Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Awesome responses everyone - really appreciate this. It seems I have my work cut out across the various tools to try to identify root cause. At first, quick glance I don't see anything obvious popping up (for example to organic vs. direct) but I have more to check, based on the excellent input from the three of you. Thank you again!

Mark

I am seeing a pretty precipitous drop in search volume traffic (see link). My keyword rankings don't seem to have suffered too much over this period. In fact, my #1 keyword have actually increased slightly in this timeframe.

Two questions...

• Is there some way to assess overall search volume across my tracked keywords (to see if this is just a case of overall searches dropping)?
• Is there a recommended plan of attack for investigating drops like this - beyond overall search volume, what other data might be important in identifying the cause of this. In short, I'm looking for some logic/structure for how I investigate this, using Moz tools and reports.

Thanks.

Mark

omE1VPc

Any thoughts on my question about availability, Russ? I understand you may not be able to offer a precise date but I have no idea whether we're looking at a month, 6 months, a year, etc. Just some sort of guideline would be helpful. For the particular research workflow I have in mind this is really important to me. I have signed for a trial account for AHrefs this morning and they seem to have very good coverage here. But, having been with Moz for a long time, my very strong preference would be to stay with Moz - but something as little more than "one day..." would be helpful

Thanks.

Mark

I see this is being endorsed as an answer to my question but until I know WHEN then I really don't have an answer.

Yeah, I'm kidding. But, seriously, "it's coming" is great and I am excited to hear that, but there's a ton of stuff that is on it's way and, until then, it's just vaporware.

I am in the slightly tricky situation that I need to look at long tail keywords pretty soon, so having at least some ballpark for when we might see this start appearing in Moz, at whatever level, would be cool.

Thanks again.

Mark

Wow - it seems my timing is indeed pretty good. Last week I posted a question on a fitness product site about a missing feature, blissfully unaware that it was about to ship. Six hours later. Beat that... Waiting...

Seriously, this is excellent. I am actively researching the solutions in this area so I guess my next question is reasonably obvious - when will this be available in some form through Moz (and is there a beta)?

Thanks again.

Mark

I recently joined a community related to Internet Marketing and I am finding it very useful. One of the topics that comes up a great deal is what tools folks use to investigate content gaps. I've been a Moz subscriber for quite some time and understand that, compared to many of its competitors, it's a high end solution. So, feel pretty well positioned there.

However, one thing that appears to be lacking is what might be called a long tail discovery tool. I am well aware of Google's Keyword Planner and other free stuff (the problem there being... so are my competitors :)). But there are a number of tools out there - SEMRush, Long Tail Premium, Authority Metrics and so on - that focus very directly on that, with "scores" for keyword competitiveness that at least help narrow down to a possible set, using filtering.

While I accept that one might argue the merits - or otherwise - of each of these specific tools, it causes me to wonder why Moz doesn't have such a capability. I see some very successful web site owners describing their processes in the aforementioned community and long tail analysis is a key part of that.

It seems that Moz has a richness of features, including around keyword ranking. But it's not clear to me why it doesn't support long tail keyword discovery "directly" (as a specific feature). I really don't want to pay for another subscription

Thoughts?

Thanks.

Mark

It does, Tom. Thank you.

Mark

Thank you, Ifemidayo. Yes, that's my conclusion too, though I'd love to be proven wrong There are a number of competitive sites (Moz, SEMRush. SearchMetrics, Traffic Analysis App and so on) that provide this so it is a little surprising Moz doesn't offer this analysis.

Like you, I'd love to hear from Moz folks on this.

Thanks.

Mark

Thank you, Thomas. Yes, that's pretty much in line with my thinking. I have used Moz for quite some time and it is indeed very rich in functionality. It's just a shame that - for this particular scenario (finding the keywords that result in traffic to competitive sites) - there doesn't seem a way to tackle this with Moz.

I was hoping there was some functionality or some combination of features that would allow me to get to this on Moz. It speaks to the breadth of the Moz feature set that I was initially assuming it was there somewhere but I just hadn't located it yet.

Thanks again.

Mark

A key part of my content creation decision is identifying keywords that have been successful for competitors. Ahrefs has a feature that allows me to see the keywords that have resulted in organic traffic for a particular page. So, for example, I can identify CompanyA as a competitor, find their top pages and, for each one, find the keywords that drove the most traffic to each of those pages. The information reported includes the monthly search volumes associated with each keyword, plus the number of visits driven to the page based on that keyword.

That is very interesting to me. I am a long time Moz subscriber and want to find a way to do this here. Is there any way to do this with Moz features? I can't justify both a Moz and AHrefs subscription so I have a tough choice to make if Moz doesnt' support this. I'm hoping I am just missing that here.

Thanks.

Mark

So far so good - every URL I try to my site is now redirected to the www subdomain and, to date, I am unaware of any side effects. I will keep monitoring but all looks good at this point.

