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We've tested this a few ways.

1. Add map to the footer - seems to help somewhat.  Not a big jump but definitely a boost.

2. Add map to the contact page along with the address - this helped the most in our testing.

3. Add map to any other page - no effect in our tests.

We tested 2 controls and 4 sites set each way = 14 total.

Of the 14, the 2 controls and the 2 "any other page" had very little improvement.  The 8 on #1 and #2 had definite moves and so it does seem to affect the results. Putting the address on the page, along with an embedded G map was by far the best for us.

Hi James,

I (and others) have answered this a number of times recently so I'm mainly going to link you in.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-does-this-site-rank-higher-than-a-seemingly-better-one

http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-t-for-the-life-of-me-figure-out-how-this-is-possible-any-ideas

http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-would-a-site-with-virtually-no-external-links-and-low-authority-rank-very-high

The basics of it are you are looking at maybe 3 or 4 metrics of maybe 200 that affect SEO.  DA and PA matter but they are heavily influenced by other factors such as domain age, page loading speed, time left on registration (surprisingly!), number and quality of anchor text vs branded text, follow vs. nofollow (not in the ways you'd necessarily expect), and again, like 175 other factors.  There are always a million "could be" answers.

Let's say the other site had a PR7 SEO site before and it is now offline.  Maybe they used it for the "black hat" version of their business.  They've seen the light, black hat works less than ever, and they've gone all white hat.  Now they 301 that domain over to the new one.  You can't "see" the 301 but the effect would be massive.  Maybe they have one big client who they managed to ask for and get a big link that isn't on the Moz index but it's showing up in WMT.  Maybe their average visitor visits 3 times as many pages as on your site or stays for 10 minutes longer per visit.  Those type of metrics make a huge difference in SEO.

I hope that helps answer your question!  A huge amount of factors control SEO - social, possibly, the platform of the site, +1s on Google, local citations that may not include a live link so they aren't picked up by Moz.... see the issue in figuring this out?

~Matt

According to the https://plus.google.com/authorship page,

1. Make sure that you have a profile photo with a recognisable headshot.
2. Make sure that a byline containing your name appears on each page of your content (for example, "By Steven Levy").
3. Make sure that your byline name matches the name on your Google+ profile.
4. Verify that you have an email address (such as stevenlevy@wired.com) on the same domain as your content. (Don't have an email address on the same domain?

A brand is rarely an "author" - someone did the writing.  Google wants that person tied to the work they created. Now, there may be ways "around" this but getting "around" stuff in SEO is why so many people scrambled so badly this year.

This page dissects it further: http://www.optimum7.com/internet-marketing/google-optimization/pros-and-cons-of-google-authorship-for-businesses.html

Most notably:

A company or brand’s Google+ page cannot be designated as the author of any web content. Therefore your company and brand name will not come up as the author in the web results.

**Warning:**If you’ve considered creating a company persona under the guise of a real person in order to have all authorship attributed to that particular Google+… Don’t do it! This really undermines AuthorRank and defeats the whole point of authorship. Google may also penalize you for trying to cheat their system… just as they’ve done for poor SEO practices through Google’s Panda-Penguin algorithm updates.

That's what I would follow.  I would not suggest trying to game Authorship at all.

I don't mean to be obvious about this but yeah, your link profile has issues, starting with your own link network:

• http://driveway-alarm.com/
• http://boat-alarm.com/
• http://freezealarms.com/
• http://entry-alarm.com/
• http://sensaphone-alarm.com/
• http://drivewayalarmreview.com/

According to Majestic Historic links your backlink profile is a disaster. They show over 90,000 links from nearly 2000 different domains. The site has been online for 15 years so I'm sure that a) there are worse links that have not been picked up and b) it's had old school 2002 SEO.

To be honest, you have a 15+ year old site and it shows. The backlink profile is a disaster and your info has been copied around the web from pretty much every page of your site. Put the two together and yeah, you wouldn't/shouldn't rank very highly with the current situation.

Hope the analysis helps some! It's going to be quite a lot of work to get you where you want to be from where you are today.

Well, he seems to be made of both bone and metal.

http://www.mythicmarketer.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/The-TAGFEE-Tenets-SEOmoz.png

He can change size:

http://mozcationportsmouth.com/wp-content/uploads/MozCation-2012-Roger1.jpg

He can plug himself into other machines:

http://designwisecustomgraphics.com/Rev%203/slices/slices/Roger-Moz-Bot-illustrations(2).png

And most importantly, he can self-heal.

