Welcome to the Q&A Forum

First, a question for you. Why are you checking if javascript is enabled?

Scott O.

You could add a noindex if you think the privacy and disclaimer pages, etc, are not bringing any SEO value. Nofollow would block search engines from even spidering them. But a noindex would just stop it from showing up as an entrance/landing page in the SERPs.

I wouldn't say that it helps "retain link juice", but it might help you to show the search engines what your most important pages are.

An alternative would be to perhaps only link to some of those pages from your home page and not from every single page. Are there any pages that you think would be appropriate NOT to link to all those pages? If so, perhaps you can write a conditional statement in your code to only show those links on some pages and not others.

Scott O.

You could go to the "Rankings" tab and export the rankings as a .CSV file. Then, you'll have a list of keywords that you can import into another campaign.

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Are you talking about an www.opensiteexplorer.org report? Or a Google "site:" search?

My guess is that you'd need more exact-match anchor text from both external AND internal links.

Scott O.

"Referral Spam" Can be seen in your web stats program, like Google Analytics. When webmasters or site owners log in to view their stats, they see a referral from a website (usually a shortened URL). The person then follows that link and the spammer gets more eyeballs to their site.

If the spammer is a service provider, their client might be paying per 1000 visitors (performance-based pay scale). So, getting x number of views to the site might mean they get paid a certain $ amount.

The other thing the spammer might get is ... tricking someone into buying their product or service.

Scott O.

I would recommend:

If the page content is truly that similar to the the others, I'd recommend using the rel=canonical tag on service pages to point to the profession page as the authoritative page

OR

Add enough unique content to the service pages to allow them to not appear as non-duplicate. This would involve either having your in-house team developing useful content or forcing your users to enter a paragraph of text that would only be used on those service pages.

OR

Last resort, you could noindex the service pages to avoid duplicate content indexed by search engines. If you noindex, you will have more control over which pages you are telling the search engines are most important.

Scott O.

I would suggest at least adding those variables in your Google Webmaster Tools account to help Google understand which query strings have an impact on changing content on a page versus the variables that are only associated with affiliates.

In GWT, go to "Configuration" in the left menu, then "URL Parameters"

Scott

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I believe appending the page number, for example: (Page 3 of 5) to the end of the meta description would suffice from SEOmoz's crawler's or GWT's perspective, however, the best would be to have the ability to create completely unique meta descriptions.

Marie, that's true. When talking "penalties", you'd want to first check in Google Webmaster Tools if there truly has been a manual action taken against the site. Otherwise, it would probably be better to refer to it as a "devaluation", correct?

Scott

Hi,

I was wondering if search engines, in particular, Google, actually use folder hierarchy to determine how important a particular page on a website might be for ranking purposes, or is on-site page inter-linking only taken into consideration.

I know that external and internal links help to support the authority or 'page rank' of a particular webpage on a website. In a typical Wordpress installation, for example, it is easy to create a page and assign child-pages to support it. These sub-pages would naturally link to their parent pages via menu and/or body links, so they would theoretically 'support' the authority of the parent folder/page.

My question is... would search engines see the parent folder page as more authoritative than a child-page, even without a lot of on-site interlinking of child and parent pages, just because it is higher up in the folder structure?

For example, I have a client who has a Wordpress website, but is using a plugin to make all pages have a .htm ending. The site is fairly 'flat', hierarchally speaking and does not use any /folders/, but the pages are inter-linked.

In the following scenario, there are 4 testimonial pages... 1 main one and 3 supporting pages.  The 3 supporting pages are linked to from the parent page and vice versa.

• /testimonials.htm
• /testimonials-quality.htm
• /testimonials-price.htm
• /testimonials-ease.htm

I was wondering if it is worth suggesting to my client that we remove that plugin so that we can more easily employ the natural folder hierarchy functions of Wordpress, such as this scenario:

• /testimonials/
• /testimonials/quality/
• /testimonials/price/
• /testimonials/ease/

Would the loss of 'link juice' due to redirects and the work that would be involved would be worth the possible ranking increases of potentially structuring the website better... or are we fine just relying on the existing page interlinking to show the search engines what are the important parent pages?

