Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Nikita,

I am going with Tom on this one. Google has made a obvious effort to cut down on web spam in all forms over the last year or two. This effort has included the devaluing of various types of links and various ranking penalties for sites it thinks are 'breaking the rules'.

Now you say these links seem legit, but the process of obtaining them is anything but. A fiver to get 15 links on edu sites that are in every way only there for the link? This is spam.

Regardless of if these links are going to have any benefit (agree with Tom here, I seriously doubt it but in some verticals you never know) the bigger picture is you are leaving the door open to future penalties and/or drops in rankings due to a dodgy link profile. I would never want to have to get into that conversation with a client!

Regardless of the value (or lack of) of a specific link from a specific directory I would agree with you that the seomoz directory list is a bit problematic. Since they are listed it does give the impression (rightly or wrongly) that these directories are 'approved' by seomoz and this might be sending the wrong message to many people. Would be interested in hearing the thoughts of a staff member on this, personally I would be tempted to get rid of the list!

Hi,

All things being equal, if the canonical tags are properly implemented you should see zero.

For ecomm sites, it is pretty easy to get duplicate title and content warnings from similar but not identical product pages which is usually an indication of thin content (no descriptions or one line descriptions that are almost identical).

So first line of enquiry is to confirm the canonicals are really doing what you expect them to be doing and if after the next crawl you still see duplicate issues then download them in a csv and start investigating them to see which pages are being flagged.

Hope that helps!

Hi Johan,

As Tom says definately make sure your 301s are in place. Especially for a large site you will want to submit a new sitemap to help indexing the new urls and a user friendly 404 page perhaps noting the redesign and linking to the main areas of the new site would be a good idea if you expect to still be getting traffic to old urls that are not covered by 301s for some reason. The basics in other words, but worth a mention.

Hi Arnout,

Hope I am not missing something obvious, but this data is already in GA if you have properly connected the adwords and analytics accounts.

You can see it in traffic sources -> sources -> search -> paid and then click the "matched search query" in the central column where it says primary dimension. This gives you the exact keywords or phrases that were matched and brought the visitor to your site.

Is that what you are after? If so, no need for extra scripts!

Hi Jon,

Are you sure the indexing issue was the cause of your drop in rankings? Switching platforms can introduce a raft of potential issues. You have probably covered these but worth keeping in mind things like any content changes that happened at the same time, proper rel canonical tags on the product pages, 301 redirects to account for url changes etc. I would pay particular attention to main keywords and their associated landing pages pre and post platform change to note any major differences which might give you more specific areas to look at.

In regards how long it might take, if you have a big site with lots of products then it could take google a number of weeks to reindex (or deindex) all the pages, so I would suggest being patient before making too many changes on top of each other. You can check the cache date of your main pages in the google serps by clicking on the 'cached' link next to the url which will give you a page with the date of the latest copy google has.

Hope that helps!

Hi Andy,

Not sure why you are seeing a 403 error (I don't see this in the headers), but you seem to have an issue with your rel=canonical tag on your homepage. It is showing a relative link to "/home" which leads you to this page: http://www.inoncology.com/home/ which is actually showing a 200 OK status, but is obviously not!

Digging into the headers a bit more it seems you might have a circular redirect going on before that, I am seeing /home redirect to /content/internet/pm/inoncology/com_EN which seems to redirect back to /home/.

No 403 in all of those, but maybe the combination of wrong rel canonical tag plus the mixed up redirects is causing the moz crawler and screaming frog to choke?

Wordpress and Joomla are both just tools at the end of the day and can both be effective depending on how you are using them. I personally have had negative experiences trying to optimise existing joomla sites (complicated templates, weird plugin functionality, slow load times etc) but I am sure those more experienced with it would say these things can be overcome.

The real questions are why you want to switch systems and how much effort it would require to do so? It looks like you have quite a bit of content in your site, so migrating to wordpress would likely need a bit of technical experience and time to complete. I am sure there are scripts around that will help in that process, but migrating a db from one system to another usually has a few gotcha moments along the way! You would also need to account for any changes in url structures and 301ing the old urls to the new. All in all not a decision to be taken lightly.

If there is not a specific reason you want to switch (ie something you are trying to do in joomla that is proving impossible for some reason) I would think that switching platforms might be more hassle than it is worth. As for one or the other being more customisable and/or secure than the other, I don't think there is really any difference between them, both are fully customisable and are as secure (or not secure) as you make them if following best practices.

Hi,

The meta keyword tag is pretty much useless in terms of ranking, so if these are the keywords you are referring to then I would not expect to see any results.

In terms of improving rankings, in the first instance you will need to give the search engines (and users!) some more information about what your site offers. Having a quick look at your homepage I have no idea what yookos offers that would make me want to register. I would recommend getting some text into the homepage describing who your site is aimed at and why it is different from other social type sites.

Your page title for example is 'Log in with your Username | Yookos', this is not helping the search engines understand what your site is about! The same comment goes for your meta description: 'Yookos is one of the leading and fastest growing social networking sites that provides a safe and engaging environment for users.'. Why is it a leading and fast growing network? Who is the main target audience(s)?

Beyond the homepage, it would help to get some more indexable pages on the site. Some ideas might include users guide or frequently asked questions type pages which will give you some more content that you can use to explain what the site is all about to users that have not already registered and also give the search engines some more information and pages they can use in the serps.

Hope that helps!