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/attachments/token/zvrbz74z9b3jy51/?name=broken-roger.png

The post that drew me into Moz and kept me here was Wil Reynolds classic "How Google Makes Liars out of the Good Guys in SEO"

As far back as 2012 Wil was concerned he was doing the right stuff and being beaten by cheaters, much like your post above. Spam won in 2012. It won in 2013. It can still win in 2015. But it's a LOT better. Penguin & Panda have cleaned up a great deal of spam.

I suppose the question is like buying a property that has a lake in the middle of your 4 acres. You start to dry up the lake and you make great progress.  One day 6 years from now you step in a bit of a puddle, your shoe gets ruined and you think "should I just move?!"  Don't move yet.

You have to do what makes your business successful within the bounds of what you feel is ethical & morally right. If you're asking for our permission, go for it. Do whatever you wish.

http://gsitecrawler.com/  GSiteCrawler is the standard.  Have indexed about 75k pages with this and  know someone who did 180k with it.

http://rapid.searchmetrics.com/seo-tools/extras/sitemap-generator,25.html  I don't see a limit on this one but someone said 10,000 on another forum.

http://wonderwebware.com/sitemap-generator/  Downloadable sitemap crawler. Theoretically this should do an unlimited number of links.

http://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/google-sitemap-generator/  This has an unlimited option.  Not sure how well it works.

Ha, it happens. Every once in awhile I do a full audit on our thousands of clients. I find the strangest things - meta robots blocked, robots.txt blocked, client releases new site, doesn't tel us, no onsite done at all, homepage titles set to "Home."  It happens - things get lost in the mix.

Plus, most people deal with robots.txt and meta robots (at least more frequently).

The simplest thing for future reference is just to drop it in Screaming Frog (even the trial) and just see what you see.

A lot of the links you have from .edu sites are linking to the https version of your site. You link to the http version in your profile. When you're looking in search console, which version are you looking at?

I was able to find the links in both Majestic and Ahrefs but many are https ... they may not show up in your link profile if you've only claimed the non-S versions. (I've seen stranger things in Search Console.)

I doubt Google is ignoring them but it may not be displaying all. They don't always show you everything they have and I always take SC links to be more of a representative example than a full collection.

First of all, I agree with everyone else but let me answer the question you asked.

Dofollow blogs often set themselves as dofollow to get links from being listed on dofollow blog lists, like the one you must've found. Once they get listed, they change back to nofollow so they don't leak their juice.

So after they were added to the list they simply changed their blog back. That would be my guess (without looking at the actual link.)

And no, there's no real benefit to doing blog comments simply for the sake of SEO. There are LOTS of reasons to leave comments though, so just do it naturally.

It's a duplicate content problem.

The site's content is duplicated 100% on many other sites, including http://no1loveastrologer .com and http://archive.is/0T8BA

The main site doesn't have enough authority for Google to consider it the source. Google is indexing all the content in other places so it doesn't "need" to index your client's page.

Rewrite unique content on as many pages as you can and ping the site in WMT (Fetch as Google, Submit all Pages to Index) and you should see the site come back.

The link info in WMT is not so much "wrong" as "based on a very heavy delayed reporting."

When you get new links it can take ages for them to appear. And when links are removed it can take ages for them to disappear.

I've found that simply dropping new links into a ping tool like 247pinger takes care of the first problem and speeds it up getting INTO WMT.  I assume if you really wanted something out you could do the same thing with a removed link and it should get rid of it quicker.

But yeah, overall a known issue. I don't think many of us rely on WMT for link data. Ahrefs, Majestic, OSE & Spyglass are all much better data sources.

I don't have a specific question, just a WOW!  I remember when the index was getting smaller & smaller as you guys went through some "figuring out" of how exactly you would index the whole internets. It has come back in SUCH a big way!

I was thinking of your "false narratives" /rand blog post and how things didn't always go the way you wanted. OSE's limits have always been one of those "not the way I wanted it to be" with Moz and this size of update is an AMAZING comeback.

So, no question - just a bit of a "great job, team!" to get the index to this size. Can't wait for EVEN MORE.

The best answer we can give before the change is "not intentionally."  It seems they intend to affect mobile rankings but some residual effect may trickle across to desktop rankings.

Just as an example, let's say pageviews were a ranking factor (I doubt they are directly one, but it's easy to visualise.)

