Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I've heard good things about Moz Local.

Happy Friday, Q&A friends!

This week's discussion question comes from Amir Jaffari's YouMoz post from Thursday, January 28. Amir explains how he was able to use annotations to massively increase his YouTube videos' views without using ads, and raise his annotation CTR 22,400%.

Have you tested annotations to see if they dramatically improve conversion rates? What were the results? What other strategies have you tried?

Hi Meier,

Since Google will recognize each subdomain as effectively its own site, each one will have to rank on its own terms. la.website.com won't get any benefit from links pointing at sf.website.com, for example.

Personally, I think the subdomains just make things harder.

That's a valid point. I'll make sure our Product folks have seen it.

Hi there!

I just want to add this post to Umar's recommendation of that Whiteboard Friday.

Also, if your site has a very high spam score, you may want to look into the other potential factors, beyond just the large number of external links. You should be able to see them in Spam Analysis.

Hi all!

On Wednesday, September 30, Moz Customer Success Lead Ellie Wilkinson will be hosting a free webinar, "Tune Up Your Twitter Strategy with Followerwonk." It'll be extremely valuable for anyone looking to get the most out of every feature of Followerwonk, particularly when it comes to building a following and optimizing your tweeting schedule.

Sign up here!

(This is part of our ongoing series of "tool-specific" webinars covering the Moz toolset. Learn more about the series—and about our twice-weekly walkthroughs of Moz Pro—here.)

Just keep in mind that there will be a number of other SEO ramifications if you decide to migrate domains. I can't say for sure not being totally familiar with your company/site, but in my opinion it would almost never be worth it to change domains for the reasons your considering. There isn't much of a bump from the domain name, and the search engines are getting much better at recognizing context, intent, and synonyms.

You may want to read through Cyrus Shepard's "Keywords to Concepts," which may help you understand the concept of topical search. It's actually possible that "yard care" is helping you with "lawn care," too.

You may want to incorporate phrases like "lawn care" into some of your site's copy, just to be safe, but I sincerely doubt it would be worth it to go through a domain migration just to change "yard" to "lawn" in your URL.

Hi Mike!

MozCon 2015 videos aren't available quite yet. There's a lot of post-production work that goes into them that we need to get just right.

They _are _coming very soon, though! We're getting into the last stages. I promise, you'll know when they're ready. We'll most definitely be promoting them.

I'd imagine it depends on the context and how it's presented. Can you provide a bit more detail on the case you're referring to?

*Edit: Miki beat me to it, but here's a little more explanation.

The first thing to note here is that Google's indexing doesn't actually have any effect on your Moz crawl report. All of the data you see there comes from our very own rogerbot, which crawls similarly to googlebot.

Though Google's crawler has a wide variety of ways to locate and index content, rogerbot can only crawl links on your site. If your crawl report is picking up each of these URLs, then there must be links pointing to those URLs somewhere on your site. The danger here is that Google and the other search engines will pick up those variants and not be able to determine which of them is the "real" one. That could lead to a) Google listing a URL you'd rather it didn't, or b) Google not understanding how to list your site at all.

A few of these have pretty simple fixes—index.html should be 301 redirected to your root domain, for example. Rel="canonical" is very applicable here, too. Here are a couple resources you may want to check out:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization - Best practices article on canonicalization
http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection - Best practices article on redirects

I hope that helps!

Matt Roney
Moz Customer Mentor

It's entirely possible that indexation issues are contributing to what you're seeing, Matt. I'd also suggest reading through this Q&A thread by Rand:

https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores

Thanks Dirk! I certainly hope all our new community members do.

Thank you for the feedback! At the moment, there are no plans to add support to Adobe Analytics. Your request has been communicated to our Product team, though.

Not using 301s could be a big part of the problem. Do your old backlinks all point to existing pages on the new domain?

Hi Dustin,

You're right—in general, a drop in DA that corresponds with a drop in your competitors' DA is most likely due to changes in the Mozscape index (though not the algorithm so much). It's best to look at DA less as an absolute value than as a benchmark against the competitors in your space.

Matt

Hi there, Lauren!

An external link is one typeof hyperlink—specifically, a hyperlink that links from one domain to another. The opposite is an internal link, which links from one page on a domain to another page on that same domain. A link from moz.com to inbound.org is an external link because moz.com and inbound.org are different domains, but a link from moz.com/community/q to moz.com/community/q/what-is-the-difference-between-anchor-text-and-external-links is internal because they're both on the domain moz.com.

Anchor text is a component of all text links, whether they're internal or external. In a traditional hyperlink that appears on the page as a bit of underlined blue text, the anchor text is that blue text itself.

This is an internal link to moz.com/community/q. The destination URL is moz.com/community/q, and the anchor text is "This is an internal link to moz.com/community/q." It's internal because both the page we're currently on and the page the link points to are on the domain moz.com. Here's another link to moz.com/community/q: The Moz Q&A Forum. It has the same destination URL as the previous link, but the anchor text—"The Moz Q&A Forum"—is different.

Does that clear things up at all?

Yes! Exactly!

Category pages actually turn up as duplicate content in Crawl Diagnostics _really _often. It just means that those categories are linked somewhere on your site, and the resulting category pages look almost exactly like all the others.

Generally, I recommend you use robots.txt to block crawlers from accessing pages in the category directory. Once that's done and your campaign has re-crawled your site, then you can see how much of the problem was resolved by that one change, and consider what to do to take care of the rest.

Does that make sense?

Thank you EGOL! Yes, this is going to become a regular thing.

I LOVE your process here, especially your very controlled research phase and your guidelines for offering guest content. I think it could be very valuable to our other community members.

In my opinion, it depends on the network. A tweet, for example, is said to have a total lifespan of 18-24 minutes; if a follower doesn't see it during that window, it's extremely likely they simply won't see it. For any Moz Blog or YouMoz post, we'll tweet a total of 12 times over six days—once each AM and once each PM, never tweeting the same hour twice. Posts for other sorts of content vary.

Of course, our social following is massive and globe-spanning, so a tweet during business hours where we're located in Seattle, WA, USA is unlikely to be seen by any of our UK followers, for example. I'd recommend testing your own post frequency to see what works best for your audience.