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From looking at one of our clients’ GA stats, we’ve discovered that they have signed up with a site called Internet Traffic Club (or they have asked someone to do it on their behalf). Their hits on one day went from a fairly standard low number to a few thousand. The hits came from cities all over the world, yet this client is a local UK solicitor offering a local town service. We feel doing this - if they do it regularly - would be harmful rather than beneficial to their rankings. Has anyone here any experience of using these traffic buying services and how Google views these hits? Of course it is also nonsensical to pay to buy traffic from Nigeria if you’re a local solicitor, but I want to explain to them the evidence behind the harmful effect it could have on their rankings.

Hi Miriam

Thank you for your very full reply, I appreciate your help. I agree with you it is a low priority and I have pointed this out to the client! The suggestion that Shannon made has already started to produce results and I agree with you that the website needs to have more links and a higher domain authority. We have recently taken over the website and are busy adding content to it as it was quite meagre in its content. Earning backlinks is our next objective.

Question: does Moz Local now work for UK businesses? A couple of years ago I used it for a client and when it came up for renewal I was told by Moz that it no longer supported UK businesses. So Moz gave me a refund as it had accepted online payment for the renewal. I had assumed it still didn't support UK businesses, but if you're saying it does, that's a whole other ball game! Please could you advise on this as I have several clients that would benefit from Moz Local.

Thanks again for all your help.

best regards, Maureen

Hi Colemckeon, thanks very much for your suggestions. I will look for a directory service in the UK as I think those you mentioned might just be for the USA.

Although the part I don't understand is how does Google get confused between 2 companies on the basis of a phone number which does not appear on the other company's website anyway?

Thanks Shannon,  those are all great suggestions, I will try them out. Many thanks

If I search for my client's phone number on Google, without gaps, ie 02036315541,  another company comes up at the top of the list. This company has a similar name to ours, but it is in a different town and it does different things. My company name is Energy Contract Renewals https://www.energycontractrenewals.co.uk/ and their company is https://energyrenewals.co.uk. As far as I can see, the other company does not mention our phone number anywhere on their site or on their GMB page so I don't know why they are coming up.  We do not come up at all for this search.

However,  if I put our phone number in like this: 020 3631 5541, our company does come up and the other company does not.

Anyone know how I can correct this or if it is even possible to do something about it?

For the past 7 months we have been managing a website for a client cvdwellbeing.com. For the first 6 months, the client has always had been 30 and 40 keywords ranking on page 1 of Google. This month I log into Moz to prepare a report for February and they now only have 7 keywords ranking on page 1. How could this happen so quickly? Is it to do with the Moz DA changes? Nothing has happened to the site apart from adding a couple of blogs and landing pages and there are no errors reported on Moz or Search Console. It is very depressing. Also their DA has dropped relative to their competitors since last month, again no idea why. If the Moz DA updates are so great, why aren't DAs going up instead of down. This is difficult to explain to clients who associate downward trends with bad news. Please don't refer me to the slide set as none of my clients have the attention span to try and understand this, they just want their rankings to get better, not worse.

Couldn't you have implemented a change to the DA that meant my client's sites went UP instead of down! British manufacturer of hospital furniture dropped from 35 to 21 overnight. The only saving grace is that their competitors have dropped in the same ratio.

Just to add that we also added GZIP compression and page caching to speed it up but it appears to be little steps on the gain front.

Again, really appreciate the time you've taken. Have a great weekend.

I typed up a response but it seems to have disappeared. Thank you so much for your very comprehensive message about this, I really do appreciate it. I am going to digest all this information over the weekend and discuss with my colleagues to see if we can make a plan to improve the site.

We did some work today and reduced the page load speed down by about 60% by removing some plug-ins, and that reduced the site score from an F to a D - you must have checked after we'd done it. But sure, D is still not great!

Perhaps LCN isn't the right environment then, I believe the site was already hosted there when we took it over last year. We'll have to look at this. Usually we host our Wordpress sites on WPEngine and they seem pretty good, but this one is an exception.

Thanks again and have a great weekend!

Yes the content was the same, the client just wanted to change the domain name as he changed the company trading name.

Thanks for the tip about the robots.txt crawl-delay - we'll have a look at that. I don't know why that was set. The site is hosted on LCN. The page loading speeds have increased considerably since 2 things happened:

The domain name was changed - but was kept on the same hosting.
We applied an SSL certificate to change to https

We have switched off some plug-ins to speed up the page loading, that may help perhaps.

Hi effectdigital, thanks for your response. I understand your point, but on the old site their DA was 14. It dropped to 2 in August when the new, renamed site went live and has not changed since. Their rankings have also dropped by about 50% but we have consulted all the expert guides and believe the redirects have been done properly.

Hi Dave, since we changed the htacess file a couple of days ago to allow the dotbot, I forced a new crawl by Moz yesterday. It has made no difference and the Domain Authority is still 2, all other factors remain the same, eg rankings etc. The only thing that's changed is that there are now only 2 404 errors whereas there were 5 previously, 3 of which we have fixed. Could there be something more fundamental wrong?

Hi again Dave

We have changed the htaccess file to allow the dotbot - so hopefully now this will rectify itself? I don’t know why it was set up this way as none of our other sites are.  Can you check that you can access the site now please?

Thanks Dave, I will investigate this

Yes

I really need some major advice on this one. Back in September, I asked a question on here as follows:

"A client wanted to change their domain name, which we have now done. The site content itself is exactly the same. We put 301 redirect links in so that Google searchers would redirect from the old site to the new one. However Moz then said that it couldn't crawl the old domain because of the redirects and advised creating a brand new campaign for the new domain. We have done this but now Moz says that the domain authority of the new site is 2 (it was 14 on the old domain)." My original question and the answers I got are here: https://moz.com/community/q/new-domain-wipes-out-domain-authority).

Generally the responses I got were that we should give Moz time to crawl the new domain and process all the "new" pages.

It is now February, ie 6 months after the domain rename, and on Moz the site still has a DA of 2. It seems like 6 months is enough time to wait. We checked all the recommended guides and believe we have done it all correctly.

I really don't know what to do now. Can anyone help or have a quick look and work out why this is so bad?

Specifics are:
old domain: https://ryemeadcleaning.co.uk
new domain: https://ryemeadgroup.co.uk

A client wanted to change their domain name, which we have now done. The site content itself is exactly the same. We put 301 redirect links in so that Google searchers would redirect from the old site to the new one. However Moz then said that it couldn't crawl the old domain because of the redirects and advised creating a brand new campaign for the new domain. We have done this but now Moz says that the domain authority of the new site is 2 (it was 14 on the old domain).

Specifics are:
old domain: https://ryemeadcleaning.co.uk
new domain: https://ryemeadgroup.co.uk

So basically it seems like we're starting again from scratch with the new domain and all the SEO from the old domain has been lost? Have we done it wrong?

Hi Eli

I sent the information off to help@moz.com on 30th November but haven't had a response yet and the tool still isn't working. Do you have any update for me please?

Whatever page/domain url I put in here, I get a message coming up saying ""Getting rankings counts failed" Why does his happen? I can't find anything in the Help about this.