Hi Paul,

As you already know there are a couple of ways to approach this. Opinions will vary, but with the details you have given I would be tempted to do as you originally thought, keep building links from US based sites. There must be some US based blogs, review sites etc that cover your software field (?), those would be the first place I would look at for getting some more relevant US links.

Keep in mind that not all .com sites are US oriented so even though you say you have more US links than UK, if this is only based on the domain then it might be a bit more complicated than that.

You have not mentioned what your keywords are, but software type keywords might have some pretty different keyword difficulty scores between the US and the UK, which might account for your #1 ranking in the UK and nowhere to be seen in the US. That being said, since you are ranking in both for other keywords that is an indication that ranking in both is at least possible with the setup you currently have.

If you have not done so already, it might be worth putting a news page or a blog post on your site about the expansion into the US market. If you run a blog then I am sure there are some other content ideas you could come up with that detail US specific data for your particular software field which would give you some nice content to use when approaching people for links.

Hope that helps!

Not being silly, but have you tried Google? Searching for seo consultant or seo agency etc together with your location will surely bring up some likely candidates. Linkedin might also be a good place to try the same type of search for some local talent. I agree with svmedia that it is nice to be able to meet them in person, although certainly not absolutely needed.

Hi Bridget,

There is no alt attribute in css, so no you cannot add it there,

There are a couple of things you can do.

1. Optimizing your image file names will at least give an indication of what the image is about and

2. Rethink your css and the use of background images. Specifically you could get the same effect as you have now without background images using a combination of absolutely and relatively positioned divs. This way you can have the same layout as now but with the image in the html rather than the css and alt tags will be available for them.

Check the link here for some demo code: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8708945/how-to-position-text-over-an-image-in-css

Hope that helps!

Hi,

Yeah I seem to not be able to get past 100 now for some reason. I remember I had some luck with this excel add-on in the past. I think it limits to 1 request every 10 seconds so if you have a big list better to leave it run over night, but it does the job and gets the data into excel so worth a shot!

http://www.businesshut.com/seo/seomoz-mozscape-add-in-for-excel/

You could also check out the seogadget excel for the moz api, I have not managed to give it a good go through, but it should also be able to do the job:

http://seogadget.com/mozscape-api-extension-for-excel/

Hope one of them helps!

Hi Phillip,

Well the short answer is sure the blog can bring benefits to the main site. It opens a number of avenues that your main site might not be able to easily address in terms of content, so more in depth discussions about XXX and posts about related topics that might not fit easily into the content of your main site.

It also can open up networking/community type opportunities with other related blogs (for example) which can result in positive social mentions and/or links, and those links into the blog will help with boosting the overall domain rank of the whole site.

And of course you can use it to target various key phrases etc that might be difficult to get into the main site and then link back to relevant pages in the main site which complement what you are discussing in the blog.

So, yes definitely can benefit the whole domain in a number of ways and having it at /blog/ is a very common practice that should work just fine!

Hope that helps!

Hi Juan,

Well for the specific url you mention something appears to be wrong.

Firstly, the url you refer to http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/alojamiento does not exist (shows the 404 page) so the moz crawler is correctly telling you that it is redirecting there.

Secondly the redirect from the first page is indeed a 302 and not a 301, I check using http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/ and it shows a 302 redirect, so again the crawler is giving you correct information.

What to do? First of all make sure the pages you want to redirect to exist and you have the correct urls for them and then have a look at your htaccess file and make sure there are no errors and test to make sure it is doing what you expect it to be doing.

I think for 301 redirects the first url need to be without the domain name like so:

redirect 301 /tks-camp/alojamiento/ http://www.tarifakitesurfcamp.com/alojamiento

Thats what I use anyway and seems to work.

Hope that helps!

Hi,

So if you have a list of urls in the A column and the A1 field has a title 'urls' or similar then you select the B1 field and in the formula box (fx) up top you can put something like

=getLinkscape(A2:A92)

Which will pull the data for the urls listed from the fields A2 - A92.

I have found that you have to have a multiple of 10 so you don't get a timeout error, I think the script bunches the urls into groups of 10 and it seems to have an issue if there is an odd number. So if you have 99 urls, add another one to make a round multiple of 10!

You can see some more tips here: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/updated-tool-seomoz-api-data-for-google-docs

Hope that helps! Its a really useful tool.

In Google Docs you can do this using the (awesome) Seer Interactive Toolbox, check it out here:

http://www.seerinteractive.com/seo-toolbox/index.html

Hi Trent,

Having a quick look I saw that you have relative urls in your canonical tag and this could be problematic. I think it would be worth making those urls absolute to avoid any confusion on Google's part in determining what page or page version should be indexed.

Cannot say for sure if this is the problem, but worth looking into.

Hope that helps!

Hi David,

Personally I feel the value is debatable. If you are syndicating your own blog content then you are running the risk of either duplicate content and/or what looks quite a bit like mechanical link building, both of which are low value options.

If you are planning on creating unique content for the other blogs then you need to balance the amount of effort it will need to create something decent with the amount of time you have. I have also found that you can be in danger of competing with yourself, and the last thing you want is your offsite blog competing with your main site/blog. In my experience blogspot etc have proven to be more hassle than they are worth in upkeep and I would prefer to focus on the main blog creating good content and building strong links.

My two cents!

Hi Natasha,

I think hitwise offers this kind of data also: http://www.experian.com/hitwise/hitwise-methodology.html