Your mobile ranking drops as a result of not having a mobile friendly site. By your traffic dropping, your desktop numbers are no longer as good and boom, you drop as well.

It's not that straightforward (and again, pageviews are not necessarily a ranking factor) but that is the way it could trickle across. So for now, I'd say "We don't expect it to but it's possible."

If you want to sell worldwide, I wouldn't use .london extension. This extension specifically tells Google (and buyers) that you are local to London. Sometimes I understand why Aussies or Americans would order from .co.uk but usually only if it's our last choice, honestly. So why would we order from a .london if there's ANY other choice?

You could run a .com or .net as your main domain and then run .london geotargeted to your UK audience. I think it's a mistake to use it globally.

Ok, so I've had a lot of discussion on this topic in the past but not recently. Pardon my bookmarks being a little old but they all still apply the same.

First, there is no meta value for title.  See the documentation here: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_meta.asp

The only values are:

• application-name
• author
• description
• generator
• keywords

There is a standard attribute for title (http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_standardattributes.asp) but specifies a bit of text more like a "tooltip" not a title tag.

The actual <title>tag <span data-mce-mark="1">defines the title of the document.  Title in a meta element defines the title of the meta element. In other words, no it has virtually no effect.</span></span></p> <p><span data-mce-mark="1"><span data-mce-mark="1">Supporting SEO docs:</span></span></p> <p>http://moz.com/community/q/title-vs-meta-title<br />http://forums.seochat.com/web-design-coding-programming-11/should-i-use-title-meta-title-460889.html<br />http://www.raisemyrank.com/articles/meta-title.htm<br />http://themeaningofweb.blogspot.com.au/2008/10/difference-between-and-nametitle-tags.html</p> <p> </p></title>

Yes, if you leave them in place for a long time Google will eventually treat your 302s like 301s. Google can also misinterpret your 302s as 301s if they think you've used the wrong redirect method.

• We've seen 302s as part of the basis for penalties.
• A while ago there was an experiment where 302s eventually passed juice.
• JohnMu says it can happen here.
• A decent amount more info on SEO Theory.

I think the general consensus is basically that 302s don't work the way we think/wish they did 100% of the time so yes, it's very possible your long term 302s have been interpreted by Google as "meaning" 301 - permanent redirects.

I don't like trying to solve problems without specific domains and example KWs so I can do a real diagnosis but let me suggest a few hypotheses (I would not suggest all of these if I could see the URLs.)

1. You don't know what they've disavowed - they could have, for whatever reason, disavowed their own cross-domain links. Disavow says "ignore these links" which is (if you're not an SEO) basically the same as nofollow "don't pass juice to these links."  So they may have made a (poor) choice to disavow their own links but it may be working for them.

2. Competitor 2 has at least 1 redirect.  Could be a site with 20 million links for all we know.  Could be nothing.

3. Can't tell the site speed, titles, content or any other on-page issues with any of the sites.  You could be over-branding (Panda issues) or smashing the site with keywords.

4. Sometimes Google doesn't make sense.

5. Ahrefs only picks up around 10-20% of all links from what we've seen. Hard to make estimates on what Majestic, OSE, & Google see without the domain info.

You're assuming this is a link issue - but honestly we just can't tell yet.  Not enough info to fully diagnose.

It really depends on your current metrics. As Sergey said things like views, videos uploaded, shares & minutes watching are all ranking factors over there so the more you have already the better.

If your average time spent watching is really low, I'd consider moving them - but an account with history is more valuable than a brand new one so if your numbers aren't completely shot, I'd keep the channel and rebrand it.

For me, I've always had something "on the side" of my marketing/agency life. I want to have personal experience with ecommerce. How does it feel to sell clothing online? What are the concerns? How can I help clients? What are the hiccups with certain sources of traffic (Stumble, Reddit, Pinterest, even Digg back in the day). When does that traffic help?

I like to always have at least a couple side projects so I can keep a bit of "skin in the game."  If I'm spending MY money on Adwords, I get better at it. If I'm spending MY time building a site or generating links, I find ways to maximise the resources I have. If you don't have your own site, maybe split/share one with someone. Just a simple side project and always have at least a little stake in the outcomes.

That goes back to how I learned - I learned marketing by owning a business. I learned SEO by ranking #1 for my own keyword. I learned Adwords after wasting thousands & thousands of dollars. I learned CRO after wasting thousands & thousands of website hits. Make it PERSONAL somehow.