I would suggest adding keywords before and/or after the company when linking. For example, if the company name is "Milwaukee Roofing LLC", you could make the anchor text "visit the Milwaukee Roofing LLC website"... perhaps this will give enough variety and make the link profile feel more natural.

Scott O.

References:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/click-here-seo http://www.seomoz.org/blog/beyond-exact-match-anchor-text-to-next-generation-link-signals-whiteboard-friday http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization

Is location-based rank tracking going to be a feature in SEOmoz any time soon? I've seen in a few other company's tools that I can select a city in which to center the search around, for example... if I track the keyword "pizza" and set it to check rankings for "Seattle", it would give me different results than I've I selected "Milwaukee".

The reason for the variation in results is due to maps listings in the results sometimes.

So, my question is, will location-based rank tracking be coming to SEOmoz soon?

Scott

Ah ha. I can see how that wouldn't be nearly as useful.

Just a little followup on this topic on my blog here: http://www.scottofford.com/2012/12/what-is-the-future-of-serp-tracking/ ~ Scott O.

One of the most important things to me was Raven's ability to do automated reporting as PDF files sent to my clients' inboxes on a monthly basis. That, combined with Traffic reports, etc was a cornerstone of our progress reporting.

I'm not considering abandoning Raven just yet. A lot of our internel processes are tied into Raven and their Content Manager and Link Manager, and other tools they have, but it does make it much more appetizing to go find other viable solutions that can help me manage my Internet Marketing client base.

Dana, how do you currently report rankings to your clients or team members? Do you plan on continuing doing it that way or will you try to ween off of using ranking reports in the future?

Scott

Hi Dana. I guess SEOmoz doesn't have Adwords API data right directly inline with ranking results, so that could be true. It seems they use the Google Analytics API more than anything.

There is a lot of discussion going around here about this on Raven's announcement:

http://raventools.com/scraped-data/ (127 comments as of the time I posted this reply)

Perhaps someone from SEOmoz knows for sure?

Scott

My question is:

Is SEOMoz's SERP Rank Tracking in compliance with Google Adwords API Terms of Service?

Background:

The reason I ask is because Raven Tools is now removing their SERP Reporting tool because it uses scraped Google position data.

So, it looks like SEO's will either have to find a new rank tracking tool or find new ways to traffic the effects that rankings have on a website traffic volumes.

For instance, there is a way to get the position a search results was in Google when it was clicked. We could create a secondary profile in Google Analytics for each client and use a custom filter to record the position that the keywords was in when the search result was clicked ( http://www.seomoz.org/blog/show-keyword-position-using-filters-and-advanced-segments )

Or perhaps we'll have to use Google Webmaster Tools' SEO Report to get data somehow ( http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1308626 )

What are your thoughts on this? As you know, ranking data is still a great way to show clients if they are gaining or losing visibility in the search engines. It helps SEO's to report how effective their efforts have been.

Because other ranking software companies uses Adwords API data to show the keyword search volume and advertiser competition of a keyword, they can not or eventually will not be able to use scraped ranking data any more.

But, if another rank tracking tool out there doesn't need to be in compliance with the Adwords API TOS because they don't use that API to show search volume and advertiser competition, they can still technically provide their ranking data and not be violating any TOS, right?

I'm just trying to understand the best way to continue reporting impact of organic keyword rankings on a website.

Does the SEOMoz SERP Tracker comply with Adwords API? Is there another rank tracking tool out there that already is using Average Position data from the GWT SEO Report tool? Should we all just stop reporting rankings to clients altogether?

Scott

That's a good point.

Very true. The original social share stats would go away. Interesting dilema there. I've noticed that for a WordPress site I run where If I change the URL, all the Social Share stats are reset.