Thanks again to everyone who helped with this.

Mark

Yep, totally agree with the thinking and prefer that approach. I researched the non-www (blank subdomain) solution a while back and the rewrite rule I used was suggested in a number of places. But your suggest seems much more robust, providing there's no gotcha (I know of none).

I implemented this and it seems to be working (after a bit of a detour because of caching :)). So, I think I am good and will monitor.

A big thanks to you and Travis. I very much appreciate the prompt responses.

Mark

Here's the only (remotely) relevant entry I have in my .htaccess file (replacing my actual domain with <domain>):</domain>

RewriteEngine On
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^<domain>.com$
 RewriteRule (.*) http://www.<domain>.com/$1 [R=301,L]</domain></domain>

The intent of this is to redirect all URLs of the form http://<domain>.com/page</domain> to http://www.<domain>.com/page.</domain> I implemented that a while back and it seems to be working just fine.

I can't find any reference to the blog subdomain. I suspect what I need to do is implement something like this:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.<domain>.com$
 RewriteRule (.*) http://www.<domain>.com/$1 [R=301,L]</domain></domain>

By the way, despite appearances I am "the guy" for this site. I've completely installed/configured it from scratch so anything broken is my fault  I have the smarts to backup, test, verify, restore etc so I can make changes to .htaccess myself. I just don't have significant experience of the .htaccess file itself so just need to be cautious as I go. But it's all me

Dare I suggest that what I am trying to achieve here (redirect from the blog subdomain to the www subdomain) shouldn't be too tricky?

Thanks.

Mark

Thanks again, Alan.

I am thinking that what I probably need is to 301 redirect all URLs of the form http://blog.<domain>.com/page</domain> to http://www.<domain>.com/page</domain>, yes? In short I don't want to use the blog subdomain anywhere so, to avoid SEO inefficiencies, I should presumably redirect as above so that everything ends up at the www subdomain.

I think

Thanks.

Mark

Travis,

I want to be really sure I understand what you are saying so let me clarify.

I do have a blog DNS entry, referring to the server (just like I have www, to the same IP address).  In a "clean" installation, any page being requested to that server, SHOULD redirect to the www subdomain because I have www.<domain>.com</domain> specified in General \ Settings. Is that accurate so far?

However, "something" (probably in .htaccess) is kicking in that allows URLs with the blog subdomain to resolve (no redirection), regardless of what is in General \ Settings, yes?

Thanks.

Mark

Thanks Alan. I would like to verify one aspect of this.

Somehow, Moz/Google located the blog.<domain>.com pages. I honestly don't know why but I assume that if these pages have actual resolved all along, as they do now, then I could potentially have external URLs pointing to them, yes? If so, then if I just follow the suggestion you have made then won't I continue to have duplicate content issues? I fear I am missing something from your suggestion :)</domain>

PS: I just realized what you perhaps meant. I have generally seen references to "non-www" to mean URLs of the form http://<domain>.com</domain> ie. with no subdomain. But I am guessing you mean "non-www" in the broader sense - absolutely ANYTHING that doesn't have the www subdomain should redirect there. That's presumably what you had in mind, yes?

Thanks again.

Mark

We are using the Redirection plugin.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

However, everything I have entered is at the page level (redirect page1 to page2). I don't know if the Redirection plugin even supports subdomain redirection. I am checking that now (a quick scan of the support page for that plugin finds every question related to subdomains unanswered :)).

It seems the working assumption is that nothing changed and that Moz/Google just found this for the first time, which I hadn't considered.

Thanks.

Mark

Thank you Travis. I have never actually edited the .htaccess file directly (not even 100% sure where it is :)) but I guess what you suggest could be put there through other means (plugins, etc).

Just to make sure I understand, though, what I actually want is a 301 redirect for all pages under the blog subdomain to the www domain. I'm not overly familiar with the .htaccess syntax for redirects (but can research) - but if you happen to have the syntax for that I'd be appreciative

Thanks again.

Mark

Thank you Leslie. Yes, I can browse to the blog... pages and they remain that way in the browsers URL field. So, the thinking is that this has been around all along and Moz/Google just found it? Interesting.

So, any idea on how I would fix this? I do use the Redirection plugin (and have been entering quite a few redirects recently) but as far as I can tell that plugin allows me to redirect between pages, rather than redirect subdomains i.e. I can redirect http://www.<domain>.com/page1</domain> to http://www.<domain>.com/page2</domain> but not www -> something else.

Thank you again, Leslie.

I should add that I do have a DNS record for the blog subdomain. However, that has been in place all along, including the last few weeks where these duplicate content errors didn't exist. Given the settings in Settings \ General I would expect these to be redirected to http://www.<domain>.com</domain>, which seems to be what was happening up until this weeks report.