can see that the content is available on both www and non www versions so maybe something has changed in your htaccess file and caused your 301 redirects to fail.

Hope that helps!

Hi Jessica,

What are the errors telling you? If it is a lot of duplicate content type errors it could be an indication that your site is linking to the same pages in multiple ways. So even though you think your site has xx number of pages, to the crawler (and search engines) it actually has more! Not sure what you mean in regards updating the profile to crawl filtered section of google analytics? If you care to give us an example of the errors and your site we might be able to give more details.

Hi Jason,

I have a site in GWT where it was wrongly setup minus the www and it was showing no links, adding the www version solved the problem. So in that regard it is possible, although it is very odd that it would change from one day to the next. By all means add the non www domain to GWT to see what data you get, but the switch from yesterday and the loss of rankings is worrying and you should definitely dig deeper... any chance there was a server setup change recently that might have thrown a spanner in the works?

Hi Anthony,

Header tags are used to indicate structure in your html document, the styling you apply to them can be anything you like and think makes the page easier to read. While it is a bit unusual to have small headings and larger paragraph fonts, it is certainly not black hat.  Is it worth using h3 and h4? You are probably not going to see any seo benefit from using them, but if your document structure makes sense to have them, then use them. Can you use more than one h2? Yes! Check out this post by Yoast which should answer most of your questions regarding structure and proper usage.

In regards what text is best, I would go with your second 'more readable' suggestion. Write your content with users in mind first, it is easy to get caught up in minor variations with the idea that it might make some difference to your rankings. 99/100 it wont, and you will just get a page that reads a bit oddly for real users.

Hi,

Well you have started on the right track with moz and the other tools! Personally I would take a step back from the link building and get a good grounding in the basics first. The moz beginner guide is a great place to start.

In regards your link profile, the moz metrics can be a bit deceptive if you have done a lot of link building in comparison to your competitors, the authority numbers can be somewhat inflated even though the links are not high value (and indeed are even hurting you). Your link profile to me looks problematic, especially the non www which has quite a few linking texts which seem completely unrelated to your site (check the anchors cloud in the ahrefs links above). Is this the reason for your ranking problems? Maybe and there is a good chance you will need to try to get rid of some of those links if possible. Might be worth asking whoever built these links if it is possible to unwind some of them, but this is a whole different conversation and worth a separate qa question where someone with more experience in getting rid of bad links might jump in with more specific advice.

What I can certainly say now is I would stop the link building you are currently doing as it looks problematic and there is no point in making it even worse. Then go through the moz guide, get a good grounding in the basics and in the first instance concentrate on building links from relevant sources from your offline world. What I mean is incorporate your real world contacts and actions with your site, register your business/site with relevant local business directories or local photography groups for example. Be a normal business with normal business activities in other words and incorporate these when relevant to a link here or there. There is no 'acceptable' rate of link building, but honestly for a local wedding photography site a 'natural' rate could be only a link or two a week! 40 a day is simply asking for a penalty, why would a site like this be getting so many links if not to try and game the search engines?

Hope that helps!

Hmm thats a point re the non www vs www. That being said, there are still a fair amount of new domains linking to the non www version also. Generally, I would not like the looks of that link profile one little bit. In all honesty, I would pause that link building until you get a better handle on what is being done vs what you need to be getting done. As Maximise points out, you might well have a real slog to get rid of the bad links later on, so don't make it any worse now.

In regards ahrefs generally backlinks are individual linking pages and domains are individual linking domains (could be one or more pages on that domain linking, its still one domain). I would look at the new/lost domains and then click on a day and look underneath to see the newly found linking domain. If most of the domains are crap directories, spam comments and generally low value links, then you do not want them.

Hi,

As the others say I would be concerned. You can get an idea of what is going on by using ahrefs, the free account will give you some basic data on new links so you have a rough idea. Check here: https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/ppp.net.nz

That being said, the link profile does not look like what you would expect with a link building campaign like you describe going on, both total links and linking domains seems to have a significant downward trend, unless at the same time as building your links you are actively trying to get rid of previous bad links? Either way, if you have a look at the newly obtained domains report here: https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/refdomains-new/subdomains/ppp.net.nz you are not going to see very much quality in there! Directories from all over the world, some comment links etc.... thats not a good link profile, watch out!

Hi,

If it is a new site it is not unusual for it to appear in pretty high positions and then fall back down once google has decided how it wants to sort/rank things. Quite possibly the same thing is happening with the other start ups you mention if they came online around about the same time. Lots of new sites aimed at similar keywords is certainly going to give the search engines a bit of food for thought in terms of how/where to rank. If you keep adding good content, attracting decent links and if the site is strong and the technicals are good you should see your rankings moving up again in the medium term.

Also worth mentioning that the coupons/deals sector can be pretty competitive and has a tendency to thin content and spammy link building sometimes, worth having a look at your top competitors and trying to see what they seem to be doing that is working for them. Did your site get caught up in a panda update? Maybe, but the way to approach it doesn't really change, address thin content issues and create good content wherever possible and naturally grow your link profile. Check out this post which is just as relevant now as it was two years ago!

Hi,

Hmm, lets look into this a bit more :).

For the sid and perhaps some of the other issues it appears you have content available on both the www and non www version of the site. This is usually the situation where the sid parameter get tagged onto the end in magento (open the non www version in a browser then click on the logo, there is your sid). Check out this post on why it happens and how to fix with htaccess. It seems that the www version is the one you are planning on using, is it possible you have set up your campaign as all subdomains? This might account for the issues being shown in the moz report (or else you might be linking to both different versions somewhere in the site like in an onsite banner for example).

I would suggest seeing to that first, letting the moz crawl run again and then assessing. Chances are the duplicate content warnings will have been reduced and you can then concentrate on the remaining ones which may need to be addressed differently.

Hi,

For the duplicate title tags implementing a rel canonical on the product pages should take care of all of the issues you mention. See this post for an explanation and implementation details. You need to be a bit careful in search results pages that have filters on them, but if the only issue is the product page with search filters added to the url then rel canonical should do the trick. Looks like you are using Magento which has rel canoncial available for product pages in the admin under System > Configuration > Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations.

For the Missing title tag, you seem to have a double quote (") attached to the end of the image url (thats what the %22‎ is). Download the moz error report and find that url in the left hand column, then find out what page is linking to it in the far right hand column. Once you know what page is linking to it, you should be able to figure out where that extra " has been added and remove it.

Hope that helps!